The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (79 page)

Val Kilmer is an imbecile
.

A
sked by the Academy to nominate the three best film moments of the century, Kilmer nominated three of his movies (one of them was
Batman Forever
). He enclosed a postcard to the Academy that said, “I can’t help it, these are my three favorite movies.”

The Pesci is beginning to stink
.

A
ctor Joe Pesci, after winning Best Supporting Actor for
Good-Fellas
, went offstage and collapsed on the floor, clutching his Oscar and mumbling, “I can’t believe this! I can’t believe this!”

Yes, but did she clean the blood off the coat hangers?

J
oan Crawford had all of her furniture and even her walls coated in plastic so she could clean them better.

Is that why he changed professions?

H
arrison Ford, carpenter, was hired by John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion to remodel their Trancas house.

Julia Roberts’s virgin eyes
…

W
hen she moved into an apartment complex, Julia Roberts had notices sent to the other tenants, telling them they were not to speak to her or even look at her if they ran into her in the corridor.

Barbra Streisand did the same thing when she was doing a gig at a hotel in Vegas.

And Hillary Clinton did the same thing with Secret Service agents in the White House.

Is Tom Thumb the new Burt Reynolds?

M
imi Rogers, discussing soon-to-be-ex-husband Tom Cruise: “Here’s the real story on why we broke up. Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldn’t fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument. My instrument needed tuning. Therefore, it became obvious that we had to split.”

James Woods’s Krazy-glued penis
.

W
hen she broke up with actor James Woods, actress Sean Young put mutilated voodoo dolls on his front porch and told friends she was going to Krazy-glue his penis to his thigh.

The one-sheet tells all
.

I
f the stars’ faces aren’t on it, their careers are fading. Check out Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, missing from the
What Lies Beneath
one-sheet, and Sylvester Stallone, missing from the
Cliffhanger
poster.

He, too, was a big-mouth Hungarian
.

H
ungarian screenwriter Andrew Solt told his friend Zsa Zsa Gabor that Ingrid Bergman, on
Joan of Arc
, the picture he had written, slept with everyone on the set, including the electricians, and that when she was through with the electricians, she had them fired.

If Bruce Willis is a real asshole, then say he’s a real asshole
.

A
t a writer’s seminar on Maui, Shane Black (
Lethal Weapon
), who was sitting next to me, said, “Okay, I’ll say it, Bruce Willis is a real asshole.”

Okay, maybe my physical proximity to Shane made him say it.

PART ELEVEN

S
URVIVING THE
C
RITICS

LESSON 18

They Want to Kill You, Rape Your
Wife, and Eat Your Children!

The definition of a critic
…

B
en Hecht: “A person who smiles when he calls you a son of a bitch.”

Comedian Dick Shawn: “A critic is someone who comes in after the battle is over and shoots the wounded.”

Don’t read your reviews
.

W
illiam Faulkner never did. “Who knows the faults of my work better than I do?” he said.

His brother said, “He was simply protecting himself from hurt.”

Never mind the damn critics; maybe you’ve just written
Dr. Zhivago.

D
r. Zhivago
was hammered by the critic when it was released. It is now considered perhaps the greatest movie of all time by many writers, directors … and critics.

The best way to deal with a bad review
…

W
hen critic Louis Kronenberger panned one of Ben Hecht’s plays, Hecht threatened to castrate him.

Bruce Willis might be an asshole, but he’s got a pretty good idea here
.

B
ruce Willis: “What I had hoped for her [the critic] was that she became so famous that she had to start worrying about her life, that she had to start feeling that she was threatened, and then had to sleep with a gun by her bed every night because she thought that she was so famous someone was going to do something to her or attack her. And then one night she finally realized the sick life she was living, and she just put the gun in her mouth and blew her fucking brains out.”

They have a (tawdry) living to make
.

M
ost film critics also do filmmaker interviews for the publications they work for. Their income depends on their access to stars.

So let’s say Steven Spielberg has directed a new movie starring Julia Roberts and written by John Doe.

Let’s say this new movie is awful. The critic for your local metropolitan paper or TV station knows he will need interviews with Spielberg and Roberts in the future. He reviews the film nevertheless and says that the movie isn’t very good. He knows that if he says a bad movie is good too often, his readers will dismiss him as a street-corner hooker.

But if the movie isn’t very good, then whom should he blame? Spielberg? Roberts? Or the screenwriter, John Doe, whom he will never need to interview because (A) the public could give a flying fig about who the screenwriter is, and (B) because there are almost no screenwriters who are stars (and whom he will ever need to interview).

This, more likely, will be the critic’s capsule review: “Julia Roberts shows flashes of brilliance with some of her obviously improvised lines of dialogue. But Spielberg, who has given it a heroic try, is ultimately brought down by John Doe’s hackneyed and cliché-ridden screenplay.”

Now you’re talking, Billy boy!

W
illiam Goldman: “Directors have no vision. … One of the reasons the media gushes about them is this—they don’t know shit about the movie business. They are filling columns or minutes for circulation or ratings. And since they want to feel important, the people they interview have to be fabulously important. The
hottest
young star, the
most brilliant
director. That kind of madness.”

They want to kill you, rape your wife, and eat your children
.

N
o critic working today compares the first draft of an original screenplay with the finished movie.

Doing this would show the critic—especially in a misfired movie—who is to blame.

What if the script was brilliant and a moronic director destroyed it?

Critics claim that it would take too much time for them to read the script of a movie, but I’m convinced they don’t want to know if a director has butchered a brilliant script.

Critics
purposely
blind themselves to any information that would force them to praise the writer and damn the director or the star.

This is because their bread and butter depends on access to the directors and the stars. And because they hate you—because they want to
be
you.

Aw, come on! Rape your wife and eat your children?

Y
up.

Because you’re a screenwriter and they’re self-styled “film experts” who can’t write screenplays.

Because you make big bucks and they make peanuts, even in comparison to what you make if you write
unsuccessful
movies.

And because they don’t think it is fair that they know all this movie trivia and you don’t, and still you’re the one writing screenplays!

They want to be you!

Consequently: If you’ve written a good movie, don’t expect them to praise you. They might not even mention you in their review, and they’ll certainly heap lavish praise upon the director for “creating” a great movie.

If, however, you’ve written a movie that winds up being bad onscreen, they’ll not only mention you; they’ll blame you for
everything
—even bad acting. The actor, they’ll say, just couldn’t do anything with your lame lines of dialogue.