The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (47 page)

When
Basic Instinct
made
500 million, their woeful, misbegotten reader was captured by the studio’s foot soldiers one night (at Starbucks), driven to the back lot (near the water tower) at Warner Bros., and beheaded.

Oh no, all those readers have been McKee’d
.

R
obert McKee’s Web site bio says, “Several companies such as ABC, Disney, Miramax, PBS, Nickelodeon and Paramount regularly send their entire creative and writing staffs to his lectures.”

If the first studio passes on your script
…

S
ugar Ray Robinson, former middleweight champion of the world: “You never know how tough you are till somebody knocks you down and you decide whether you wanna get yourself up or not.”

A Calling-Card Script

A script that you don’t sell but that studio execs read as an indication of your talent. Figure it his way: Even if you don’t sell the script that you’ve put your heart and guts into, it still might get you a writing job—although this kind of figuring can get a bit overdrawn at times. I spoke to a wannabe screenwriter once, who said, “I haven’t sold anything yet, but I’ve got six or seven really great calling-card scripts.”

Cover the Waterfront

It once used to mean something very different, but now it means getting your script to as many potential buyers as possible if you’re trying to sell it on a spec basis.

A Pussy Hair Away

According to producer Robert Evans, this is a deal that’s almost but not quite done.

After several months of trying, your new agent has sold your script to a studio. They ask you how long it took you to write it. Lie
.

A
fter I had sold
Basic Instinct
for
3 million, many people asked me how long it had taken me to write it.

I had my answer down pat: “Well, I’ve probably been working on this script for most of my life. It’s about homicidal impulse and thrill killing, and I was fascinated by those things even twenty-five years ago, when I was a journalist. I remember I interviewed a mass murderer named Edward Kemper when I was writing for
Rolling Stone
magazine, and before that, when I was a reporter in Cleveland, I interviewed two kids there who’d killed their parents, Freddie Esherick and Treva Crosthwaite. And I’d known and worked with cops from the time when I covered the police beat in Cleveland to the time I interviewed narcotics agents for
Rolling Stone
. I actually had my office in Cleveland in the basement at Central Police Station. I even covered a shooting where eight policemen were shot down in the streets a couple hundred feet in front of me. And I did a profile of a burned-out cop very much like the Nick Curran character in my script; he was involved in so many shootings, he was suspended from the force. And, from the point of view of the other central character, Catherine Tramell, well, I’ve already written three films where women were manipulated by men—
Betrayed, Jagged Edge
, and
Music Box
—and I wanted to write a story about a woman who is so smart and so sensual that she can manipulate even the smartest streetwise homicide cop. And, of course, I’m a writer and the central character of this piece is a writer. I wanted to get into the whole notion of becoming your characters, of getting too close to the fire and getting burned. So, as you see, this script comes from deep in my soul, and maybe the reason it was sold for so much money is because the buyers sensed the authenticity, the reality, of it.”

This was all true, but it was also malarkey. Because while it was true that I had done all the things I referred to in my little speech, it had taken only thirteen days from the moment I had the idea to the moment my agents sold the finished script at auction.

Truth is, I had gotten
3 million for maybe ten days’ writing.

I certainly wasn’t about to tell anyone
that
.

Had I said that, many people in Hollywood would immediately have said, “Never mind that it sold for three mil, if all it took to write it was ten days, then it’s a piece of shit.” (Few in Hollywood knew or would have cared that it took William Faulkner
six weeks
to write
The Sound and the Fury
, one of the most complex
novels
of our time.)

Only after
Basic
was a smash did I tell the press that it had taken just thirteen days from inception to sale.

I told the truth, then, to flip a gigantic bird in the face of Hollywood.

Thirteen days and five hundred mil! I can do that and you can’t!

But nowhere have I revealed my real motive for writing that script. In 1980, I had set a record for a spec script by selling
City Hall
for
500,000. I had broken my own record a couple of years later by selling
Big Shots
for
1,250,000. Then a writer named Shane Black had broken my record by selling
The Last Boy Scout
for
1,750,000.