Adventures in the Screen Trade (6 page)

Of course De Niro will play a psychopath in Taxi Driver. Some psychopath-he risks his life trying to save the virtue of your everyday ordinary-looking child prostitute, Jodie Foster.

Lawrence Kasdan, Hollywood's hottest (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and I think best (Body Heat) young screenwriter, had some wonderfully penetrating things to say in a recent interview:

If I thought that was all I could ever do and that I would constantly be turning over these works of love to other people and having them changed, I don't know how long I could do it. . . .

. . . The movie comes out and there's the pain that your movie never got made; there's this other movie instead. But everyone says you wrote it, and they blame you for it anyway. So you're getting it from both sides, from inside and outside.

Clearly, that's true, but perhaps it doesn't go far enough. Look, we are wonders, those of us still left walking on the earth. We can create leaders ranging from Churchill to Attila, singers

from Caruso to Florence Foster Jenkins, writers from Shakespeare to Beverly Aadland's mother.

In the world of the screenplay, not only are you terribly limit- ed as to what subject matter is viable; your treatment of that sub- ject matter is infinitely more restricted by the power of the star.

Which is why I truly believe that if all you do with your life is write screenplays, it ultimately has to denigrate the soul. You may get lucky and get rich, but you sure won't get happy. Because you will spend your always-decreasing days doing the following; writing Perfect Parts for Perfect People.

And there's got to be more to the human condition than that....

Studio Executives

Studio executives are intelligent, brutally overworked men and women who share one thing in common with baseball managers: They wake up every morning of the world with the knowledge that sooner or later they're going to get fired.

In the old days of the great studios, this situation didn't exist. The Harry Cohns and the Louis Mayors fully expected to be in their traces till they dropped. Their modern counterparts are under a totally different system: They must get results-now- or they're gone. There is perhaps more executive shuffling in any single year now than existed in the entirety of the nineteen thirties or forties.

And with this pressure always on them, always mounting, each "go" decision they make becomes excruciating-one of the reasons why, right now, no one in Hollywood wants to make movies. (As of June, 1982, film starts were down exactly fifty percent from a year ago.)

The "go" decision is the ultimate importance of the studio executive. They are responsible for what gets up there on the silver screen. Compounding their problem of no job security in the decision-making process is the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry;

- NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.-

If there is a Roman numeral/to this book, that's it. (Actually, there are two Roman numeral /'s to this book, but I won't get to the second until the chapter on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) Again, for emphasis-

- NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.-

Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's g6ing to work. Every time out it's a guess- and, if you're lucky, an educated one.

They don't know when the movie is finished: B. J. Thomas's people, after the first sneak ofButch, were upsel about their client's getting involved with the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." One of them was heard to say, more than once, "B. J. really hurt himself with this one."

The initial preview of Star.' was such a success that Richard Zanuck cancelled any further previews and sent a wire to his father, Darryl, that said, "We're home. Better than Sound of Music."

The Sound of Music was then the most popular movie in history, and Star! went on to become the Edsel of 20th CenturyFox: No matter how they readvertised it or changed the logo or the title, no one came. And Richard Zanuck has as keen a mind about commercial films as anyone.

They don't know when the movie is starting to shoot either. David Brown, Zanuck's partner, has said, "We didn't know

whether Jaws would work, but we didn't have any doubts aboul The Island. It had to be a smash. Everything worked. The screenplay worked. Every actor we sent it to said yes. I didn't know until a few days after we opened and I was in a bookstore and I ran into Lew Wasserman and said 'How're we doing? and he said, 'David, they don't want to see the picture.' "

They don't want to see the picture-maybe the most chilling phrase in the industry.

Now, if the best people around don't know at sneaks, and they don't know during shooting, you better believe that executives don't know when they're trying to give a thumbs-up or - down; they're trying to predict public taste three years ahead and it's just not possible.

Obviously, I'm asking you to take my word on this anc there's no reason really that you should, because pictures suet as Raiders of the Lost Ark probably come to mind. Which, I grant was an unusual film.

Raiders is the number-four film in history as this is being writ ten. I don't remember any movie that had such power going in It was more or less the brainchild of George Lucas and was direeled by Steven Spielberg, the two unquestioned wunderkin der of show business (Star Wars, Jaws, etc.). Probably you al knew that. But did you know that Raiders of the Lost Ark was of fered to every single studio in town-

Adventures in the Screen Trade 41

-and they all turned it down ? All except Raramount.

Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows any- thing. And why did all the other studios say no? Because no- body knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars, a decision that just may cost them, when all the sequels and spinoffs and toy .money and book money and video-game money are totaled, over a (nilion dollars? Because nobody, nobody-not now, not ever-knows the least goddam thing about what is or isn't going to work at the box office.

One additional anguish executives must cope with is that hot streaks don't last. A recent newspaper article mentioned how the other studios were gloating over what was happening at Columbia. Columbia had been sizzling, but then Annie went wildly over budget. And an expensive action film wouldn't cut together co- herently. And everybody knew that the set of Tootsie was not where you wanted to spend your summer vacation. And they had passed on E. T.

Columbia had had it, developed it for a million dollars, look a survey, and discovered the audience for the movie would be too limited to make it profitable. So they let it go. (Universal picked it up and may make back the billion they didn't earn by dropping Star Wars. )

David Picker, a fine studio executive for many years, once said something to this effect: "If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down, and no to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same."

In any case, do not send to know why studio executives have insomnia. It goes with the territory. . ..

WHO ARE STUDIO EXECUTIVES?

Mostly, today, they are agents.

Ex-agents, more accurately. And a lot of people interviewed tor this book feel that that accounts, more than any single thing, for Hollywood's present plight. I'm not at all sure I agree with the conclusion, but I can summarize the wisdom behind it.

Let's begin with some agent jokes; there are always agent jokes in Hollywood and the most recent ones I've heard are these: A patient goes to see a surgeon about having a heart transplant. The surgeon says, "I'll give you a choice: You can either have the heart of a twenty-five-year-old marathon runner or a sixty-year-old agent, which do you want?" And the patient answers, "Easy-let me have the agent's." And the surgeon, dumbfounded, says, "Why would you pick the heart of a sixty- year-old agent over a twenty-five-year-old marathon runner?" And the patient replies, "I want one that's never been used."

Or this one: An agent and a bunch of other passengers are on a boat in dangerous waters and the agent falls overboard, and before anyone can do anything this giant shark comes swimming up, and when the shark is six feet away he veers off and swims in another direction, and one of the passengers says, "Did you see that, did you see what just happened, it's an act of God," and another passenger answers, "That wasn't an act of God, it was professional courtesy."

All agent jokes are based on that same premise: Agents are not noted for human kindness. Now, in point of fact, this is not true. (I'm serious.) Most of the major agents I've come in con- tact with are decent human beings.

But probably one can make a certain valid generalization about agents, and it's this: Their primary interest is not in the art object but in the deal. That's not criticism, that's basic logic--if a man makes his living, offten percent of his client's earnings, the more those earnings, the more meaningful his percentage. That's his job. As an agent. But it's not his job when he changes hats. Agents become studio heads primarily for one reason: No one else will undertake the occupation. It's terrible work. It's seven days a week, it's mornings and evenings, it's getting killed by agents who are still agents. It's escalating costs, it's getting killed by their boards of directors, who are screaming that costs are too high,

So why do agents accept the responsibility? Because, in many ways, it's better than being an agent. There's more power and generally there's more money.

So we've got an ex-agent running our studio. What can we say about him? A lot of good things. He's hardworking. He's

shrewd as hell. He's got a lot of contacts in the business. He understands a great deal about how the business operates. What he doesn't understand, generally speaking, is passion. Just as in the old days, when he didn't care about the film as much as the deal, the same holds true now. He never, most likely, has worked on a film, never written one or produced one, most certainly never directed one. People are coming at him day and night with projects-"I must make this. You must give me my chance." The agent, being unused to working this side of the street, seeks help from two sources: (1) stars, be- cause he understands them from his earlier life, and (2) the business end of the studio, the people who handle the selling of films. Because they never cared about passion, and because they, at least in theory, know what will sell and what won't. (We know that's not true, and the business people do, too, but obviously if they admit it, they get drummed from the corps; my God, what are business people/or if they don't know.)

Business people do know one thing: what they can book into theatres in advance. Theatre owners often don't sec the prod- uct they're buying until it's too late, so if they are given a choice between a Steve Martin musical and a movie about two English guys running in the 1924 Olympics, logic dictates which way they swing.

I think it's safe to say that today, more than ever in Holly- wood history, the business types hold sway. They are kept in close touch on every conceivable project that the studio may contemplate. And what they say matters. Matters crucially. In the old days, a studio head might have said, "Let's make the goddam movie and hope the business guys know how to sell it." Such words are not much uttered nowadays. . . .

THE THREE S's

Hollywood has always been a caste-system town. An ancient survivor told me: "When I was a fifteen-hundred-a-week writer, it was understood I didn't associate with another guy who only got seven-fifty. And the twenty-five-hundred-dollar guys didn't want me contaminating them. And it's the same with the other jobs-top directors knew top directors, big stars didn't pal around with unknowns. Oh, maybe they'd keep them as gofers, but when it was a heavy social situation that needed attending, the gofers were gone."

Of course this holds true with studio executives. They tend to know each other-they may have worked at the same agencies at the same time. And naturally, they are all competitive, one with the other. Out of this situation comes their reliance on stars. And that need can be divided into thirds, which can be called the three S 's.

S Number One: Social

This is more than one executive or his wife being able to say, casually, "Just made a two-picture deal with Burt." Or "Clint just signed on, we go in April." This is important in and of it- self. If you've got nobody to talk about, it can make for grim going at a cocktail party.

A deeper need for parity comes not from individual social needs but from those of a studio itself.

One example: When the Arthur Krim group left United Artists to form Orion, there were rumors all around the industry that the new United Artists people weren't in the big time any- more. This was dangerous to United Artists because it meant that major "elements"-stars, directors, producers-might avoid going to UA with their projects. (Studios rarely initiate projects anymore. A package of sorts will be put together and brought to them and they will decide whether to put up the money. This abdication of what was once the essential role of the studio is as big a change as any in Hollywood.)

Anyway, here's UA, shunned and forlorn. So what did they do? They bought, for the record-breaking sum of two and a half million dollars. Gay Talese's sex book, Thy Neighbor's Wife.. There was great publicity and the studio announced they would make not one but two major films out of the material. (They have made, to this date, a grand total of none and things seem likely to stay that way.)

Now, the thing that made the Talese buy remarkable wasn't just the incredible sum. The book was famous long before publication, and the logical assumption would be, to grab such a

property at such a price, you have to outbid competition. I mean, the reason you pay two million five has got to be that someone else bid two million four.

Well, the rumor around town was that nobody else bid anything for the Talese.

UA paid that amount for two reasons: The first, obviously, was to acquire the property. But the most important was the second: They were announcing to the Hollywood community, "Hey, we 're still here. " Probably they could have bought the book for half or less than half of what they spent. But that wouldn't have served their purpose-they needed to blow the money. It served to put them back up there with their peers.