Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  He called the National Enquirer and they sent a reporter out and he sold everything he had learned about Jack Nicholson for $10,000.

  He went back up on his pole and traced Jack calling all of his friends—Marlon Brando and Warren Beatty and Bob Evans and Lara Flynn Boyle. Then he went up on poles near all of their houses and listened to all of them and learned all about their intimate lives and made another $30,000.

  Then he traced all of the numbers they called and climbed up on other poles and pretty soon he felt like he had the whole movie industry wired.

  He was dating a famous television starlet now. She’d showed up on one of his traces and he learned everything about her as he listened to her talking to her mother and her boyfriend and especially her girlfriends. Then he just happened to be at the Viper Room when she was there with her sister and he just happened to start a conversation with her about Costa Rica, which was her favorite place in the world. And then he just happened to be at the same hotel at the same time she was in Costa Rica without her boyfriend.

  His income from what he heard up on the pole was endless. He was thinking about becoming a producer.

  CHAPTER 10

  I Coldcock Ovitz

  DAVID

  You’re such a cynical sonofabitch.

  MATT

  That’s why we’re friends.

  Jade

  I WAS BEING represented in the summer of 1989 by CAA, Creative Artists Agency, the most powerful agency in Hollywood. My career was skyrocketing … it was after Flashdance and Jagged Edge, after the Big Shots auction, after a six-picture deal at $750,000 a script with United Artists.

  Most of those “scores,” as CAA agents liked to say, had been orchestrated by my two agents … the young, preppie-like Rand Holston … and the Kingfish Himself, the Thousand-Pound Gorilla—Michael! Ovitz!

  I didn’t know Ovitz very well, but I liked what I saw of him. I thought he was probably the most intelligent and dynamic agent I’d met. On a personal level, Michael had once offered to fly his acupuncturist to Marin when I badly injured a disc while vacationing in Santa Fe.

  I was in Longboat Key, Florida, surfing warm Gulf waters with Gerri, Steve, and Suzi, when I got a call from Guy McElwaine. After an eight-year absence from the agency business, running various studios, Guy told me he was going back to ICM, Creative Artists’ biggest competitor, and becoming an agent again.

  Before Guy could say anything else, I said, “You’ve got your first client, pal.”

  My instant decision had nothing to do with CAA or with Michael Ovitz.

  Yes, CAA had done a superb job representing me.

  Yes, Michael had stayed personally involved in my deals.

  But I loved Guy … it was as simple as that … he had helped me from the day we’d first met. And now, for the first time in my life, as my career was skyrocketing, I could help him.

  I would become his first “star” moneymaking client at a time when he had none.

  Guy thanked me, his voice a little hoarse, and said it meant a lot to him. “It’s not going to be as easy as you think,” he said. “Ovitz isn’t going to like this.”

  “Come on,” I said, laughing. “He knows our history. He knows you created the monster.”

  “That I did,” Guy laughed. “Call Barry Hirsch, see what he thinks.”

  Barry had been my attorney for more than a decade now. At fifty, he was powerful, low-key, and engaging, still doing his gestalt practice on the side. He had given himself a little red Porsche for his fiftieth birthday.

  I called Barry from Longboat Key and told him casually that I was leaving CAA and Rand Holston and Michael Ovitz and going over to ICM and Guy McElwaine.

  “You can’t do that,” he snapped at me. “They’ve done a great job for you.” He said I was making a “silly and sentimental decision that will hurt your career.

  “Guy doesn’t know anything about being an agent in this town anymore,” Barry went on. “He’s too old to be an agent. It’s a young man’s game. The only reason he’s an agent again is because he busted out of Rastar and Columbia and Weintraub and he needs to make a living.”

  “I don’t care,” I told Barry. “I owe him. And I like him. And it’s going to mean a lot to him right now to be representing me.”

  “You’re not in the charity business,” Barry said. “You’ve got your wife and kids to consider. You’ve got your career to consider.”

  “I feel a loyalty to Guy,” I said. “He’s always been loyal to me.”

  “What about your loyalty to Michael? To CAA? Haven’t they done right by you?”

  “It’s not the same thing,” I said.

  “It is the way I see it. Michael likes you. He’s going to be hurt personally. You don’t want to make an enemy of him.”

  “An enemy? What do you mean an enemy?”

  “An enemy. You know what it means.”

  “Just because I’m going to go back to a person who made my career—because for the first time in my life I can help him—that’s going to make Michael Ovitz my enemy?”

  “Bet on it,” Barry Hirsch said, “and put it in the bank.”

  I told Barry my mind was made up and asked him to notify CAA that I was leaving.

  “Not me,” Barry said. “I don’t want to have anything to do with this. If you’re really going to do this, then you tell Michael personally. You owe him that much.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed.

  “Joe,” Barry said, his voice softening. “I mean, really think about this. I don’t think I’ve ever given you bad advice, have I? Don’t make an emotional decision here. You do not want Michael Ovitz to be your enemy.”

  I called Guy back from Longboat Key and told him what Barry Hirsch had said.

  He laughed and said, “I told you it wouldn’t be easy.”

  Gerri and the kids and I stayed on the Florida beaches for another month, doing our annual beach/wildlife/sun crawl, moving from Key West to Captiva to Longboat to Disney World to Boca and Palm Beach, and I kept thinking about the decision I had made, as Barry had suggested. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I’d made the right decision. It was a personal choice and had nothing to do with business. It was a payback for Guy’s many years of caring.

  Maybe Barry was right. Maybe Guy had busted out of the studios. Maybe it was impossible to be an agent when you were pushing sixty in a town dedicated to eternal youth and new meat. I didn’t care about any of that. All I cared about was that now, finally, after all these years, I could help Guy.

  We got home to Marin from our Gypsy-like beach bum binge and I called Barry to tell him I was setting up an appointment with Ovitz. I told him that my decision to leave CAA and Michael Ovitz was final.

  Barry said, “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.”

  I called Ovitz’s secretary to set up the appointment and flew down to L.A. Rested from the long Florida trip, I was tan. I wore a beach shirt and shorts and grungy sneakers. My producer friend Ben Myron, whom I’d met in Marin, picked me up at the airport and drove me to the meeting.

  I told Ben I knew this wasn’t going to be pleasant, but I thought it’d work out okay. Ovitz, I said, had to be enough of a human being to understand my motivation. He had to understand that my decision had nothing to do with his agency’s performance.

  I’d never been inside the new CAA building before. I’d never seen the new Lichtenstein painting on the wall in the lobby. I was impressed—it was the classiest-looking agency headquarters in town.

  I announced myself and an assistant came down to the lobby and led me up to Ovitz’s office. Michael was sitting behind his desk, waiting for me. He was smiling.

  I was struck by how small the office was compared with Guy’s old barn-sized lounge-bar.

  We shook hands warmly and he asked me to sit down facing him. He stayed behind his desk.

  He was buttoned-down, impeccably dressed in corporate Armani wear—I was a bizarre counterpoint, I realized
, in my beach clothes and grungy sneakers. I hoped the sneakers didn’t smell. I hadn’t had time after the trip to buy new ones.

  He asked me about Gerri and the kids and our vacation. I noticed his eyes fix on, then flit away from my sneakers.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Well, I guess you know why I’m here,” I said.

  He looked at me a moment and said, “Barry told me.”

  I explained to him about Guy and went on at length about the great loyalty I felt to him, about how, even during his corporate years, Guy had kept looking out for me.

  Michael listened impassively, nodding. Then he said, “What about your loyalty to me?”

  He had a thin and strained smile on his face.

  I tried to tell him that I did feel a great loyalty to him and to CAA. That, indeed, there was no other possible reason, no other possible person, that would cause me to leave.

  “You mean all the deals we made for you don’t count?” he said. “The three-picture deal, then the six-picture deal, the Big Shots sale, all the casting we’ve done for your movies.”

  He mentioned Debra Winger and Tom Berenger in Betrayed and Jessica Lange in Music Box, all CAA clients.

  “We’ve made you the highest-paid screenwriter in the world. That doesn’t count?”

  “Of course it counts,” I said.

  “But not enough.” We were looking right at each other, that thin strained smile still on his face.

  “No,” I said.

  For a moment his smile disappeared as we looked at each other evenly. Then his face broke into a broad grin. He leaned forward over the desk, leaning closer to me.

  “You know what, Joe?” he said quietly. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re not leaving this agency.”

  His grin was frozen now, his eyes right on mine, his voice soft, friendly, avuncular. I could hear my own heart beating like an echo chamber in my ears. He went on in a calm monologue. It almost sounded rehearsed to me. I glanced at his desk to make sure he didn’t have notes in front of him.

  He said that he was going to sue me.

  “I don’t care if I win or lose,” he said, “but I’m going to tie you up with depositions and court dates so that you won’t be able to spend any time at your typewriter. If you make me eat shit, I’m going to make you eat shit.”

  When I said I had no interest in being involved in a public spectacle, he said, “I don’t care if everybody in town knows. I want them to know. I’m not worried about the press. All those guys want to write screenplays for Robert Redford.”

  I knew that he (and Barry Hirsch) represented Redford.

  He said, “If somebody came into the building and took my Lichtenstein off the wall, I’d go after them. I’m going to go after you the same way. You’re one of this agency’s biggest assets.”

  He said, “This town is like a chess game. ICM [Guy’s agency] isn’t going after a pawn or a knight, they’re going after a king. If the king goes, the knights and pawns will follow.”

  He facetiously suggested that maybe he’d make a trade with ICM. He’d keep me and give ICM four or five clients.

  Almost as an aside, he said that if I left, he’d damage my relationships with Irwin Winkler, who’d become a close friend, and with Barry Hirsch, whom I also viewed as a good and trusted ally.

  “Those guys are friends of mine,” he said. “Do you think they’ll still be good friends of yours if you do this?

  “I like you,” Michael Ovitz said. “I like your closeness to your family. I like how hard you work. I like your positive attitude. I like the fact that you have no directing or producing ambitions. You write original screenplays with star parts—your ideas are great and so are your scripts.

  “I like everything about you,” Michael Ovitz said, smiling good-naturedly, “except your shirt.” He looked at my shirt, the floral Hawaiian knockoff I’d picked up at a roadside T-shirt shop facing the beach in St. Pete.

  “You know what you’re like?” Michael Ovitz smiled. “You’re like one of my kids. He builds these blocks up real high and then he knocks them all down. I’m not going to let you do that to yourself.”

  I couldn’t believe what he had said. I felt like leaning over his desk and hitting him.

  Who in the fuck did this smug, self-absorbed asshole think he was?

  But I realized another part of me was scared.

  He was the most powerful man in Hollywood—that’s who this asshole was.

  He was telling me he’d put me out of business and, knowing from many years of experience what a chickenshit town Hollywood was, why did I think that he couldn’t do that?

  That he wouldn’t do that?

  · · ·

  “You’re not leaving, Joe,” he said, “that’s all there is to it.” His smile broke into a sneering little laugh.

  I stared at him and didn’t say a word. I felt frozen.

  I felt like I’d been witness to some obscenity that would come back in flashes till the day I died.

  He was watching me assessingly, his smile gone, like a referee watching a guy on the apron of the ring, eyeing him for signs of life.

  “Think about it,” he said, his words quiet as a whisper.

  He put his hand out to shake hands. I hesitated a second in shocked disbelief and then, may God forgive me, I shook his hand.

  He gave me a big grin and said, “I’ll walk you out.” He opened his door for me and we walked down some stairs and through the full lobby. People stared.

  Michael Ovitz, I suspected, didn’t walk clients to the front door himself very often. When we got to the front door, he cut the black doorman off and opened that door for me, too.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Joe,” he said again. “Call me.”

  He slapped me on the back as I stepped out the front door, his grin so toothy now I could almost see his molars.

  My friend Ben Myron, who had been waiting for me in the lobby, stepped quickly around the black doorman … what was CAA, the model of liberal political correctness, doing with a black doorman in 1989? … took one look at me and said, “Are you okay? You’re white as a sheet.”

  “No,” I told Ben, “I’m not. I’ve just been fucked by a thousand-pound gorilla.”

  When we got to Ben’s car—a long, antique white Cadillac with fire-red interior—we sat there for ten minutes as I told him what had happened. It was now Ben’s turn to pale.

  “Is he nuts?” Ben said. “He sounds like Captain Queeg. Did you see any brass balls?”

  “He might have ’em in his pocket,” I said, “but he wasn’t playing with ’em.”

  Ben said, “What are you going to do?”

  I had no idea what I was going to do, I was still reeling, but I knew I had to tell Guy what had happened as quickly as possible.

  Ben drove me over to Guy’s house high in Beverly Hills, just down the street from Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbank’s legendary Pickfair estate. Guy was watching a football game with a bunch of the Monday Night Regulars—Alan Ladd, the producer, was there … and Jim Aubrey, the famed “Cobra,” former television mogul, and a cherubic man named Mr. Katz, Bookie to the Stars.

  They were all in Guy’s den, where the cocktail table was littered with hundred-dollar bills (these guys bet handoff-or-pass) and where the walls were lined with framed photos of Guy with Peter Sellers and Yul Brynner, Burt Reynolds, and Sinatra, Sinatra, Sinatra.

  I drew Guy away from the others and told him what Ovitz had said. He was stunned. He kept shaking his head.

  “I can’t believe this fucking guy,” he said. He noticed the expression on my face and added, “You need a drink.” I glugged half a glass of straight gin and Guy said, “Lew Wasserman would pull some hard-assed shit in the old days, but nothing like this.”

  He called Jeff Berg, the head of International Creative Management, gave him a summary, and handed me the phone.

  Jeff, known to friend and foe as “the Iceberg,” asked me to give him a detailed rundown and I did.
Jeff wasn’t surprised.

  “It’s their old game,” he said. “Ovitz sits a guy down who wants to leave and threatens him. They run it all the time. I think they hold on to half their clients this way. Most people soil their drawers and stay. I’ll tell you this, Joe. If you leave there and they try to hurt you, this agency as an agency will do everything it can to protect you. And we can do a lot.”

  I thanked Jeff, hung up, and told Guy I was seeing Rand Holston that night for dinner. I’d scheduled it earlier to tell him in person that I was leaving.

  “He’ll play good cop,” Guy said. “They’ve got it down to a cabaret act. Ovitz beats the shit out of you. Holston’s going to tell you how much he loves you … all Hungarians, your kids, your pets, whatever.”

  Guy understood how shaken I was. “I want you to do whatever you want to do,” he said. “If you’re not comfortable leaving there after what he told you, then don’t do it. It’s not worth it to me to see you this upset. Just do what feels good to you. But remember this—if you write a good script that people in this town think they can make money off of, Michael Ovitz and all his yuppie wimps won’t matter. This town runs on greed. If people think they can make money with a script, they’ll go with Eszterhas over Ovitz—no matter how many stars Ovitz or CAA represents.”

  That made me feel a little better.

  “Are you sure about that?” I smiled.

  “Well.” Guy grinned. “It’d better be a real goddamn commercial script.”

  I went to meet Rand Holston at Jimmy’s, CAA’s quasi-official clubhouse. Holston, whose usual style was humorless and robotic, was waiting for me in the bar when I got there, looking grim. It didn’t look to me like Guy’s good cop/bad cop prognostication was going to happen.

  Holston said that after his meeting with me “the veins were bulging out” of Ovitz’s neck. He added that Ovitz was the best friend anyone could have and the worst enemy.

  If I left, Rand said, “Mike’s going to put you into the fucking ground.”