The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (53 page)

W
ORKING WITH THE
D
IRECTOR

LESSON 12

He’s a Passive-Aggressive Snake!

Defining the director
…

S
creenwriter William Faulkner describing his director friend Howard Hawks: “He’s a cold-blooded man, but he will protect me if I write a script that will make money for him.”

Another definition of the director
…

T
he starlet offers the director a blow job for a bit part. The director says, “What’s in it for me?”

It’s all about
the next job,
isn’t it, Ron?

O
scar-winning screenwriter Ron Bass (
Rain Main
) on the director: “He’s a
fascinating
guy. He’s a
brilliant
guy. He’s really a
challenging
guy. … Everything he wanted to do, even when I didn’t see the sense of it at the time or I didn’t see where he was going, it all did make sense and it was all going toward
a vision that was his vision
. … This was my first lesson in trying to let go of my vision of the piece and understand that there comes a point when the director’s the guy who’s got to make the movie, and you really have to be
servicing his vision
. … I see the film and I say at the end of it, ‘Boy,
he’s a lot smarter than I was
and smart enough to realize it.’ …
The director is the author of the film
. … The farther I go in my writing career, the more I enjoy what I’m doing,
the more sympathetic and admiring I am of directors
. I think directing is the lousiest job in the world. …
The directors are the victims
. They are controlled by the movie. They are the victims of the flaws in my script.”

Directors can plagiarize anything they want
.

I
f
they
steal, it’s called an
homage
. The director Brian De Palma has done whole film-length homages to Hitchcock—
Sisters
,
Blow Out
,
Obsession
.

Directors are petty despots
.

D
irector Ken Russell to screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky: “What’s it to you whether you like the set or not? You’re only the writer! … Take your turkey sandwiches and your script and your Sanka and stuff it up your ass and get on the next fucking plane back to New York and let me get on with the fucking film.”

Avoid auteur directors
.

T
he director’s job is to put
your
vision up on the movie screen. If you work with an auteur director, he will steal
your
vision and change it enough so he can call it his own.

Stanley Kubrick, perhaps the best director in the world, wanted to direct Paddy Chayefsky’s
Network
. Paddy wouldn’t work with him and stopped the studio from hiring him.
Network
won the Oscar for Best Screenplay and was a huge worldwide hit. It remained very much “a Paddy Chayefsky film,” not “a film by Stanley Kubrick.”

An Ambience Chaser

A director who uses smokepots in every scene.

Don’t work with any director who’s just won an Oscar
.

T
hat director will be so impressed with his accomplishment that he won’t work again for many years.

Robert Redford didn’t work again for eight years after he won for
Ordinary People
; Warren Beatty didn’t direct again for nine years after
Reds
; Milos Forman didn’t direct for five years after
Amadeus
.

What these guys all did, though, for all those years they didn’t direct, was
develop
properties.

They worked with screenwriters like you, trying to get a script in good-enough shape to shoot. The fact that they found no scripts in all that time good enough to shoot may have had something to do with how petrified they were to direct after winning an Oscar.

To Do a Cimino

To direct a film that fails so badly that it kills the studio, like Michael’s
Heaven’s Gate
.

ALL HAIL

Bruce Vilanch!

Never mind all the producers and directors and hosts, Bruce Vilanch, screenwriter, has been writing the Academy Awards show for fifteen years and is its true voice.

Work with a director when he is “briefly, temporarily, human.”

P
roducer Robert Evans: “The time I want to work with a director is when he’s just had a gigantic failure. Think Cimino after
Heaven’s Gate
, Spielberg after
1941
, Coppola after
One from the Heart
, Verhoeven after
Showgirls
. That’s the time to work with them—when, briefly, temporarily, they’re human.”