The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (29 page)

The greatest fun in screenwriting is
not
getting paid a lot of money … and it’s certainly no fun trying to hustle the Neanderthal who doesn’t even read and barely watches movies into being impressed with your pitch; the great fun in screenwriting is writing your first draft without anyone else’s ideas cluttering or polluting it. Just you and your muse and the empty page or blank screen. Creating. Playing God.

Why would you turn down being God for playing Willy Loman selling his shoes to an imbecile studio exec?

Pitching your script can hurt your writing
.

D
irector David Lean: “These American screenwriters really frighten me. They talk so well and write so badly. I have now worked with five of them, and not one has come along with a big original idea. We
need
an original idea. Hence my fright.”

There is no risk to writing a spec script
.

N
ot selling it is not a risk.

I didn’t sell several—
Magic Man, Blaze of Glory, Platinum
—but by writing each one I got better at writing scripts; I learned form and structure on each one. It was like going to school.

And even though no one bought those unsold-at auction scripts, a lot of people read them and admired them—which is how many years later I sold
Magic Man
(I retitled it
Telling Lies in America
). A producer who’d read it during the failed auction recommended it to a young director, who fell in love with it.

Ron Bass is Willy Loman
.

S
creenwriter Ron Bass (
Rain Man
): “I was sitting with David Madden [a studio executive] and I was pitching him. At the beginning, I used to have fifty different ideas, a carpetbag; I would go and I would pitch six or eight things at a time. I pitched him, over the course of a day, about six or seven ideas and two different main ideas. … I work in this very strange way where I book myself way, way, way ahead. I’m usually booked for two or three years in advance; that’s the way I work. I have a lot of things going at the same time. I’m usually writing six or seven things at the same time, different drafts at different stages.”

Here comes the woodpecker!

O
ne studio exec gave writers three minutes to pitch their stories. He had an aluminum pole in his office with a woodpecker on top of it. When the writer began the pitch, the exec prodded the woodpecker and it made its way down the pole—hammering away loudly with its beak—as the writer chattered on about his idea. The woodpecker got to the bottom of the pole exactly three minutes later, when the writer had to finish his pitch.

You don’t want to do your work at a urinal
.

B
en Hecht walked into a restaurant rest room and found Sam Goldwyn standing at a urinal. Ben stood at the next urinal and pitched Sam a story. Goldwyn had prostate problems, so Ben had a long time to pitch. When Sam finally shook off, he told Ben he’d buy it for
125,000.

Don’t become “a good meeting.”

J
ohn Gregory Dunne: “Screeenwriters known in Hollywood as ‘good meetings’ are those with the gift of schmoozing an idea so successfully—as if getting that idea down on paper was only a matter of some incidental typing—that studio executives pressed development funds on them.”

Don’t listen to morons like this
.

I
n his book
Screenwriting from the Heart: The Technique of the Character-Driven Screenplay
(
the reading line of which describes it as
“An Indispensable Guide to Developing Dramatic and Passionate Screenplays Based on Compelling Characters”), Professor James Ryan writes: “To begin a pitch you should first lure someone with a tease, such as ‘Did you ever think what it must be like to have sex with someone in your office? It doesn’t just happen in the Oval Office. Maybe your girlfriend has dumped you and you are hurt and vulnerable, or maybe you found out that your lover is two-timing you.’ The pitch then continues to the story. … You may notice that I tied the tease to the current events of that time in the Oval Office. … However trite it may seem, it’s good strategy. Giving a pitch … is about being simple and
shameless
in your effort to grab the listener’s suggestion.”

Always go to a pitch meeting with a witness
.

T
ry to convince your agent or your agent’s assistant to accompany you. If you can’t convince them, go with a friend, whom you should call your “writing partner.”

They will be less likely to rip you off if they know you had a witness in the room—and if they do rip you off, you can go to court with a chance to win.

Who is this goofball?

P
rofessor James Ryan in
Screenwriting from the Heart
: “A producer asked me to take the concept of the film
The Man Who Came to Dinner
and change it into
The Woman Who Came to Dinner
. He had a producing deal with a well-known actress and thought this screenplay would provide an excellent vehicle for her talent. Written by the Epstein Brothers,
The Man Who Came to Dinner
was based on the Kaufman-Hart play about a pompous New York critic, Monty Wooley, who accidentally slips on ice, breaks his leg, and is forced to stay with a midwestern family during his recovery, driving them crazy with his arrogance and grandiosity. At the time we were pitching this project in Hollywood,
Jurassic Park
had just opened and everyone was taken with its blockbuster success. When we sat down to discuss the project with a studio executive, my producer introduced me in this way: ‘James has a really great story to tell you. Just like
Jurassic Park
, this story is about a dinosaur that descends upon an unsuspecting midwestern town.’ ”

Take notes for yourself after a pitch meeting
.

D
escribe what you pitched, what you said, and what those in the room said to you. Be very detailed about everyone who was in the room.

Then mail these notes to your lawyer, keeping, of course, a copy for yourself.

Bill Goldman and I agree on something
.

W
illiam Goldman: “I have only tried one ‘pitch’ in my life and that was for friends, and I was so awful I quit halfway through.”

Send those that you’ve pitched an e-mail
.

T
he e-mail should begin by saying how much you enjoyed the meeting, and end by detailing everything that you said and that they said.

Yes, of course they will know why you sent the note, but it will make it less likely that they will steal your ideas.

Pukeheads

A studio exec’s term for those screenwriters who are nervous doing a pitch.

W
RITE WHAT YOU KNOW …
MUSIC BOX

As an immigrant kid in Cleveland, I played with kids whose fathers were raving anti-Semites and whom other Hungarians in Cleveland were calling “war criminals.”

Many years later, I wrote a script called
Music Box
about a Hungarian-American lawyer who defends her father against criminal charges for activities back in Hungary during World War II
.

D
O YOUR RESEARCH …
BASIC INSTINCT

One night when I was a young man, I was with a girl I’d picked up at a go-go bar in Dayton, Ohio. She was one of the dancers
.

We went to a hotel and, after what we’d done what we went there to do, she pulled a cute little .22-caliber revolver on me and asked if I had any real good reason why she shouldn’t pull the trigger, considering the way her life was going and considering how used she felt at that moment
.

She told me I wouldn’t be the first guy she’d pulled the trigger on, and I believed her … and somehow talked her out of pulling it on
me.

When I was writing
Basic Instinct
many years later in a little room of my house in San Rafael, California, I remembered the girl in that hotel room in Dayton, Ohio
.

If you’ve pitched a story and they want you to give them an outline
…

F
udge. I do this all the time. I explain in the first paragraph of the outline that it isn’t an outline. It is a document containing “notes in the direction of a story.”

This wording gives you a legalistic out in case your script doesn’t reflect what is in the outline that isn’t an outline.

Don’t talk your story away
.

K
eep what you’re writing to yourself. Don’t expend the energy you’ll need to write it by talking your story instead, telling friends in bars, restaurants, and beds what you’re working on.

I’ve heard too many good stories from screenwriters who talked but never wrote them. I’ve come to the conclusion that your characters get angry at you if you speak about them … and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge.

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

Screenwriter Robert Towne is famous in Hollywood for talking terrific scripts that never get written. Towne even had an agent once who heard so many brilliant and unwritten scripts from Towne that he started writing their plot summaries down. He proposed to Towne that they form a production company together and assign the unwritten Towne stories to other writers. Towne, horrified that his agent was taking notes about what he was telling him, fired the agent instead.

There is another reason not to tell anyone what you are writing. It isn’t as likely that you’ll be ripped off if you stay mum. Rip-offs are common in Hollywood; some of the town’s most successful writers have plagiarized. A screen-writer won an Academy Award by ripping off a novel written by one of his college professors; the studio paid a hefty six-figure sum to settle the suit.

Write your script; don’t schmooze your producer
.