“I know you’ve done all those TV things, Frank,” I finally said. “I understand what you’ve done. That’s exactly the problem, all the crap you’ve done.”
When Marty and I went back to Guy’s office, Guy said, “Well, you just have to burn all of your bridges, don’t you?”
I was a little dazed, I think, because I asked the same question that I had never gotten an answer to in the previous meeting.
“Do those assistants ever do anything but nod?”
Guy didn’t think that was funny, possibly still sniffing the ash from those burning bridges, but Marty laughed.
“They’re hall mice,” he said.
“What are hall mice?”
“They scurry up and down the halls every day picking up little pieces of cheese—information—and run the cheese back to Frank. Hall mice nod. Everybody knows that, Bananas.”
“What do we do now?” I asked.
Guy just shrugged. Marty asked me to walk back with him to his office.
“You can’t use his ending,” Marty said.
“I don’t intend to,” I said.
“Good. A writer who actually believes in what he writes. I can’t believe I’m seeing it, but good.”
“He’ll just bring somebody else in to rewrite me,” I said.
“Not if he doesn’t have the script,” Marty said.
“What do I do—not write it?”
“You write it but you don’t turn it in. You say you’re still working on it. You say you’re a perfectionist and want to get it right. You say you’ve got writer’s block.”
“How long do I keep saying that?”
Marty Ransohoff smiled a beatific smile and said, “Until he gets fired.”
“Frank Price is getting fired?”
The smile positively glowed now.
“They all get fired sooner or later, Bananas.”
“Will this be sooner or later?”
He chuckled now. “Sooner rather than later.”
“Did Herb Allen or one of the corporate guys tell you that?”
“Bananas! Bananas!” Marty Ransohoff said. “You always ask so many fucking questions!”
I went back to Marin and finished the script in eight weeks.
Two weeks later, Columbia called my agent and formally asked when I would deliver the script.
Two weeks later they called again.
Two weeks later, they were threatening to sue me.
My agent said I was a perfectionist. And that I was suffering from writer’s block.
“I don’t know how long I can keep dodging,” I said to Marty. “Their lawyers are into it now.”
“It’s your call, Bananas,” Marty said. “View this as a test of conscience. Are you a writer or are you a two-dollar whoor?”
Frank Price was fired a week later. The man who replaced him—the new president and CEO of Columbia Pictures!—was the Golden Beef himself, Guy McElwaine.
His first phone call as the top man was to me.
“You’ve got your ending,” he said. “Write it the way you want to write it.”
“You’ll have it in three days,” I said.
“You sonofabitch.” He laughed.
The men Guy appointed as his top vice presidents at Columbia were Craig Baumgarten, with whom I’d worked at Paramount; my old agent, Bob Bookman; and one of the nodders at the meeting with the Sphinx, Robert Lawrence, now suddenly known as the Hall Mouse Who Went to Heaven.
Craig Baumgarten was assigned as the executive in charge of my script, which was to become the film entitled Jagged Edge. The appointment from Guy was Craig’s biggest break in the business. He had begun in a way that he now tried to keep hush-hush. He had not only produced a porn movie called Sometime Sweet Susan but had also starred in it. He had moved from porn into independent production, then on to Paramount, then to another independent production company, and now here he was at Columbia.
Originally from Chicago, from an upper-middle-class background, he was opinionated, temperamental, sometimes abrasive, and smart. He spoke with a sense of passion about the projects he was involved in, a rarity for a studio executive.
Marty Ransohoff knew, of course, that Craig and I had been friendly in the past—“You’ve sure got a lot of boyfriends, Bananas”—and seemed threatened by it.
“You’ve got one loyalty here, Bananas,” he said, “and it’s to me. Forget McElwaine, forget Baumgarten. I’m the one who okayed you for this. I’m the one getting this piece of shit script of yours made.”
“I’ve got one loyalty here, Marty,” I said, “and it’s to my script.”
“You’re a typical fucking egotistic sleazy dime-a-dozen screenwriter,” he said. “Chayefsky was the worst.”
I knew he didn’t mean that; I knew that he was actually paying me a great compliment in his gruff, wild-boar way. He had gone to the wall for Paddy the way few producers ever go to the wall for a writer, when he fired the director who’d wanted to change Paddy’s script.
When Guy got the script of Jagged Edge, he read it immediately and called to tell me he loved it. He gave it to Craig and Craig felt the same way. The studio formally sent the script to Jane Fonda.
My attorney, Barry Hirsch, who was also Jane’s attorney, called me on a Sunday night to tell me that Jane didn’t like the script. He also told me that the Columbia executive who gave her the script told her that Columbia didn’t like the script either and that other writers would have to be brought in before it would be a movie.
According to my attorney, what this executive said to Jane tainted her reading. She was reading something that, she thought, the studio disliked.
I called Marty, who became apoplectic. He knew that both McElwaine and Baumgarten loved the piece and he now knew that someone had sandbagged us with Jane Fonda. He discovered the villain the next day.
It was Robert Lawrence, Frank Price’s nodder, the Hall Mouse Who Went to Heaven.
Lawrence denied everything, but we knew from Hirsch, Jane’s attorney, exactly what he had said. Guy threatened to fire him and I called him from Marin and threatened to break his knees the next day at ten o’clock in his office.
When I got to his office the next day, I discovered that the Hall Mouse had called in sick.
We had a serious problem now, though. Jane Fonda didn’t like the script and she was putting together a memo asking for specific changes. When I got her memo, a week later, I realized that if we were to take her suggestions, it would mean a complete, page-one overhaul of the material. What she had in mind was a different movie.
I read Ransohoff, who had been out of town, part of her memo when he called me from Los Angeles Airport. I could hear a lot of people around Marty, who was in a phone booth. He suddenly started to bellow: “The stupid cunt! What does she know?”
The studio now had a decision to make. Guy McElwaine could either fire me and bring other writers in to do a rewrite at Jane’s behest … or he could remove Jane from the project and look for other actresses.
My attorney and Jane’s, Barry Hirsch, tried to mediate.
“You and Jane have been friends for a long time,” Barry said. “It’s silly to end a friendship over a script.”
“What do you suggest I do, Barry?”
“Rewrite it. She’ll do the movie if you rewrite it.”
“She wants a totally different movie.”
“But she’ll do it,” Barry said.
“I can’t do that, Barry.”
“Joe, it’s only a script,” said Barry, the gestalt psychologist, “we’re talking about a relationship here.”
Marty Ransohoff, God bless him, told Guy that if I was taken off the project, he would remove himself, too. He eloquently defended the script in a lengthy memo and said Jane “doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
I called Barry Hirsch back and said, “Talk to Jane for me, Columbia’s going to take her off the project. I think she’d be great in it. She’s making a creative mistake.”
&
nbsp; Barry scoffed at me. “Never,” he said. “Jane Fonda is a very big star. I know you and McElwaine are close, but no studio head is going to begin his run by firing one of the biggest stars in the world … because of a screenplay,” Barry said.
But that’s exactly what Guy did. To the amazement of Hollywood’s trade press, Jane Fonda was off a movie because of a “creative difference” with a screenwriter.
“This is better than William Wyler and Paddy,” I said to Marty Ransohoff. “This is a movie star getting canned.”
And Marty shot back: “Don’t you dare bring Paddy up in this context.”
“All I know,” Guy said, as he was fielding phone calls from Liz Smith and Army Archerd, “is that this movie better work or I’m going to look like the biggest asshole in the universe.”
· · ·
We decided to look for a director before a star.
Craig Baumgarten, Marty Ransohoff, and I went over a list of six directors. At the bottom of that list was my friend Richard Marquand, finished with Jedi now and available. He was at the bottom of the list and not the top because Marty said he didn’t like his work.
The real reason, I realized, was that Marty knew Richard and I were friends, knew as well that Craig and Richard were friends, and didn’t want to be surrounded by people in the making of a movie who had close personal relationships.
“Everyplace I look, Bananas,” Marty said, “I see one of your fucking boyfriends.”
The arrangement we made with Marty was that if the other five passed … then … and only then … would we go to Marquand.
Craig and I both badly wanted Richard to direct it. We knew he could do a mystery thriller well. And the three of us liked each other. This could actually be one movie where we could have fun.
Each week Craig called Marty to tell him that one of the five directors at the top of our list had passed. After five weeks and five passes, per our arrangement, we sent the script to Richard with Marty’s blessing and Richard agreed to do the movie.
At our first dinner with Richard, Marty casually asked him when he had read the script and Richard said, “Oh, about six weeks ago.”
I saw Marty’s Adam’s apple bob. He looked at me for a moment, knives in his eyes. The next day he called the directors who’d been the top five and learned they had not even been submitted Jagged Edge.
It was too late for him to do anything about Richard—Columbia had formally made an agreement with his agent to direct Jagged Edge.
“You and your boyfriends,” he raged to me, “you sold me out! You fucked me behind my back!”
“I didn’t know anything about it,” I said. “Craig sent those scripts out—I didn’t.”
“He didn’t fucking send them out!” Marty screamed.
“Well, then Craig didn’t send them out,” I said.
He called Craig and screamed at him, too, and Craig, armed with his own volatile temper, screamed back.
“You don’t run this studio!” Craig said to Marty Ransohoff. “We do!”
“You better find a new boyfriend,” Marty told me one night, strangely whispering over the phone, “your old boyfriend is a dead cocksucker, Bananas.”
· · ·
As we began casting, Marty called Craig’s office to inform him that he was going to New York that weekend to look at off-Broadway actresses for one of the smaller parts.
It was a routine notification. While a producer had to inform the studio that he was making such a trip (the studio was funding it) the notification was pro forma. With a producer as powerful and as successful as Marty, this kind of call was always a notification and never a request.
Craig’s secretary called Marty back an hour later to notify him that Columbia was not approving the trip.
Marty could go to New York, but only at his own expense.
Marty went berserk. He launched into a tirade with me over “my boyfriend” that exceeded all the others and ended this way: “You tell that sleazy cocksucker boyfriend of yours that I’ve got his porno tape! I can send it to whomever I want! Do you understand me, Bananas?”
“Have you gone nuts?” I asked Craig. “What does a three-day tab in New York matter? Columbia’s got the money.”
He repeated the same words to me that he had said to Marty. “He doesn’t run this studio, we do.”
Richard Marquand and I went to London to talk about the final shooting script. Bob Bookman, my old agent, became the executive in charge of the project.
Our trip to London was partly a getaway. Richard and I liked being around each other. He showed me his world as I had shown him my Marin County world. We went for long lunches to his club (the White Elephant), spent time at his Kensington flat, and drove out into the countryside to stay at his seventeenth-century estate, complete with pond, in Kent. The script was nearly ready: Richard made one insightful suggestion that had a great beneficial impact upon the script. Sam Ransom, the private eye, Teddy Barnes’s partner, Richard thought, should be more of a comedic character, an aging private eye with a burned-out sardonic wit.
Richard had a single concern about the shoot. He was afraid of Marty Ransohoff.
Marty, we had discovered, was really a frustrated director. When a director let him know that he didn’t really need any help directing, thank you very much, Marty would try to fire him. It had happened with Sam Peckinpah and with Lewis John Carlino—both of them gutted and discarded by the Wild Boar two weeks into the shoot.
Then, too, there was the pregnant postcard Marty had sent me in London with the simple scrawled words: “Old age and treachery will always defeat youth and Bananas.”
When we got back to L.A., we began casting in earnest. Richard met with Kathleen Turner and said that their meeting was a “chemical mismatch.” He met with Michael Douglas, an old friend of his, but Michael wasn’t interested in doing a mystery-thriller.
We made a formal offer to Glenn Close, who wasn’t a star, who’d never had a box office hit, but who, we both felt, was a brilliant actress. She accepted it but wanted to have a “discussion” with me.
We met in L.A. She was wearing a baseball jacket from The Natural.
“The only thing that bothers me,” she said, “is that this is a revenge piece.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she kills him at the end. It’s almost like a vigilante thing, a right-wing thing.”
It was the first time in my life I had ever been accused of writing a “right-wing thing” … I had been involved in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and I tried to explain to her that it was a “self-defense thing.” Jack Forrester tries to kill her at the end of the movie and she kills him in self-defense.
“But she knows he’s coming to the house and takes a gun up there to wait for him.”
“She doesn’t use the gun until he comes at her to kill her.”
“But do you think people are going to focus on this as a vigilante movie?”
“It’s a mystery-thriller,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll focus on it politically. It’s a genre piece.”
“Well, I know some of my friends in New York will.”
“I can’t help what your friends in New York will do,” I said. “We’re not making The Song of Bernadette here.”
“No,” she said with a half smile, “we’re not.”
Richard and I were both great admirers of Jeff Bridges’s work and pushed Guy to make him an offer to play Jack Forrester.
“He’s a great actor,” Guy said. “There’s no actor I admire more. I personally love to see his movies. But he’s death at the box office. Anything he’s in, it bombs.”
We thought Jeff would be ideal casting. He could play Jack Forrester with boyish charm, innocence, and warmth. The more he played him that way, the more startling our ending would be.
“What the hell,” Guy said after a while, “Glenn Close isn’t a star, that’s for sure. We might as well make it an all-nonstar team.”
Marty Ransoho
ff adamantly opposed casting both Glenn and Jeff.
“Have you ever seen her sexy?” he kept saying about Glenn. “She’s a matron in training. There’s a love scene in this movie. Would you want to fuck her? I wouldn’t want to fuck her!”
And about Jeff: “Sure, put him in a cowboy movie. Put him in a farm movie. But he’s supposed to be the editor of the San Francisco newspaper! He can play a T-shirt. But he can’t play a suit!”
Partly to assuage Marty, we agreed to his choice to play Sam Ransom, Teddy’s private eye sidekick. Marty was an old friend of Robert Loggia, an actor known more for playing the Beverly Hills dinner circuit than for playing great parts. We felt Loggia was shopworn, “a TV face,” as Richard said, but Marty wanted him, and the Craig Baumgarten Moral of the Story was that it wasn’t a bad idea to try to keep Marty at bay.
“Thank God I’ve never done any porn films,” Richard said.
For a small but significant part—a woman who had had an affair with Jack Forrester and was now testifying against him—we chose Leigh Taylor-Young, who just happened to be Guy McElwaine’s most recent wife … the seventh or eighth, no one seemed to know for sure.
Richard and I knew there were already strains in their marriage. We were both present one night at Guy’s house, sipping Jack Daniel’s and talking about casting, when Leigh came in and asked Guy to sign a check.
Guy looked at the check and the bill and said, “Jesus Christ! You spent ten thousand dollars at Fred’s?”
Richard and I sat there in pained discomfort as they went back and forth about the bill until Guy said, “Goddamn it! I can’t believe this!” and signed it.
A few days before the shoot was to begin, Jeff arrived looking trimmed down and lean. He had put himself on a regimen of diuretics and vegetables and had lost twenty pounds in three weeks. And he looked just sensational, never mind Marty, in his Armani suits!
He was having trouble figuring out the part, though. As Richard and I listened to him, we realized that he was over-intellectualizing it. He was reading Scott Peck about the nature of evil.
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