The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (28 page)

It didn’t do him any good. The script remains unsold.

PART THREE

G
ETTING
R
EADY TO
W
RITE THE
S
CRIPT

LESSON 7

Avoid the Woodpecker!

Inhale a writer you admire
.

K
nowing nothing about writing a play, Paddy Chayefsky taught himself playwriting by sitting down at the typewriter and copying Lillian Hellman’s
The Children’s Hour
word for word.

He said, “I studied every line of it and kept asking myself, Why did she write this particular line?”

W
RITE WHAT YOU KNOW …
F.I.S.T
.

I grew up on the west side of Cleveland among working-class folks, many of whose parents were involved in the union struggles of the 1930s and 1940s
.

The first script I wrote was called
F.I.S.T.
and was about a union’s struggles in the thirties and forties
.

D
O YOUR RESEARCH …
BASIC INSTINCT

When I was a police reporter in Cleveland, I knew a cop who was also a television cameraman on his days off. He’d been involved in several police shootings. He craved action. He couldn’t stand to be away from the scene, even on his days off, which is why he did the cameraman gig. He liked it too much. He got sucked too close to the flame. I remembered him twenty years later when I wrote the burned-out cop Nick Curran, who got sucked too close to the flame in
Basic Instinct.

ALL HAIL

The Old Macho Bastard!

Selznick told Ernest Hemingway that, as an homage to him, he would give him fifty thousand dollars from the profits of
A Farewell to Arms,
even though that was not in the contract.

Hemingway wrote him a note back, telling him that since Selznick’s forty-one-year-old wife was playing Hemingway’s twenty-four-year-old Catherine Barkley, any profit on the movie was unlikely.

But if a miracle somehow occurred and the movie did go into profit, Hemingway told Selznick, he could change the fifty grand into nickels … and shove them up his ass … until they came out his ears.

High Concept

The best high-concept definition of a film I’ve ever heard is producer Robert Evans’s description of his film
The Cotton Club
: “Gangsters, music, pussy.”

Don’t pitch a story; write it
.

D
on’t sit there like Willy Loman with a roomful of imbeciles who see shoe salesmen pitching their wares all day. If you do this, you’ll demean yourself and it will harm your creativity.

If you really believe in your story, believe in it enough not just to chatter about it but to sit down and
do the hard work and write it
.

It is the only honest way to sell a script. With a pitch, you’re trying to convince the studio that you
will
write a good script. Instead,
just write the good script
.

If they buy it, chances are good that they will piss in it less … because it’s all done and ready to be cast and produced.

And, too, if it’s already written and ready to go, they will pay you more for it than as a “pitch”—especially if you can get other studios interested in buying it.

One of the reasons I’ve made so much money on my scripts through the course of my career is that most of my sales have been scripts I just sat down and wrote and then sold … instead of “pitching” them to the imbeciles.

Real writers sit down and write: wannabe writers sit around and talk.

In a town full of cons, writing a spec script is an act of integrity
.

I
t’s the honest way to go for both you and the studios you are trying to sell it to.

As a spec script, something that you have already written in toto for no compensation, it’s right there in front of your potential buyers. You’re not selling them a hustle: your promise in a pitch meeting that you’ll write and your promise
how
you’ll write it.

You’re selling the thing itself—boom!—it’s right there on the table, take it or leave it.

It’s the most honest way for you to deal with
you,
too. You can sell it to a whole
bunch
of possible buyers in a script auction instead of the one or two you’d pitch it to. If you get two or more wannabe buyers bidding against each other, the sky is your limit.

I sold
Basic Instinct
for
3 million because every production entity in town except one was bidding on it.