The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (58 page)

In theory, to have a man who is a visual artist direct a script written by someone who works with words sounds like the perfect combination. Except that the director always tries to tell the writer what to write, while the writer never tries to tell the director how to compose his images on the screen.

Director Michael Mann is an especially brilliant visual stylist
.

G
usmano Cesaretti, a respected still photographer, has been Michael Mann’s associate producer since the 1970s. After he reads the script of whatever Mann’s upcoming film is, he goes out and shoots thousands of stills of images that might work in the film.

As Mann shoots the movie, he tries to fit photographer Cesaretti’s images into “his” film.

Some directors love torturing the actors
.

W
alter Salles (
The Motorcycle Diaries
): “We asked the actors to arrive four months prior to the shoot in Buenos Aires and then we started to do a series of seminars on Latin American history; on the cinema of the 50s. We did seminars on Incan history; we studied the music of the 50s in Latin America, with the help of professors from Buenos Aires University—all this was done to create a collective starting point, where the actors and the technical crew could have a really ingrained sense of what this journey was about.”

Orson Welles was a liar
.

W
elles said he wrote the character of Harry Lime in
The Third Man
. “I wrote everything to do with his character, I created him all around,” Welles said. “It was more than just a part for me. Harry Lime is without doubt part of my creative work.”

The Third Man
was written by Graham Greene. Welles
played the part
of Harry Lime. He wrote no dialogue for the character.

Orson Welles was a big fat liar
.

T
he only film I wrote from the first to the last word,” Welles said, “is
Citizen Kane
.”

Welles directed
Citizen Kane
, but he didn’t write it. It was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz.

You’ll meet all kinds
.

W
hen Joe Mankiewicz was on the set directing, he always wore white cotton gloves. He had eczema, which broke out on his hands whenever he was nervous. He was always nervous on a set.

Director Jack Clayton (
Moby Dick, The Innocents
) chain-smoked on the set, drank brandy and sodas nonstop, and wore a Bedouin knife strapped to his right leg. He once said to his producer, “Don’t speak while I’m talking or I’ll have you thrown off the set.”

You might even run into some Hungarian hack
.

L
egendary director Michael Curtiz, who was Hungarian, was often used by the studios to replace other directors. He was famous for getting the script on Saturday and beginning to shoot on Monday.

Hitchcock was a great auteur
.

I
n a letter to the head of MGM after he’d written the screenplay of
Strangers on a Train
, Raymond Chandler wrote, “Are you aware that this screenplay was written without one single consultation with Mr. Hitchcock after the writing of the screenplay began? Not even a telephone call. Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence then and since. There are always things that need to be discussed. There are always places where a writer goes wrong, not being himself a master of the camera. There are always difficult little points which require the meeting of minds, the accommodation of points of view. I had none of this. I find it rather strange. I find it rather ruthless. I find it almost incomparably rude.”

To Do a Jim Cameron

To have the kind of huge success that frightens you out of doing any more films.

Robert Altman is an asshole
.

T
hat’s what producer Don Simpson, a friend of mine, thought: “We made
Popeye
and we hated Altman. He was a true fraud … he was full of gibberish and full of himself, a pompous, pretentious asshole.”

Don Simpson was right about Robert Altman
.

R
ing Lardner wrote
M
A
S
H
and director Altman praised his script in early interviews.

After the movie was a hit, Altman said that he had tossed out Lardner’s script and written it himself.

The movie’s producer, George Litto, said, “Bob was never one to acknowledge a writer’s contribution. The movie was ninety percent Ring Lardner’s script, but Bob started saying he improvised the movie. I said, ‘Bob, Ring Lardner gave you the best opportunity you had in your whole life. Ring was blacklisted for years. What you’re doing is very unfair to him and you ought to stop it.’ ”

Howard Hughes’s masturbatory vision
…

H
e took over directing
The Outlaw
from Howard Hawks. His camera angles were always in dominant positions over Jane Russell, who was nineteen years old during filming. His biographer Charles Higham wrote, “No other individual in commercial Hollywood had so completely released his sexual urges on screen.”

Directors are occasionally self-aware
.

A
book published in Holland about director Paul Verhoeven is entitled
Verhoeven: Poet or Pervert?
Paul told me that he came up with the title.

Never mind everything else, Billy Friedkin is an honest man
.

F
riedkin: “The day after I won the Oscar was the only time I ever went to see a psychiatrist. I was profoundly unhappy. I told him I won an Oscar and didn’t think I deserved it.”

Beware of English directors
.

T
he English were supposed to be so nice,” Marilyn Monroe said. “But they treated me like a freak, a sex freak. All they wanted to know was whether I slept without any clothes on, did I wear underwear, what were my measurements. Gosh, don’t they have women in England?”

It’s tough for a director to share credit with Henry James
.

W
oody Allen had lunch with Peter Bogdanovich shortly after Bogdanovich wrapped
Daisy Miller
.

Allen: “He spent the whole meal agonizing. He didn’t know what the credit should read. A Peter Bogdanovich Film of Henry James’s Novella? Henry James’s Novella Directed by Peter Bogdanovich? Henry James’s
Daisy Miller
, a film by Peter Bogdanovich? Peter Bogdanovich’s
Daisy Miller
, from Henry James’s Novella?”

Directors have taste
.

C
osta-Gavras directed two of my scripts—
Betrayed
and
Music Box
—showing, I think, great taste in choosing them.

I don’t know why he passed on directing
The Godfather
.

First-time directors are piglets
.

O
n HBO’s
Project Greenlight
, directors Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle did the following things on-camera:

1. Tried to fire a boom-mike operator because he had “a bad attitude.”
   
2. Wasted most of a day’s shoot talking to producers as cast and crew stood around doing nothing.
   
3. Asked that the screenwriter and the producer communicate with them through index cards.
   
4. Demanded a free car when learning that the screenwriter had been provided a car to use.
   

After all, they were first-time directors.

Don’t hold your breath
.

E
ventually,” wrote screenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler in 1951, “there will be a type of director who realizes that what is said and how it is said is more important than shooting it upside down through a glass of champagne.”

If you consider yourself a writer, don’t direct
.

P
laywright Robert E. Lee: “Becoming a director diminishes the writer. He may have more control and more power, but he loses the writer’s perspective, the chance of looking at something with a broad, objective eye.”

“More and more writers are becoming directors,” wrote Raymond Chandler in 1957. “But in essence they cease to be writers, because a writer creates his own world on his own terms, in his own way.”

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