The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (20 page)

P
ERK OF SUCCESS:
SLEEP WITH THE STAR

Even if you’re married—it’s worth the memory
.

Don’t lose your head in the process, though. Paddy Chayefsky and Kim Novak had a brief affair. “He was awestruck, really, that someone like Kim Novak would be interested in him,” said a producer. “Kim had Paddy thinking he was seven feet tall, a blond, blue-eyed WASP.” Said another producer: “This was a sensational-looking woman. She had a pair of tits you would not believe, and she never wore a bra.”

Paddy believed his friend Irwin Shaw’s dictum that “the writer only has one obligation—to stay alive and try to please himself.”

But he lost his head. He told his wife that he wanted a divorce because he was in love with Novak
.

His wife, luckily, said, “Don’t be ridiculous!”

A week later, Novak dumped him
.

So you’re a little nuts, so what
.

I
know it wasn’t really sane to tell those Disney executives to “get your hands off my dick” in the Disney conference room … or to send a memo to a director that caused him to suffer a heart attack.

But all writers are a little nuts. The people who know me and love me have made peace with that.

As the writer/director Garson Kanin said of his friend Paddy Chayefsky: “I think it’s fair to say—and nothing against him—Paddy was a little crazy. I don’t think there is any important writer who is completely sane. If he was, he wouldn’t be a writer—or a painter, or a poet, or a sculptor. I don’t mean clinically insane—but his reactions aren’t normal, and his perceptions certainly aren’t normal. And Paddy, more than most, was a little bit cuckoo.”

It is not who you know
.

A
ll it takes to become a successful screenwriter is to
sell one script
.

One person has to read your script and believe that he/she can make money off of it.
They
can’t begin
making
money, of course, until they pay
you
some.

Spend your time on your butt, working on that one script instead of trying to seduce people into being your friends—so they can be there to buy your script, if and whenever you finally get around to writing it.

They’ll do everything they can to stop you from being a star
.

I
t is not in the studio’s interest for a screenwriter to become a star, the way directors become stars.

If a screenwriter becomes a star, studio execs won’t be able to tell him what to write.

If a screenwriter becomes a star, he’ll wind up in the papers and on TV, criticizing studio heads.

Everyone knows directors are controllable and they
need
the studios to be able to work.

But those crazy asshole writers—all they
need
to go to work is a piece of paper and a pencil.

Don’t break your own heart
.

S
hane Black was the hottest young writer in town, selling original spec scripts for lots of money. He was a savvy, well-read guy with balls.

The Long Kiss Goodnight
was his pet project—a brilliant script that director Renny Harlin and his wife at the time, Geena Davis, turned into a turgid and empty film.

Shane stopped writing for a long time after that nightmarish experience and tried to make it as an actor. The reason he stopped writing was that his heart was broken, but that’s only half the story.

The reason his heart was broken was that he had broken it himself. He had let Renny Harlin cajole and charm him into making fatal changes to his script, the changes that ruined his own script and doomed his own movie.

After many years, Shane came back to direct his own script—one way of making sure you don’t break your own heart again … unless, of course, he listens too closely to his producer, Joel Silver, who is, unfortunately, a friend of his and very good at cajoling and charming.

Don’t write for “blood money.”

B
lood money” is when you’re rewriting someone else’s script, and you change anything and everything in the script—plot points, characters, and especially characters’ names—not because the changes are creatively necessary but so you’ll get screen credit and the money that’s tied to you getting that credit.

There is a story, hopefully apocryphal, about a screenwriter assigned to adapt
The Great Gatsby
. The screenwriter changed the name “Gatsby” to “Farrell” and the title to “The Great Farrell” in an attempt to get screen credit and more money.

Sometimes the damn place just makes you cry
.

C
orky was a sweet little man who poured the stiffest drinks at the Hideaway Bar at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Jack Lemmon and I would sip our drinks there on soggy or smoggy L.A. afternoons.

Corky had a laugh that made Jack and me laugh, and he told the dumbest jokes in Southern California.

One day, I walked in and there was a new guy behind the bar and Jack was floating his scotch high up in his eyeballs.

Jack told me that Corky had met a guy right there in the Hideaway Room who’d taken him home, then left his body in a Dumpster.

No more laughs and jokes. No more hiding in the afternoons at the Hide-away Bar. Jack and I both started to cry, realizing that sometimes there is simply no shelter from the town’s degradations.

You don’t want to get in a creative disagreement with a Scientologist
.

W
hile they’re nice folks, scientologists don’t like to be messed with.

I once threatened to take Sylvester Stallone on in a fistfight. I once threatened to break a studio executive’s knees. I once told the most powerful man in Hollywood to go fuck himself and the foot soldiers he rode in on.

But under no circumstances would I get into a creative disagreement with a Scientologist.

Besides, I don’t think the Dogon fighting stick or the Tibetan rock or the hunting knife I carry are any match for their E-meter.

You don’t want to mess with that E-meter, either
.

S
cientologists have this machine called the E-meter. They will have someone read your script and E-meter it before one of their people commits to do the movie.

It’s more than enough, in my experience, for a screenwriter to deal with a director, a producer, studio notes, a star’s ego, et cetera.

Trust me on this: You don’t need to deal with an E-meter.

Oscarosis

A disease whose main symptom is that the victim is willing to do anything—
anything
—to win an Oscar.

With actors and executives, act like you’re a playwright, not a screen-writer
.

A
ctress Jill Hennessy (
Crossing Jordan
): “When you’re an actor working in the theater, you would never say anything to the writer, never alter the dialogue, never dream to ask for changes.”

Good ideas can come from great gossip
.

I
n
Sliver
, Sharon Stone spends a lot of time looking through a telescope at her New York apartment building neighbors. I got the idea from a friend of Jackie Kennedy’s who told me Jackie loved to do the same thing.

ALL HAIL

Clifford Odets!

Agent Swifty Lazar: “Clifford Odets was a wily client. One day he called me. He was so in debt, he said, that he’d sold his art collection. But he had an idea for a movie,
Page One
. I knew he was spitballing, but I took him over to see Jerry Wald and Jerry bit. Jerry sent us out to Darryl Zanuck.

“I got Odets two hundred thousand, a small fortune for a screenplay in those days. … A month later, Odets invited me to pick up the script. When I walked into his cottage, he was holding a six-hundred-page screenplay—a document about five times longer than a standard script.

“Odets said, ‘I’ll cut it if they pay me.’

“I soon realized that Odets had planned this caper. … I got him some additional money. Odets started cutting away. He trimmed it down to three hundred pages, and then I had to get him some additional money to cut it to two hundred. At that point, he announced he wanted to direct the movie. … They let him direct the picture. … It was a ghastly movie that died on Pico Boulevard and should never have been released.”

The word
Death
in a title is death at the box office
.

I
t will bum audiences out and let them know they’re in for a depressing experience. I’ve heard at least three producers tell me this.

Each time I’ve said, “Have you ever heard of something called
Death of a Salesman
?”

If you sell the concept for a script, demand a hotel suite in which to write it
.

M
any screenwriters claim to get in touch with their muses
best
at places like the Dolder Grand in Zurich, the Dorchester in London, the Kahala on Oahu, the Ritz-Carlton on Maui, or the relatively cut-rate Beverly Hills Hotel and Chateau Marmont in L.A.

While vacationing with my family at the Kahala once, we were sitting on the beach when we saw John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion walking along the beach, their heads down,
matching sweaters tied around their hips
, lost in
serious thought
.