The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (76 page)

ALL HAIL

Mercedes de Acosta!

Truman Capote designed a game that he called the International Daisy Chain. Its goal was to connect people through the people they had slept with.

Capote said that the best card to have in the game was screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta because she had slept with so many people, “you could get to anyone from Francis Cardinal Spellman to the Duchess of Windsor.”

You, too, can marry a movie star
.

P
aul Bern wrote screenplays for German films directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg.

That’s not what made him famous. What made him famous was marrying sex bomb Jean Harlow.

When Harlow married him, she said, “He doesn’t talk fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck all the time.”

He was just another impotent screenwriter
.

S
creenwriter Paul Bern killed himself after two months of marriage to Jean Harlow.

The studio wanted to make sure the public didn’t blame Harlow in any way for her husband’s suicide. They made up a story that Bern killed himself because he was suffering from “underdeveloped genitalia”—a real problem, considering he was married to the world’s greatest sex bomb.

Keep your casting ideas to yourself
.

N
ovelist Margaret Mitchell suggested that Groucho Marx be cast as Rhett Butler in the film version of her novel,
Gone With the Wind
.

Don’t fly on the same plane with actors
.

W
e were flying from Dubuque, Iowa, to Chicago in a puddle jumper after the
F.I.S.T
. premiere—Norman Jewison, the director, and I and the actors Kevin Conway and Cassie Yates.

We got caught in a thunderstorm and the little plane started to be buffeted about in the wind.

“Oh shit,” Norman Jewison said to me. “If this thing crashes, I’m only going to get the second paragraph. The actors always get the lead—and you, the screenwriter, will be mentioned somewhere deep in the middle of the story.”

Don’t have a movie star for a friend
.

R
emember that the word
star
spelled backward is
rats
.

LESSON 17

Just Say the Fucking Words!

Even Bill Goldman wrote a tell-all
.

B
ill Goldman wrote about going bikini shopping with Elizabeth Hurley; Norman Mailer wrote about his great lust for Marilyn Monroe; Arthur Miller wrote a play about Marilyn Monroe, his wife; and then there was the screenwriter who wrote about rolling around on the floor with Sharon Stone.

Movie stars are right not to trust writers.

Warren Beatty shouldn’t ever be without his watercooler
.

W
hen studio head Frank Wells denied director and star Warren Beatty’s request for a watercooler in his office, Beatty took
Heaven Can Wait
away from Warner Bros. and went to Paramount.

Actors are teenagers undergoing a sexual identity crisis
.

S
ir Laurence Olivier: “To oneself inside, one is always sixteen with red lips.”

T
AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

Actors are like children and children are simple.

Stallone fights like a sissy and Sean Penn can’t fight
.

W
hen Sylvester Stallone claimed in interviews that he had written
F.I.S.T
. (it had taken me years to research and write the script), I challenged him to a fistfight by saying I’d been in more barroom brawls and claiming that he “fought like a sissy.”

My father, who loved me, said “I’ve seen
Rocky
. I’ve seen him fight. Challenge him to fight, yes, but do not under any circumstances fight him. He will beat you bloody.” I took my father’s advice.

At dinner one night, screenwriter/novelist Charles Bukowski told Sean Penn that his wife smelled “like she’d been sucking donkeys off all day.”

Sean jumped up and challenged Bukowski to fight. Bukowski, then in his seventies, said, “Sit down, Sean, you know I can take you.”

A Blood Star

An action star like Van Damme, Stallone, Seagal, or the governor of California.

Don’t get caught in a cross fire between two superstars
.

W
hen Sly Stallone was directing John Travolta in
Staying Alive
, they got into a hellacious battle royal over the script.

Sly wanted me to do a rewrite incorporating both of their thoughts. I had a meeting with the two of them in Sly’s trailer and saw that they were a thousand miles apart.

Sly and I had had a previous battle over
F.I.S.T
., so I said to him now, “Sly, you fucked me with a tree trunk on
F.I.S.T
. What do you want to fuck me again for?”

Both Sly and Travolta laughed—they thought that was really funny.

I didn’t do the rewrite.

You, too, can be a star maker
.

J
ennifer Beals, Sharon Stone, and Gina Gershon became stars playing the characters that I created.

All three of them denied it and said they became stars thanks to their own talent.

But none had any explanation for why they didn’t become stars after playing other screenwriters’ parts.

Actors know how to flatter you
.

A
n actress in a Harold Pinter film said that saying Pinter’s words was like “blowing air into yeast when making bread.”

Liv Tyler is obsessed with me
.

L
iv Tyler did an interview in which she said
she
was the inspiration for
Showgirls
. She said I had become obsessed with her after seeing her play a stripper in an Aerosmith video.

She said, “Joe Eszterhas thought the video was brilliant. It gave him the idea for
Showgirls
. He tried to get me to take the lead in the movie, but I didn’t want to get into that kind of thing.”

It was news to me.

I’d never seen the Aerosmith video; neither had Paul Verhoeven, the director of
Showgirls
.

I’d never met or spoken with Liv; neither had Paul Verhoeven.

I didn’t even know that Steven Tyler had a daughter named Liv; neither did Paul Verhoeven.

ALL HAIL

Tim Robbins!

The actor thanked novelist Dennis Lehane and screenwriter Brian Helgeland “for the writing of this amazing script” before thanking the director and producers as he accepted his Oscar for
Mystic River
.