Adrian, Simpson told me later, came up after me five minutes later and found that I was gone.
“He’s checked out!” Adrian said to Simpson, still in his Jacuzzi. “He’s bloody left the hotel.”
“When the gorilla shits in your face,” Simpson said to Adrian, “get out of the way.”
My sudden departure from Vegas had its desired effect.
Don was able to convince Adrian that a rape at age eight did not belong in this movie.
Auditions were also held on the Paramount lot.
A two-hour wait to get into the room … a sweltering day on the lot … a musical … a dance picture … an audition for Flashdance … a movie about following your dream.
She’s a dancer or so she says … auditioning for stardom … for survival … following her dream.
She’s pretty … but not all that special … skinny but still fuckable … edgy but still vulnerable … but … but … oh, Lord … she can dance.
You did great, you really did … We’ve got your phone number right here … We’ll call you … Don’t call us … Ha ha.
Two hours later … the audition long over … she’s back suddenly … “You won’t believe this.” She smiles … We don’t believe it … But we pretend to.
She was supposed to get a ride … her girlfriend’s clunker broke down … she wonders if any of us … are headed toward Westwood?
Yes … miraculously … one of us is.
Yes … one of us will give her a ride.
And then we’ll tell her that … she’s good … don’t … give up … ever … give up … follow … your dream.
Casting Alex, our lead character, came down to three finalists. Demi Moore, a young actress who’d been in Young Doctors in Love; Leslie Wing, a New York model; and Jennifer Beals, a young model from Chicago.
The studio couldn’t decide whom to cast.
Michael Eisner finally directed that each young woman do an audition reel in full costume with Adrian directing them under “shoot” conditions—the use of a professional cinematographer and lighting man.
When the reels were done, Michael Eisner, who in his heart of hearts is a Mike Todd–like showman, organized one of the most unusual test screenings in the history of Paramount Pictures. He gathered together two hundred of the most macho men on the lot, Teamsters and gaffers and grips, and sat them down in a screening room.
He got up onstage to tell them what was about to happen. That they would see a reel from three young actresses auditioning for the lead in the movie called Flashdance.
“I want to know one thing from you guys after you’ve seen it,” he said. “I want to know which of these three young women you’d most want to fuck.”
The men cheered and threw fists into the air and after they saw the reels they voted overwhelmingly for Jennifer Beals. She was cast in the part.
The shoot was uneventful—Pittsburgh looked glorious on-screen (I wanted to set it in Pittsburgh; when I was living in Cleveland, Pittsburgh was where we escaped to on weekends), and at the end we felt we’d have a visually startling and romantic movie.
Simpson started to work on the music. He was a genius with film music. He had an instinctive rock and roll feel and he came up with a brilliant idea. He gave the script or showed the rough cut to musicians he liked—people like Irene Cara and Michael Sembello and Kim Carnes—and asked them to write songs that might work in this movie.
Adrian, meanwhile, worked on the cut. His director’s cut was two hours and twenty minutes long. It was, I thought, beautifully done—the characters were fleshed out—it wasn’t just the story of a welder who wanted to be a dancer; it was also the story of a young comedian who fails and gives up, of an ice skater who compromises her talent, of a young man … (played by Michael Nouri after Mickey Rourke turned the part down, feeling, at the time, pre–Wild Orchid, that he couldn’t do love scenes) … who comes to realize what loving someone really means.
But the studio—Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg—hated the cut and insisted that Adrian make deletions. Every time Adrian made a cut, they insisted on more, until all that was left, finally, was dancing, a very bare story line, and music.
Adrian felt his movie had been raped at the age of eight.
I felt like the writing was gone from the piece. Simpson was having a nervous breakdown, especially after he discovered that Paramount had so little faith in Flashdance that the studio sold off 30 percent of its own potential profit to a private investors group. We all knew, of course, that studios only did that with movies that they were absolutely certain would stiff.
The weekend we opened, we stiffed. The reviews were vicious—most reviewers dismissed the movie as “soft porn.” The opening weekend’s grosses were a blip on the screen—$3.8 million—in Hollywood terms, “zilch.”
The Thursday after we opened, Simpson called me. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, “but something’s going on.”
Theater owners were reporting that they were getting repeat business—especially among young women. People were leaving the theaters in tears, humming the music. The owners also had to order triple the amount of popcorn they usually ordered.
“This could be a popcorn movie,” Simpson said.
“What’s that?”
“An audience picture. The audience comes, has fun, tells their friends. The movie becomes critic-proof.”
The following weekend, we did $4.3 million—it was still a very small number, but the fact that we’d gone up instead of suffering the usual second-weekend drop meant that we were getting great word of mouth.
And from then on, the movie just kept getting bigger box office each weekend.
Irene Cara’s “Flashdance” and then Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” went to number one on the Billboard chart. Within a month, we knew we had a phenomenon. It played in the theaters for eight months and made more than $400 million worldwide.
Everyone took credit for it, a sure sign of a huge hit. Peter Guber and Jon Peters bragged about producing it, although I had never even met them in the course of the production.
Lynda Obst bragged about developing it, although the script she worked on with Tom Hedley was junked. Tom Hedley said that he wrote it, although all that was left of his script was the title and the dance style (enough, though, in my mind: without his original creativity, there would have been no movie).
The truth is that it was really one person’s movie. It was Simpson’s baby from beginning to end and it made a lot of us involved a lot of money.
I had a very few net profit points in residual earnings, what Eddie Murphy referred to later as “monkey points”—meaning that they never paid off, that the studio accounting system was always able to deny net point participants money because no movie ever made so much money that they had to pay monkey points off.
My monkey points on Flashdance amounted to over $2 million.
When Art Buchwald sued Paramount years later, Paramount asked me to testify on its behalf. The studio needed an example to show that net points sometimes meant real dollars.
I turned the request down.
I didn’t want to be known as the one writer in Hollywood the studios wouldn’t cheat.
You’re never hotter in Hollywood than when you have a raging hit movie out in the world and Flashdance was so hot around the world that Europeans had a new craze: trading cards consisting of five hundred shots from the movie.
I wondered how some United Artists executives were feeling: at a time when “the buzz” on F.I.S.T. was good, they had authorized the manufacture of thousands of brass F.I.S.T. belt knuckles, which were now, no doubt, filling up a warehouse somewhere.
When it was clear that Flashdance was a gold mine, Guy McElwaine called me to advise: “You are going to get avalanched with offers. Do none of them. Wait. Take all the meetings, but accept nothing till they offer you what you should have.”
I was making $275,000 per script.
“What should I have?” I as
ked Guy.
“Six hundred thousand a script,” he said.
So that’s what I did. I met with everyone and turned everything down. I wanted to sit down and write a new spec script on my own but I was so busy that I didn’t have the time.
It was a swirl of meetings, lunches, and dinners in both L.A. and San Francisco. Congratulatory cases of champagne and breathtaking bouquets of flowers were arriving from producers and studio heads I’d barely shaken hands with.
I was busy in Marin with my other life.
My son Steve was first in soccer and then in Little League. I went to every game. I won an award as the only parent who attended all seventeen Little League games.
Sometimes, I thought, dealing with Little League was as difficult as Hollywood. I was almost escorted off the field at a Little League game for berating a teenage umpire who, I felt, didn’t know what constituted a balk.
My daughter, Suzi, had decided she was going to be the next Dian Fossey. She was eight years old.
Gerri and I took her to every zoo and animal preserve in the area.
My father, approaching eighty, enjoyed accompanying me to L.A. He still lived in Cleveland but he was flying out a lot to Marin, and often, when I had a meeting, he’d come with me. He had friends in L.A. While I was having meetings in L.A., he was visiting his friends there. When I was free, my father and I would trip around the town together.
We made an odd couple, but we had fun: a shuffling old man in his black suit, carrying a cane, his arm held by a younger man with hair over his shoulders, a mountain man beard, and wearing tattered jeans.
We were a long way from the Lorain Fulton Theatre now, as we visited Grauman’s Chinese or walked the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but we still enjoyed ducking into a matinee before my meeting with David Begelman, the head of MGM.
We liked meeting at midnight, after I’d had a dinner at Morton’s with yet another producer who wanted to be allied with one of the hottest screenwriters in town.
My father and I would sit in the El Padrino Room at the Beverly Wilshire sharing a Caesar salad and talking about the old times on Lorain Avenue.
He had remarried, unhappily, after my mother died, and we talked about my mother a lot. Thanks to the movies, I was able to support him. He had been fired without warning when he was seventy-three by the Franciscan monks who owned the Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday. I started making money at about the time he got fired and the money allowed him to publish new Hungarian novels that he wrote—and whose publication costs I covered. It gave him a sense of worth and, more than that, it gave him something to do. Without the money Hollywood was paying me, my dad, I knew, would quickly have become a candidate for an old-age home.
Instead, I was able to show my father the better restaurants and walked around the Warner Brothers lot with him and I even got a map of the stars’ homes one afternoon and we drove around Bel Air and Beverly Hills.
“I wouldn’t know how to do this,” my father said to me one day as we were walking down Rodeo Drive, arm in arm.
“What, Pop?”
“This Hollywood business,” he said in Hungarian.
I asked him what he meant.
“Sometimes I see you at night when you come back,” he said, “and you have had meetings and lunches all day and meetings again and I see you very tired.”
“Everybody gets tired,” I said.
“Yes, but you look very tired. And I know in my life sometimes I have gotten very tired, but I have gotten tired from the writing and not the meetings.”
“Well, tired is tired, isn’t it?” I said.
“No,” he said, “there are very different ways of being tired.”
I thought about it for a while and then I took my father into Café Rodeo. He ordered a corned beef sandwich—they had it, thank God.
He and I laughed over something from my childhood … I felt the setting sun on my face, and I didn’t feel so tired anymore.
[Close-up]
The Smart Girl
A PLAIN WOMAN in a town filled with beautiful ones, she began as a studio reader, assigned screenplays which the studio execs, all men, were too busy to read because they were too occupied with beautiful women.
She worked fourteen, sometimes even sixteen hours a day, reading diligently and carefully, not just critiquing scripts like the other readers but offering suggestions about how to make them better.
One of the execs took credit for her suggestions and, thanks to her, developed two hit movies.
He offered her a job as his special “creative assistant.”
She participated in meetings with screenwriters now but never said anything, putting all of her thoughts into memos for her boss, who, thanks to her memos, was rewarded for a series of hits by being named the head of production.
Word had leaked out about her memos and box office instincts and when she was offered a VP job at another studio, she took it, knowing she had to get away from the boss who would always take credit for her ideas.
Her new studio job was ideal for her. The studio chief, one of the town’s great lovers, was also known to be remarkably dumb. There was no possibility he would get any credit for her work. Even better, he didn’t try to hog the credit. He knew no one would believe him and he was also way too busy trying to bed various models who wanted to be actresses.
When he was finally fired—the men in New York had tired of his personal excesses—she was the logical choice to replace him. The East Coasters liked her work ethic and were amazed to find someone smart in Hollywood. She was appointed head of production on her twenty-eighth birthday.
She had never had much of a personal life but it really hadn’t ever mattered to her. It still didn’t. Men bored her and beautiful women intimidated her and she loved nothing more than her work. It was enough. She was happy.
CHAPTER 7
Blood and Hair on the Walls
BILLY
The night is young.
The tide is red.
There are pigs in the sea.
Foreplay, unproduced
RICHARD MARQUAND, AN English director who had directed Eye of the Needle, one of my favorite thrillers, was in Marin shooting George Lucas’s Return of the Jedi. A wry, down-to-earth Welshman in his early forties, Richard and I were introduced by a mutual friend and were instant mates.
He and his wife, Carol, a smart, cigar-smoking woman, were renting a house in Tiburon. George Lucas was driving him nuts—“he just bloody stands there, right behind me, watching”—and Richard and I enjoyed sharing moments at local pubs dwelling on the glories of Guinness stout.
Jedi was a big-budget, high-profile production, and Richard, who had spent many years scuffling in L.A. trying to get a directing job, was near the top of the heap. He remembered those years in L.A. all too well, though, hanging out at Barney’s Beanery—“I lived on that damn chili”—and living in a succession of ratty Hollywood Hills apartments.
“You’re only as good as your last picture if you’re a director,” he said to me. “It’s different if you’re a writer. Your profile is lower, you can get away with much more. But I can’t. And I know I can’t.”
In the course of spending time together, we talked often about our kids. We were both devoted fathers and we both felt that the children in our lives had opened inner doors which we had mostly kept shut. Our children were humanizing, softening, sensitizing influences which we both greatly welcomed and treasured in our lives.
Richard remembered a moment when he was watching Sam, his three-year-old, as Sam watched a butterfly alight on a windowsill. Sam made a movement to touch the butterfly and then held back, his hand still up in the air. As the butterfly flew away, Sam started to laugh in delight … and Richard, watching him, started to cry.
I started talking about writing a script which would be about an inheld man, a man who had walled his heart off from most people … a man who, thanks to children that he loves, finds himself reborn.
“I’ll direct that mov
ie, Squire,” Richard said.
“You will?”
“I give you my word,” Richard said, and we shook hands.
I sat down and wrote the script and called it Pals, the name with which both Richard and I often addressed our kids. It was about a convict named Sam Bragg (named, of course, after Sam Marquand) who escapes and holes up in woods neighboring a farm.
The farm is run by a widow with two little kids and the story focused on the convict being brought back to inner life by the love he felt for the children.
Richard cried when he read it, formally committed to do it as his next movie, and the script was quickly sold to Paramount for $400,000.
“You’re crazy,” Guy told me when he heard about the sale. “You should have held out for $600,000.”
“It’s a labor of love,” I told him, and told him about the butterfly on the windowsill that Sam Marquand had watched.
A month after I sold the script, with Richard in post-production now on Jedi, he and I went to have a production meeting with Paramount about Pals. Richard wanted to go into pre-production right away.
“We don’t want to move quite that fast,” Jeff Katzenberg, Paramount’s head of production, said.
“Oh?” Richard said. A month earlier they had bought the script very fast, literally overnight after receiving it.
“Why not?” I asked.
“It’s a brilliant script,” Jeffrey said, “it’s moving, it’s poignant, it makes you cry.”
“Yes?” Richard said.
“And you are a terrific talent,” he said to Richard. “The word of mouth on Jedi is fantastic. It’s got a great buzz.”
Oh, oh, I thought. There’s that “buzz” word again. F.I.S.T. had had great “buzz,” too.
“Yes?” Richard said.
Jeffrey looked down at his desk for a moment, and Richard and I glanced at each other.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Jeffrey said. “It’s essentially a character piece set on a farm, a relationship piece on a farm.”
“That’s what it was when you bought it,” I said.
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