The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood

by Joe Eszterhas

  You’re the storyteller, not the director.

  The director takes your story and characters and translates it and them to the big screen.

  If anybody in your presence refers to the director as a “storyteller,” deck him (or her).

  In musical terms, you are the composer; the director conducts the orchestra.

  The director is passé.

  William Goldman: “There is a theory put forward by some (Gore Vidal for one) that the true influence of the director died with the coming of sound. In the silent days, Griffith could stand there and, with his actor’s voice, he could talk to Lillian Gish or whomever and literally mold the performance with long, heated verbal instructions while the camera was rolling. Not anymore. Now the director must stand helpless alongside the crew and watch the actors work at their craft.”

  You are more important than the director.

  Sometimes even directors admit this. Famed director Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon): “With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this.”

  Aren’t you worried about your next job, Bill?

  Screenwriter William Goldman: “Directors—even though we all know from the media’s portrayals of them that they are men and women of wisdom and artistic vision, masters of the subtle use of symbolism—are more often than not a bunch of insecure lying assholes.”

  You’re the asshole responsible.

  Screenwriter Robert Towne: “Until the screenwriter does his job, nobody else has a job. In other words, he is the asshole who keeps everyone else from going to work.”

  They all know you’re the asshole responsible.

  Actress Barbara Stanwyck: “The performer can’t work miracles. What’s on paper is on the screen. If it isn’t there, it isn’t on the screen.”

  Without you, nobody gets paid.

  Mike Medavoy: “Writers get directors. Directors get actors. And the right combination of all three gets the money.”

  Don’t let ’em fart at your ideas.

  Producer Bert Schneider could fart whenever he wanted and farted often during story meetings with screenwriters at ideas he didn’t like.

  Like I said, damn it, don’t let ’em fart at your ideas.

  Screenwriter Robert Carson was summoned to producer David O. Selznick’s house to pitch a script.

  Selznick was in the bedroom, lying down, in pain from an attack of the stomach flu.

  Carson said, “David, I don’t think you’re really in any shape to listen to a story.”

  Selznick said, “That’s all right—go ahead.”

  Carson told his story.

  Selznick listened in bed as he groaned, strained, and passed gas.

  The next day, he informed Carson that he was passing on his project, too.

  The War Zone

  Beverly Hills, Bel Air, the Palisades, north to Malibu and Point Dume and Carbon Beach … where most of the industry’s wealthiest and most powerful “player” warriors live.

  Haunt streets, saloons, and whorehouses.

  Ben Hecht: “I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.”

  Live your life fully so you can write fully.

  Screenwriter Michael Blake (Dances with Wolves): “Characters do come out of the thin air. I think writers acquire characters by living a life in which something is risked. It’s only by being defeated, rejected, exalted, by going through all the peaks and valleys, that you can acquire anything worth writing down.”

  Don’t see a movie; read a book.

  Director Akira Kurosawa: “In order to write scripts, you must first study the great novels and dramas of the world. You must consider why they are great. Where does the emotion come from that you feel as you read them?”

  See some good movies.

  Screenwriter Michael Blake: “My approach to learning how to write screenplays was to watch the best movies. I tried not to watch lousy movies, because I didn’t think I could learn anything from them. I didn’t take any classes. I just kind of dreamed it.”

  Don’t see too many movies.

  Novelist Charles Bukowski: “People who hang around celluloid usually are.”

  Don’t turn into a film geek.

  It’s okay to see movies, but it’s not okay to get caught up in movie trivia if you want to write screenplays—that is, to become a film geek who can tell you the name of the DP on the movie Two-Lane Blacktop, directed by Monte Hellman … or the name of the character in Jack Nicholson’s first bit part.

  Knowing these things will clutter up your brain. Knowing these things won’t help you become a screenwriter.

  Knowing too much about movies can be hazardous to your creativity. Put that energy into learning about real life and the loves, hopes, aspirations, guilts, failures, and dreams of the human beings around you.

  There’s hope for you; Faulkner couldn’t write screenplays, either.

  Jim Harrison: “A good screenplay takes a sizable measure of talent and I hadn’t yet studied the genre. Later on at Warners when I read a half dozen of William Faulkner’s screenplays I was appalled and amused by how terrible they were.”

  To Do a Joe Eszterhas

  To get out of town and live somewhere in flyover country, in some town no one has ever heard of.

  Put a piece of paper up above your writing desk.

  Mine says, “The first thing a writer must do is protect his own ass.”

  Novelist/screenwriter Jim Harrison’s says, “You’re just a writer.”

  Novelist Mickey Spillane’s used to say, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!”

  After he was born again, Mickey replaced that with “Oh Lordy! Oh Jesus!”

  Repeat to yourself: “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  That’s what screenwriter Callie Khouri kept telling herself as she wrote her first screenplay. “I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ve got nothing to lose. I’ve got nothing to lose!” She was writing a groundbreaking and original script, which won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay: Thelma & Louise.

  Exempt yourself from shit.

  Novelist/screenwriter Harlan Ellison has a typewriter emblazoned with “I am an artist and should be exempt from shit.”

  ALL HAIL

  Harlan Ellison!

  The screenwriter/novelist did an interview with a magazine and posed for the photograph accompanying it. He was nude.

  The caption read, “The writer at work; naked and unashamed.”

  “Fuck You” Money

  You know you have “fuck you” money when you tip the bathroom attendant ten bucks for handing you a towel and then, after he looks at you quizzically, you hand him another ten and smile as you walk out the door.

  Sit on your damn butt.

  What’s the key to being a successful screenwriter?

  I say it’s “sitzfleisch”—a German term that means the ability and the strength to sit on your ass.

  According to my writer/producer friend Bill Froug, it’s “the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

  Ego is good.

  Paddy Chayefsky: “The most impure motives are useful to a beginning writer. Just to get your name in the papers is not an improper motivation for a writer, when you’re a kid, when you’re young. The need for fame and notoriety, I think, is part of the package that brings you into show business.”

  When Paddy was at the height of his fame, he was the only screenwriter to get his picture
—of him beating away at his typewriter—on the posters for his movies.

  I tried like hell to equal that but couldn’t do it. I did get the line “From Joe Eszterhas” splashed across the poster for An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. I also got the same words onto the T-shirts made to promote the movie, which, alas, was a critical and commercial disaster.

  Hollywood is the kingdom of greed.

  It doesn’t matter if you are a convicted child molester; it doesn’t matter if you once pissed on a studio executive’s new Tibetan rug; it doesn’t matter if you bitch-slapped David Geffen at the Ivy; it doesn’t matter if you told the press how Sherry Lansing saved the best Paramount scripts for her husband to direct.

  All that matters is that someone who reads your script believes that money can be made making it into a movie.

  Be polite at all times.

  My fellow Hungarian, actor Tony Curtis: “Universal sent me to Chicago on tour for a picture. I made an appearance at a theater, and while I was there I met a beautiful girl who worked in the Universal distributing office, and I asked her if she’d go out with me after I finished the tour that day. She said yes, so we had dinner, and I took her up to the hotel room. We necked on the couch and got semi-undressed, and she started to go down on me. About the fourth stroke, she stopped and looked up at me and said, ‘If my mother could only see me now.’ I said, ‘Darling, it’s not polite to talk with your mouth full.’ ”

  When speaking to people in the industry, try to put things in Hollywood terms.

  Producer Robert Evans to director Larry Kasdan: “I’d give up a blow job to direct this picture.”

  Practice humming.

  You, too, can sound authoritative.

  Producer Robert Evans says his deep baritone is a result of many years of practice.

  Humming, Evans says, deepens the voice.

  Evans hums all day, every day.

  Never stand anyone up for a meeting.

  I had a breakfast scheduled with agent John Gaines, but I got back to my hotel at five o’clock in the morning, after extensive latenight research. I knew I’d never make the breakfast. So I called to cancel. At five in the morning. To cancel an eight o’clock date.

  John said, “I’ve never had anyone call me at five in the morning to cancel breakfast.”

  I said, “I didn’t want to be rude and stand you up,” then hung up … and laughed myself to sleep.

  Always treat superstar actors with the proper respect.

  When screenwriter/novelist Charles Bukowski met Arnold Schwarzenegger, he said, “You’re a piece of shit.”

  You, too, can be Jack Nicholson’s bodyguard.

  Screenwriter/novelist Jim Harrison: “Several times when traveling with Jack Nicholson, I suppose partly because of my poor tailoring and thickish appearance, I had been mistaken for his bodyguard.”

  TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

  Don’t let yourself get horsewhipped.

  Zsa Zsa Gabor: “Once she arrived in America, my sister Magda also started acting, winning parts in several plays. Then she married an Irish screenwriter. Unfortunately, though, he was continually drunk. Magda complained to Father, who promptly horsewhipped the screenwriter and arranged for Magda to divorce him.”

  Your time is more precious than theirs.

  A producer sent me a two-page outline of a story he wanted me to write. To each page was attached a thousand-dollar bill.

  I read the two pages and then, just to be fair to the man, reread the two pages.

  I didn’t like the story and wrote him a note telling him that … and also thanking him for the “beer money.”

  You, too, can be Robert Evans’s writer.

  Robert Evans took two writers with him to the island of Maui, where they all stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, which overlooked the sea, and helped Bob write his autobiography.

  One “writer” was sixteen, the other seventeen. They looked like corn-fed farm girls. During the day sometimes, while Evans slept, gathering his energy, they enjoyed manicures and pedicures in the hotel salon.

  Evans introduced them to everyone they met as “my writers.”

  A Mush Pit

  A place where a lot of women looking to become stars hang out to meet powerful men in the industry—to get a knee up the ladder. Producer Robert Evans’s house is a well-known Hollywood mush pit.

  You won’t get a Land Rover, either.

  On Lethal Weapon 3, the studio gave the director, Dick Donner, and the star, Mel Gibson, gift Land Rovers.

  Shane Black, the screenwriter who invented the entire franchise, didn’t get one. He didn’t even get to write the sequels.

  If you make it, they’ll ask you to steal from yourself.

  Mike Medavoy: “The natural instinct of studio executives is to pigeonhole creative people and ask them to repeat themselves.”

  I got pigeonholed.

  I had a meeting with Cuba Gooding, Jr., about playing soul singer Otis Redding in my script Blaze of Glory.

  I wrote it after Showgirls and Jade and was happy that since the critics had clobbered me for excessive sexuality, there was no sex in this script.

  “I want to talk to you about that,” Cuba said. “You’re the guy who wrote Showgirls and Jade. That’s what you do—I mean, can’t we put some sex in this script?”

  PERK OF SUCCESS: YOU DON’T HAVE TO GET YOUR TEETH FIXED

  “I could never be attracted to a man who had perfect teeth,” Marilyn Monroe said. “A man with perfect teeth alienates me. I don’t know what it is, but it has something to do with the kind of men I have known with perfect teeth. They weren’t so perfect elsewhere.”

  Learn all you can about modern art.

  Steven Spielberg has an extensive collection; the real reason producer David Geffen and once-superagent Michael Ovitz hate each other is because they are jealous of each other’s art collections; and—get this—director Arne Glimcher (Mambo Kings) was an art dealer (Ovitz’s) when he began directing movies.

  Don’t write an adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

  Gatsby has been filmed four times. It has failed at the box office four times. Being assigned to adapt Gatsby for the screen is the filmic equivalent of what city editors on newspapers used to do to rookie reporters: assign them to interview the mother of the Unknown Soldier.

  Don’t let your urine rise to your head.

  It’s an old industry saying.

  When the agent Michael Ovitz told me his foot soldiers would put me into the ground, he was letting his urine rise to his head.

  When I told the director Arthur Hiller he was a “doddering old fuck,” I was letting my urine rise to my head.

  Other urine risings:

  The director Paul Verhoeven saying to me, “I am the director, ja? You are the writer. You will do what I tell you to do.”

  And me saying to Paul: “If you use that tone of voice with me again, I’m going to come across this fucking table at you.”

  (Notice how artfully I used my f-bomb in that last sentence.)

  Choose your projects wisely.

  In the 1980s, “the Polish Prince,” crooner Bobby Vinton, asked me to write the screenplay of his “true life story.”

  It was a tortuously tough decision … but I turned the Polish Prince down.

  Fartland

  What Hollywood executives call the Midwest, the heartland.

  Mel Brooks caused the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

  The former president of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, watched Blazing Saddles in the White House screening room twenty-four times.

  I wonder if Mel Brooks feels responsible for what happened with Monica.

  Writing during a Writers Guild strike can be extremely lucrative.

  The Guild strike had been going on for several weeks when the producer flew up to see me at my home in northern California.

  If I rewrote the script that would soon go into production, he said, he would pay me 200,000.

  He would put the
money into a bank account in Dubrovnik, in what was then Yugoslavia.

  No one would ever know, he said. Not the IRS and certainly not the Writers Guild, which forbids doing any writing during a strike.

  Did I do it?

  Ha! What are you—nuts?

  If you live in L.A., don’t get involved in Writers Guild politics.

  Don’t join any committees or go to too many meetings. The people who get involved in Writers Guild politics are people who don’t, or can’t, write all that much—or all that well, or all that well anymore.

  They’ll pay you for writing nothing.

  I made a deal with ABC Films in the early eighties to write a script about the wheat harvesters who travel from state to state in the summer.

  I was to be paid 350,000.

  I went off to Nebraska and Iowa for two weeks to interview the harvesters. When I got back, ABC informed me that their marketing people had concluded while I was doing research that a film about wheat harvesters wouldn’t be commercially successful.

  So ABC wanted me to write a film instead about Ross Perot.

  My agent said not a chance—the deal we had made called for me to write a script about wheat harvesters.

  ABC Films paid me the full fee—350,000—for what amounted to two weeks’ research.

  Don’t buy the mink coat yet.

  This advice was given to me by F.I.S.T. producer Patrick Palmer after everyone involved loved my first-draft screenplay.

  He was right. The movie went into turnaround; then forty pages had to be cut from the script; then 7 million had to be cut from the budget; then Robert De Niro wouldn’t respond to the studio’s offer to star in the film; then Sylvester Stallone played the lead instead of De Niro; and after all that, the movie failed both critically and commercially.

  With a mentor like this, you, too, can cowrite Predator.