On Christmas Eve, the three of us took the bus to the May Company near the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland. We went to the bargain basement, where, after two in the afternoon, prices were the lowest of the year. We picked out one piece of clothing as our Christmas present for each of us.
We hurried to get the bus back to Lorain Avenue so we could stop at Gerzeny Brothers Movers before six o’clock. That’s where we bought our Christmas tree and they closed at six sharp. Between five and six on Christmas Eve we could buy a tree for one dollar.
We carried the tree the two blocks home and decorated it with strips of paper my mother had scissored from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
When I was a young American man and a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I wondered if anyone else on the staff had ever decorated their Christmas tree with the newspaper they now worked for.
CHAPTER 6
Michael Eisner Pimps the Teamsters
TONY
Come on, give me a break here, willya? Even a prick deserves a break sometime, am I right?
DAWN
Never.
Showgirls
IN 1981, DON Simpson, the head of production at Paramount, had a script called Flashdance written by a former journalist named Tom Hedley. Simpson thought the script needed a rewrite and sent it to me.
I’d been screenwriting for six years now, though I’d still only had one movie made. But I’d been in innumerable meetings and shucks and shine-ons … and I’d heard and told too many worn-out lies to and from too many producers, directors, and studio heads. By no means a Hollywood animal, I was no longer the fresh-from-the-underground, Rolling Stoned Hollywood naïf, either. Head honchos like Simpson didn’t scare me anymore.
I read the script and thought it needed not a rewrite, but a total re-creation from page one. It was about a group of kids at the Fashion Institute of Technology who band together against a Hells Angels–type cycle gang which is threatening their neighborhood. At the center of the piece was a young woman designer who falls in love with a married man in his sixties. What I liked about the piece, I told Simpson, was the title and the kind of arty fashion-oriented stripping that some of the girls did on the side.
“What would you do for the story if you redid it?” Simpson asked.
“I didn’t say I was interested in redoing it,” I said.
“I know that,” Simpson growled, “but what would you do?”
“If you make me an offer I can’t refuse, then I’ll tell you.”
“Fuck you,” Simpson said, “you want me to make a deal with you to rewrite it before I know what you want to do?”
“I don’t want to do anything until you make me an offer I can’t refuse.”
He hung up amidst a torrent of obscenities and called my agent. He wanted to pay me $125,000 for a rewrite and my agent told him he’d have to pay me my full fee for an original screenplay ($275,000 at the time), considering the work I’d want to do.
“You tell your client,” Simpson said, “that he is a greedy pig! I will never—never—never pay that kind of money for a rewrite.”
Simpson and I had a special bond between us. I enjoyed teasing him. He still talked about the time I sat down in his chair and put my feet up on his desk. And then, too, there was a more recent and painful (to Simpson) incident which took place at the bar of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York.
Simpson and I were knocking down Tanqueray shooters late one afternoon when we were joined by Hillary, a beautiful young woman who was an editor at the Village Voice. Simpson prided himself on being a stud—“I know more about pussy than anybody in Hollywood with the possible exception of Robert Evans”—but two hours later she left with me, not with Don.
He had called me the next morning, sputtering.
“You motherfucker!” he ranted. “I don’t get it. I’m the head of a studio, you’re just a writer. No, you’re a screenwriter! You’re nothing! and she leaves with you? The bitch! The fucking bitch!”
Three weeks after he told my agent I was a greedy pig, he called him back and made the deal with me. “Tell that pig I want him down here!” Simpson said.
He told me about the background of the piece and introduced me to the others involved. Peter Guber and Jon Peters had originally been involved; Lynda Obst had developed the screenplay with Hedley. Hedley had based the script on a particular kind of stripping/dancing that was being done in some of the clubs in Toronto.
They were all gone from the project now. Adrian Lyne, a hip Englishman who had directed a beautiful little movie called Foxes, was now involved to direct. Dawn Steel, a vice president of production at Paramount, was the executive in charge of the project. He filled me in on Dawn. She had begun her career as an assistant to Bob Guccione at Penthouse. She had then, on her own, started manufacturing Gucci toilet paper and made a lot of money until Gucci stopped her.
Now that we had a deal, Simpson said, now that he had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, maybe I’d condescend to tell him what I had in mind for the story.
Not yet, I said.
“Excu-u-u-u-use me?” Simpson said in a voice I was sure you could hear over the lot.
Well, I said, if Hedley based his script on something that was actually being done in Toronto—then why didn’t we begin by going up to Toronto and speaking to some of the young women who were “flashdancing.”
“Jesus, Toronto?” Don said. “You want to go to Toronto? We’re not talking about Miami Beach here or Vegas. Toronto is the boonies.”
I didn’t just want to go to Toronto, I explained. I wanted him to come with me, along with Adrian Lyne … and Dawn if she wanted to come.
“I am not going to Toronto!” Simpson said.
But a week later we were there—Don and I and Adrian and a young producer who would also be involved in the project, Jerry Bruckheimer, lean and sharp-eyed, who had produced a funny movie called Young Doctors in Love.
Toronto, we discovered, was sex-crazed. Not only were there dozens of clubs where “exotic dances” and “exotic acts” were performed, but the weekends were sexual extravaganzas.
A promoter would rent out a hall—I mean a hall with seating for ten thousand or so people, a hall where rock acts would usually perform, and into that hall the promoter would book a Penthouse Pet or a Playboy Centerfold. The Pets and Centerfolds would take most of their clothes off in front of this hooting, foaming-at-the-mouth, slobbering mob and receive $50,000 for the weekend. Sometimes there would be three of these arena-strips going at the same time and the papers would have ads for “The Battle of the Busts.”
We focused on the more intimate clubs where “flashdancing” was being performed. We discovered that several of these young women began wanting to be classical dancers. Some had even had formal training. Most regretted that they hadn’t followed that path for one reason or another—usually having to do with boyfriends and unexpected children and putting food on the table. One young woman cried as she spoke softly about not “following her dream.” Another told me of her very talented younger sister who could have been an Olympic skater had she only pursued it. What was her sister doing now? I asked. She was stripping, too, I was told, in a very grungy after-hours club where “she took it all off.”
After one of the flashdancers got off the stage, I ran my hands through her hair, sopping with sweat, and an aura of perspiration exploded into the bright lights and Adrian said, “I have to get that effect on-screen.”
On the way back to L.A., Don and I talked about it. What if our lead, I suggested to him, was a girl who had a dream to be a dancer? What if she was uneducated, blue-collar, and got sidetracked into stripping just to survive? What if the piece really was about “following your dream”?
What if we put the entire piece within a blue-collar context—if her love interest was also a blue-collar guy, who finally had to understand that it was more important for her to follow her dream than to marry him?
What if he loved her so deeply that he was
willing, finally, not only to accept that most painful of all acceptances, but to help her realize the dream?
Simpson thought it was a good beginning but wondered what it was she actually did—blue-collar sounded intriguing, but what did she do?
“She welds,” I blurted, “she’s a welder.” All the research I had done with welders on Rowdy, the Alaska pipeline piece, suddenly came back to me.
Adrian, a visual wizard, loved it instantly.
“She has a torch in her hand,” he said, “she has a mask. The torch flares. She flips her mask up.”
I started working on the script and was summoned to L.A. days later. There was an … unexpected … problem. Don was out as head of production at Paramount. The project, I was told, was “up in the air.” He was now negotiating an independent production deal with the studio. If the deal worked out, he and his friend Jerry Bruckheimer would produce Flashdance. If the deal didn’t work out … nobody knew what was going to happen to the project.
Adrian, Jerry, and I talked about the script for a couple days with Simpson absenting himself from the meetings … sort of. He would occasionally chime in on the speakerphone from home, but he was wired and edgy.
The negotiations, I was led to believe, were not going well. Don said that Michael Eisner, in charge of the studio, was “a motherfucker.” Jeff Katzenberg, who had replaced him, was worse.
I went home to Marin County to continue working on the script and Don concluded an independent production deal with the studio. I thought he’d settle down then but he seemed to be more cranked up than ever before.
He’d call me at midnight or two o’clock in the morning with script ideas. He was full of words like “catharsis” and “epiphany” and “second act overdrive” and “redemptive arc.”
He sounded like he had been to some literary critic’s rummage sale.
“This is important,” he yelled into the phone. “I’ve got everything riding on this. This is the only movie I’ve got now! I don’t have a slate of them anymore. I’ve got this one. I’ve got you! I have to have a hit movie!”
The day after I sent him the finished script, he sounded ecstatic.
“It’s sensational!” he said. “It’s just what I wanted. We’re going to have a big hit movie! Thank you! Thank you!”
He sent me a case of Dom Pérignon.
The day after I got the champagne, he sent me a forty-three-page single-spaced memo. The memo literally took the script that he had thought “sensational” apart.
I felt like beating him to death with a bottle of Dom Pérignon.
What particularly galled me was the tone of the memo. It was supercilious and patronizing and command-like. “We” feel this and “we” think this should be changed.
I wrote him a twenty-four-page memo back that took apart his forty-three-page memo. I began by asking who the “we” was.
“You may not have noticed it,” I wrote, jabbing him about the fact that he no longer spoke for the studio, “but the emperor has new clothes.”
I also demanded a face-to-face meeting with him and Dawn and Adrian and Jerry Bruckheimer.
When we met in Dawn’s office, I immediately demanded a stenographer.
Simpson couldn’t believe it! “You want a what?” Simpson said.
“I want a stenographer. Call for one. You can get one from the studio pool.”
“What the fuck do you want a stenographer for?” he asked.
“I want every word to be on the record. I want posterity to know what asshole, stupid, benighted, moronic suggestions you’re making.”
It looked like smoke was coming out of his ears.
“Call a fucking stenographer,” he growled at Dawn.
We sat there in that room—Dawn and Jerry and Adrian and I—waiting for a stenographer, not looking at each other. Don went back and forth to the bathroom; each time he came back, his sinus condition was worse.
Fifteen minutes later, the stenographer arrived. The stenographer was a transvestite.
Don stared in dazed and blinking disbelief. I started to go through my rebuttal to his memo. The stenographer was writing everything down.
Don interrupted me. “Can I speak to you for a moment outside?”
We went outside the building. He looked like he was going to have a stroke. “We gotta do this with this fucking freak in there?” he said.
“I don’t have any problem with her.”
“Him! Him! Did you see the hair on his arms?”
“You want to call for another stenographer, it’s okay with me.”
“I don’t want to call another stenographer! I don’t want any stenographer in there! I wanna do it with just you!”
“You and me—nobody else, is that the deal?” I said.
“No—Jerry, Adrian, Dawn—”
“All they’re gonna do is agree with you. You’re stacking the deck. At least having a record will prove what an idiot you’re being.”
“I could fire you! I could fire you and not pay you out!”
I hadn’t yet been paid my full fee.
“I’d sue you!” I said.
“Fucking sue me!”
“Okay, I’ll fucking sue you!”
We went at each other like that and he finally agreed to it.
He and I, alone, would have discussions. When we were done talking about the script, we’d ask Dawn and Jerry and Adrian to join us.
We went at each other for days then—back and forth, arguing, cajoling, swearing, screaming. At one particularly difficult moment, we even walked into Michael Eisner’s office to see what he thought.
Michael seemed amused. We were like two kids taking it to daddy. He wouldn’t take a position agreeing with either one of us. He started talking about O. Henry and how much he admired him. I admired O. Henry, too, but I wasn’t sure how relevant he was to a discussion about the dreams of a flashdancer.
At the end of those days, Don and I were still somehow friends. My script was still intact, but I had agreed to make some changes that I liked.
“You’re a prick!” Simpson said as I left. “You’re a no-good fucking Hungarian prick,” and then he mock-punched me goodbye.
The project went on a very fast production track and two weeks before the start of photography, Simpson scheduled a final script meeting. It would be at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, I was told.
“Why are we having a script meeting at Caesars Palace?” I asked him.
“Because we’re going to be auditioning at the same time we’re having the script meeting.”
“Auditioning whom?”
“Dancers for the movie,” he said.
My suite at Caesars was glaring red. Red walls, red ceiling, a red shag rug—and, outside my window, a red neon sign. Simpson’s suite, the size of a house, had a Jacuzzi in the middle of the living room.
That’s how I first saw him in Vegas. He was sitting in the Jacuzzi with Adrian and Jerry on chairs nearby. He had a bottle of Tanqueray on the edge of the Jacuzzi, a gram of coke on the rug behind him, and a cigar in his mouth.
Over the next few days, we would discuss the script and interrupt our discussion to meet some nineteen-year-old nubile young woman who wanted to dance in the movie. Adrian held a full audition one afternoon where a hundred young women in bikinis and leotards bumped and grinded as the Stones’s “Start Me Up” exploded in a Caesars Palace conference hall.
One night Don held a party in his suite. It was Don, Jerry, Adrian, and I, and fifty of the most beautiful young women in Vegas, all desperate to be in the movie.
I saw him early in the evening sitting next to a voluptuous young woman in a see-through dress. He was earnest and shy speaking to her. She was so air-headed and stoned I’m not sure she was picking up a word of it; she had her hand on his thigh.
Around three in the morning, when I was leaving, I wanted to say good night to him.
“He’s in there,” Jerry said, pointing to a door. I opened the door and saw him. He was naked and had a n
aked young woman up against the wall with her back to him.
I said, “Good night, Don.”
He looked back and grinned but didn’t stop what he was doing.
We started at noon the next day, none of us too fresh. It was at this moment that Adrian launched his big creative idea. Until now, he had pretty much kept his suggestions to visual ones, but now he had a whopper.
Adrian very strongly felt that our lead character, the young woman welder who wanted to be a dancer, was raped by her father when she was eight years old.
I was trying to shake the cobwebs out of my head. I realized that we were at Caesars Palace and realized that we’d had a bacchanalian evening and that we were in a room that had a Jacuzzi in the middle of the floor, but I couldn’t have heard Adrian right, I just couldn’t have.
But Adrian repeated it. He felt she needed “motivation.” He felt the script needed “an additional layer.”
“You don’t mean just telling the actress that,” Simpson said, “you mean actually putting it into the piece—that her father raped her when she was eight years old.”
“Yes,” Adrian said.
He went on to talk about Last Tango in Paris, which was his favorite movie of all time. Last Tango had those kinds of “layers” he said.
“Adrian, this isn’t Last Tango,” I said. “We’re not going to have a butter scene in this one. This is a little fairy tale of a movie. It’s innocent, it’s romantic—the fact that it retains that innocence and romance in a seedy world is what makes it different.”
Don leaned back in the Jacuzzi, poured himself some Tanqueray on ice, and lighted a cigar. Jerry, as is his wont, didn’t say much.
Adrian and I went at it. “You’re destroying this movie,” I said.
“I’m giving it some solidity.”
“It’s a fairy tale! You don’t have a butter scene in a fairy tale!”
“I didn’t say anything about a butter scene!”
We went on and on until suddenly it was too much for me. I turned from them, went out the door, went up to my red suite, packed my suitcase, checked out, and went home.
Hollywood Animal Page 22
