“Don’t the writers care about the fact that they are being censored by the people they’re writing about?”
I was curious. I was a former journalist who had fought an editor sometimes if he wanted to change punctuation marks in my story.
“No,” she said, “they care about getting access to big stars. The better access they have to big stars, the more money they’ll make.”
“I guess they don’t have a real strong sense of artistic integrity,” I said, laughing.
Pat Kingsley laughed with me. “Not yet,” she said. “They all want to be screenwriters. They have scripts they leave with my clients during interviews. What they really want to do is direct. Then they’ll develop some artistic integrity.”
I was going to sign up with her but not long after our lunch I had an ugly public disagreement with Michael Ovitz, the most powerful agent in town, whose agency, CAA, represented most of Pat Kingsley’s clients.
I ran into Sean Connery at the Warner Brothers commissary. A studio executive introduced us. He was wearing a safari jacket, jeans, and sandals. We shook hands.
He looked me up and down. I was wearing a red Cleveland Indians T-shirt, jeans, and mud-splattered tennis shoes.
“Do you act?” he asked.
“I write,” I said.
“You should act,” he said, smiled, and walked away.
I worried that maybe he’d read one of my scripts.
There is no better feeling than sharing a hit movie with a director who is your friend (and no worse feeling than sharing a disaster with a director who is your friend: Norman Jewison and I had never even had one phone conversation since F.I.S.T.).
But Richard and I raged on together as our movie raged on week after week at the box office. We took innumerable meetings as a team.
“I’m only directing it if Joe’s writing it,” he told studio heads.
“I’m only writing it if Richard’s directing it,” I told producers.
One memorable evening at Morton’s, in the company of three studio executives trying to involve us in a project, we drank six bottles of Cristal champagne … then moved to the El Padrino Room of the Beverly Wilshire, where I was staying, and started on the cognac.
John Madden and Howard Cosell, the TV football announcers, were at a nearby table and for a while we carried on with them—they had both seen Jagged Edge and were full of questions.
“Jeez, Glenn Close was great,” Madden said.
“You didn’t think her bum was too big?” Richard asked, his eyes merry.
“Her what?” Madden asked.
“Her ass,” Cosell translated.
“Christ no,” Madden said, “I thought she was great.”
And then, after they left, we were joined by two young women who had been sitting at the bar and had overheard some of the conversation. They were, naturally, would-be actress-models and they had, naturally, loved all of my movies and Richard’s.
Richard left with one of them for more drinks in his suite at the Westwood Marquis and I took the other one upstairs for drinks in my suite. The suites, naturally, were compliments of Columbia Pictures.
At seven o’clock the next morning, Richard called me.
“Can you get up here right away?” he said. “I need help.”
I raced over to his hotel and banged on his door, unprepared for what I saw when he opened it. He was stark naked. His hands were handcuffed behind his back. He had an erection.
I started to laugh.
“This isn’t funny,” he said.
I said, “Oh yes it is!”
“I fell asleep,” he said. “When I woke up, she was gone. It took me a half hour to figure out how to call you. Have you ever tried making a phone call with your hands handcuffed behind you?”
“You dumb fuck,” I said, “you didn’t know her well enough to let her handcuff you.”
“Please don’t be judgmental,” Richard said.
“Where’s the key?” I said.
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” Richard said. “I don’t see it anywhere. I think she took it. I think she took my wallet and my watch, too.”
“How come you’ve got a hard-on?” I said. “Does this situation turn you on?”
“I always have a hard-on when I wake up,” Richard said. “Always.”
“It must come with being a director,” I said.
“Will you just shut the fuck up and help me look for the damn key?” Richard said.
We looked everywhere. The key was gone.
“What do we do now?” Richard said, pacing around the suite stark naked, his hands handcuffed behind him, his penis still standing at attention.
I said, “I’m stumped.”
He said, “You’re the damn screenwriter. Figure something out!”
I put his pants on for him, then his shoes and socks. I called hotel security and said we needed help.
Two security guys came up and I told them who we were and what we did for a living and said we’d been trying to act out a scene in my script where a man has to free himself of handcuffs.
The damn prop department, I said, had given us real handcuffs accidentally and of course we didn’t have a key.
The security guys stared at us, glanced at each other, and one of them said, “Oh—kay.”
They first tried to pick the lock on the cuffs with a toothpick and then with the innards of a ballpoint pen. Then they called hotel engineering.
“Handcuffs,” I heard one of the security guys tell hotel engineering. “That’s what I said. Handcuffs.”
Two men from engineering came up. I saw them try to hide their smiles.
I didn’t even want to think about what they were thinking.
They tried to pick the lock on the handcuffs with various pliers. No luck.
“These are real high-quality cuffs,” one of the engineering guys said admiringly.
“Can’t you call your prop department at the studio?” one of the security guys said. “Maybe they’ve got the key for it.”
“It’s Saturday,” I said quickly, “the prop people are closed Saturday.”
Richard said, “Christ, can’t you just saw the bloody things off?”
“No, sir,” one of the engineers said. “Like I said—these are real high-quality cuffs you got here.”
“Fuck me!” Richard said.
“Excuse me?” one of the engineers said.
“It’s a Brit expression,” I said.
“Oh,” the engineer said, eyeing me oddly.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“We’ll have to call a locksmith,” one of the security guys said.
“It’s Saturday, it’s early,” the other security guy said.
“Fuck me again!” Richard said.
Three hours later, a locksmith took Richard’s cuffs off.
The minute they were off, Richard was in excruciating pain. With the locksmith, the engineers, and the hotel security guys standing there, I called the hotel doctor. He said that Richard had strained his back muscles by being handcuffed for so long.
He was flying back to England and I offered to drop him at the airport. He thanked me and asked that we stop on Sunset Boulevard for a moment first.
“Why?” I said.
“You’ll see.”
“Does it have anything to do with the handcuffs?”
“You truly are a writer,” Richard said. “No director should ever have a writer for a friend.”
I was driving down Sunset when he suddenly told me to stop.
Across from us was a gigantic billboard of Jagged Edge. We looked at it.
Richard said, “I just wanted to see it again.”
Six months later, the movie was still playing in New York, and one night Richard and I, there for different reasons, had dinner and a couple of drinks and as we were walking down Madison Avenue, we saw the big lighted-up marquee for Jagged Edge and said, what the hell, let’s go see it.
They were sold out. We told the ticke
t taker who we were and she didn’t believe us.
We asked her to summon the manager. We pointed to our names on the poster and the manager asked to see our IDs.
We showed them to him and he stared at us and said, “I don’t believe you guys, okay? If you don’t get the hell outta here, I’m gonna call the cops.”
Richard and I stumbled down Madison Avenue, arm in arm, howling at the moon.
Many years later, when there was a hip-hop group called Jagged Edge making hit records, my son Steve told me how much he admired my title.
“There are a lot of titles for movies that you forget, Pops,” Steve said. “But you remember Jagged Edge. How did you come up with it?”
My policy with my kids is to never lie to them. Steve’s question was a test of my policy.
“Well,” I finally said, “I didn’t come up with it.”
He said, “What?”
“My title, if you can believe it, was—Hearts of Fire. The studio hated it and decided to change it.”
“But then who came up with Jagged Edge?” Steve asked.
“They assigned some secretary at the studio to go through my script letter by letter, word by word in the effort to come up with another title. The secretary found ‘jagged edge’ in my description of the murder weapon: ‘a knife with a jagged edge.’”
Steve smiled. “It’s your title then,” he said, “it was in your script. You just didn’t know you had it.”
My children love me.
Even though Richard Marquand and I both hated Hearts of Fire as the title of Jagged Edge, we still liked the sound of it.
We changed the title of the next movie we did together—American Rocker—to Hearts of Fire.
CHAPTER 8
It’s Only a Movie
CARL
I had me eight ice-cold Budweiser beers. I’m probably still drunk. But you know what? Everything else is so damn cockeyed … to hold on to your balance, I figure you gotta get just as cockeyed.
Foreplay, unproduced
BEN MYRON, MY wannabe producer friend from the Book Depot in Mill Valley, had been knocking on every door in Hollywood with my unsold spec script Checking Out in hand for two years.
All the doors shut in his face, and then one of them was suddenly open a crack.
George Harrison, the Beatle, owned a small film company called Handmade. George liked Checking Out and said he had a director in mind who was the “flavor of the month.”
David Leland was the flavor of the month. He had just written and directed a movie which whiz-banged the film festivals: Wish You Were Here, starring a bright English actress named Emily Lloyd. David, who had worked up through English television, was suddenly being offered everything in town.
I was more than pleased, then, when he read Checking Out, the story of a suburban husband and father who becomes obsessed with the notion that he is dying.
It was a dark comedy, which came from that very personal moment in my life when, at the age of thirty-three, after a lifetime of good health, I woke up one morning thinking that my heart was about to blow out of my chest like the Alien, called the paramedics, was ambulanced to a hospital, and told that my heart was fine, but that I had to stop smoking and drinking black coffee.
I sat down with David Leland in a suite at the Beverly Hilton with a pool table and a living room Jacuzzi compliments of Handmade and I said, “David, I own this script. It’s very personal for me. I want to know one thing. Please tell me the truth. You’re a writer-director. Are you going to change this script?”
David Leland, a pleasant, clear-eyed young Brit, looked me right in the eye and said, “Not one word.”
We shook hands. I agreed to sell the script to Handmade, with David directing it and Ben Myron producing; and talked Jeff Daniels into starring in it.
David started shooting. He called a couple of times a week to tell me everything was playing wonderfully. He came up on a weekend and amazed Steve and Suzi. David was double-jointed. He made magic tricks with his fingers.
He called and asked me to come down to see a rough assembly.
I stared, my jaw slack. Not one word would he change, he had said. Everything was playing wonderfully, he had said.
He’d lied. He’d looked me right in the eye and lied … because there were new subplots I was seeing on-screen and new characters who weren’t in my script.
Worse, much worse, tragically worse: the new characters he had created were buffoon-like and had clichéd stereotypical Jewish names.
I wrote Warner Brothers, the distributor, a letter demanding that my name be taken off. I carboned my agents, my lawyers, Handmade, George Harrison—anyone I knew who was involved in the production.
David Leland took most of what I was objecting to out and I put my name back on.
The movie was minimally distributed and bombed. The night it opened in San Francisco, there were eight people in the theater.
David Leland, double-jointed flavor of the month, went back to England.
Sylvester Stallone called to tell me how much he had liked Jagged Edge. He also said he wanted to do me a favor.
“I owe you one,” he said.
Well, I thought, at least he doesn’t have short-term memory loss.
He was directing a movie called Staying Alive, he explained, with John Travolta. It was the sequel to Saturday Night Fever. They were halfway through the shoot and he and John were having differences over the script. He needed, he said, a fast rewrite. A two-week rewrite and “I can get you $500,000.”
“I owe you one,” he said again.
I told him that I had no interest in doing a rewrite, and was thinking about what my next original screenplay would be.
“Come on down,” he said, “we’ll talk on the set. We’ll have dinner. We’ll put you up in the Presidential Suite of the Wilshire, how’s that? We’re friends. Friends help each other.”
Well, okay, I thought, so now we were friends.
I had called him a thief and he had said he’d been burgling my house and he’d had a picture taken of himself hitting a punching bag with my name on it … but now we were friends.
I flew down the next day to speak to him.
We met in Sly’s trailer. We gave each other hugs. He badmouthed Norman Jewison, and John Travolta walked into the trailer. He was wearing a black motorcycle jacket and had the emaciated look that stars often do during shooting. He struck me as a very earnest and nice … boy. Say whatever you want about Sly Stallone, he was no boy.
He and John started talking about the script. Sly wanted to do one thing with the script and John wanted to do another. Sly kept talking about emphasizing Tony Manero’s “cool” and John kept talking about his “vulnerability.” They were on different planets and were interested in writing different scripts.
“What do you think?” Sly asked me.
“I think you guys have a real problem here,” I said, “and you’ve gotta work it out.”
“You’ll help us work it out,” Sly said.
“Not me, guys,” I said to them.
“Come on,” Sly said, “you can do this.”
“No, I can’t,” I said.
For the first time I saw Travolta smile.
“Sure you can,” Sly said, “we’ll talk it through today, we’ll have dinner tonight, I got you the Presidential Suite at the Wilshire, we’ll finish up tomorrow.”
I started to laugh. Both of them watched me. John kept smiling; Sly looked puzzled.
“Sly,” I said, “you fucked me once on F.I.S.T. What do you want to fuck me again for now that we’re friends?”
Then John started to laugh, too, and after a moment so did Sly.
“Maybe you’re right,” Sly said. I was out of there.
I used cabs in L.A. whenever I commuted from Marin for meetings. The cabbies asked me what I did for a living and I told them the truth: I was a screenwriter.
And I discovered that most of the cabbies in L.A., including the Russians, were either wri
ting a screenplay or had written one which they wanted me to read, co-write, or at least sell for them.
Scripts were dropped off with the concierge of my hotel. Cabbies prowled the lobby waiting for me as I got off the elevator. A Russian cabbie showed up in the bar of the hotel where he’d dropped me off—showed up with his wife, his infant daughter, his mother-in-law, and his script, written in a language which I discovered to be neither Russian nor English.
After a while, whenever a cabbie in L.A. asked me what I did, I said, “This, that, or the other, you know.” And one cabbie smiled and said, “What does that mean—criminal activity?”
But I still had a problem with those cabbies who either dropped me off or picked me up at studios, so I started using limousines on my trips—the cost didn’t matter, the studio was picking it up anyway.
My son Steve was eleven years old. We did everything together—played catch together, swam together, collected baseball cards together, and watched batting practice at the Oakland Coliseum in the bleachers together. We even caught foul balls at the ballpark together.
I started thinking about the special closeness there is between fathers and sons at this age in a boy’s life and it led me to write a script about a little boy whose dad dies unexpectedly and he suddenly has to cope with the world alone.
I sent the little boy whose dad dies, Obie, off on an adventure with a little black kid whom he meets, Scam. The script, I knew, was really a very personal gift to Steve. Obie was Steve—in appearance, shyness, and style, right down to the vernacular that skateboarding kids of his age used, words like “Sau-sage!” when they got excited about something.
I sent the script down to my agent and we decided to send it out to auction. Our expectations weren’t high. This was a little arty piece about two little kids becoming friends and discovering the world. As my agent pointed out, “There aren’t even any women in it.”
To our surprise, Big Shots captured the interest of both Twentieth Century Fox, headed by Barry Diller and the producer Larry Gordon, and Lorimar, headed by Merv Adelson and Lee Rich. My old ally Craig Baumgarten had found a job there as head of production.
Fox and Lorimar bid against each other for the script and, at the end of the day, Lorimar bought it for $1.25 million. It was a new record high for a spec script in Hollywood. (Jim Morgan and I had set the previous high six years ago when City Hall sold for $500,000.)
Hollywood Animal Page 27
