The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (8 page)

If you have to be in L.A., stay at the Chateau Marmont
.

S
creenwriter L. M. Kit Carson: “There’s several ghosts at the Chateau. The ghost would come at 3:30 in the morning. Regularly. It would wake me up and make me go to work. It was a
writing ghost
.”

If you have to rent a car in L.A
.

S
creenwriter and novelist Jim Harrison (
Wolf
): “Certain actors and producers are spectacularly good drivers. I’m so lousy in traffic. Having only one eye doesn’t help. In fifty or so trips to L.A., I tried to drive from the airport in a rental car only once, a shattering experience. After rush hour I could drive locally, though not well, in Beverly Hills and environs, though other cars would beep at me for driving too slow. … A number of times I asked studios to have a five-year-old brown Taurus station wagon sent to my hotel, but they were never able to deliver.”

Beware of medical help in Los Angeles
.

I
was hoarse. I went to see a couple of highly respected ear, nose, and throat guys in Los Angeles. They examined me and said I had a benign polyp that was wrapped around my vocal cord. They scheduled outpatient surgery at a hospital, to take place six weeks later.

My hoarseness got worse. I went to the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. They told me I had throat cancer. I had surgery and lost 80 percent of my larynx.

When the head of the ENT practice read that I had throat cancer, he called my agent at William Morris, Jim Wiatt. He didn’t call
me
; he called my
agent
. A doctor—calling not his patient but his patient’s
agent
.

He told my agent it wasn’t
his
fault. The doctor who’d first examined me was no longer with the firm, the head doctor told Jim Wiatt.

He told Jim Wiatt to wish me good luck.

Jim passed it on to me.

Beware of nurses in Los Angeles
.

A
young nurse who worked at a hospital in Los Angeles showed me her photo album.

It was filled with photos of delighted nurses cuddling with their famous patients. The nurses were wearing nifty little goodies from Victoria’s Secret, and their patients, mostly rock stars, were niftily naked. The nurses were smiling coyly, lasciviously, joyously, teasingly, ironically, daringly, contentedly, triumphantly.

The stars in the hospital bed with them were anesthetized … in postsurgical comas … blasted out of their gourds … an IV sometimes still sticking in their arms.

If you’re going to be in L.A. working on a script, don’t take your cell phone
.

T
he director, producer, studio execs, and any or all of their assistants, gofers, and secretaries will be bugging you all the time if you’ve got a cell phone.

Tell everyone that you left your cell phone home so your significant other could use it. Then tell everyone that you always shut the phone off when you’re writing.

If you’re Catholic, don’t go to Our Lady of Malibu church
.

W
hen we lived in Point Dume, our church was Our Lady of Malibu. We’d heard of Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Fatima … but we’d never heard of Our Lady of Malibu.

Lourdes and Guadalupe and Fatima were places of miracles, but we didn’t know about Malibu. What had Our Lady of Malibu done? Appeared at a bonfire on the beach to tell three quaaluded surfers the secrets of the perfect and holy wave?

We went to Mass there one Sunday and I was sure the Beach Boys were making an unheralded benefit appearance, pounding out “Help Me Rhonda” to help the missions of “the Dark Continent” (as the sisters in grade school used to say).

But it wasn’t the Beach Boys. It was a local Malibu group doing “Kyrie Eleison” surfer-style.

If you’re staying in a hotel in Beverly Hills, don’t go for a walk at night
.

T
he cops will arrest you and take you to jail.

Nobody walks at night in Beverly Hills. Read Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian,” which is about a man who goes for a walk in Los Angeles and is taken to a mental institution. Bradbury wrote the short story in
the 1950s
!

If you’re writing in L.A
. …

D
rive down to the Formosa Café and get a whiff of what Hollywood used to be like. Elvis used to hang there; so did Robert Mitchum; so did Tuesday Weld. You’ll run into some people if you’re lucky.

The last time I was there, I ran into Sean Young, no longer a movie star but still a fine woman who likes to drink beer.

And stay away from the Rose Café
. …

I
t’s where all the wannabe screenwriters hang out, exchanging ideas, talking about movies, popping their pimples, sharing their dreams.

It is a stultifying, suffocating place fueled by ambition, greed, and envy.

If you share your dream with anybody here, chances are it’ll be ripped off and wind up in a script that will never be sold.

T
AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

Don’t buy any parrots in L.A., either.

Actress and famed Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “On my way to the kitchen, I passed Caesar’s cage. Our eyes met and the parrot fixed me with what, at the time, seemed to be an evil eye … and in the clearest voice possible pronounced the words ‘Fuck you!’ I fetched a piece of orange for Caesar, careful to avoid his eyes. In silence, he ate it. I breathed a sigh of relief. Prematurely. Because from that moment on, all Caesar would say to me, and to anyone who crossed the threshold of our house, was ‘Fuck you
!’ ”

Go shake Bob Walker’s hand
.

D
rive out to Malibu and check out a little gallery in the Cross Creek Center called TOPS. It’s owned and managed by Bob Walker, also known as Robert Walker, Jr., who was going to be a big movie star—until one day he just left it all behind and decided to live like a human being. If you’re lucky, you’ll run into him and can shake his hand.

Everything in L.A. is so inbred
.

R
obert Walker, Jr., is the son of the actors Robert Walker (
Strangers on a Train
) and Jennifer Jones (
Duel in the Sun
).

ALL HAIL

Bob Towne!

Yelling that he was being cheated by Warner Bros., screenwriter Robert Towne drove to Warner head Terry Semel’s house in the mideighties and screamed obscenities outside his bedroom window.

The Auteur Theory

It will be the bane of your existence as a screenwriter and is the biggest single reason why movies are so awful today.

In France, where directors also write the scripts they direct, they are viewed as “the authors” of their films. They own the film’s copyright and distributors can only release their films, not interfere with them.

American directors—who mostly don’t
write
their films—began viewing themselves as “auteurs” in the seventies, looking for the same kind of critical canonization French directors were getting.

A generation of American film critics—some of them failed screenwriters like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael and Janet Maslin—supported these American directors and extended the “author” label to them.

The auteur theory is hypocritical and corrupt—
unless the film’s writer and director are the same
.

Try not to “go Hollywood
.
”

S
creenwriter William Faulkner, a good ole boy from Oxford, Mississippi, took to wearing sunglasses while he wrote his scripts in his studio office in Hollywood.

And I, the street kid from Cleveland, allowed myself to be talked into putting blond highlights in my hair—which I grew to mid-back length—while I lived in Malibu on a bluff overlooking the sea.

I shopped at the same market as Tom and Nicole for recently arrived fresh truffles and got a black Dodge Ram pickup truck the same month that Steven Spielberg and David Geffen got theirs.

I had Sunday brunch at Wolfgang Puck’s Granita, listening to violinist David Wilson play his boulevardier chansons, avoiding eye contact with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, who kept staring at me one day.

Her stare said, There’s that misogynist, sexist asshole who wrote
Showgirls
and
Basic Instinct
.

I did
not
, however, wear sunglasses while I wrote my scripts—though I did wear them everywhere else … even, to my first wife’s great annoyance, in airports at night.

Don’t piss off the most powerful man in Hollywood
.

H
e’s not a star or a studio head. He’s not a director or producer. He’s a lawyer. And he’s over seventy years old.

His name is Bert Fields. He’s the most powerful man in Hollywood because if he sends someone a letter threatening to sue, the recipient of that letter is better off simply giving Bert what he wants, instead of going to court to argue with him. He is a brilliant litigator, maybe the best in America. He’s also a writer (of thrillers) and a Shakespearean scholar. (Didn’t I tell you
everyone
in Hollywood,
even the most powerful man in Hollywood
, wants to be a writer?)

Patricia Glaser is the second most powerful person in Hollywood. Don’t piss her off, either
.