The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (13 page)

Unelectric

Uninspired, flat, dull, benighted—the opposite of producer Peter Guber, known in the industry as “the Electric Jew.”

The Blue in the Toilet Bowl

An old-time studio term for a successful WASP in Hollywood.

Never underestimate how scared everybody else in town is
.

I
said this on ABC’s
20/20
: “People in Hollywood pee themselves the moment their feet hit the floor in the morning.”

Don’t count on anything
.

A
ctress Hedy Lamarr: “That’s how it always is in the entertainment industry, your feet are always treading Jell-O. From one minute to the next everything changes.”

Take this to heart
.

P
roducer Ray Stark gave me this advice: “Don’t let anyone push you around, do what your heart tells you to do, and don’t borrow any money.”

To Cut Down on Your Cream

To stop living excessively, to save for a rainy day.

Do what Sharon does
.

S
haron Stone keeps a large punching bag in her garage and pounds on it every day.

I created a monster
.

A
ctress Sharon Stone: “I’ve got the biggest balls in Hollywood. It’s good that they’re scared of me. The longer they stay scared, the longer I keep my job.”

If you don’t like your own writing, do something else for a living
.

W
illiam Goldman: “Since I don’t much care for my writing,
Princess Bride
is the only picture of mine I can look at without embarrassment.”

Why does your butt hurt after you’ve taken Robert McKee’s course?

T
he New Yorker
wrote: “McKee, who is sixty-two, and likes to wear dark shirts with two buttons undone at the neck, suggesting a career in extortion, lit a cigarette, then walked down the street while listening to an agitated young man say that the last time he had heard McKee speak the effect had been so overwhelming that he had fallen ill. ‘All the stuff you don’t want to face, which is to say emotional truth, the stuff of good story telling, it was coming out!’ the young man said, very fast. ‘It was coming out in such a way that it caused this pain in my back, because subconscious growth is such a painful process.’”

I shouldn’t be telling you all these things
.

S
creenwriter Dan O’Bannon (
Alien
): “Most of what is written on how to write a screenplay is written by people who don’t know how. … There aren’t that many who do know how, and those who do know how tend not to tell. For the very obvious reason: they don’t want to train their own competition. These are not unknowns, but it’s on the level of the mortuary trade—it’s passed on by word of mouth.”

The Screenwriter’s Lament

“The fucking you get isn’t worth the fucking you get.”

LESSON 3

Don’t Let ’Em Fart at Your Ideas!

If you’re nineteen years old and writing your first script, know this: Life will get easier
.

P
addy Chayefsky (
Network, The Hospital
): “Nineteen-year-old writers want more out of their writing than mere satisfaction. They want approbation, to change the world and many other things. Besides, at nineteen, he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.”

Don’t be a screenwriter; be a writer who just happens to write for the screen
.

D
on’t spend all of your time in dark theaters watching movies. Live. Love. Immerse yourself in the messy entanglements of
real
, not
reel
, life.

Listen to human beings talk, not characters created by other screenwriters who spend all their time in dark movie theaters.

Use the events and the human beings of your everyday life to create a fictional world that
real
people, not
reel
people, will recognize, understand, and be moved by when they see what you have created.

You scare the living shit out of the studios
.

P
addy Chayefsky: “When the studios hire a director, they can see him direct, or an actor act, or a typist type, but they can’t see a writer think, and that frightens them.”