The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (82 page)

Maybe he thought Mike Ovitz would help him sell his script
.

A
reporter working for
Details
magazine asked me how I felt about the distress I was causing Michael Ovitz “and his family” by telling the world that he had threatened to destroy my career unless I continued to let him represent me.

From a writer’s point of view, who is the best film critic working today
?

F
rom a writer’s point of view, there are no good film critics working today.

There weren’t any good film critics working yesterday, either (except for maybe Graham Greene).

And there won’t be any good film critics working tomorrow, either.

From a writer’s point of view, as my late director friend Richard Marquand advocated, “All critics should be taken into the backyard, lined up alongside the garage wall, and shot.”

Forget about critics
.

M
arilyn Monroe said: “I don’t care about the critics. I don’t care about anybody. The only people I care about are the people in Times Square, across the street from the theatre, who can’t even get close as I come in.”

They even beat up on Arthur Miller
.

A
1991
New Yorker
article referred to Arthur Miller (
Death of a Salesman, After the Fall, The Misfits
) as “a critic’s punching bag.”

Leave the sons of bitches hanging
.

M
any film critics supplement their income by teaching film classes at various schools around L.A. and New York. Their salaries depend to a great extent on being able to get “stars” to do free Q and As sessions for their classes.

If, while doing an interview with you, they ask you to make a guest appearance in their classes, always say yes. The interview with you or their review of your movie will appear long before your scheduled appearance in one of their classes.

Then, a day before your scheduled appearance, call the person and, faking a hoarse voice, tell him you’ve got the flu.

Since my throat cancer, I don’t even have to fake my hoarse voice.

It pays to be friendly with
Daily Variety.

G
etting great coverage from
Daily Variety
translates into dollars and cents. If a studio knows that your profile and your relationship with
Daily Variety
can get it positive front-page coverage, that studio is more likely to make a deal with you.

You can use
Variety
to close your deals
.

A
nother way to profit from a good relationship with
Daily Variety
: When a deal isn’t quite done, leak the story as a fait accompli to
Daily Variety
—it will make the deal more likely to get done if everyone is already talking about it.

It worked when I leaked that Paul Verhoeven was directing
Showgirls
, before he’d actually decided to direct it. Everyone told Paul what a great idea it sounded like, and he closed his deal.

It didn’t work when I leaked that Cuba Gooding, Jr., would play Otis Redding in my script
Blaze of Glory
. Cuba got pissed that
Variety
was writing about something he hadn’t yet decided to do, and he immediately pulled out of the project.

I had outfoxed myself.

This
Variety
device to get deals done was something I called “the Mike Fleming Net,” after the
Variety
writer who wrote all the stories about new deals.

Columnists like Cristal
.

I
f you want her to mention you and to mention you nicely” producer Irwin Winkler said to me about entertainment columnist Marilyn Beck, “send her a bottle of great champagne each Christmas.”

I did … and she did.

A Chatter Chippie

A Hollywood gossip columnist.

Disrupt traffic, break windows, and slit tires
.

A
group of Writers Guild officials sat in my dining room in Malibu, telling me how awful it was that the
Los Angeles Times
was increasingly giving the “Film by” credit or simply the “by” credit to directors.

I said, “What are you guys doing about it?”

One of the Guild people said, “We’re setting a series of cocktail events up where
Los Angeles Times
and other journalists can come by and meet screenwriters once a week.”

I said, “Why are you doing that?”

One of them said, “So they can get to know screenwriters, write about them, and elevate their profile.”

I said, “That won’t do any good. Those journalists are jealous as hell of screenwriters. Those bastards would die to make the kind of money a lot of screenwriters make.”

One of them said, “Well, what would you do?”

I said, “I’d set up a picket line outside the
Los Angeles Times
building to protest the ‘Film by’ credit. I’d make a lot of noise, disrupt traffic, break some windows, slit some tires, and get our feelings on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
SCREENWRITERS RUN AMOK
—that’d be a great headline.”

The Writers Guild people got out of my house very quickly.

Isn’t there something wrong here
?

M
any newspapers are already using the “by” credit.

Here is what it looks like:
Daisy Miller
by Peter Bogdanovich;
The Color Purple
by Steven Spielberg;
Gone With the Wind
by Victor Fleming;
The Godfather
by Francis Ford Coppola;
War and Peace
by King Vidor;
Huckleberry Finn
by William Desmond Taylor;
The Ten Commandments
by Cecil B. DeMille; and
The Bible
by John Huston.

PART TWELVE

T
HE
H
APPY
E
NDING

LESSON 19

Fight, Write, Throw Up, and
Keep Writing!

It’s okay to be jealous of other screenwriters
.

N
ovelist and screenwriter Gore Vidal: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

Robert McKee can get jealous, too
.

M
cKee: “Would you rather get paid
25,000 to have your story on the screen exactly as you wrote it, or get paid a million dollars by a studio and have your script butchered by development executives? Nine out of ten screenwriters want the latter. These people are not artists. They have no integrity and they get what they deserve—to have their names associated with bad films.”