The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood

by Joe Eszterhas

  The Oscar

  Woody Allen: “An inanimate statue of a little bald man.”

  You’re not in Kansas anymore, sweetie.

  Mike Medavoy: “The movie business is probably the most irrational business in the world … it is covered by a set of rules that are absolutely irrational.”

  Nobody knows anything.

  This is Bill Goldman’s famous (and accurate) phrase, but its flip side is: “Everybody thinks he knows everything there is to know about writing.”

  Which includes the cabbie, the waitress, the director, the traffic cop, the producer, the sanitation engineer, the studio head, the massage therapist, and the star.

  Scott Fitzgerald didn’t know anything, either.

  He did an uncredited rewrite on Gone with the Wind. This is what he thought of the book: “I read it—I mean really read it—it is a good novel—not very original. … There are no new characters, new technique, new observations—none of the elements that make literature—especially no new examination into human emotions.”

  He thought it was a good novel, though, right?

  Poor, poor Scott Fitzgerald …

  Can you imagine Scott Fitzgerald’s pain as he rewrote Margaret Mitchell?

  Fitzgerald to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: “I was absolutely forbidden to use any words except those of Margaret Mitchell, that is, when new phrases had to be invented one had to thumb through it as if it were Scripture and check out phrases of her’s which would cover the situation!”

  These are words Hollywood lives by.

  Keep your friends close to you, but keep your enemies closer.” These words of advice were first given to me by a woman producer who still occasionally slept with her ex-husband, also a producer, even though she had remarried and was “absolutely in love” with her new husband.

  Her ex-husband had beaten her, sold naked photos of her to a Web site, told the court she was a “whore and a druggie” in a custody fight, put a .45 Magnum into her mouth and pulled the trigger, and tried to blackball her in the industry.

  She loathed and feared him but slept with him whenever he wanted to “keep him close” and neutralize him.

  Over the years, I heard the same advice from studio head Sherry Lansing, superagent Michael Ovitz, and producer Ray Stark.

  If you get reamed, take him or her out to lunch.

  Mike Medavoy: “Breaking bread with them that wronged you is as common as air kissing in the movie business.”

  The key to winning in Hollywood is to let them think they won.

  Iadmit there are people in Hollywood who are much better at this than I am.

  Among them is director Phillip Noyce (Sliver, The Quiet American): “My own directorial style can be described as ‘nudging’—nudging people. I don’t believe much is achieved by confrontation, except resentment. I mostly get exactly what I want. But the secret of doing that in movies is to allow the other person to think what you want is what they really want.”

  Barry Diller knows what he’s talking about.

  The studio head and corporate mogul said, “People get corrupted. They don’t lose their brains. God knows, they don’t lose their talent. But part of the process of success and what it does, it corrupts in the way that it removes their objectivity, it removes their instincts.”

  Most of what you’ve heard about Hollywood is true.

  Screenwriter William Goldman: “Understand this: all the sleaze you’ve heard about Hollywood? All the illiterate scumbags who scuttle down the corridors of power? They are there, all right, and worse than you can imagine.”

  God bless us everyone.

  Producer Robert Evans: “In this town everybody’s a whore. Everybody can be bought.”

  You’ll need to be a really good liar.

  Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “The art of lying is the art of the practical. It ought never be indulged in for the pure pleasure of the thing, since over-usage dulls the instrument, corrodes the character, and despoils the spirit. The important thing about a lie is not that it be interesting, fanciful, graceful or even pleasant but that it be believed. Curb, therefore, your imagination. Let the lie be delivered full-face, eye to eye, and without scratching of the scalp. Let it be blunt and forthright and so simple that you can repeat it in detail and under oath ten years hence. But let it, for all of its simplicity, contain one fantastical element of creative ingenuity—one and no more—designed to capture the attention of the listener and to convince him that, since no one would dare to invent the improbability you have inserted, its mere existence places the stamp of truth upon everything you have said. If you cannot tell a believable lie, cling then to truth which is always our secret succor in times of need, and manfully accept the consequences.”

  It’s all good news, all the time!

  What absolutely no one does in Hollywood is tell you bad news. If someone doesn’t like your script, they won’t tell you that. You’ll simply never hear from them. If somebody doesn’t like your movie, they’ll tell you they haven’t seen it yet.

  Hold out for the fifty cents.

  Marilyn Monroe: “Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.”

  To Do a Begelman

  To commit suicide, like agent and studio head David.

  Don’t live in L.A.

  Everyone in L.A. wants somehow to get into the movie business or has a friend or a relative who wants to get into the business. Everyone is a wannabe, already in star training.

  All the wannabe screenwriters you meet will quote you classic movie lines, which you are better off not hearing and certainly not remembering.

  Lines like “I will not be ignored, Dan”—written by James Dearden in Fatal Attraction.

  And “When you give up your dream, you die”—written by Joe Eszterhas in Flashdance.

  And “It’s turkeytime, gobble gobble”—written by Martin Brest in Gigli. And “How does it feel not to have anyone comin’ on you anymore?”—written by Joe Eszterhas in Showgirls.

  You don’t want to live in a tabloid, do you?

  Actress Jessica Alba (Sin City): “Literally the whole town is a tabloid. At every restaurant, every hotel, everywhere you go, people are looking at the door to see who walked in. It seems like no one is ever satisfied with their jobs or their lives, everyone is always sort of maneuvering for something else, something better.”

  Just another Hollywood burnout …

  Screenwriter/novelist Jim Harrison: “I was driving on the Hollywood freeway, crossing the hill over toward Burbank, when we stopped in traffic. I looked up at the apartment buildings stacked against the wall of the canyon and on a deck a young man was standing in an open robe, whacking off and looking down at the freeway.”

  Forget everything you’ve heard about networking.

  It is not who you know in Hollywood. If you write a good, commercial script and start sending it out—-someone will recognize that it is good and commercial.

  It is a town that runs on greed, filled with desperate people who will do anything to make money.

  If they think your script will make them money, they will option or buy your script.

  You can write your script anywhere. I suggest that you write it anywhere but in L.A.

  You won’t be able to write real people if you stay in L.A. too long.

  L.A. has nothing to do with the rest of America. It is a place whose values are shaped by the movie business. It is my contention that it is not just a separate city, or even a separate state, but a separate country located within America.

  Real Americans live in Bainbridge Township, Ohio.

  If you have to go to L.A. for a meeting …

  Do it as former Orion Pictures head Eric Pleskow advises: “Only as needed, like taking medication.”

  And Truman Capote gave this advice to Dominick Dunne: “Remember this—that is not where you belong,
and when you get out of it what you went there to get, you have to return to your own life.”

  It’s still bedlam.

  After two weeks of writing scripts in L.A., screenwriter William Faulkner wrote home: “I have not got used to this work. But I am as well as anyone can be in this bedlam.”

  Don’t wind up weeping into your beer.

  Norman Mailer, writing to a friend in 1949: “Hollywood stinks. I’ll probably stay here the rest of my life and weep into my beer about what a writer I used to be.”

  A Lanzman

  A Yiddish term for a fellow Jew, it is used in Hollywood now to describe a good and loyal friend—being a lanzman is one rung above being a mensch (good people).

  They can snort you there.

  Producer Bert Schneider took care of an ill friend for two years. When she died, he held a party and the guests snorted her ashes up their noses.

  Save the horses.

  Screenwriter William Faulkner bought a horse for his daughter in Hollywood. When he realized the mare was going to foal, he drove her home to Mississippi. “I’d be damned,” he said, “if I let a Faulkner mare foal in Hollywood.”

  This isn’t the kind of place where you want to raise your kids.

  Inoticed our six-year-old, Joey, staring out the window of our Malibu house one sunny morning. Curious, I looked at what he was looking at.

  On the patio of the house next door, a gorgeous naked young woman was with another gorgeous naked young woman.

  Joey said, “What are they doing, Dada?”

  I thought about it and said, “Saying hi, I guess.”

  Joey said, “Like doggies.”

  I smiled and said, “Yup.”

  TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

  Do you want neighbors like this?

  Actress and Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “Vera Krupp used to live next to me in Bel Air and they say that she got 25 million from her husband, the German armaments king, Krupp. With it, she bought the most unbelievable diamonds. Vera wasn’t in the least bit overwhelmed by any of her diamonds and used to wear them while gardening or doing the dishes. But Vera lost all her money when she went to Las Vegas, fell in love with a croupier there, married him, and gave him her entire fortune. When she died, she had her four black Great Danes cremated and buried in the coffin with her.”

  You’ll meet some mighty odd folks in L.A.

  Agent Swifty Lazar: “Now, as everyone knows, I have a legendary fear of germs. The problem isn’t really germs, it’s the proximity of dirt that annoys me, especially someone else’s dirt. Howard Hughes, on the other hand, did have a germ phobia. So that night, as I always do when leaving a public toilet, I reached for a paper towel to use on the door handle so I wouldn’t have to touch it. Alas, there were none left. A few seconds later, Howard made the same discovery.

  “So there we were, two germ freaks, both walking toward the door with dripping hands. I lingered, hoping to force Howard to deal with the door. But Howard saw that gambit and stepped aside, leaving me right in front of the door. Was I going to grab that germ-ridden handle? Not on your life. So we were at a standstill. Luckily, another man entered, giving us a chance to duck out before the door swung shut again.”

  See a proctologist often.

  Playwright/screenwriter David Mamet: “Writing for Hollywood is a constant trauma.”

  You’ll need to get yourself some Kaopectate, too.

  Screenwriter William Goldman: “I bought a bottle of Kaopectate as soon as I reached the hotel. No joke. For the first several years, whenever I was in Los Angeles, I went nowhere without a bottle of Kaopectate hidden in a brown paper bag.”

  For almost twenty years while I was a screenwriter, I lived in Marin County in northern California and commuted to Los Angeles for meetings.

  If I had a noon meeting in L.A., I’d be sitting at the bar of the terminal in San Francisco sipping two glasses of white wine at nine in the morning.

  I’d have two Bloody Marys on the plane.

  Upon landing, I’d go to the bar of the terminal in L.A. and drink two more glasses of white wine. Then I’d be ready for my meetings. I guess maybe Bill Goldman is smarter than I am. He limited himself to Kaopectate.

  In Shallow Waters the Dragon Becomes the Joke of the Shrimp

  Studio executive Dore Schary’s famous line, originally applied to a down-on-his-luck David O. Selznick. Later applied to Orson Welles, producers Allan Carr, David Begelman, Dan Melnick, and directors Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, and David Lynch, among others.

  If you have to be in L.A., stay at the Chateau Marmont.

  Screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson: “There’s several ghosts at the Chateau. The ghost would come at 3:30 in the morning. Regularly. It would wake me up and make me go to work. It was a writing ghost.”

  If you have to rent a car in L.A.

  Screenwriter and novelist Jim Harrison (Wolf): “Certain actors and producers are spectacularly good drivers. I’m so lousy in traffic. Having only one eye doesn’t help. In fifty or so trips to L.A., I tried to drive from the airport in a rental car only once, a shattering experience. After rush hour I could drive locally, though not well, in Beverly Hills and environs, though other cars would beep at me for driving too slow. … A number of times I asked studios to have a five-year-old brown Taurus station wagon sent to my hotel, but they were never able to deliver.”

  Beware of medical help in Los Angeles.

  I was hoarse. I went to see a couple of highly respected ear, nose, and throat guys in Los Angeles. They examined me and said I had a benign polyp that was wrapped around my vocal cord. They scheduled outpatient surgery at a hospital, to take place six weeks later.

  My hoarseness got worse. I went to the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. They told me I had throat cancer. I had surgery and lost 80 percent of my larynx.

  When the head of the ENT practice read that I had throat cancer, he called my agent at William Morris, Jim Wiatt. He didn’t call me; he called my agent. A doctor—calling not his patient but his patient’s agent.

  He told my agent it wasn’t his fault. The doctor who’d first examined me was no longer with the firm, the head doctor told Jim Wiatt.

  He told Jim Wiatt to wish me good luck.

  Jim passed it on to me.

  Beware of nurses in Los Angeles.

  A young nurse who worked at a hospital in Los Angeles showed me her photo album.

  It was filled with photos of delighted nurses cuddling with their famous patients. The nurses were wearing nifty little goodies from Victoria’s Secret, and their patients, mostly rock stars, were niftily naked. The nurses were smiling coyly, lasciviously, joyously, teasingly, ironically, daringly, contentedly, triumphantly.

  The stars in the hospital bed with them were anesthetized … in postsurgical comas … blasted out of their gourds … an IV sometimes still sticking in their arms.

  If you’re going to be in L.A. working on a script, don’t take your cell phone.

  The director, producer, studio execs, and any or all of their assistants, gofers, and secretaries will be bugging you all the time if you’ve got a cell phone.

  Tell everyone that you left your cell phone home so your significant other could use it. Then tell everyone that you always shut the phone off when you’re writing.

  If you’re Catholic, don’t go to Our Lady of Malibu church.

  When we lived in Point Dume, our church was Our Lady of Malibu. We’d heard of Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Fatima … but we’d never heard of Our Lady of Malibu.

  Lourdes and Guadalupe and Fatima were places of miracles, but we didn’t know about Malibu. What had Our Lady of Malibu done? Appeared at a bonfire on the beach to tell three quaaluded surfers the secrets of the perfect and holy wave?

  We went to Mass there one Sunday and I was sure the Beach Boys were making an unheralded benefit appearance, pounding out “Help Me Rhonda” to help the missions of “the Dark Continent” (as the sisters in
grade school used to say).

  But it wasn’t the Beach Boys. It was a local Malibu group doing “Kyrie Eleison” surfer-style.

  If you’re staying in a hotel in Beverly Hills, don’t go for a walk at night.

  The cops will arrest you and take you to jail.

  Nobody walks at night in Beverly Hills. Read Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian,” which is about a man who goes for a walk in Los Angeles and is taken to a mental institution. Bradbury wrote the short story in the 1950s!

  If you’re writing in L.A. …

  Drive down to the Formosa Café and get a whiff of what Hollywood used to be like. Elvis used to hang there; so did Robert Mitchum; so did Tuesday Weld. You’ll run into some people if you’re lucky.

  The last time I was there, I ran into Sean Young, no longer a movie star but still a fine woman who likes to drink beer.

  And stay away from the Rose Café. …

  It’s where all the wannabe screenwriters hang out, exchanging ideas, talking about movies, popping their pimples, sharing their dreams.

  It is a stultifying, suffocating place fueled by ambition, greed, and envy.

  If you share your dream with anybody here, chances are it’ll be ripped off and wind up in a script that will never be sold.

  TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

  Don’t buy any parrots in L.A., either.

  Actress and famed Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “On my way to the kitchen, I passed Caesar’s cage. Our eyes met and the parrot fixed me with what, at the time, seemed to be an evil eye … and in the clearest voice possible pronounced the words ‘Fuck you!’ I fetched a piece of orange for Caesar, careful to avoid his eyes. In silence, he ate it. I breathed a sigh of relief. Prematurely. Because from that moment on, all Caesar would say to me, and to anyone who crossed the threshold of our house, was ‘Fuck you!’ ”