The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood

by Joe Eszterhas

  PERK OF SUCCESS: MY ACCOUNTANTS ALMOST KILLED ME.

  The day after I had my first meeting with accountants, I had a full-blown anxiety attack that was initially misdiagnosed as a heart attack.

  Your accountant may fire you.

  This is especially true if you have gotten behind on paying your taxes. The good accountants in L.A. all have excellent relationships with the IRS.

  The IRS knows that if you are being represented by an accounting firm it’s done business with, the odds are very good that you won’t be cheating on your taxes—which makes an audit of your returns a waste of time. So it won’t audit you if you are represented by one of these firms.

  But if you can’t pay your taxes, your accounting firm will worry that your problems will affect its relationship with the IRS, and its other clients, so it will quickly rid itself of you.

  Sometimes the accounting firms get rid of a client too quickly and regrets it. Sharon Stone’s accounting firm got rid of her the year before she starred in Basic Instinct. They made a big, big mistake.

  Congealed Snow

  What screenwriter Dorothy Parker called Hollywood money.

  Hire a good lawyer, too.

  Peter Guber: “In business, you don’t get what’s fair. You get what you negotiate.”

  Be sure to hire a damn good lawyer.

  John Gregory Dunne: “The attitude studio business affairs attorneys seem to take toward writers is that a writer’s time is nowhere near so valuable as that of a director, producer, or star; that the writer always needs money; and that stalling is a tactic that will ultimately cause the writer who is a little short on the do-re-mi to cave in.”

  You’re going to need an agent, too.

  There’s no heart as black as the black heart of an agent,” my longtime agent, Guy McElwaine, once told me.

  You need an agent right now, right this minute.

  The playwright Brendan Behan sold the rights to all of his plays at the pubs where he drank—sometimes to customers, sometimes to bartenders, sometimes for as little as a couple of drinks.

  It’s still the same old story.

  Sixty years ago, studio head Howard Hughes sent his executives a memo saying he only wanted to make movies “about fighting and fucking.”

  It’s always been a meat market.

  Marilyn Monroe: “Expensive cars used to drive up beside me when I was standing on a street corner or walking on a sidewalk and the driver would say, ‘I could do something for you in pictures. How would you like to be a Goldwyn girl?’ I figure those guys in those cars were trying for a pickup and I had an agent so I could say to those fellows, ‘See my agent.’”

  It is still the same old meat market, too.

  Producer Brian Grazer and I were driving back to town after a meeting in the Valley, when Brian spotted a gorgeous young woman walking down the street.

  He pulled over, got out, and said, “Hi, I’m Brian Grazer, the producer. Has anyone ever told you you should be in movies?”

  She gave Brian a dazzling smile and said, “Thank you. My agent tells me that all the time. I’m represented by CAA. Here’s my agent’s card.”

  Don’t be too sure.

  Well, that’s the last cock I have to suck,” said Marilyn Monroe after she signed her first big studio contract.

  You see what I mean?

  I crawled the hill of broken glass and I sucked and I sucked until I sucked all the air out of my life,” Sharon Stone told me after she became a big star.

  It helps to be Hungarian, though.

  I am Hungarian-born. I dallied with the star I created, Sharon Stone. André de Dienes was Hungarian, too. He dallied with the star he photographed, Marilyn Monroe. The famous William Morris agent Johnny Hyde was part Hungarian (Ivan Haidabura). He also dallied with the star he created, Marilyn Monroe.

  But it’s not enough to be Hungarian.

  In the early days of the film business, there were so many Hungarian filmmakers in L.A. that there was a sign at the MGM commissary that read “IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO BE HUNGARIAN. YOU STILL HAVE TO PAY FOR THE CHICKEN SOUP.”

  The Panic List

  Allegedly kept by the studios, it is a list of those who badly need money and will work cheap. The only time I heard direct mention of it was in a studio meeting with a Paramount executive, who suggested hiring a well-known director for one of my scripts and said, “He’s on the panic list. He just bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard and needs to go to work.”

  ALL HAIL

  Hail Paul Rudnick!

  He not only has put together a lengthy and successful career as a screenwriter but, as columnist Libby Gelman-Waxner in Premier magazine, he has also wickedly trashed most of the town’s heavyweights and gotten away with it.

  Don’t gamble.

  Gambling is part of ancient Hollywood tradition, going back to David O. Selznick losing much of what he made. David Begelman, agent/studio exec/embezzler/suicide was addicted to gambling.

  I saw producer Don Simpson lose thirty thousand dollars in fifteen minutes at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

  If you’re successful, you’ll be invited to industry poker games—some are legendary. Don’t do it.

  I was even introduced to a little man who was the industry’s bookie to the stars. He was very rich and knew the works of George Bernard Shaw inside out.

  TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

  Don’t marry a writer.

  Actress and famed Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “Even though painters and sculptors and composers and writers have a romantic reputation all over the world, in my opinion they are worthless as ex-husbands, or as husbands, or as anything else you may have in your mind to do with them, except if you want to have a beautiful nude statue made of you. Honestly, no woman, even if she is the most alluring creature that ever existed, can win out when she is competing for a man’s attention with his precious muse. Artists spend all their time thinking about imaginary beauty. …

  “Let’s face it, nine times out of ten intellectual men would rather go to bed with a good book. Which just goes to show how unintelligent an intelligent person can be.”

  If you get married, do it in Portofino.

  This, too, is an old Hollywood tradition. David O. Selznick was married there … and I had an agent who was married there—at the Splendido Hotel—three times to three different women.

  I stayed there once, when I was already married to my first wife, Geraldine, and happened to arrive the first day that the Splendido opened for the season. In the dining room that night, Gerri and I found ourselves surrounded by German couples in their seventies and eighties.

  “All Nazis,” our American waiter told us. “They came here to hide after the war, and on the first day that the hotel is open each year, they flock here to celebrate surviving another year without capture.”

  Always let them pick up the check.

  Only pick a check up if you’re out with another screenwriter … and if you’re doing better than he/she is.

  Agent Swifty Lazar, describing gossip columnist Walter Winchell: “He had a great way of not reaching for a check. He’d feign a move toward it, but if someone made the slightest protest, he’d redirect his hand and pick up his water glass. In all the years I knew him, I never saw him pay for a meal.”

  You’re dealing with horribly spoiled people.

  Actress Hedy Lamarr: “If a man sends me flowers, I always look to see if a diamond bracelet is hidden among the blossoms. If there isn’t one, I don’t see the flowers.”

  I sent Sharon Stone a hundred red roses once. She sent me a card thanking me.

  I sent her a gold bracelet. She called and asked me to dinner.

  Everything you’ve ever heard about Hollywood parties is true.

  Actress Hedy Lamarr: “At one magnificent party (for which I bought a gown that cost me two weeks’ salary) I excused myself to fetch a scarf that was in the sleeve of my fur coat. I couldn’t find a maid, so I went into the darkened master bedroo
m, where many furs were laid out on the bed. And when I got into the room I could see and hear that wasn’t all that was laid out on the bed. A man and woman were right on top of all the furs, taking desperate advantage of the occasion. I merely said, ‘Excuse me,’ reached under the young girl, and pulled out my green scarf. They never stopped for one moment. Later on I saw the two of them formally dressed, sipping champagne cocktails. They knew it was me, but they didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed. Nor was I.”

  Avoid Hollywood parties.

  Screenwriter/novelist Charles Bukowski wrote this after getting home from a Hollywood party: “Sitting naked behind my house, 8 a.m., spreading sesame seed oil over my body, Jesus, have I come to this? I once battled in dark alleys for a laugh, now I’m not laughing.”

  F-bomb the world!

  Tom Tapp, the editor of VLife magazine, published by Daily Variety: “Among moguls, crude language is part of routine business. In turn, the executives who work under them don’t exactly censor themselves. One network honcho is so well-known for his foul mouth that it’s become a calling card. Such language is not necessarily derogatory. It’s a colorful patois that can often be complimentary. Everyone understands this.”

  Even Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ director and a devout Christian, described the man in charge of distributing the movie as “a very smart fucking guy.”

  Bill Clinton belongs in Hollywood.

  Producer David Geffen took his boyfriend to meet Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.

  Clinton said, “Is that a fuckin’ reporter?”

  “No, he’s with me, Bill,” Geffen said.

  “Oh,” Clinton said, “I thought he was a fuckin’ reporter.”

  If you want to sound like a real Hollywood pro …

  Always refer to MGM as “Metro” and Twentieth Century–Fox not as “Fox” but as “Twentieth.”

  Dirt Sandwich

  Popularized by Sharon Stone’s reference to a boyfriend as such, it’s an old Hollywood term for someone who rips you off, someone who leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

  Be nice to the Godfathers.

  I met Sidney Korshak, mob lawyer and Hollywood Godfather, in producer Robert Evans’s screening room moments after a young woman in her twenties had finished going down on him. Sidney was in his late seventies.

  I’d stumbled into the screening room (literally) as the young woman was leaving and as Sidney was getting his pants up off his ankles.

  I introduced myself and said it was a pleasure to meet him, and Sidney said likewise, reached out a hand, shook mine, and finished zipping himself up.

  I went into the nearest bathroom and washed my hands just as the same young woman was coming out of it. A bottle of mouthwash was on the sink.

  As I spent more time in Evans’s house, I realized there were bottles of mouthwash everywhere.

  Hey, Sidney, I liked Estes Kefauver.

  Sidney Korshak once blackmailed Senator Estes Kefauver, the head of a Senate rackets committee, by showing him a photograph of a naked young woman going down on the senator in a Chicago hotel room.

  TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

  Don’t ask a Hungarian to help you.

  The young Zsa Zsa Gabor went to see an old Hungarian friend, the producer Alexander Korda, when she got to Hollywood. She asked him to help her get an acting career started.

  He said, “Take your clothes off.”

  She fled.

  Remain philosophical.

  An angry housekeeper who arrived and found a disastrously messy house said to the producer who owned it, “There’s shit everywhere.”

  The producer said to her, “There’s shit all over the world.”

  Think Yiddish, Dress British

  A saying of Harry Cohn–era studio heads.

  And William Morris was Jewish, wasn’t he?

  William Morris agent David Wirtschafter described the industry’s perception of the agency this way: “In the minds of our competitors, we’re still a lot of old Jews dropping dead in our offices.”

  But Walt Disney was a schmuck.

  Everybody argues about who is entitled to call it “my film.”

  Screenwriters hate it when a director or producer refers to “my writer.”

  And during an interview with a reporter involving a financial question, Walt Disney said, “Before answering, I’d like to ask my Jew to come over and help me on this one.”

  Unelectric

  Uninspired, flat, dull, benighted—the opposite of producer Peter Guber, known in the industry as “the Electric Jew.”

  The Blue in the Toilet Bowl

  An old-time studio term for a successful WASP in Hollywood.

  Never underestimate how scared everybody else in town is.

  I said this on ABC’s 20/20: “People in Hollywood pee themselves the moment their feet hit the floor in the morning.”

  Don’t count on anything.

  Actress Hedy Lamarr: “That’s how it always is in the entertainment industry, your feet are always treading Jell-O. From one minute to the next everything changes.”

  Take this to heart.

  Producer Ray Stark gave me this advice: “Don’t let anyone push you around, do what your heart tells you to do, and don’t borrow any money.”

  To Cut Down on Your Cream

  To stop living excessively, to save for a rainy day.

  Do what Sharon does.

  Sharon Stone keeps a large punching bag in her garage and pounds on it every day.

  I created a monster.

  Actress Sharon Stone: “I’ve got the biggest balls in Hollywood. It’s good that they’re scared of me. The longer they stay scared, the longer I keep my job.”

  If you don’t like your own writing, do something else for a living.

  William Goldman: “Since I don’t much care for my writing, Princess Bride is the only picture of mine I can look at without embarrassment.”

  Why does your butt hurt after you’ve taken Robert McKee’s course?

  The New Yorker wrote: “McKee, who is sixty-two, and likes to wear dark shirts with two buttons undone at the neck, suggesting a career in extortion, lit a cigarette, then walked down the street while listening to an agitated young man say that the last time he had heard McKee speak the effect had been so overwhelming that he had fallen ill. ‘All the stuff you don’t want to face, which is to say emotional truth, the stuff of good story telling, it was coming out!’ the young man said, very fast. ‘It was coming out in such a way that it caused this pain in my back, because subconscious growth is such a painful process.’”

  I shouldn’t be telling you all these things.

  Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (Alien): “Most of what is written on how to write a screenplay is written by people who don’t know how. … There aren’t that many who do know how, and those who do know how tend not to tell. For the very obvious reason: they don’t want to train their own competition. These are not unknowns, but it’s on the level of the mortuary trade—it’s passed on by word of mouth.”

  The Screenwriter’s Lament

  “The fucking you get isn’t worth the fucking you get.”

  LESSON 3

  Don’t Let ’Em Fart at Your Ideas!

  If you’re nineteen years old and writing your first script, know this: Life will get easier.

  Paddy Chayefsky (Network, The Hospital): “Nineteen-year-old writers want more out of their writing than mere satisfaction. They want approbation, to change the world and many other things. Besides, at nineteen, he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.”

  Don’t be a screenwriter; be a writer who just happens to write for the screen.

  Don’t spend all of your time in dark theaters watching movies. Live. Love. Immerse yourself in the messy entanglements of real, not reel, life.

  Listen to human beings talk, not characters created by other screenwriters who spend all their time in dark movie theaters.

  Use the events and the human beings of your everyday life to c
reate a fictional world that real people, not reel people, will recognize, understand, and be moved by when they see what you have created.

  You scare the living shit out of the studios.

  Paddy Chayefsky: “When the studios hire a director, they can see him direct, or an actor act, or a typist type, but they can’t see a writer think, and that frightens them.”

  Darling and Honey

  These are two of Hollywood’s most meaningless and overused words and greatest clichés. In the past few decades, there has been a trend away from using these words, although longtime Paramount head Sherry Lansing insisted on calling everyone “darling” and “honey,” perhaps as a homage to Hollywood’s Golden Age.

  Robert McKee and I agree about one thing.

  McKee: “Movie-making is a collaborative endeavor—requiring great skill and talent by the entire cast, crew, and creative team—but the screenwriter is the only original artist on a film. Everyone else—the actors, directors, cameramen, production designers, editors, special effects wizards, and so on—are interpretive artists, trying to bring alive the world, the events, and the characters that the screenwriter has invented and created.”