The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood

by Joe Eszterhas

  Find yourself a smart mate.

  I take my wife, Naomi, into most studio meetings with me. Before he was the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger relied on his wife, Maria, the same way.

  Says studio head Mike Medavoy about trying to get Arnold to star in the Sixth Day: “Maria Shriver made notes on all the drafts of the script. She saw her role as her husband’s advisor and protector. In one meeting, she was the only one who had problems with the material, so I began addressing my questions to her, as if she were the one who had to be fully sold on the material. In a way, she was. No matter how much money we paid Arnold, he wasn’t going to do the movie unless both he and Maria felt comfortable with the script.”

  Does anyone realize that Maria Shriver is running the state of California?

  We all have our own trophies.

  I’m jealous that Bill Goldman has won two Oscars and I’ve won none.

  But I bet Bill Goldman is jealous that I’ve bedded Sharon Stone.

  Larry McMurtry says what you’re doing isn’t even hard work.

  Screenwriter/novelist Larry McMurtry: “So much has been written about the miseries of screenwriting or, more precisely, about the miseries of the screenwriter’s lot, that I, for one, am sick of reading it. I think it is time to redress the balance, to treat Hollywood fairly, and to suggest that screenwriting, far from being hard work, might actually be considered to be a form of creative play.”

  PERK OF SUCCESS: YOU CAN MAKE THEM BABY-SIT YOUR DOG

  Screenwriter John Milius, at the height of his success, forced producers to make side deals with him. Not only did they have to sign a contract for him to write the script; they also had to baby-sit his dog on certain days so he could write that script.

  ALL HAIL

  Harlan Ellison!

  After he won a copyright court battle with Paramount over a TV show, the screenwriter/novelist bought a billboard just outside the Paramount lot.

  It read WRITERS—DON’T LET THEM STEAL FROM YOU.

  Unemployable

  The biggest scare word in Hollywood—as in, “You’ll never eat lunch in this town again.” As in, “NO—MORE—MONEY!”

  Your film can become a joke at the Oscars.

  Discussing my film Showgirls, Whoopi Goldberg said at the sixty-eighth Academy Awards, “I haven’t seen that many poles mistreated since World War Two.”

  Make ’em feel smart and you’ll get your way.

  I learned this trick from screenwriter Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy). He’d finish his script and then tear six or seven pages out of it and turn the script in to the studio.

  The studio execs would sometimes—not always—notice that something seemed to be missing from a sequence and suggest that he fill it in with some scenes.

  Seemingly acting on their suggestions, he would then put the pages that he had torn out back into the script.

  The studio executives would then praise him for listening to, and acting upon, their suggestions.

  When you’re not writing, read stage plays.

  Reading plays is great training for writing dialogue; think of it as doing push-ups for the ear.

  Don’t, however, read playwrights like Mamet or Pinter and Beckett, who are so stylized that their style can creep into your head and stylistically affect what you write.

  Reading plays from the thirties and forties is ideal training because plays in those days were much more accessible than they are today.

  Hollywood won’t corrupt you, but your family might.

  Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “I begin to realize why people believe the legend that Hollywood corrupts writers. But they’re quite wrong. All Hollywood does is give them enough money so they can get married and have kids like normal people. But it’s the getting married and having kids that really corrupts them.”

  Pay for your own drinks.

  If a studio has flown you to L.A. for a meeting and is picking up your hotel bill, don’t put any drinks you may have had in the bar on it.

  A studio accountant will let the executive in charge of your project know how many drinks you had. If you had more than a few, the studio will decide that you have a drinking problem and will not hire you for the project.

  And, obviously, don’t charge to your hotel bill any hookers, sex toys, or jewelry bought in the store in the lobby, either.

  See Thunder Road.

  Hunter S. Thompson: “Between Mitchum and Burroughs and Marlon Brando and James Dean and Jack Kerouac, I got myself a serious running start before I was twenty years old, and there was no turning back. Buy the ticket, take the ride. So welcome to Thunder Road, Bubba. It was one of those movies that got a grip on me when I was too young to resist. It convinced me that the only way to drive was at top speed with a car full of whiskey, and I have been driving that way ever since, for good or ill.”

  PERK OF SUCCESS: SLEEP WITH THE STAR

  Even if you’re married—it’s worth the memory.

  Don’t lose your head in the process, though. Paddy Chayefsky and Kim Novak had a brief affair. “He was awestruck, really, that someone like Kim Novak would be interested in him,” said a producer. “Kim had Paddy thinking he was seven feet tall, a blond, blue-eyed WASP.” Said another producer: “This was a sensational-looking woman. She had a pair of tits you would not believe, and she never wore a bra.”

  Paddy believed his friend Irwin Shaw’s dictum that “the writer only has one obligation—to stay alive and try to please himself.”

  But he lost his head. He told his wife that he wanted a divorce because he was in love with Novak.

  His wife, luckily, said, “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  A week later, Novak dumped him.

  So you’re a little nuts, so what.

  I know it wasn’t really sane to tell those Disney executives to “get your hands off my dick” in the Disney conference room … or to send a memo to a director that caused him to suffer a heart attack.

  But all writers are a little nuts. The people who know me and love me have made peace with that.

  As the writer/director Garson Kanin said of his friend Paddy Chayefsky: “I think it’s fair to say—and nothing against him—Paddy was a little crazy. I don’t think there is any important writer who is completely sane. If he was, he wouldn’t be a writer—or a painter, or a poet, or a sculptor. I don’t mean clinically insane—but his reactions aren’t normal, and his perceptions certainly aren’t normal. And Paddy, more than most, was a little bit cuckoo.”

  It is not who you know.

  All it takes to become a successful screenwriter is to sell one script.

  One person has to read your script and believe that he/she can make money off of it. They can’t begin making money, of course, until they pay you some.

  Spend your time on your butt, working on that one script instead of trying to seduce people into being your friends—so they can be there to buy your script, if and whenever you finally get around to writing it.

  They’ll do everything they can to stop you from being a star.

  It is not in the studio’s interest for a screenwriter to become a star, the way directors become stars.

  If a screenwriter becomes a star, studio execs won’t be able to tell him what to write.

  If a screenwriter becomes a star, he’ll wind up in the papers and on TV, criticizing studio heads.

  Everyone knows directors are controllable and they need the studios to be able to work.

  But those crazy asshole writers—all they need to go to work is a piece of paper and a pencil.

  Don’t break your own heart.

  Shane Black was the hottest young writer in town, selling original spec scripts for lots of money. He was a savvy, well-read guy with balls.

  The Long Kiss Goodnight was his pet project—a brilliant script that director Renny Harlin and his wife at the time, Geena Davis, turned into a turgid and empty film.

  Shane stopped writing for a long time after that nightmarish experience and tried to
make it as an actor. The reason he stopped writing was that his heart was broken, but that’s only half the story.

  The reason his heart was broken was that he had broken it himself. He had let Renny Harlin cajole and charm him into making fatal changes to his script, the changes that ruined his own script and doomed his own movie.

  After many years, Shane came back to direct his own script—one way of making sure you don’t break your own heart again … unless, of course, he listens too closely to his producer, Joel Silver, who is, unfortunately, a friend of his and very good at cajoling and charming.

  Don’t write for “blood money.”

  Blood money” is when you’re rewriting someone else’s script, and you change anything and everything in the script—plot points, characters, and especially characters’ names—not because the changes are creatively necessary but so you’ll get screen credit and the money that’s tied to you getting that credit.

  There is a story, hopefully apocryphal, about a screenwriter assigned to adapt The Great Gatsby. The screenwriter changed the name “Gatsby” to “Farrell” and the title to “The Great Farrell” in an attempt to get screen credit and more money.

  Sometimes the damn place just makes you cry.

  Corky was a sweet little man who poured the stiffest drinks at the Hideaway Bar at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

  Jack Lemmon and I would sip our drinks there on soggy or smoggy L.A. afternoons.

  Corky had a laugh that made Jack and me laugh, and he told the dumbest jokes in Southern California.

  One day, I walked in and there was a new guy behind the bar and Jack was floating his scotch high up in his eyeballs.

  Jack told me that Corky had met a guy right there in the Hideaway Room who’d taken him home, then left his body in a Dumpster.

  No more laughs and jokes. No more hiding in the afternoons at the Hide-away Bar. Jack and I both started to cry, realizing that sometimes there is simply no shelter from the town’s degradations.

  You don’t want to get in a creative disagreement with a Scientologist.

  While they’re nice folks, scientologists don’t like to be messed with.

  I once threatened to take Sylvester Stallone on in a fistfight. I once threatened to break a studio executive’s knees. I once told the most powerful man in Hollywood to go fuck himself and the foot soldiers he rode in on.

  But under no circumstances would I get into a creative disagreement with a Scientologist.

  Besides, I don’t think the Dogon fighting stick or the Tibetan rock or the hunting knife I carry are any match for their E-meter.

  You don’t want to mess with that E-meter, either.

  Scientologists have this machine called the E-meter. They will have someone read your script and E-meter it before one of their people commits to do the movie.

  It’s more than enough, in my experience, for a screenwriter to deal with a director, a producer, studio notes, a star’s ego, et cetera.

  Trust me on this: You don’t need to deal with an E-meter.

  Oscarosis

  A disease whose main symptom is that the victim is willing to do anything—anything—to win an Oscar.

  With actors and executives, act like you’re a playwright, not a screen-writer.

  Actress Jill Hennessy (Crossing Jordan): “When you’re an actor working in the theater, you would never say anything to the writer, never alter the dialogue, never dream to ask for changes.”

  Good ideas can come from great gossip.

  In Sliver, Sharon Stone spends a lot of time looking through a telescope at her New York apartment building neighbors. I got the idea from a friend of Jackie Kennedy’s who told me Jackie loved to do the same thing.

  ALL HAIL

  Clifford Odets!

  Agent Swifty Lazar: “Clifford Odets was a wily client. One day he called me. He was so in debt, he said, that he’d sold his art collection. But he had an idea for a movie, Page One. I knew he was spitballing, but I took him over to see Jerry Wald and Jerry bit. Jerry sent us out to Darryl Zanuck.

  “I got Odets two hundred thousand, a small fortune for a screenplay in those days. … A month later, Odets invited me to pick up the script. When I walked into his cottage, he was holding a six-hundred-page screenplay—a document about five times longer than a standard script.

  “Odets said, ‘I’ll cut it if they pay me.’

  “I soon realized that Odets had planned this caper. … I got him some additional money. Odets started cutting away. He trimmed it down to three hundred pages, and then I had to get him some additional money to cut it to two hundred. At that point, he announced he wanted to direct the movie. … They let him direct the picture. … It was a ghastly movie that died on Pico Boulevard and should never have been released.”

  The word Death in a title is death at the box office.

  It will bum audiences out and let them know they’re in for a depressing experience. I’ve heard at least three producers tell me this.

  Each time I’ve said, “Have you ever heard of something called Death of a Salesman?”

  If you sell the concept for a script, demand a hotel suite in which to write it.

  Many screenwriters claim to get in touch with their muses best at places like the Dolder Grand in Zurich, the Dorchester in London, the Kahala on Oahu, the Ritz-Carlton on Maui, or the relatively cut-rate Beverly Hills Hotel and Chateau Marmont in L.A.

  While vacationing with my family at the Kahala once, we were sitting on the beach when we saw John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion walking along the beach, their heads down, matching sweaters tied around their hips, lost in serious thought.

  A producer and his family sat near us and I asked him what Dunne and Didion were doing here.

  “What do you think?” the producer said. “Can’t you tell? Writing. Working.”

  If you make it, directors will resent the amount of money you make.

  Director Phillip Noyce: “I continued to work on a script of The Sum of All Fears. Paul Attanasio [Donnie Brasco and Quiz Show] wrote another draft with a lot of input from myself and, particularly, my business partner Kathleen McLaughlin. He was paid more than a million dollars to rewrite the screenplay, which, due to another commitment, he ended up doing in about ten days. Nice work if you can get it!”

  You didn’t write Gone with the Wind.

  I was at a shop in Los Angeles in the mideighties and the store owner asked me what I did for a living. I told him I wrote movies, and when he asked me which ones, I told him my last movie was Flashdance.

  “Hey,” he said, “you must have worked with my niece.” He told me her name.

  I’d never heard of his niece and asked what she did on the film.

  He said, “She wrote it, too.”

  I said, “No, she didn’t.”

  He said, “Yes, she did.”

  I said, “Is her name up on-screen?”

  He said, “She wrote the damn movie; that’s what she told me.”

  I discovered that his niece had been brought in to do some “polishing” on the script but didn’t do enough work on it to get any credit from the Writers Guild.

  It was my first introduction to a whole subgenre of screenwriters in Hollywood: those who claim to have “written” a movie but don’t have any writing credit on it.

  You’re a writer, not a social butterfly.

  I ran into him by the pool of the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. He came up and introduced himself and told me his story.

  He was a successful and well-known attorney from Chicago but had always wanted to write for television, so one day he took a leave of absence and came out to L.A. He was living at the Four Seasons.

  He’d given himself six months. He’d be at the Four Seasons for six months and in that time he would have as many meetings with television producers and executives and showrunners as possible. If it didn’t work out in six months, he’d go back to Chicago.

  I got a note from him about a year later. He was back wi
th the law firm in Chicago. It hadn’t worked out in L.A.

  “But I’ll always know that I tried,” he wrote. “I didn’t futz around. I really, really went for it.”

  I remembered what I had told him when we met: “Stop running around meeting people. Go back to Chicago and write something.”

  I hoped that’s what he was doing.

  You, too, can con the MPAA.

  When the MPAA ratings board saw Basic Instinct, they gave the movie an NC-17.

  As long as Sharon uncrossed her legs, the board told us, the NC-17 would stand.

  I told the studio PR people to tell the MPAA that this wasn’t a sex scene; this was a confrontation scene between an empowered and liberated modern woman and her male-piggy poe/leece inquisitors.

  The “empowerment” argument swayed the MPAA and saved the beaver. Paul Verhoeven only had to take a few snips from the, um, focal point of the scene to satisfy the ratings board.

  You never know how they’ll film the scene that you wrote.

  I wrote an extravagant dance sequence for Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.

  Some studio wizard suggested cutting the sequence in half and rewriting it, but I convinced them that a big dance movie had to have a lot of dance in it.

  Since Jenny couldn’t dance very well and certainly couldn’t do a big dance sequence, the director hired a “dance double” for Jenny named Marine Jahan.

  But it still wasn’t enough to convince the audience that Jenny Beals could dance, because Marine Jihan couldn’t do the floor spins.

  So the producers brought in someone who could do the floor spins perfectly—a guy, who had to wear a wig and shave his legs … but who refused to shave his mustache.