His big brother, screenwriter James Goldman (The Lion in Winter), wrote this to director Joe Mankiewicz: “I need your help to write this thing. If this letter sounds prosy and dull, it’s because I’ve been reading my script.”
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, in Adaptation: “Do I have an original thought in my head? Maybe if I were happier my hair wouldn’t be falling out. … I’m a walking cliché. Why should I be made to feel that I have to apologize for my existence?”
In the movie Tales of Ordinary Madness, written by Charles Bukowski about himself, a prostitute was trying to get Ben Gazzara (playing Bukowski) to stop writing and make love to her.
Watching the movie in the back of a Hollywood theater, the real Bukowski yelled, “If that were me, I would have stopped typing long ago.”
Somebody in the audience told him to shut up.
“Hey,” Bukowski said. “I’m the guy they made the movie about. I can say anything I want to say!”
Somebody yelled, “Oh yeah? Then shut the fuck up!”
Bukowski yelled, “Oh yeah? Fuck you!”
Cops were called. They handcuffed Charlie Bukowski and dragged him out of his own movie and locked him in jail.
You’re certainly in good literary company.
William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Alberto Moravia, Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Jim Harrison, Joan Didion, Ken Kesey, William Kennedy, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Jay McInerney, and Hunter S. Thompson were all screenwriters at one point or another.
Faulkner even took a meeting with Sammy Glick.
After he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner did rewrites of these scripts: The Left Hand of God and Land of the Pharaohs. He took meetings with actress Julie Harris and producer Jerry Wald, Budd Schulberg’s model for agent Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run?
Robert McKee is an artist …
McKee: “People today don’t respect screenwriting as an art. People didn’t think this way in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. But it takes real genius to do it beautifully.”
Don’t ever refer to yourself as an artist.
Novelist Sherwood Anderson said to Ben Hecht, “You let art alone … she’s got enough guys sleeping with her.”
The Revolt of the Assholes
Screenwriter John Gregory Dunne’s definition of a writer’s strike.
Faulkner was a mensch.
Aproducer, who’d begun as a press agent for studio czar Harry Cohn in the 1930s, wanted to demonstrate his knowledge of American “literatoor” for me.
“Fitzgerald?” he said. “His wife, that crazy bitch Thelma, told him he couldn’t get her or any other woman off because it was too small. And that hotsytotsy Brit gossip kurva he was living with out here, what was her name? Graham, that’s it. Heather Graham. She said Fitzgerald was so ashamed of it, she never saw him with his clothes off. And then after the poor putz died, she said she’d rather make it with the size of a chimpanzee than the size of a horse. That was almost as ugly as the stuff Sally said about Burt in Playboy … that fageleh stuff that everybody talked about. Anyway. Hemingway? His bullfighting friend, that American, that gay guy, Sidney, Stanley, whatever. Stanley said Hemingway was always worried about his size. Sidney said it was the size of a thirty-thirty shell. And then there was that gay-bashing thing where Ernest sees a guy across the street who’s flaming and goes across the street and beats the fageleh up. Faulkner? He schtupped that little secretary in town for almost twenty years. Liked her to put on little skimpy white dresses. Took her out to the beach in Santa Monica so the other guys could look through those white dresses, too. She told everybody he was a wild man—three, four times a night. Faulkner liked it here, kept coming back for the money and the pussy, just like the rest of us. Faulkner was a mensch.”
You don’t have to be smart to be a screenwriter.
Screenwriter Sylvester Stallone was thrown out of fourteen schools in eleven years.
Be proud that Rocky is your colleague.
Sylvester Stallone even had himself photographed for a cover of Writer’s Digest. He even sat in front of a typewriter. He even wore horn-rimmed glasses. He even said he was more a writer than an actor.
Then he stopped writing for thirty years and became an action figure and a windup toy.
But … at one point during those thirty years, he even smoked a pipe for a while.
He had himself photographed smoking his pipe, too, though he didn’t wear his horn-rimmed glasses at the same time.
You don’t want to turn into Sylvester Stallone … or do you?
Thirty years after Rocky, Sly and I were talking about writing.
“I used to love writing,” Sly said. “I don’t know what happened.”
I said, “I do. You became a movie star. You’ve had your head in pussy all these years.”
Sly said, “You’re probably right.”
You’ve got a good shot to make it.
Less brains are necessary in the motion picture business than in any other,” producer Lewis J. Selznick, David’s dad, told a congressional committee.
A Hollywood High:
To be overjoyed at the prospect of something great happening … something that will turn into shit the next day.
Maybe you might need a brainguard, too.
Producer David O. Selznick felt that a good idea was worth a million dollars, so he hired a guard to stand in front of the room where his company’s scripts were kept.
He called this guard “the Brainguard.”
Let’s hope you get it kissed.
Legendary studio boss Harry Cohn: “I kiss the feet of talent and I kick the ass of those who don’t have it.”
Everybody wants to be a screenwriter.
Alice Sebold, author (The Lovely Bones): “We are living in the shadow of Hollywood where I teach, at UC Irvine. I was stunned at how students talked about movies when we went out to dinner, when I was expecting them to talk about novels. There is big money in Hollywood and it lures away really good minds.”
David Benioff, screenwriter (Troy): “Thirty years ago, students probably wanted to be the next great novelist. Now many want to write the next great screenplay. Film is something young writers think about.”
Jim Shepard, instructor, UC Irvine: “If you go into a classroom and ask who’s read Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, half the students will raise their hands and say they’ve seen the movie. All of these students are interested in writing books. But more and more are finding it hard to keep their eyes off the brass ring that film represents.”
Paul Schrader, screenwriter/director (Taxi Driver, American Gigolo): “More literature is being written to be film-friendly. When I was a student, the writer Robert Coover said the goal should be to write a novel that cannot be adapted to film. I doubt any student aspires to that today.”
Screenwriter/novelist William Goldman: “When I was a kid, novels were important, theater was important, movies were our secret pleasure. Now, movies are the center of our culture.”
Screenwriter/director Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally): “Movies are the literature of this generation and all subsequent generations.”
Norman Mailer: “Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people. … People who can’t read are quite able to reach profound reactions in the dark of a theater.”
Because everybody but everybody goes to the movies.
In 1991, during the Gulf War, Iraqi airplanes dropped leaflets on our troops that said, “Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.”
Even Richard Russo wants to be a screenwriter.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author (Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool) has written three teleplays and an original screenplay and has also adapted Scott Phillips’s novel, The Ice Harvest, starring Billy Bob Thornton.
Even FDR wrote a treatment.
Yes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as a young man, pitched a story about John Paul Jon
es to Jane Wells of the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation.
Ms. Wells liked the future president’s pitch and asked him to send her an outline. He sent her a twenty-nine-page treatment.
Everybody is a writer.
Disney Mogul Michael Eisner wrote a play called To Metastasize a River; famed attorney to the stars Bert Fields writes thrillers under the pseudonym D. Kincaid; ex–Beverly Hills mayor Robert Tanenbaum writes mysteries under his own name; former L.A. mayor Richard Riordan has written several unproduced screenplays; assistant U.S. attorney Dan Saunders has written a play entitled The Death of William Shakespeare.
Even the swamis write screenplays.
Writer Anthony Haden-Guest: “It was a crisp fall morning in 1971. Two swamis were down by the desk of the Chateau Marmont. They wore long swami hair and filthy swami robes, but the swami with blond hair was fiddling with amber worry beads in an un-guru-like fashion. ‘Get this, Al,’ he said apologetically. ‘I can let you have a script by Thursday.’
“The other swami dropped his key on the desk with a metallic clatter. His occult pendant jangled.
“ ‘I don’t want a script,’ he declared coldly. ‘I want the script.’ ”
Robert McKee owes his success to me and to Shane Black.
Ian Parker, writing in The New Yorker: “McKee became part of a great boom in screenwriting instruction which had its roots in the end of the studio system and the subsequent rise of the American auteur director: a screenwriter being one step from a director, and a director being God. The boom was further propelled by public knowledge of the multimillion-dollar fees paid to writers like Joe Eszterhas and Shane Black.”
Will this be you?
Actress Hedy Lamarr discussing screenwriter Gene Markey (Meet Me at the Fair, A Lost Lady): “I had never been close to an American screenwriter before and I felt Gene was an individualist, one of a kind. He was bright and amusing, often brittle and super-ficial but at other times deep and confused. I have since learned that most screenwriters are this way. I don’t know what came first, the chicken or the egg—whether they try to live up to the reputation writers have or whether their work makes them like that.”
PERK OF SUCCESS:
THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE
WORKING FOR
When my son Steve was twelve years old and the greatest Oakland Athletics fan in the world, he was desperate to meet his hero, the slugger Mark McGwire.
I called the A’s publicity office, identified myself as the screenwriter of Flashdance, and the next thing I knew, Steve and I were in the A’s dugout, talking to McGwire, and McGwire was telling us how much he loved Flashdance and asking me if Jenny Beals was as hot as she looked.
When my son Joe was eight years old and the greatest Cleveland Indians fan in the world, he was desperate to meet some of the players.
I read an interview in the newspaper with an Indians rookie pitcher named Roy Smith, who was quoted as saying he wanted to be a screenwriter.
I called Roy Smith and told him that if he got Joey into the Indians’ dugout, I’d buy him lunch and that at that lunch he could ask me anything he wanted about screenwriting.
Roy picked out a date on which Joey could meet the Indians, but two days before the date, Roy was traded to the Oakland A’s. He called me from Oakland and said Joey could meet the Indians and the A’s the next time he came to Cleveland with the A’s.
A week before the A’s arrival in Cleveland, Roy Smith was cut by the team and sent down to the minors. I haven’t heard from Roy since, but I am certain I will hear from him again if he ever gets back to the majors.
You can even turn priests on.
Through the years, a great many people have told me, like Mark McGwire, how much they loved Flashdance. Hundreds of women have viewed me more kindly the moment they found out I wrote (actually cowrote) the movie; some of these women even took me to bed to demonstrate to me their enthusiastic and wholehearted endorsement of the movie.
My wife Naomi’s OB-GYN told me how much he loved Flashdance as Naomi was in her twenty-second hour of labor—sweating and nearly purple with our firstborn. He asked me, like Mark McGwire, “Is Jennifer Beals as hot as she looked?” even as Naomi groaned in pain in the background.
And my parish priest, Father Bob Stec, told me how much he had loved the movie—for other reasons, though, than McGwire and Naomi’s OB-GYN. Father Bob loved the line “When you give up your dream, you die!” and said he had lived his life by that line since he’d seen the movie as a teenager.
I gave him a Flashdance poster and wrote that line on it and signed it.
Life-Affirming
New Age studio exec–speak for “Will it make a hundred million dollars?” It began to be used extensively after the success of Forrest Gump. Dreamworks chieftain Jeff Katzenberg begins each pitch meeting with a writer by saying, “Tell me how this movie you’re about to pitch will be life-affirming.”
What ever happened to FDR’s treatment?
It’s probably still up on the shelf at Paramount.
Twelve years after he wrote that treatment, when he was president of the United States, FDR asked a lieutenant in naval intelligence to the Oval Office. The lieutenant was a former Paramount executive.
“You know why I asked you up here, don’t you?” the president asked.
The lieutenant said, “Of course. It’s John Paul Jones.”
“Whatever happened to my treatment?” the president of the United States asked.
“It’s on the shelf,” the lieutenant said. “Paramount hasn’t rejected it, but they haven’t decided anything on it yet.”
Then the treatment went into storage. It now lies in a sealed locker inside a mountain in Missouri, where the studios jointly own a vast storage area of old treatments and scripts.
You, too, can be in FDR’s shoes.
I certainly am.
These scripts of mine were all bought by Paramount and are still, like FDR’s John Paul Jones, inside that mountain in Missouri: Nark (1981); Dieshot (1982); Beat the Eagle (1984); Male Pattern Baldness (1996); Reliable Sources (1997); Land of the Free (1998); Other Men’s Wives (1999).
What are movies?
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “Movies are an art that is a business and a business that is an art.”
Movies are sausages.
Producer Mike Medavoy: “Getting films made is like watching sausage be produced: the finished product is great, but the process of putting it together is often messy.”
Movies are selling sausages.
Director Phillip Noyce: “I realized that the Hollywood system—based as it is on the employment of branch offices all over the world promoting and selling movies—is totally dependent on a continual flow of product, and it’s been set up to promote that product into the hearts and minds of people all over the world. In essence, movies represent marketing opportunities for Hollywood.”
Without you, there is nothing.
I know that in theory the word is secondary in cinema,” said director Orson Welles, “but the secret of my work is that everything is based on the word. I always begin with the dialogue. And I do not understand how one dares to write action before dialogue. I must begin with what the characters say. I must know what they say before seeing them do what they do.”
You are more important than the director.
It all begins in the script,” says director Milos Forman. “If what’s happening is interesting, it doesn’t matter where you shoot from, people will be interested to watch. If you write something boring, you can film from mosquitoes’ underpants and it will still be boring.”
Hollywood will hate you.
The relationship between Hollywood and the writer is basically adversarial,” says writer Jim Harrison. “The film business acts as if it wishes it could do without writers, but it can’t, and it has accepted the fact without grace.”
ALL HAIL
Billy Bob Thornton!
A hard-nosed screenwriter (Sling Blade) who went to
the wall with several studios that wanted to change his scripts, he even jumped atop a studio head’s desk once. … Billy Bob is the realization of all of our dreams: He became a movie star; he became a rock and roll star; he married Angelina Jolie.
Tony Kushner is no role model, either.
Kushner: “I didn’t write Angels in America. The actors wrote it, the directors wrote it, we all wrote it.” Can you break your Pulitzer Prize into little pieces, then, Tony, and share it with all the others?
This is you.
Screenwriter Milo Addica (Birth): “The writer is the lowest man on the totem pole, but potentially he has the most power. He comes up with the idea; he makes it work. You can’t make a building without the blueprint; you can hire the labor and buy the material, but to make a building, you need a blueprint—which means someone has to sit at a table, rack their brain, and figure it out. That’s what a writer does.”
You ain’t nothing but a Hessian to them.
John Gregory Dunne: “Screenwriters are regarded in the industry as chronic malcontents, overpaid and undertalented, the Hollywood version of Hessians, measuring their worth in dollars, since ownership of their words belongs to those who hire and fire them.”
How about sleeping with the screenwriter?
Hedy Lamarr: “The ladder of success in Hollywood is usually agent, actor, director, producer, leading man; and you are a star if you sleep with each of them in that order. Crude but true.”
These are the rules of the game.
Old Hollywood adage: “In the beginning, when he is writing the script, the screenwriter has the gun. When he turns his script in, he turns the gun over to the producer. When the producer hires the director, he hands the gun over to the director. When the director turns in his final cut, he hands the gun over to the studio. The studio then takes the gun and shoots the writer, the producer, and the director. The studio then hands the gun to the stars of the movie, who are going out to publicize the film. In rare cases like Heaven’s Gate, the studio turns the gun on itself and blows its own brains out.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 2
