Richard reappeared. He was still wearing the jeans and the work shirt, but now he was carrying a fresh pair of jeans and a fresh work shirt.
“Memphis Slim,” I said. “He’s always fascinated me. I love that boogie-woogie sound, and then the guy becomes an exile and lives like the lord mayor of Paris for twenty years.” The same thing would happen to you here.
“No Chicago connection, though,” Richard said. He stood ten feet from me. He started to take his clothes off.
“No, I guess not,” I said.
His shirt was off. He was unbuckling his belt and unzipping his fly.
“Big Bill Broonzy,” Richard said, “he was a Chicago guy.”
His jeans were off. He wasn’t wearing underwear. Forget the boxers—you should do that.
“Big Joe Turner?” I asked.
“Kansas City.”
Richard was snuggling into the fresh pair of tight jeans.
“Big Mama Thornton?” I asked.
“Maybe. I know she did some things on Chess.”
Richard buckled his belt and started putting on his fresh work shirt. His fly was still unzipped. You’ve been there, Bubba.
“What I’d like to do,” I said, “is research it first. Spend a couple months in Chicago and do the research.”
“Sounds great,” Richard said. “I think it could be a helluva movie, don’t you?”
He zipped his fly up.
“Fun,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “A lot of fun.”
He asked me to walk him down to the parking lot.
“I hate photo shoots,” Richard said. We shook hands. “I’ll call you next week,” he said. “We’ll work up a deal.”
I thanked him. We smiled at each other. He got into a hot little Porsche and roared away.
I never heard from him again. Don’t you wish you would never again have heard from Paula Jones?
The Saturday Night Massacre
The first time I met Gina Gershon, standing a few feet away from a naked and sweat-soaked Elizabeth Berkley on the Showgirls set— Easy, Bubba! You’ll get bursitis in your hand! —she told me how much she admired my screenplay. “I know you were inspired by the story of Zeus and Aphrodite,” she said; “it’s one of my favorite stories.”
Well, I didn’t know about that, but I liked her performance. I had a script called Original Sin, a story of past-life romance, over at Morgan Creek Productions, and I convinced the company head, Jim Robinson, to see her performance in Showgirls. He’s a stand-up guy, always appreciative of a great performance.
Robinson liked what he saw, but he said, “She’s not a star. She’s a starlet.” I told him that with the right part, I thought Gina could become a star. You’d like Gina a lot! Robinson wasn’t certain, but I talked him into it. Morgan Creek signed Gina for the lead in Original Sin. I knew she wasn’t getting any star offers. “I just love this script,” she said; “it’s the perfect script.” She said she, like her character, had also had a past-life romance. You and Cleopatra?
She said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
We needed a director. I had seen and admired the English director Nick Broomfield’s documentaries and asked to meet with him. I asked him if he was interested in directing a fictional feature. He was. I gave him Original Sin. He liked the script “very much,” he said, but had “thoughts.” We spent an afternoon discussing his “thoughts.” I liked them and told Jim Robinson I’d found the perfect director. He wasn’t overwhelmed.
“He does documentaries, for Christ’s sake,” Robinson said; “plus, he’s a Brit. This piece takes place down south. What the fuck does he know about the South?” Robinson’s got a little bit of Carville and Ickes in him. I talked him into meeting Broomfield and I rewrote the script, including Nick’s “thoughts.” Robinson liked Broomfield, liked the script, signed a deal with Nick, and we had a go movie.
A month later, Robinson called me and said, “What the fuck’s going on?”
Broomfield, he said, wasn’t out scouting locations, wasn’t doing casting, wasn’t hiring a crew.
I said, “What’s he doing?”
Robinson said, “He’s working on the fucking script.”
I said, “Whaaaat?”
When I calmed down, I said, “I thought you liked the script?”
“I like the script,” he said. “Broomfield doesn’t like it. Gina Gershon doesn’t like it.”
I said, “Whaaaat?”
When I calmed down, I said, “Gina Gershon is lucky to be in the movie. Nick Broomfield is lucky to direct the movie. I convinced you to bring them into the movie.” How would you feel if Al Gore gave you lip?
Robinson laughed. “That’s right,” he said, “call ’em.”
I called Gina and said I’d heard she had script problems. “Not really,” she said. “I mean, I love the script. It’s really the perfect script. But Nick and I have been talking. I’m just worried about my motivation in some scenes. I don’t understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. Nick and I have some ideas where I do things that are different.”
I called Broomfield. “Gina’s really gotten into her part,” he said. “She is becoming her character. She’s got some insights we should listen to.”
“She’s ‘becoming’ her character?” I said. “She didn’t create her character; I did. If she wants to become her character, all she has to do is what’s in the script.” D oes Al Gore improvise? Hell no! “I see your point,” Broomfield said. “But I think we should talk.”
I didn’t want to talk. My script and I had gotten both these people their jobs. Now they were conspiring to change what I’d written?
At exactly this delicate moment, Jon Bon Jovi, who loved Original Sin and wanted to play a leading part, flew across the country for a meeting at my home in Malibu. Robinson and Bon Jovi arrived together and, moments later, Nick and Gina arrived together.
As we talked, it became obvious to Robinson and me that Bon Jovi was more excited about the script than either Nick or Gina. While Jim and I thought Bon Jovi would be perfect in the movie, Broomfield and Gina condescended to him.
“Yes, perhaps I’d have time to audition you tomorrow,” Broomfield said, his English accent becoming buttery-crusted. Blumenthal would like him.
“Have you taken acting lessons?” Gina asked Jon. You’re fine—Harry Thomason is better than Stanislavsky. Nick and Gina excused themselves, leaving Jim and Jon and me to mull over the evening.
“That guy’s an asshole,” Robinson said of Broomfield. “I think he’s afraid to direct. That’s why he’s not scouting or casting. That’s why he’s still dicking with the script. He’s afraid to go out and do it.”
I could see Robinson was angry at the way Nick and Gina had treated Bon Jovi, who’d gone to great effort to have this meeting.
“You told me to hire Broomfield,” Robinson said to me.
“Fire him,” I said.
The next morning when Nick Broomfield arrived at Morgan Creek to audition Jon Bon Jovi, Jon wasn’t there. There were security people there who, at Jim Robinson’s behest, escorted Nick Broomfield off the lot. A settlement was reached with Nick and, sometime later, a settlement was also reached with Gina. You’d still like her a lot, Bubba.
Sensitivity Training
A few years after the success of Jagged Edge, its director, Richard Marquand, died of a stroke in England at the age of forty-eight, leaving behind his wife and two small children.
He was my good friend. Crushed, I informed those who’d worked with him on the production. When I reached Glenn Close in New York, I was still in shock. She said not a word as I gave her the details: In seemingly perfect health, Richard had been vacationing with his wife in Greece, and so on. There was a pause when I finished.
I said, “Glenn?”
“Yes, I’m here,” she said.
There was another pause, and then Glenn said, “Well, you know, he didn�
�t do anything for me in that movie. My ass looked too big.” Politics ain’t beanbag, either, right?
High Noon
Frank Price was the head of Columbia when I wrote Jagged Edge. He was a former television writer and was known as a smart executive. He hated the ending of my script and insisted the movie end with Jeff Bridges innocent and with a hug between Jeff and Glenn Close. I told him I thought that was a silly television idea.
He told me he’d produced McCloud and Columbo.
“I know your credits, Frank, and your credits are a good part of the problem,” I said. Frank passed on E.T.
The producer, the veteran Martin Ransohoff, agreed with me. We didn’t know what to do. The studio president had given me a direct order to change the ending and I’d said no.
Ransohoff called his friend Herbert Allen, a member of Columbia’s board of directors— You’ll never be as powerful as he is, Bubba —and discovered that Frank Price’s job was shaky.
We decided to outwait his firing. Every other week, Frank Price wanted to know where the new ending was, and every other week, Marty Ransohoff said, “Joe’s still working on it.” We dodged for three months … until Frank Price was finally fired.
Three days after his ouster, I turned in my new ending—which was the same ending I’d written before. The new president liked my new old ending and the movie was shot that way. It didn’t hurt that the new president was my former agent.
It doesn’t hurt to have Janet Reno as attorney general, does it? …
Negative Advertising
You remember Ryan O’Neal, don’t you, Bubba? He played Al Gore in Love Story, which Al says is the story of Al and Tipper. (I guess Tipper, a formidable woman, came back from the dead somehow.)
I wrote a script a couple years ago called An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, which featured a character named James Edmunds, a cynical, deceitful, low-life Hollywood producer. You know him—he stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom three times. We had trouble casting the part, and then my wife thought of Ryan O’Neal. Once a big star, Ryan wasn’t getting big parts anymore. He was appearing not in films but in People magazine, in stories about his relationship with his daughter, Tatum, or his longtime love, Farrah Fawcett. He was washed up in Hollywood and had ballooned physically. His spare tires were approaching the size of Alec Baldwin’s. How’s Kim?
I thought it was a great idea. Who better in a Hollywood satire to play a Hollywood animal than a Hollywood animal whom the town had discarded? I sent the script to his agents, and within a day, Ryan accepted the part. Within a week, he was at my house having lunch, telling me very loudly that this was the best script he’d ever read. He gave me a hug at the end of the lunch, then asked that my wife join the hug, and gave her a hug that was a little too close for my comfort (and hers). Your kind of hug, Bubba.
The shoot began and we made plans for Ryan and Farrah to come to dinner at our home. The day before the dinner, I asked my assistant to cancel it. A week of rain in Malibu had caused mud slides and Malibu was nearly isolated. On the night of the scheduled dinner, our gate bell rang and our housekeeper informed us that Ryan and Farrah had arrived. Naomi and I were both in our frumpies, containers of Chinese food all over the floor, which was wet from a leaking window. We were in no shape to entertain, and we told the housekeeper to inform Ryan and Farrah that we were not at home. I called my assistant, who confessed that he had forgotten to cancel the dinner. I called Ryan the next day, apologized, and sent flowers to Farrah, which she never acknowledged. No! Don’t! Take my advice—stay away from Farrah!
As the shoot went on, it became obvious to those of us on the set that Ryan was having an affair with our female lead, Leslie Stephenson, young, sultry-eyed, and playing a hooker. Then Ryan informed me one day that he and Leslie were living together out in Malibu and that he had left Farrah. “It’s all thanks to you,” he said. “If you wouldn’t have written this script, I never would have met Leslie. And after you stood us up for dinner that night, my relationship with Farrah was never the same. She was nuts. She got all dolled up—it took her two hours—we drove out there through the rain, and you guys weren’t there.”
He seemed in love and happy, although he was still Ryan. We shared a limo on the way to a screening and he talked about Leslie, but as he talked, he kept touching my wife’s bare leg, until I finally said, “Ryan, if you touch her again, I’m going to break your arm.” You never told Vince that, did you? When we got to the screening, Ryan hovered in a corner to get away from the public, although, from what I could tell, no one even approached him for an autograph.
When the movie was about to be released, the studio organized a press day at the Four Seasons Hotel. Ryan was supposed to be there, but the night before, I heard he wasn’t coming. He hated these things, I was told. He’d done too many of them through the years. I called his agents and said, “Come on. The guy was unemployable. I had to convince the director to give him the part. What do you mean, ‘he’s not coming’?” Ryan called me later that night and said there had been a misunderstanding … of course he’d be there.
When I got to the Four Seasons the next morning, a studio publicist informed me Ryan was there, getting ready to do interviews in the suite the studio had arranged for him. Everything looked under control until … a producer came to tell me he had just seen Ryan in his suite and the suite reeked of marijuana. Then the producer came to tell me he had just seen Ryan’s first interview and Ryan had said he “didn’t really like” the movie, that he didn’t even want to talk about the movie. He wanted to talk about another independently made movie in which he had a smaller part. Forget Hillary’s health-care plan; let’s talk about the spotted owl.
I called his agent and his agent started screaming, “Get him out of there! Right now! You gotta get him out of there right now!” Moments later, Ryan left, leaving a note for me saying he was sorry but that he wasn’t feeling well. He thought he had the flu and had to go home. You, too, can be a Hollywood animal, Bubba!
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Studios and producers sometimes have trouble deciding how they feel about a script and sometimes have even more trouble articulating it.
I rewrote a script called Other Men’s Wives, about wives cheating on their husbands. Why should the talk always be about us, right? The head of the studio was Sherry Lansing— You’d like her, too —and the producers were Wendy Finerman (Forrest Gump)— Too skinny for you —and Mario Kassar, the once-legendary head of Carolco.
I sent the three of them the script by messenger on a Friday afternoon. On Sunday morning, Sherry called me and said, “I didn’t really like it, but don’t say anything about my reaction to Wendy or Mario. I want to hear their reactions first. I also want to think about it. I could be wrong.”
Wendy called me Sunday night. “I didn’t really like it,” she said. “Have you heard anything from Sherry or Mario?”
I said I hadn’t.
“Well, I could be wrong,” Wendy said. “I want to reread it and think about it. Don’t say anything to Sherry or Mario about what I think; I’ll talk to them myself.”
I heard nothing from Mario on Monday, and neither Sherry nor Wendy called me back.
Mario called me at noon on Tuesday. He sounded scrambled.
“Joe,” he said, “we’ve been friends. I need you to tell me the truth. Did you hear from Sherry about what she thinks of the script?”
“Wait a minute, Mario,” I said. “Tell me what you think of the script first.”
“Look, Joe, it doesn’t matter what I think. I don’t run a studio anymore. I’m just a producer. I want to be in agreement with what Sherry thinks.” You should bring Dick Morris out here with you.
I told him Sherry didn’t like it.
He called me back two hours later, irate. “How could you tell me she doesn’t like it when she likes it?”
I said, “She does?”
“Ther
e are some things in it she doesn’t like, but she likes it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, we had a pretty bad connection—she’s on her way to a corporate retreat in the Bahamas—but—”
“Maybe you should call her back.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve got a better idea. I’m going to make some calls over to Paramount—to Goldwyn and Manning and some of the others—to see what Sherry told them.”
“You mean she might have said something different to them?”
“We’ll find out,” he said.
He called the next day to say that on the basis of his conversations with studio executives John Goldwyn and Michelle Manning, he didn’t think Sherry liked the script.
“Did Goldwyn and Manning like it?”
“They need more time to think about it.”
Wendy called me to schedule a meeting with her and Mario.
“What are we going to talk about?” I asked.
“We’ve got to figure out how we feel about the script.”
“Well, I like it,” I said.
“You don’t count; you wrote it.”
“Then why don’t you and Mario have the meeting without me?”
“You’re right,” Wendy said. “Good idea.”
You didn’t have Hillary at most cabinet meetings, did you?
The Politics of Personal Destruction
• When I learned that a Columbia executive named Robert Lawrence had bad-mouthed one of my scripts to a star, I called him to say, “I’m gonna come down there tomorrow and kick the living shit out of you!” I went down the next day on other business with Columbia and Lawrence had called in sick. F-word Milošević!
• Years later, the same Lawrence turned up as an executive at United Artists, where I’d just made a three-picture deal. I told studio head Jerry Weintraub I didn’t want to work with Lawrence, and Jerry summoned him to his office. “If you fuck with Joe,” Weintraub said, “I’m going to throw you out this fucking window.” Lawrence nodded, smiled, and left. F-word Saddam!
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