The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (77 page)

T
HE HELL WITH TIM ROBBINS

In
The Player,
he plays a sleazy studio executive who murders the screenwriter
.

Actors, like writers, don’t like to think of themselves as liars
.

A
ctress Melina Mercouri: “My colleague says that all actors are liars. But my colleague is an actor. So he is lying, yes? So therefore actors are not liars. Therefore he speaks the truth and therefore actors are liars, so therefore he lies and so on and so on.”

You, too, can get even with an actor who treats you badly
.

J
ohn Barrymore already had an opossum, a kinkajou, a mouse deer, and six dogs, which had been born during an earthquake—it was his theory that dogs born during earthquakes are more alert than others.

And then, as a gift from an English actress, John was given a monkey, which bit everyone in the house except him. The monkey would sit next to his feet for hours, gazing at him fondly. It was only after he’d been forced to give the monkey to the zoo that a vet told him the monkey had been transfixed not by his personality but by the booze he’d smelled on him. So John made weekly visits to the zoo to breathe on his monkey.

And then a screenwriter who secretly despised him gave John a vulture. Not just any vulture, but a king vulture, which became John’s best friend. He named the vulture Maloney. He’d take Maloney out on the yacht, and the crew would be horrified as the big vulture sat on John’s shoulders, nibbling at John’s eyeball, holding his beak out for a kiss. They sailed happily up and down from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara, but one day John realized that Maloney wasn’t happy. Maloney wasn’t eating properly. John realized he wasn’t able to feed Maloney what he required: partially but not
completely
decayed meat.

So he took Maloney ashore, kissed him farewell, and sailed away.

From then on, for the rest of his life, thanks to a diabolical screenwriter who hated him, John Barrymore did little but drink, a brokenhearted old actor pining for his vulture.

You can get even with an actress, too
.

O
n the set of one of her earlier movies, Sharon Stone’s prima donna act pissed off the crew so badly that
they pissed
into a bathtub before Sharon got into it for her scene.

What you write can destroy someone’s career
.

T
hey told her she was going to be a big movie star and she almost believed it. She had done the television and the stage work, and here she was, at twenty-seven, costarring in a big movie with a big star at a cheap hotel out in the middle of nowhere, with only her pills and her little Baggies of coke to keep her company, to make her forget how much she hated the script. (They weren’t such little bags, really; they were pretty big bags, a last-minute gift from her agent in L.A.)

She had a 5:00
A.M.
wake-up call, and here it was, 2:00
A.M.
, and she couldn’t get to sleep. She kept thinking about how awful this script was. She went out on her patio and practiced deep breathing for a while, noticing the balminess of this Iowa summer night, the softness of the corn-scented air.

She went downstairs, her pills and her Baggies in her purse, and got into her rent-a-car. Just a little drive around the blacktop and dirt roads was what she had in mind. But somehow she found herself flying down the interstate, popping another pill.

She lost track of much of the next couple of days. She woke up in the desert sun, out of pills, out of coke, trembling, knowing that it was over, that everything she had worked for was gone, knowing now that she would never be a star.

Beware of “serious” actors
.

L
aird Cregar was the best fiend you’ve ever seen on-screen. He was a talented actor with a weird, off-kilter face and a swollen body. Playing monsters and freaks, he’d go into makeup at the start of each film and ask them what they were going to do to his face, and they’d smile and say, “Nothing.”

He read a sensitive book about an inward young guy with an inferiority complex. At his suggestion, a studio bought the book, but then the people there turned the inward young guy into a rapist and a murderer and cast Laird in the part.

When the shoot ended, Laird had plastic surgery done on his eyes, his nose, his jaw, and his ears. He wouldn’t ever allow himself to be cast as a fiend again.

He was going to turn himself into a romantic lead. All he had left to do was to lose the weight.

He lost thirty pounds. Then he suffered a heart arrhythmia from the weight loss and died.

The pain, the pain
…

M
arlon Brando to Mike Medavoy: “Can you imagine going to work every day and pretending to be someone else?”

Just say the fucking words!

F
aye Dunaway asked Roman Polanski about her character’s motivation in
Chinatown
.

Roman said, “Say the fucking words. Your salary is your motivation.”

Sharon didn’t like Billy
.

S
liver
director Phillip Noyce: “Billy Baldwin knew that Sharon Stone hadn’t wanted him in
Sliver
and their relationship was always tense. I ended up having to shoot many of their close-ups with only one of them in the room at a time, because they didn’t want to look at each other.”

Why didn’t Sharon want Billy to costar with her?

B
ecause she wanted Billy’s older brother, Alec. Sharon said, “Alec can put me over a table anytime he wants.”

What did Billy Baldwin have to say about that?

B
illy called Sharon “a paean to lipstick lesbianism.”

Comedians can kill you
.

P
roducer Bernie Brillstein: “The words of comedy are death—‘I killed them, I laid them in the aisle, I blew their head off, I murdered them’—it’s all death—it’s how far you can take a human being.”

Who the hell is Hedy Lamarr?

H
edy Lamarr: “I enjoyed the location trips to desert towns in Arizona. The nights were mellow and romantic. Making love out of doors is so much more thrilling. Add a cowboy who never heard of Hedy Lamarr and the situation is ideal.”

My friend Phillip Noyce fell in love with Angelina Jolie
.

D
irector Phillip Noyce, discussing
The Bone Collector
: “In the second half of the schedule I was shooting predominantly with Angelina Jolie. Usually in the morning when I woke up, I couldn’t wait to get to the set to work with her. I was impatient to continue what became a sort of love affair, being connected in this weird manner, through the lens, through the story, through the strange relationship between performer and director. I had the same connection with Nicole Kidman. I loved her, adored her; she was the angel who couldn’t do a thing wrong.”

The Crack of the Ass

The line at which most actresses stop when it comes to shooting nudity. There is usually a clause in their contracts that specifies that in a scene in bed, the bedsheet will be high enough so that a “crack of the ass” is visible.

My friend Phillip didn’t just fall in love; he went stark raving gaga apeshit
.

S
ome directors can fall gaga apeshit over their actors.

Phillip Noyce, discussing Angelina Jolie: “When I first met Angie I felt a sense of discovery, of being there when something wonderful is being formed. You could see tremendous talent as well as hunger, a hunger for work, good work, a love of trying things, a love of giving herself up to the character, to the lens, to the moment. … Porcelain isn’t fine enough to describe how fragile she is. She’s not burned out with the joy of performing. She’s in her element because she can set parameters for a character, whereas I suspect she doesn’t know her own boundaries emotionally and physically. She’s very courageous as an actress. Angelina will go anywhere, or at least she’ll try going anywhere that the director suggests.”

Clint is Marilyn in drag
.

C
lint Eastwood’s ex-lover said that Clint listened to hours and hours of audiotapes of Marilyn Monroe—to get his hushed voice just right.

Dustpan Hoffman, movie star
…

A
s a young actor, Dustin Hoffman was known to his friends as “Dustbin” and “Dustpan.” But after he was cast in
The Graduate
, all of his friends called him “Dusty.”

Dennis Quaid asked God to take it all away
.

A
ctor Dennis Quaid (
Far from Heaven
): “I wasn’t really prepared for the sort of attention I got. When it started happening, it was just too much—and I was also fueling it by getting loaded a lot. There was so much coming at me at one point that I remember just asking God to take it away from me.”

Tom Thumb’s boots
…

T
om Cruise didn’t mind being cast with Brad Pitt in
Interview with the Vampire
, but he demanded that his costumer be allowed to make him boots that made him look taller than Pitt.

Her acting teachers killed Marilyn
.

M
arilyn Monroe’s drama coach, Michael Chekhov, told her to spread her arms wide and stand with her legs apart so she could imagine herself becoming larger and larger.

She had to say to herself, “I am going to awaken the sleeping muscles of my body. I am going to revivify and use them.”

Then she was to kneel on the floor and imagine herself getting smaller and smaller, until she became a speck on the floor.

She did these exercises every day for six hours.

Bogie was a wuss
.

A
t a party he was attending with Lauren Bacall, his wife, Humphrey Bogart got angry when a sailor pinched Bacall’s butt.

Bogie and some friends locked the sailor in the bathroom and called the Shore Patrol to come and arrest him.

Billy Wilder, who witnessed it all, said, “That was Bogie, the hero of
Casablanca
.”

Michael Douglas looks better with Botox and surgery
.