The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (5 page)

Maybe you might need a brainguard, too
.

P
roducer David O. Selznick felt that a good idea was worth a million dollars, so he hired a guard to stand in front of the room where his company’s scripts were kept.

He called this guard “the Brainguard.”

Let’s hope you get it kissed
.

L
egendary studio boss Harry Cohn: “I kiss the feet of talent and I kick the ass of those who don’t have it.”

Everybody wants to be a screenwriter
.

A
lice Sebold, author (
The Lovely Bones
): “We are living in the shadow of Hollywood where I teach, at UC Irvine. I was stunned at how students talked about movies when we went out to dinner, when I was expecting them to talk about novels. There is big money in Hollywood and it lures away really good minds.”

David Benioff, screenwriter (
Troy
): “Thirty years ago, students probably wanted to be the next great novelist. Now many want to write the next great screenplay. Film is something young writers think about.”

Jim Shepard, instructor, UC Irvine: “If you go into a classroom and ask who’s read Michael Cunningham’s
The Hours
, half the students will raise their hands and say they’ve seen the movie. All of these students are interested in writing books. But more and more are finding it hard to keep their eyes off the brass ring that film represents.”

Paul Schrader, screenwriter/director (
Taxi Driver, American Gigolo
): “More literature is being written to be film-friendly. When I was a student, the writer Robert Coover said the goal should be to write a novel that cannot be adapted to film. I doubt any student aspires to that today.”

Screenwriter/novelist William Goldman: “When I was a kid, novels were important, theater was important, movies were our secret pleasure. Now, movies are the center of our culture.”

Screenwriter/director Nora Ephron (
When Harry Met Sally
): “Movies are the literature of this generation and all subsequent generations.”

Norman Mailer: “Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people. … People who can’t read are quite able to reach profound reactions in the dark of a theater.”

Because everybody but everybody goes to the movies
.

I
n 1991, during the Gulf War, Iraqi airplanes dropped leaflets on our troops that said, “Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.”

Even Richard Russo wants to be a screenwriter
.

T
he Pulitzer Prize–winning author (
Empire Falls
and
Nobody’s Fool
) has written three teleplays and an original screenplay and has also adapted Scott Phillips’s novel,
The Ice Harvest
, starring Billy Bob Thornton.

Even FDR wrote a treatment
.

Y
es, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as a young man, pitched a story about John Paul Jones to Jane Wells of the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation.

Ms. Wells liked the future president’s pitch and asked him to send her an outline. He sent her a twenty-nine-page treatment.

Everybody
is a writer
.

D
isney Mogul Michael Eisner wrote a play called
To Metastasize a River
; famed attorney to the stars Bert Fields writes thrillers under the pseudonym D. Kincaid; ex–Beverly Hills mayor Robert Tanenbaum writes mysteries under his own name; former L.A. mayor Richard Riordan has written several unproduced screenplays; assistant U.S. attorney Dan Saunders has written a play entitled
The Death of William Shakespeare
.

Even the swamis write screenplays
.

W
riter Anthony Haden-Guest: “It was a crisp fall morning in 1971. Two swamis were down by the desk of the Chateau Marmont. They wore long swami hair and filthy swami robes, but the swami with blond hair was fiddling with amber worry beads in an un-guru-like fashion. ‘Get this, Al,’ he said apologetically. ‘I can let you have a script by Thursday.’

“The other swami dropped his key on the desk with a metallic clatter. His occult pendant jangled.

“ ‘I don’t want
a
script,’ he declared coldly. ‘I want
the
script.’ ”

Robert McKee owes his success to me and to Shane Black
.

I
an Parker, writing in
The New Yorker
: “McKee became part of a great boom in screenwriting instruction which had its roots in the end of the studio system and the subsequent rise of the American auteur director: a screenwriter being one step from a director, and a director being God. The boom was further propelled by public knowledge of the multimillion-dollar fees paid to writers like Joe Eszterhas and Shane Black.”

Will this be you
?

A
ctress Hedy Lamarr discussing screenwriter Gene Markey (
Meet Me at the Fair, A Lost Lady
): “I had never been close to an American screenwriter before and I felt Gene was an individualist, one of a kind. He was bright and amusing, often brittle and super-ficial but at other times deep and confused. I have since learned that most screenwriters are this way. I don’t know what came first, the chicken or the egg—whether they try to live up to the reputation writers have or whether their work makes them like that.”

P
ERK OF SUCCESS:
THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE
WORKING FOR

When my son Steve was twelve years old and the greatest Oakland Athletics fan in the world, he was desperate to meet his hero, the slugger Mark McGwire
.

I called the A’s publicity office, identified myself as the screenwriter of
Flashdance,
and the next thing I knew, Steve and I were in the A’s dugout, talking to McGwire, and McGwire was telling us how much he loved
Flashdance
and asking me if Jenny Beals was as hot as she looked
.

When my son Joe was eight years old and the greatest Cleveland Indians fan in the world, he was desperate to meet some of the players
.

I read an interview in the newspaper with an Indians rookie pitcher named Roy Smith, who was quoted as saying he wanted to be a screenwriter
.

I called Roy Smith and told him that if he got Joey into the Indians’ dugout, I’d buy him lunch and that at that lunch he could ask me anything he wanted about screenwriting
.

Roy picked out a date on which Joey could meet the Indians, but two days before the date, Roy was traded to the Oakland A’s. He called me from Oakland and said Joey could meet the Indians
and
the A’s the next time he came to Cleveland with the A’s
.

A week before the A’s arrival in Cleveland, Roy Smith was cut by the team and sent down to the minors. I haven’t heard from Roy since, but I am certain I will hear from him again if he ever gets back to the majors
.

You can even turn priests on
.

T
hrough the years, a great many people have told me, like Mark McGwire, how much they loved
Flashdance
. Hundreds of women have viewed me more kindly the moment they found out I wrote (actually cowrote) the movie; some of these women even took me to bed to demonstrate to me their enthusiastic and wholehearted endorsement of the movie.

My wife Naomi’s OB-GYN told me how much he loved
Flashdance
as Naomi was in her twenty-second hour of labor—sweating and nearly purple with our firstborn. He asked me, like Mark McGwire, “Is Jennifer Beals as hot as she looked?” even as Naomi groaned in pain in the background.

And my parish priest, Father Bob Stec, told me how much he had loved the movie—for other reasons, though, than McGwire and Naomi’s OB-GYN. Father Bob loved the line “When you give up your dream, you die!” and said he had lived his life by that line since he’d seen the movie as a teenager.

I gave him a
Flashdance
poster and wrote that line on it and signed it.

Life-Affirming

New Age studio exec–speak for “Will it make a hundred million dollars?” It began to be used extensively after the success of
Forrest Gump
. Dreamworks chieftain Jeff Katzenberg begins each pitch meeting with a writer by saying, “Tell me how this movie you’re about to pitch will be life-affirming.
”

What ever happened to FDR’s treatment
?

I
t’s probably still up on the shelf at Paramount.

Twelve years after he wrote that treatment, when he was president of the United States, FDR asked a lieutenant in naval intelligence to the Oval Office. The lieutenant was a former Paramount executive.

“You know why I asked you up here, don’t you?” the president asked.

The lieutenant said, “Of course. It’s
John Paul Jones
.”

“Whatever happened to my treatment?” the president of the United States asked.

“It’s on the shelf,” the lieutenant said. “Paramount hasn’t rejected it, but they haven’t decided anything on it yet.”

Then the treatment went into storage. It now lies in a sealed locker inside a mountain in Missouri, where the studios jointly own a vast storage area of old treatments and scripts.

You, too, can be in FDR’s shoes
.

I
certainly am.

These scripts of mine were all bought by Paramount and are still, like FDR’s
John Paul Jones
, inside that mountain in Missouri:
Nark
(1981);
Dieshot
(1982);
Beat the Eagle
(1984);
Male Pattern Baldness
(1996);
Reliable Sources
(1997);
Land of the Free
(1998);
Other Men’s Wives
(1999).

What are movies
?

S
creenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “Movies are an art that is a business and a business that is an art.”

Movies are sausages
.

P
roducer Mike Medavoy: “Getting films made is like watching sausage be produced: the finished product is great, but the process of putting it together is often messy.”

Movies are
selling
sausages
.

D
irector Phillip Noyce: “I realized that the Hollywood system—based as it is on the employment of branch offices all over the world promoting and selling movies—is totally dependent on a continual flow of product, and it’s been set up to promote that product into the hearts and minds of people all over the world. In essence, movies represent marketing opportunities for Hollywood.”

Without you, there is nothing
.

I
know that in theory the word is secondary in cinema,” said director Orson Welles, “but the secret of my work is that everything is based on the word. I always begin with the dialogue. And I do not understand how one dares to write action before dialogue. I must begin with what the characters say. I must know what they say before seeing them do what they do.”