What Just Happened? (21 page)

‘Toothache,' I announced to the room, but no one was listening.

What resulted from all of this was not particularly significant. As we fumbled through some brief explanations about a couple of movie ideas, occasionally interrupted by a muffled moan from Michelle as she tried to get more comfortable on the couch, I realized it didn't matter much what was being said. Tanen was intrigued by the players. He was smitten by Michelle. If it wasn't going to cost too much, he was definitely going to explore it. In the end, we walked away with some inexpensive development deal that never resulted in the making of an actual movie. Nonetheless, this story illustrates two things: one, rock stardom packed tons of power in the back rooms at the end of the sixties, and two, more instructively, when you took a meeting in Hollywood, the decision to buy or pass was usually made before the meeting ever took place.

I'd like to say that at this moment I had an epiphany, that I looked around the room and said, ‘What a wacky time, I gotta make a movie about this,' but that's not what happened. A few months after this meeting, however, I did run into an old high school mate whom I had not seen in ten years. He couldn't sing, write a song, or play bass, but he had paid the price. From clean-cut, innocuous Jewish kid, he had dramatically mutated into a dashiki-wearing, world-renowned rock publicist strung out on black women and party favors. And, yes, he was wearing a coke spoon around his neck. Over the next few years, I couldn't help but notice that everyone, including me, was irrevocably altered by the times. Irrevocably
altered by the music. I was starting to connect the dots. Someday this would be fertile territory for a movie. I put it on hold because I was still trying to figure out how to mix the business of Hollywood with pleasure and still pay the rent. It took twenty-five years for me to pull the trigger. We were in the middle of shooting
Fight Club
when I decided to try to get a script written about some of the people who were hanging out in front of the Whisky A Go Go way back then—not a movie about the rock stars but a movie about the people who were on the fringe trying to get in.

‘If you want to develop this, it's okay with me,' Laura Ziskin said rather matter-of-factly.

‘Thanks.'

Laura wasn't quite so perky these days. The trill in her voice had evened out. She was entering her third rocky year as a studio executive, heading up the Fox 2000 division, a pet project of Bill Mechanic's. Before taking this job, Ziskin had had a successful run as a movie producer, but she soon realized that the participation she enjoyed as a ‘hands-on' producer would have to be shelved for now. For the most part, directors, writers, and producers simply didn't want her help. Ziskin was left with a mess of bureaucratic details while Mechanic, her boss, was under massive fire from Chernin and Murdoch. Add to that a series of Fox 2000 bombs that was beginning to rain down in buckets (
Inventing the Abbotts, Ravenous, Brokedown Palace
), and Laura was savvy enough to know she might soon be back on the street with the rest of us.

Might as well go with the flow.

‘Bill said if we keep the costs down, we should do this,' she said flatly.

‘Laura, we can do this, all in, for ten million dollars.'

‘Why not?'

‘Why not, indeed.'

I didn't know at the time that Cameron Crowe was planning to write and direct a similar movie covering the same period that was going to cost fifty million dollars. No one would be able to write about this period in Hollywood with more power than Cameron. He was there. Both movies were intended to be ensemble
pictures. I didn't know it then, but ours was never going to get the same paint job.

There's a producer, a successful producer, who says that he never hires a writer or a director until he watches him walk. If he walks lucky, he hires him. After years of picking wrong, when everything seemed so right, it's only natural that one would resort to a little mojo to get a hit. I'd like to blame the horrible demise of
Sunset Strip
on the first-time director or the well-intentioned writer, but I chose them and I worked with them. I forgot to watch them walk.

Since I can only assume that none of you ever saw this movie, there is no reason to explain it in great detail other than to encourage those of you who are obsessive about movies to try to find this thing in a video bin so you can dissect the making of a bomb. To your surprise, you will see several young, gifted actors (Rory Cochrane, Jared Leto, Anna Friel, Adam Goldberg, and Simon Baker) doing some excellent work. You will hear and see some guitar playing that is impressive. You will see some witty and authentic moments from the seventies that rival anything that has been done of that period. Nonetheless, it fell through the cracks. It didn't walk lucky. Apparently, it didn't have that thing.

We screened it for the taciturn Bob Harper to see what sort of read we would get from marketing.

‘What do you think, Bob?'

‘I just don't know who it's for.'

‘Uh-oh.'

‘I don't see the target.'

‘Well, why not sell it to those that like it?'

‘That's the problem.'

‘How so?'

‘I'm afraid those that will like it skew older, and the materials, vis-à-vis the cast, is gonna skew younger.'

‘How do we know this?'

‘The test scores.'

‘But the test scores aren't always—'

‘And my
gut
.'

‘Of course, the gut thing.'

I was fucked. You simply can't argue your way around marketing ‘speak.' Fox held the release of
Sunset Strip
for several months. By the time they were ready to come out with it, I was no longer under contract at the studio. Laura Ziskin was back on the street working as a producer for Sony Pictures. Bill Mechanic was unceremoniously dumped by Chernin and Murdoch and was already hanging out in Beverly Hills considering his options. The controversy over
Fight Club
was rumored to be the bullet that finally got him, but the facts don't bear it out. A true malaise had hovered over all of us during the last twelve months. Those providing Bill with movies that were nose-diving into oblivion were not part of an exclusive club. The Fox movie division couldn't buy a hit. It didn't matter what the genre was. Action movies like
Thin Red Line
or
The Siege
disappointed. Smarter fare such as
The Newton Boys
or
Pushing Tin
or
Bulworth
gagged. Big-name stuff like Jodie Foster in
Anna and the King
or Leonardo DiCaprio in
The Beach
or the costly animated
Titan A.E
. were total wipeouts. As the carnage piled up, I would look for telltale signs when I ran into Bill. Little things, such as would there be a slight lisp or stutter in his speech? Or would he be bleeding from his ears while we were eating lunch in the commissary? I gotta say, he handled the avalanche with fatalistic poise, integrity intact.

I was reminded of an old studio head who said to me, shortly after being fired from Paramount, that if he had green-lighted the movies that he had passed on and canceled all of the movies he had agreed to make, he would have ended up in the same place. When his reign ended, he left the place with the humility of knowing that he didn't seem to know anything.

Mechanic told me months later, after denying me the extra money I needed to secure a vibrant seventies sound track, that Fox had decided to cut their losses and put the movie out in only one theater and then they were going to pull it. No matter how you feel about your movie, no matter how small the movie, this sort of news is like getting gutted. There's no response. It's the terminal-cancer call from the doctor, the intimate dread of being caught on
the street with nothing on. All you can do is go home and commiserate with your loved ones.

Why bother with one theater? Why not just take the film and make hundreds of guitar picks? Because it was the only credible business decision. Let me explain how this works. In their corporate output deals—with video companies, pay-per-view, syndications, and cable—the studio gets paid when a movie gets theatrically released. A theatrical release in that deal was triggered when the movie appeared in only one theater (these terms have changed somewhat since, but that was the deal that studios could make then). If they did not put it in one theater, they would not get paid at all. In the case of a small movie that the studio no longer believes in, it's smart business to bite the bullet, get several million dollars back on these output deals, and not risk any further money by investing in a large marketing campaign. Today, the marketing costs to open a movie nationally can soar upward of twenty to thirty million dollars. You've gotta believe.

Ironically, Cameron Crowe's
Almost Famous
, a wonderful movie about the seventies, probably lost more money for DreamWorks than
Sunset Strip
did for Fox. With all the dazzling talent of Cameron, the movie's costs, including marketing, did not bring in sufficient numbers to break out anywhere near even. Between the two of us, making future genre movies about the seventies will inevitably be put on hold.

One of the minor producing lessons from all this is to know that the more money a movie costs, the greater the chance that the studio will be compelled to provide it with a major marketing campaign. It's the only way they can get their big investment back. Expensive movies, even if they don't ‘test' well, will always get a big national splash. By this time, the chance that
Sunset Strip
would ever get a legitimate release was zero. It was too cheap, too under the radar, to become a noticeable failure. The remaining executives had no personal investment in the movie. Hell, most of them weren't even aware the movie got made. Fox had nothing to gain other than its erasure.

It disappeared like the morning mist.

‘David, you know Tia Carrere?' Elie Samaha asked.

‘Uhhh …'

David Mamet looked at me over his glasses. Mamet didn't have a clue who she was, but he was being cautious because this might be some sort of quiz he had to pass to get the money for his next movie. We were in an empty Italian dive on Santa Monica Boulevard and La Cienega sitting at a small table next to a reeking open men's room. It was a business lunch. It didn't resemble lunch at Sherry Lansing's table at the Paramount commissary or the special booth next to Barry Diller at the Grill in Beverly Hills, but the intentions were all the same. I found out later, Samaha owned the restaurant.

‘You don't know Tia Carrere!'

‘How 'bout you?'

‘Uh, Latin dancer, right?' I guessed.

‘No. Actress.'

‘Of course she is.'

‘
My Teacher's Wife? Instant Karma
?'

‘I think I remember.'

‘Do you know why I tell you?'

‘No.'

‘She's also my recent ex-wife.'

‘I'm sorry,' David commiserated.

‘Eh, it's okay,' Elie said. He made a fist with his left hand and straightened his forearm simulating a hard-on. He broadened his smile. ‘Cost me thirty-two million dollars, but what a, what a—'

‘Does that mean you want us to cast her?' I asked.

David sighed.

Let me back up. After leaving Fox, I decided to take the indie route to raise money for
Heist
, a movie Mamet wanted to direct and I wanted to produce. It's not that we didn't want a major studio to fund it, but because of a variety of factors, mainly a series of regrettable turndowns, we were on the street looking for money. We had to put a ‘package' together and peddle our wares.

I'm certain that you're about to say, ‘Well, I sure hope he didn't try Robert De Niro again and have another one of those God-awful readings.' Of course I did. And for those observant students of Hollywood, you know that history always repeats itself. Do I have to add that after this reading Bob nodded, gave me his famous wrinkled grin, then talked briefly about how good the screenplay was and what a great writer Mamet was? Of course he did. Bob was always respectful. But when we walked outside and he started to tell me what a great producer I was, I knew we were dead. When he shook his head and said, ‘I've got a little problem with “the gold,” all that talk about “the gold, the gold, the gold.” Uh … I don't get it.' I was on the raw edge of saying, ‘Fuck me, the movie's
about
the fucking gold! Are we all on acid?' But even I was starting to figure this game out. In the vernacular of Hollywood, Bob meant unequivocably no, he'd rather piss in a fountain.

Fortunately, within a few weeks of that rejection, Fred Specktor, the venerable agent from CAA, called Mamet and me and said both Gene Hackman and Danny DeVito had read the script, wanted to work together, and wanted to do the movie. Great news. I'd been trying to corral Hackman for years and had finally got him. Our spirits were temporarily lifted, but some significant hurdles were
ahead. The addition of these key elements was a terrific start, but this movie was going to cost substantially more than any movie Mamet had previously directed. As much acclaim as some of his movies had received, the box office results were not significant. We had to convince someone that if Mamet was given a larger budget with a more recognizable cast, he would deliver a movie that would intrigue a larger audience. Being artsy and classy to the studios was euphemistically suicide to the upside. As producer Joel Silver once proudly said, ‘I don't make art. If I want art, I'll buy it.' This made him a very endearing fellow in the executive hallways.

The world of independent financing is considerably different from traditional studio financing—different in style as well as in substance. As odd as it sounds, the studio system and the agency system have become gentrified over the last thirty years—more conservative, more polite, and even more ineffective. This was not how it began. Sam Goldwyn was a glove salesman and Harry Cohn started by selling ‘hot' furs. Neither of them finished high school. When Lewis Selznick met an old chum, a herring salesman turned movie producer, Lewis told his family, ‘Today I met an old friend. He is the dumbest man I ever knew. If he can make money in pictures, anyone can.' Years ago, when Lew Wasserman instituted a tacit dress code of black suits and black ties for the MCA executives to spruce up the dignity a bit, hoping to make his group look like smart-thinking corporate types, he still insisted that all his agents follow the mantra ‘Don't smell it. Sell it.' But the times had softened the town. Everyone had been making too much money. It was time to clean up the act. Instead of imitating the outrageous behavior and spirit of the pioneers who had started the business, the players slowly but inexorably started to separate themselves from the past. Like the Jews and African-Americans trying to assimilate to their new country, those with power in Hollywood have quietly been straightening their hair and scooping their noses, trying carefully to fit in to look like those East Coast bankers and intellectuals who never took much notice of them in the first place.