“As you would probably expect,” said the agency’s letter to me, “the scene would make an allusion to the ‘foot soldiers’ incident that took place several years ago.”
I played myself.
I said, on camera, to a Michael Ovitz–type agent, “My foot soldiers who go up and down Zuma Beach will blow your brains out.”
The scene, I heard, was a big hit at the CAA company retreat.
Guy still couldn’t get the production deal he was looking for.
“You gotta know when to get off the stage,” our mutual friend Frank Price had told him, but Guy couldn’t afford to get off the damn stage, he had too many ex-wives and children.
Two young screenwriters he’d represented formed a television production company and they gave Guy an office and a salary.
He had been a titan in Hollywood, the head of three studios, an agent with superstar clients like Yul Brynner and Peter Sellers and Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds and Jackie Bisset—all of whom, as far as Hollywood was concerned, were dead.
Here he was, in a little office in a building where he couldn’t even smoke for Christ’s sake.
He had to go down and stand on the street every couple of hours and hope that the two young screenwriters wouldn’t get upset that he was out of the office again.
Naomi’s journal:
We went to the Grille for lunch today. I love going there. We always sit at the bar. As we finished our meal I spotted Mark Canton coming toward us.
Someone from a booth stopped him so I said to Joe, “It’s Mark Canton! He’s seen us! And you’ve said all those nasty things about him in public!”
Joe says, “Be cool.”
I say, “But you’ve called him a moron! More than once!”
Joe says, “He won’t stop. He’s just heading out.”
I turn around and look in the mirror behind the bar. I can see him behind us. Sure enough, he looks up at us and heads right over.
He puts his hand out and says, “Joe! Good to see you!”
Joe shakes his hand and says, “Mark, you remember my wife, Naomi.” He says, “Nice to see you.” Then he says softly, “Hey, Joe, listen, I just want to thank you for all the kind words …”
He was totally guileless. He wasn’t kidding. No hint of sarcasm.
Joe says, “You’re welcome. Good to see you Mark,” and Mark says, “Great to see you, too. Take care,” with a big smile and walks out.
Steve gave Joey a shark tooth for his birthday that Steve had worn as a child.
Joey wore his shark tooth proudly everywhere he went.
Naomi and I had our fourth son, Luke. I could hear Carrie Rickey of the Philadelphia Inquirer saying, “He is so misogynistic that he impregnates his gun moll only with boys.”
Naomi’s journal:
I took the boys Christmas shopping in Beverly Hills. It was hovering at 90 degrees and we all had on shorts, but I tried to make it feel like Christmas.
We walked by a display window on Rodeo Drive. They had little pieces of Styrofoam blowing out of a snow-blower, amid woolly caps and gloves and coats. Joey screamed, “Snow! Snow!” And they all pressed their noses against the glass, marveling at something they’d never seen, but heard so much about.
Sometimes I ache that they won’t share my wonderful childhood memories. I try to tell them about it. But how can you explain how it feels to live in the seasons? To be buried in a mound of multicolored leaves? How the excited voices of the children burying you grow fainter and fainter as more handfuls are piled on, until you’re left with only the intoxicating smell of autumn leaves and a deafening, crunching wall of sound.
Or how it sounds to walk in the snow. Sort of squeaky. And sometimes, when it’s really, really cold, you can walk on top of it when you’re little. And once in a while it caves in and your heart leaps to your throat if it’s really deep. And the absolute rapture of rolling over in your bed as your mom says, “No school today, guys. Too much snow. Go back to sleep.” Or hearing the crickets and tree frogs announce spring, after the absolute silence and stillness of winter. Or how it feels to catch a lightning bug at dusk in early summer, and watch it glow in your cupped hands. Then set it free again by blowing on it until it flies blinking off into the night. Or massive thunderstorms that nearly rock and roll you out of bed.
Sometimes I feel like they live in a gilded cage. The ocean is there, but Point Dume is so treacherous they can’t even go in. The view is spectacular, but you can’t take off on your bike behind a gated wall. They know beauty, but they don’t know freedom.
As I watched them celebrate the snow I said, “That’s Styrofoam, guys. It’s not real snow.” They didn’t care. It was close enough.
I told Steve and Suzi about the things their grandfather had done in Hungary.
It didn’t matter to them. They remembered how he had played and drawn and colored with them while they were children.
They loved their grandfather.
Blood is thicker than spilled blood.
[Close-up]
The Poet Laureate to the Stars
THE BEST HOLLYWOOD poet I’ve ever met doesn’t write poems. He collects things. Independently wealthy, he spends vast amounts of money to purchase the objects which are the stanzas of his magnum opus. His house in the Hollywood Hills, not far from the Hollywood sign, is the volume within which he displays his genius. His collection includes:
Humphrey Bogart’s last half-smoked cigarette.
Shirley MacLaine’s Tibetan prayer beads.
Clara Bow’s USC Trojans pennant.
A video of Orson Welles’s last Paul Masson commercial.
A handwritten death threat from Hunter S. Thompson to Bill Murray.
Marlon Brando’s Polynesian muumuu.
Joan Crawford’s coat hangers.
An envelope inscribed from Owsley Stanley to Dennis Hopper containing three tabs of LSD.
John Belushi’s syringe.
Bobby Darin’s mitral valve.
A handwritten death threat from Hunter S. Thompson to director/producer Art Linson.
Mae West’s gold-studded girdle.
The crumpled front fender of James Dean’s Porsche.
Marilyn Monroe’s copy of Arthur Miller’s screenplay of The Misfits, inscribed to her by John Huston.
Rock Hudson’s butt plugs.
Audie Murphy’s Medal of Honor.
Sal Mineo’s handcuffs.
Sissy Spacek’s culottes.
A movie theater ticket stub purchased from Pee Wee Herman.
Tony Curtis’s toga.
Linda Lovelace’s mouthwash.
A handwritten death threat from Hunter S. Thompson to director Alex Cox.
Tallulah Bankhead’s oxygen mask.
A pair of gold-plated brass knuckles engraved—“To Jilly—always, Frank.”
Erich von Stroheim’s riding crop.
The satin shorts John Garfield died in.
Elvis’s adult diaper.
Valentino’s eyelashes.
Bela Lugosi’s teeth.
Gary Cooper’s dentures.
A piece of Jayne Mansfield’s head.
A handwritten death threat from Hunter S. Thompson to director Terry Gilliam.
Howard Hughes’s toenails.
CHAPTER 30
I Redeem Myself
RIZZO
Nobody hustles like a screenwriter hustles. Forget Sammy Glick. But remember that Sammy was created by a screenwriter.
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
I WROTE MAGIC Man in the early eighties, twenty years after I left high school, to get even with all those snobs and elitist idiots who had made life so miserable when I was at Cathedral Latin.
The script was about a sixteen-year-old Hungarian kid named Karchy Jonas who lived on Cleveland’s West Side and went to Cleveland Cathedral High School, where he was bullied by a bunch of snobbish elitist idiots.
It was about how Karchy got into the WHK High School Hall of Fame by sendi
ng in a bunch of postcards forged with his classmates’ names. It was about how Karchy dreamed of becoming an American writer and about his relationship with a disc jockey named Billy Magic and a young, working-class woman who worked at the West Side Market named Diney.
When no one wanted to buy the script, I knew that getting even for high school humiliations wasn’t the most lofty and literary reason to write something.
One day, years after Guy McElwaine had tried and failed to sell the script, I got a call from a producer named Carol Baum who ran Dolly Parton’s production company.
She—and Dolly—had read and been moved by Magic Man and wanted to produce it.
It didn’t mean that they were financing it. It meant that they would look for a financing entity as well as a director and stars … in return I would authorize them to produce the movie.
I said, “Does this mean I’m going to be meeting Dolly?”
Carol said, “Probably.”
It wasn’t true. I never met Dolly.
But I did meet their first choice to direct it—the successful director of many “hot” MTV videos.
We had dinner at Morton’s and the video director started telling me how I should rewrite the script. I listened until he was finished and then said, “You’ve never directed a movie, have you?”
He said no but went into a rap about how each MTV video was “a movie in miniature” with its own “dramatic arc.”
“Do I tell you how to make your MTV videos?” I asked him.
He smiled and said no.
“No,” I said. “I don’t tell you because I’ve never done an MTV video and I would feel like an asshole if I started telling you how to do one. Yet you—you’ve never done a movie, but you don’t feel like an asshole telling me how to write one. How come?”
He looked at Carol Baum for help. Carol smiled at me. She wasn’t going to help him.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “I know how come! You’re an asshole but you don’t feel like you’re an asshole because you don’t know you’re an asshole. Just like most directors. But I’m telling you: You’re an asshole.”
He didn’t know what to say. He tried to laugh it off and left shortly afterward.
Joe Roth was the next would-be director of Magic Man. He had just directed a movie with an immigrant theme, Streets of Gold, written by Richard Price, and said that while he hadn’t intended to do “another immigrant story,” he’d been “charmed” by my script.
Joe and Carol and Dolly tried to get financing for it but weren’t getting anywhere and one day Joe Roth asked to meet me in the bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and told me he was moving on to another project: Revenge of the Nerds II.
I was disappointed, but I liked his honesty. In a town where no one ever does anything for the money, Joe Roth said, “I need the paycheck.”
Chris Cain was a down-to-earth, folksy man who was most interested not in Karchy, the kid, but in Billy Magic, the disc jockey. He had just directed Jim Belushi in The Principal (a moderate hit) and the two were interested in working together again.
Chris sent the script to Jim, who wanted to play Magic, and Chris and Jim and Carol and Dolly went out looking for financing again.
Everybody passed again.
The Principal, I was told, hadn’t been a big enough hit to justify financing Magic Man.
Even though it had been a hit, that didn’t mean Jim Belushi was a star.
After my very public conflict with Michael Ovitz in 1989, Carol Baum and Dolly Parton faded away from Magic Man.
Carol stopped calling me.
I wasn’t surprised.
Dolly, I knew, was represented by CAA and Ovitz. Not that I suspected Ovitz of saying to them: “I don’t want you working with Eszterhas.” I knew that in Hollywood people were so afraid of Ovitz that they wouldn’t take the chance of giving him apoplexy by working with me.
A couple of months after the newspapers wrote about my letter to Ovitz, I was at dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s Eureka in Santa Monica with Gerri and Steve and Suzi.
Sitting at the next table with a group of people was Dolly Parton.
She kept staring at me all night. It looked like she was studying me, like she was trying to answer for herself this question: Why isn’t that suicidal lunatic sitting over there wearing a straitjacket?
For a while I tried to ignore her awestruck and awful stares but then I gave up.
When Gerri wasn’t looking, I winked at her.
Dolly saw the wink and looked for a terrifying moment like she was going to spit her food across the tables at me.
But Dolly stopped staring.
At about the same time, I ran into Joe Roth, who had chosen to direct Revenge of the Nerds II instead of Magic Man.
I was sitting at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York. Joe came in the bar door and looked right at me. I was only a few feet away from him.
I grinned and waved. He turned right around and went back out the door.
I thought we were friends. He had even introduced me to his father-in-law, the zany impresario Samuel Z. Arkoff, a man who wore a hat with a propeller on top of his head.
Post-Ovitz, it seemed, Joe wasn’t my friend anymore.
Fran Kuzui had directed Tokyo Pop, an international film festival smash, and Guy McElwaine sent her Magic Man.
She wanted to direct it and was certain that, after Tokyo Pop’s critical success, she could get the financing for it. She was considering making it with Burt Reynolds.
Six months later, she was still looking for the financing.
A year later, she admitted defeat.
Sam Goldwyn, Jr., who ran his own production company, got the script from Guy and asked us to a meeting at the Friars Club. Sam loved Magic Man. He wanted to buy it. He was willing to pay $750,000 for it.
But I’d have to make one change.
Just one.
I’d have to make it a contemporary piece instead of a piece that took place in the sixties. And, in keeping with making it contemporary, Karchy Jonas would have to be a Latino kid in L.A. instead of a Hungarian kid in Cleveland.
In other words, Karchy Jonas couldn’t be me anymore.
I said no soap.
Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars wasn’t enough money to make me forget about getting even with those idiots at Cathedral Latin.
I didn’t say that to Sam Goldwyn, of course.
I said I couldn’t make the changes because the script was “too close to my heart and my roots.”
That was a noble reason and not a petty and vindictive one.
Sam Goldwyn even said he admired me.
“I don’t know a lot of writers who’d turn this kind of money down because of their hearts,” he said.
He didn’t know how angry I still was at Cathedral Latin, either.
Guy gave the script to his client John Candy, who asked me to meet him at his office, which I was amazed to see was a bar. His own bar! A fully stocked and decorated barroom with stools, chairs, tables, neon decorations, and a jukebox.
John was the bartender, standing behind the bar as I sat on a stool in front of him.
I thought I was a heavy smoker but I was a baby compared to John Candy. A cigarette was never out of his hand. Once he had two of them lighted up at the same time … and smoked them both … at the same time.
I thought I could drink, but I was a teetotaler compared to John Candy. I drank five bottles of Heineken while we were in his bar. He drank thirteen rum and Cokes.
(Guy had warned me: “John and I were in Monte Carlo. He was doing publicity. I came back to L.A.—he was supposed to be back the next day. A week later, he called me. He was still in Monte Carlo, still partying.”)
We went from his bar to dinner a few blocks away on San Vincente. I drove. At dinner I had two more beers. John had eight more rum and Cokes.
“I’m begging to do this movie,” John said. “Please. You’ve got to promise me you’ll let me do it.”
He said he
was trying to change his image from the goofball funnyman to a real actor. He’d starred in several movies that had tanked recently.
“You’ve got it,” I said. “I promise you.”
He hugged me. He didn’t just have tears in his eyes. He was nearly sobbing.
I was sure he was drunk.
I knew I was.
A couple of weeks later, as we were trying to get financing for Magic Man with John Candy attached to it, John fired Guy as his agent. He went to CAA.
I knew right away that John’s next step was to bail out of Magic Man.
I was right.
Ronnie Meyer, his new agent at CAA, informed Guy that John didn’t want to do Magic Man anymore.
I was furious. I called John and, to my amazement, he took my call. Standard Hollywood behavior in such cases is to pretend the telephone has not yet been invented.
“How can you do this to me?” I screamed at him. “You gave me your word—I gave you mine! I lived up to mine!”
He started to cry.
“Call Ronnie Meyer,” he said. “He’s the one who told me I can’t do it!” John was blubbering now. “He said it would hurt my career. Call Ronnie. Talk to him. Maybe you’ll change his mind. I hope you do. I want to do Magic Man. I want to be Billy Magic. It’s a great script. Call him!”
I called Ronnie Meyer at CAA, never thinking it even possible that he’d take my call. I knew how close (then) Ronnie and Michael Ovitz were.
But I got right through.
I screamed at him, too. “You tell Candy that it would hurt his career if he did Magic Man?” I said. “Bullshit. You don’t want him to do it because it’s my script! Because of me! Because of what happened with me and Ovitz!”
Ronnie started screaming right back at me. “You hurt CAA! You hurt my business! You expect me to help you after you hurt my business? Fuck you!”
He hung up. Here he was, years later, admitting that CAA was still after me because of my letter to Ovitz.
Ronnie Meyer was a tough, no-bullshit ex-Marine. I had forgotten his reputation for always telling the truth … in a town where, at best, truth was ambiguous.
Nearly ten years went by.
Hollywood Animal Page 76
