The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (52 page)

Don’t go to any focus-group screenings
.

L
.A. is a city full of make-believe film critics who wanna be screenwriters. They turn out en masse at focus-group research screenings.

Every twit out there thinks he’s a critic, and they all think they know better than guess who?

Not the director, because the director knows things about camera angles and cameras that they don’t.

Not the actors, because, well, they’re handsome or beautiful or, minimally, graduate students of the Method.

Okay, all together now, they think they know better than—
ta da
—the highly paid, millionaire screenwriter!

And here are all these twits, gathered together in this room, part of a focus group, with the screenwriter usually there, and they have a chance to tell him (with studio execs listening) how it
should have been
written.

And maybe, in the process, they’ll be discovered by the director or producer—it’s their big chance at the brass ring, at discovery, at stardom, if they can just sound smart enough about what the screenwriter did wrong.

I saw one guy in his late thirties in three of my focus groups at research screenings—
the same guy at three of them
, at
Jagged Edge
and
Betrayed
and
Music Box
—and in all three cases, the guy lectured me about how bad my ending was.

See your films in a theater with real people
.

M
ost people in Hollywood see movies in a screening room or on their home screens. But it’s important for a writer to see how a film affects real people—especially the impact your own lines of dialogue and your story have on them.

This should be the final part of your creative experience of writing a screenplay. It begins in a little room, with you sitting there all alone, making it up, and it ends in a big room, with hundreds of people communicating to you their reactions to what you’ve written.

If you don’t experience what you’ve written with an audience, then you’re not bringing your communication process to a conclusion.

Avoid the industry premiere of your film
.

M
ike Medavoy: “Industry screenings might be the ultimate hypocrisy in a business that can be very hypocritical. The audience is usually composed mostly of the filmmaker’s genuine friends, who applaud and laugh at all the right moments. They want the studio executives in the audience to hear what a great film it is so the studio will support their friend’s film with marketing dollars. The studio executives tend to be a group of people who either inherited the film from a previous regime or don’t want anything to do with what they think is a potential turkey, so they walk out and praise the film in Hollywood doublespeak. Typically, they can be heard telling the producer and director things like “You did it again” or “What a picture!” neither of which says what it really means. Those executives also know they might need that producer or director in the future. So in the end, everyone runs from a failure and tries to walk alongside a success.”

Make sure you’re part of the junket interviews
.

S
ome directors like to exclude screenwriters from these interviews because the journalists who fly in from everywhere are bought and paid for—literally. The studio covers all their expenses. That means they’re not going to write anything bad about your movie or, if you’re there to be interviewed,
you
—not unless they want to lose their sunny weekends sitting by the pool at the Four Seasons, enjoying anything they want to order from room service.

Wash your hands of any blood
.

I
f your script becomes a movie and on the first weekend of its release some sick freak in Omaha kills his girlfriend in the same manner in which you killed one of your characters, forget about it.

Remember that Mark Chapman had a copy of
Catcher in the Rye
in his pocket when he shot John Lennon. And keep in mind that more killers have carried the Bible in their pockets during the act of murder than any other book.

Your words can become toys and trading cards
.

T
raveling through Italy while
Flashdance
was being released there, I started collecting
Flashdance
trading cards. Each shot of the film I had cowritten had been turned into a trading card. I saw little Italian kids flipping the cards against the curb and trying to win them from one another.

Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (
Alien
): “When
Alien
was made, I went into a Thrifty Drug and there was a little
Alien
doll in the toy stand. When your work begins to become somewhat influential like that, you do see pieces of yourself come floating back in the oddest places.”

If your movie fails, they’ll blame the marketing department
.

W
hen three straight MGM films with big budgets and big stars failed miserably—
Windtalkers, Hart’s War, Rollerball
—the studio didn’t fire its head of production and didn’t hesitate to make new development deals with the screenwriters and directors of those three disasters. Instead, the studio got rid of two people in the marketing department.

Aw, stop whining already
.

S
creenwriter/director Larry Kasdan (
Body Heat
), talking about screenwriting: “The movie comes out and there’s the pain that your movie never got made; there’s this other movie instead. But everyone says
you
wrote it, and they blame
you
for it anyway. So you’re getting it from both sides: from inside and outside.”

Pissing on Your Leg

What audiences do when they don’t like something they see on-screen—that, at least, is how Warren Beatty puts it.

If your movie fails, blame it on the director
.

T
ell everyone he trashed your script and/or let the actors improvise.

As my good friend Don Simpson used to say, “It’s not how you play the game; it’s how you place the blame.”

Or blame it on the good old USA
.

I
n an interview in Budapest, Hungary, director Oliver Stone blamed the failure of his film
Alexander
on American audiences. “Americans aren’t interested in history,” he said, “and can’t concentrate enough for a three-hour film.”

And talk about how huge it is in Croatia
.

O
liver Stone, discussing the failure of
Alexander
: “Europe was spectacular. Not the major territories—that’s in January. What’s positive is that it opened in various regions very strongly—Russia, Sweden, it moved down to Croatia. And then you go down to Turkey, Taiwan, the Asian side. Then to Bangkok and the Philippines. That was very, very encouraging. I don’t follow these things—I’m told it’s like Number One.”

Or use Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Goethe as your alibi
.

O
liver Stone, discussing the failure of his film
Alexander
: “I mean—why didn’t Shakespeare touch Alexander, or Marlowe or Goethe? Alexander was famous. Nobody touched him. Why? Because there’s too much success. He’s too much—too much for people.”

In other words, while Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Goethe chickened out, at least Oliver tried!

But you won’t be able to fool Robert J. Hurns of Mount Prospect, Illinois
.

A
fter reading Oliver Stone discussing the failure of
Alexander
, Mr. Hurns wrote a letter to
The New York Times
(January 2, 2005):

“The failure of his film wasn’t due to a lack of interest in Alexander the Great, but rather to the unwillingness of moviegoers to invest their time and money in a product associated with Oliver the Opinionated.

“Mr. Stone states that Alexander was ‘too much’ for Shakespeare, Marlowe and Goethe. The true epic here is that of Mr. Stone’s bloated ego.”

Once you write some hit movies, you’ll have much more power
.

S
creenwriter Jeffrey Boam (
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon
): “I get no more respect now than I did when I first started. Absolutely none … I feel that I’ve earned more respect than I’m getting. And that my ideas shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, which they often are. I’ll throw out an idea at a meeting, and the director or producer or the studio executive will say, ‘I hate it.’ They won’t explain to me why; they feel like they don’t have to. They’re not curious to know how I would actually execute this idea. They stop me and say, ‘That’s terrible. We don’t like it. Move on.’ You know, just like I’m the errand boy.”

If you let ’em treat you like an errand boy, Jeffrey, then you’re an errand boy.

If somebody says “I hate it,” one possible answer, with your record of hit movies, is, “Oh yeah, how many millions have your movies grossed, asshole?”

In my experience, I’ve found that most producers, directors, and studio execs don’t know how to deal with that word—
asshole
—when it’s directed at them, possibly because deep in their hearts they know that they’re …

If your movie fails, there’s a good chance that one day it will be remade
.

S
amuel Goldwyn: “It’s a mistake to remake a great picture, because you can never make it better. Better you should find a picture that was done badly and see what can be done to improve it.”

PART SEVEN