The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (56 page)

W
hen director Bob Fosse was dying, he asked his best and oldest friend, Paddy Chayefsky, to look over his will.

“Hey,” Paddy said to Fosse, “why am I not in your will?”

“I’m taking care of my wife and my kids,” Fosse replied.

“Fuck you, then,” Paddy said. “
Live!
”

Don’t be anybody’s “pocket writer.”

T
his can happen when you get to be pals with a director. In most cases, a director will be pals with you if you do exactly what he tells you to do,
if you write what he tells you to write
.

If you do that, he will then bring you into his future projects (written by others) and get you a lot of money to rewrite those scripts.

Kurt Luedtke (
Absence of Malice
) and David Rayfiel (
The Firm
) made a lot of money being director Sidney Pollack’s “pocket writers.” As a result, though, they were mistrusted by other directors, who feared that if they worked with them, these writers would pass their ideas on to their pal Pollack.

If you’re working with a director, don’t just “come up with the details.”

S
creenwriter José Rivera, talking about working with director Walter Salles on
The Motorcycle Diaries
: “Some of the best collaborative work I have ever done with a director was with Walter because he doesn’t rewrite you. He makes very precise and interesting comments on everything you’ve written, and some of them yield new things … He would have an idea and I would come up with the details.”

Directors like being deified
.

B
illy Friedkin about Alfred Hitchcock: “I don’t give a flying fuck about him, and I’m not a worshipper of his, nor have I ever set out to emulate him. But I’m glad that people deify directors because I make more money that way.”

But you don’t really have to deify your director
.

S
creenwriter Brian Helgeland on director Dick Donner: “With his leonine head and booming voice, he seems more like a movie star than the stars he’s directing. When Donner shouts action on a set, it’s the voice of God coming down from on high.”

Oh gag me!

S
creenwriter Darryl Ponicsan on director Martha Coolidge: “She values words, but she knows the silences are worth more. A rambling rose rambling down a Texas street says more than words can convey. Come to think of it, so does this photograph of Martha.”

Please pass me that barf bag
.

S
creenwriter Jeff Davis, asked to adapt a novel for director William Friedkin, whose wife, Sherry Lansing, headed Paramount at the time and who hadn’t had a hit movie in thirty years, said, “To be writing a psychological horror film for William Friedkin, the man who set the standard in the genre by directing what is considered to be the scariest and most viscerally disturbing movie of all time, is more than a writer could hope for.”

You can get up now, sweetie
.

R
onald Harwood won Best Adapted Screenplay for
The Pianist
and said in his acceptance speech, “Roman Polanski [the director] deserves this.”

ALL HAIL

William Goldman!

He wrote an article in
Daily Variety
saying that Martin Scorsese did not deserve to win an Oscar for
Gangs of New York
: “
Gangs of New York
is a mess.”

He also wrote that he would never forgive Miramax for “hyping the Oscar to Robert Benigni, the scummiest award in the Academy’s history.”

Don’t ever trust your director
.

J
ean Renoir, the king of auteur directors, said, “Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal?”

You can’t ever overestimate a director’s ego
.

B
illy Friedkin told screenwriter William Peter Blatty that he refused to cast Marlon Brando in
The Exorcist
. Blatty: “His reason was that if he cast Brando, it would be Brando’s picture, not his.”

Where do their brains go? Be prepared for the director of your film to have an affair on the set with the lead actress
.

I
t happened to me twice—with Costa-Gavras and Debra Winger on
Betrayed
and, more famously, with Paul Verhoeven and Elizabeth Berkley on
Showgirls
.

Costa’s affair didn’t hurt
Betrayed
, but Paul’s destroyed
Showgirls
.

After the film bombed, I said to Paul, “When a man gets a hard-on, his brains slide into his ass.”

Paul laughed; he didn’t argue with me.

But they can’t walk the walk
.

D
irectors know they can’t write, but they try to make up for this by
talking
about writing.

They are similar to the screenwriting teachers in this regard—the teachers who can’t write scripts but tell you how you should write them.

Directors will talk to you about the “through line” and “the arc,” ask “Where is the redemption?” … and refer to “deep in the subtext” and “the door to the character’s motivation.”

Some directors, interestingly, have taken screenwriting courses from the likes of Robert McKee, but even those who haven’t have learned how to speak this cinema-lit psychobabble.

They can’t write, but while
you’re
writing, they have to do
something
creative—they can’t even cast or scout for locations until you’re
done
writing.

So what they do to kill time while you’re creating the movie is to talk to you about how to write—like the baseball-hitting coach who never got out of the minors telling major leaguers how to hit a curveball.

A good director is worth waiting for
.

C
osta-Gavras, the director of
Z
, called me in 1977, after he’d read my script of
F.I.S.T
. He said, in very broken English, that he loved the script but that he couldn’t speak English very well.

But he was taking Berlitz courses, he said, and when his English got better, he’d call me back and maybe we could do something together.

Eight years after that first phone call, he directed my script
Betrayed
.

Don’t completely dismiss your director’s ideas
.

D
irector Costa-Gavras saved me from an ending to
Music Box
that, I think, in retrospect, would have hurt the movie. I will always be grateful for the way he slugged it out with me and convinced me that my ending was wrong.

On the other hand, dismiss most of your director’s ideas
.

C
osta-Gavras had an idea for the ending of
Betrayed
that, I was convinced, would destroy the movie.

We slugged it out for two days and, at the end of those days, he reluctantly agreed with me that he was wrong. I will always be grateful for that, too.

LESSON 13

Every Good Director Is a Sadist!

If you argue with your director, go for the jugular
.

S
am Spiegel, arguing with Elia Kazan, said to him, “What the hell do you know? You only know about testifying on your friends.”

On
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
, I said to Arthur Hiller, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, you doddering old fuck.” (I apologized later.)

Are you masochistic?

P
roducer David Merrick: “All good directors are sadists. I won’t put up with it from mediocrities, but for genius I’m willing to be a doormat.”

Your disagreement with the director can get ugly
.

W
orking on
Lawrence of Arabia
, screenwriter Carl Foreman and director David Lean got along so badly that they were even arguing about whether a character would scratch his face or not.

Foreman accused Lean of being “an art house director.” “You have made only small British films,” Foreman said. “You have no experience of the international market.”

Lean attacked Foreman in an eight-page letter to the film’s producer, which began: “This is not meant to be an attack. But when one gets into the scenes in detail, they are awfully rough and ready, and in many cases cheap and derivative.”

In a creative discussion, use any lethal weapon you can
.

D
irector Jack Garfein (
The Strange One
) had survived concentration camps, and when a screenwriter wasn’t listening to him about the scene he wanted, Garfein asked, “Why are you arguing with me? Don’t you know I am an Auschwitz victim?”

The way to talk to a director
…

P
roducer Robert Evans: “I don’t want a director to talk with me and then leave and say, ‘Gee, what a nice guy.’ I want him to say, ‘That bastard.’ ‘That son of a bitch!’ Because then they always come back and say, ‘You were right. Let’s talk.’ ”