And so I did. I had to do, not factual research, but as Marcia called it, “emotional research.” I had to get a “feel” for those places.
I went to Belfast and did a lot of walking about, stayed at a great hotel, and ate at the best places. Belfast was a singularly barren and threatening place and after about three days, I felt I had “the feel” down just right.
Then I went to Villefranche, a luxurious resort location not far from Nice. I walked about, stayed at a great hotel overlooking the marina, and ate at the best places. There were a great many “best” places here, though, and the sun was out—and while I had gotten “the feel” in Belfast after three days … it took me nearly three weeks to get “the feel” in Villefranche.
I came back to L.A. tanned and refreshed and Karel, Frank, and I resumed our discussions. Karel and I quickly allied forces and all we did was argue with Frank.
Finally, Karel, as the director, spoke up and said: “Perhaps we should just let Joe go back to Marin County and write his script.”
“I’m not gonna like what he writes,” Frank said.
“Oh, you never know.” Karel chuckled. “He might surprise us.”
“I know he’s not going to surprise me,” Frank said.
But Marcia supported Karel’s suggestion and I was quickly back in Marin, still throwing up every morning, adapting Brian Moore’s novel.
I hated doing it. I had a reverence for the novelist’s words, didn’t want to change any of them, and felt like I was doing nothing but a translation of form—putting Brian Moore’s words into a scripted format.
When I turned the script in, Frank Rosenberg hated it and wanted me to start from scratch.
I wasn’t about to start from scratch and wasn’t about to napalm Brian Moore’s novel and so I quit.
When Karel Reisz heard that I’d quit, he quit, too.
When UA heard that Karel Reisz quit, UA quit.
Frank Rosenberg had a problem: he had no screenwriter, no director, and no studio. He was out in the cold, starting all over again with a project that only a few months ago had looked like a movie.
Marcia was right. Never mind F.I.S.T.’s abject critical and commercial failure, Sly was already booked two movies ahead and Norman was mounting his next movie. And I was the newest “hot” screenwriter in town.
I got two offers that were particularly intriguing:
1. David Obst and Peter Guber were setting up a new publishing company and wanted to sign me up to write a novel. David was the founder of the Dispatch News Service, which had broken the Seymour Hersh stories of the My Lai massacre, and Peter, already the former head of Columbia Pictures, now the head of Casablanca Film Works, was an industry wunderkind.
2. The director Alan Pakula (The Sterile Cuckoo, The Parallax View), respected by both the critics and the industry, wanted me to write a script about the Alaska pipeline.
I met with Obst and Guber and decided to do the novel.
They put an ad in Daily Variety, full-page, that I framed: “David Obst and Peter Guber take pride in announcing the signing of Joe Eszterhas for his new novel.”
I called Pakula and told him that I hoped he understood, I’d always wanted to write novels, this was a particularly good offer, blah blah blah.
“What do you mean you expect me to understand?” Pakula said. “Understand? I thought we had an understanding that you’d do this script.”
“I hadn’t agreed to do it,” I said, “we don’t have anything in writing.”
“Writing?” Pakula said. “How dare you talk to me about what’s in writing?”
My agent called me that night and summoned me to a hasty meeting in L.A. “Pakula called me,” he said.
“I told him we didn’t have anything in writing.”
“Nobody has anything in writing,” he said. “Most directors don’t even sign their contracts until they finish shooting the movie.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I thought having something in writing means something.”
“Not in this town, not unless it’s a shooting script that’s been green-lighted and cast.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He said,” my agent told me, “that you’ll never work in this town again if you don’t do this script for him.”
“Alan Pakula said that to you? He’s got a reputation for being a sensitive, caring guy.”
“He is a sensitive, caring guy,” my agent said. “He is sensitive about you not doing his script and cares about it maybe being his next movie.”
“Can he sue me?” I asked.
“How could he sue you? There’s nothing in writing.”
“Well,” I said, “does he really have the power to stop me doing screenplays if I want to do one again?”
My agent shrugged. “He’s a very respected part of this community. This is the smallest town in the world, you know.”
“Well what the hell are we gonna do?” I said. “Obst and Guber have already run their ad in Variety.”
“A lot of people run ads in Variety announcing new projects,” my agent said, “half of them never happen. Everyone who reads Variety knows that.”
“You mean they ran an ad and nobody paid attention to it anyway?”
My agent shrugged again.
“Did you sign your contract with Obst and Guber?” he asked.
“No.”
“Well,” my agent said, smiling, “then they can’t sue you.”
I didn’t know what to do. I went back to the Beverly Wilshire where I was staying, compliments of Obst and Guber, of course, and sat down at the bar and asked for a double Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.
A woman was sitting down the bar from me. She was in her fifties, coiffed, manicured, and wearing tasteful gold jewelry with a mink coat. She kept staring at me.
I was aware of her presence but I wasn’t interested. I looked into the bottom of my Jack Daniel’s and thought about Todd’s painting in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust: The Burning of Los Angeles.
“Excuse me, do you mind if I speak to you?” she asked.
I said, “Sort of.”
She laughed and came over to sit next to me. She spoke with what sounded like a British accent. Her perfume was subtle and meadowy.
“I have to tell you this,” she said. “I read auras. You have an amazing aura.”
She went into it: She was from South Africa. She was a diamond merchant with offices in Johannesburg and Tokyo. But what she really did was auras. She could also “read” people.
“Would you like me to tell you about yourself?”
I thought: This screwy town. It really is lalaland.
Within thirty seconds, she told me these things: I was a writer. I had recently made a lot of money. She told me the exact figure—$240,000. I would be rich and world-famous. The key was to continue doing what I was doing now. I should not be tempted by doing anything else. She gave me her card, listing her offices in Johannesburg and Tokyo, wished me luck, and left.
I thought about it that night as I fell asleep. She was clearly a complete wacko. I came from good hunkie peasant stock, my feet on the ground, far from auras.
But she did tell me the exact amount of money I had recently made. She did tell me I was a writer—most people thought I was a Hells Angel.
She told me I would be world-famous—but screenwriters not only weren’t world-famous, most people didn’t know what it was they did. And she said I had to continue doing what I was doing right now.
But what was I doing right now? Yes, I’d written two screenplays, but on the other hand I had agreed to do a novel.
Was I screenwriting right now or planning the novel right now?
The next morning I called my agent and told him I was doing the script for Alan Pakula.
“I think you made a really good decision,” he said.
“You won’t believe how I made it.”
“Try me.”
“Well, I was sitting at the bar at the Wilshi
re—”
“Right.”
“And this woman was sitting near me—”
“Right.”
“And she was a diamond merchant—”
“Got it. And you figured it’d be easier buying diamonds with screenplays than novels. See ya later.”
He hung up on me.
· · ·
Alan Pakula certainly seemed like a sensitive and caring man, not the kind of street punk who’d tell you you’d never work again. He was literate and literary, charming and friendly. His reputation was that he was always involved in many projects and had some difficulty deciding to commit himself to actually directing one of them.
His offices were in New York, high up in the Gulf + Western Building, and his offices swayed while we spoke—there was a gusty wind that day. He didn’t deny that he often worked on a project that wound up in his drawer.
“There’s always the fear that one day my phone will stop ringing,” he said. “And that day I’ll know that I have some good scripts in my drawer ready to go. I’ve got a Pat Resnick script in there and an Alvin Sargent script and maybe there’ll be a Joe Eszterhas script in there, too. But that’s not so bad, is it? You’d be in good company.”
His idea was to do a story about the heroic construction of the Alaska pipeline. He wanted me to research it extensively and then capture a kind of old-timey frontier spirit within a modern-day context.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it,” he said, “go do it.”
Alan’s nephew by marriage, a young man named Jon Boorstin, was to be the co-producer of the project. He would travel with me. Jon was the son of Daniel J. Boorstin, the historian. He was very intellectual and prone to abstractions and by the time we got to our first stop on the research trip—Tulsa, Oklahoma—I knew we were not ideal traveling companions.
But the pipeliners were wild, larger-than-life characters. They’d worked on pipe all over the world. A union in Tulsa had a lock on the welders—so if pipe was being laid anywhere in the world by any American company, these guys from Tulsa had to be the ones doing the work. They’d been everywhere—Abu Dhabi and Singapore and Kuwait—sported gold, diamond-encrusted Rolexes and thick gold chains, and were never without a beer can nearby.
They were a raw-meat, no-bullshit, fuck-’em-if-they-can’t-take-a-joke group very much like a lot of the guys I’d grown up with on Lorain Avenue in Cleveland.
We found an entire colony of them in a place called Grand Isle, Louisiana, down on the bayou two hours out of New Orleans at the tip of the Gulf of Mexico, deep in Cajun country where the stop signs looked like swiss cheese from all the target practice everybody took as soon as the sun went down.
There was one motel in town and one bar where all the pipeliners hung out—it was a vast U-shaped bar decorated with hardhats. There was one bartender and she was the only beautiful woman in town.
Jon Boorstin and I went in there and Jon started telling the bartender that we were from Hollywood and were doing a movie that he was going to produce.
She liked that. “Oh yeah? You gonna put me in it? I can be sexy.” She laughed, swayed her hips, and licked her lips with her tongue.
There were fifty of the roughest-looking guys I’d ever seen listening to all of this and they sure didn’t look like happy campers. The only relatively beautiful woman in town was acting like she was ready for the casting couch with these two Hollywood assholes who had no business down here on the bayou.
I tried to tell Jon to cool it but Jon was into it, he was having fun and, from what I could tell, so was she.
It went on for a while—she was full of all kinds of questions about Hollywood, not questions really but periodic quasi-observations like: “That Robert Redford, he must be really somethin’ huh” or “Burt Reynolds, now he can park his boots under my bed anytime!” and as she and Jon kept talking I noticed two Cajuns glaring at us.
They were rip-roaring sky-high drunk, the empty Pearls a fort around them, and after a while they got into an argument with each other which, the best that I could make out, had to do with their scars.
They took their shirts off and one of them said—“Lookit this here, now this a .38 Magnum went clear on through.” The other said, “This one here, it’s that Bowie knife Willie Joe got for Christmas year fore last.”
They kept giving us glances as the enumeration of wounds went on.
Then they suddenly started yelling at each other about something and it ended with one of them saying to the other, “Fuck you, motherfuckin’ sonofabitch fuck! I’m gonna kill you!”
The one using the words jumped up and tore ass out of the bar.
I grabbed Jon by the lapels of his sport coat, said, “Okay, we’re out of here,” and dragged him outside and down the stairs while he all the while kept saying, “Are you completely nuts? What’s wrong with you? Have you lost your mind?”
We had turned the corner and were heading into our motel court—the ground was littered with seashells—when we heard the gunshots. The Cajun had meant it. He’d gone to his car and gotten his gun and gone back into the bar, where he shot his friend and two others.
Had we still been in there, I’m convinced, the two Hollywood assholes would have been the first two dead men.
I went back home, happy to be alive, and wrote the script based on my interviews and research, still dealing with my now familiar morning ritual: first you throw up and then you write the screenplay.
I went to New York to discuss it with Alan Pakula. He hated the script and gave me the best writing advice I ever got from anyone.
“Forget the research,” he said. “Go back home and use your imagination, make it up. Don’t lean it on great lines and great characters you’ve heard and seen, just, make the whole thing up.”
I went back home and did exactly that. It was the most fun I’d had writing anything. It was the first fun I’d ever had writing a screenplay, the greatest natural high I’d ever felt. Out on a high wire every morning, way out on an edge, playing God, just … making … it … all … up.
And, after nearly three years of my morning ritual, I stopped throwing up.
I sent the new script to Alan and he loved it. He had the script budgeted and started sending it out to cast it. He was thinking about Burt Reynolds and Jane Fonda. The budget came to $40 million.
Forty million dollars?
Forget about it, the studio said. Heaven’s Gate had just put United Artists out of business. Forty million dollars?
We had to cut the script—but we couldn’t cut the script, Alan pointed out. Most of the money was in rebuilding and re-creating pipeline conditions in Alaska, with the inherent dangers of blizzards and windstorms delaying shooting.
In the middle of the budget hassle with the studio, both Burt Reynolds and Jane Fonda passed. “If you want a star to do a movie,” Barry Hirsch, my lawyer, said, “don’t set it in a blizzard in Alaska for God’s sake.”
When Burt and Jane passed, Alan Pakula called to tell me that my script, entitled Rowdy, was going into the drawer with Pat Resnick and Alvin Sargent.
“Well,” I said, “will you let me find another director for it?”
“Absolutely not,” Alan said. “It’s a great script and if my phone stops ringing one day, who knows …”
“Yeah, I know, I know,” I said, but I almost didn’t care.
First he’d threatened to put me out of business if I didn’t write his script. Now that I’d written the script and written it well, he wasn’t allowing anyone else to put it up on-screen; he was hiding it in his drawer.
The damn script had almost literally left me a dead man in Bayou Country, but he had given me the best writing advice I’ve ever had and I will be forever grateful to him.
Alan Pakula also told me one of the truest stories I’ve ever heard about film journalists:
“When Sophie’s Choice was coming out, one of the news magazines sent a writer to do a major feature on me. He came to my office to d
o the interview and, during it, he told me about a script he had written. He just happened to have it with him and he gave it to me.
“Three days later, he called me and asked if I’d had a chance to read his script yet. He told me that he was in the middle of writing his profile about me. I knew what he was doing: he was shaking me down. While he was in the middle of writing a profile of me which would be read by millions of people, he was asking me what I thought of his script.
“I told him that I’d been very busy, but hoped to read his script that weekend—which I knew was past his deadline for submitting my profile.
“‘Oh,’ he said, sounding disappointed, ‘I was hoping you’d have it read before then.’
“I thought about it. A favorable profile in a magazine with that kind of mega-circulation would certainly help the movie. I was worried about Sophie’s box office anyway. The subject matter itself would scare some people off.
“I called him back and told him that I’d finished reading his script and loved it. I told him that I wanted to produce it—not direct it, but produce it like I had produced other movies earlier in my career.
“‘Oh,’ he said, sounding disappointed, ‘I was hoping you’d direct it.’
“I called him back the next morning and told him I’d thought about it more. I told him I liked his script so much that I wanted to direct it. As my next movie.
“There was a pause and he said, ‘I hear you’re an honorable man. Do I have your word on that?’
“‘Absolutely,’” I said to him. ‘I give you my word. You’ve written a brilliant script.’
“‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘this is probably the greatest moment of my life. By the way, I think you’re going to like the profile I’m writing.’
“We made plans to get together in a week—way past his deadline—to celebrate.
“When the profile came out, it was long, glowing, and flattering and I’m sure it helped the movie’s success.
“He called me after the article came out and he kept calling for days, but I wouldn’t take his calls.
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