Memo to Michael Moore.
Old Hollywood saying: “If you want to write a message, use Western Union.”
Don’t let anyone impugn your integrity … not even Farrah Fawcett.
In the book American Rhapsody, I wrote that Farrah Fawcett pooped on the front lawn at a party she was attending. In an interview with a New York gossip columnist, Farrah denied it. I wrote the gossip columnist a note:
“I sure don’t see why she’s denying it. In an interview in the September Movieline magazine she said, ‘If I’m on location in the woods and my trailer is miles away, I will go to the bathroom in the bushes. There’s no way my makeup lady would do that, for instance, but that’s who I am.’ Farrah clearly loves nature; she is, after all, a country girl from Texas.
“Let me say in defense of Farrah that we’ve all been in situations like that. It’s tough when nature calls so rudely. As they say in Ohio, where I’m from, ‘When you gotta go, you gotta go.’ I remember nearly causing an international incident once—when I asked a limo to pull over between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and took a hike into a field.
“Also, this party where nature called Farrah so rudely was held at the agent Arnold Rifkin’s house. I was at a party on another occasion at that house and I remember my wife, who was very pregnant at the time, had to use the bathroom. But the bathroom was locked. Some sniffling people were having a lengthy Hollywood conference in there. So I certainly understand the same thing could have happened to Farrah. Some sniffling people may have been having a lengthy Hollywood conference in the bathroom and Farrah couldn’t get in there and nature called.”
A pratfall is better than a kiss.
If you want to write a hit movie …
Remember screenwriter Preston Sturges’s (The Power and the Glory, Strictly Dishonorable) eleven rules for writing a hit movie:
A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
A leg is better than an arm.
A bedroom is better than a living room.
An arrival is better than a departure.
A birth is better than a death.
A chase is better than a chat.
A dog is better than a landscape.
A kitten is better than a dog.
A baby is better than a kitten.
A kiss is better than a baby.
A pratfall is better than anything.
Don’t write a script set in a jungle.
Actors will avoid your script. Actor Christopher Walken: “Just a month ago I shot in a place in Hawaii where they made Jurassic Park. I mean, I didn’t know there was a place like that: it was so pristine. … But I’ll tell you, I would have to really need money to do another jungle movie. I’m never going back to the jungle. It’s a nightmare. Getting up at night and turning on the light in the bathroom? You see lots of, you know, scary things. I’m never going back.”
They were honorable hookers.
During the blacklist, screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo sometimes wrote ten scripts a year under pseudonyms for relatively little amounts of money.
Because it was so difficult for them to get work, they did what Trumbo did. Trumbo agreed to rewrite and rewrite until the producer was “satisfied”—no matter how many drafts the producer wanted him to do and no matter what the producer wanted him to write.
Trumbo didn’t care. He just wrote what he was told to write.
Since this became somewhat common practice during the blacklist, some producers ever since have expected “their writers” to write this way. If you’re ever asked to do this, tell your producer you want to check it out with your lawyer.
You’re a bust-out loser if you do this.
Dalton Trumbo: “In order to earn what I do earn I have felt compelled to make a policy of absolutely guaranteeing my work. Thus I may rewrite a script three or four times. Certainly it’s not worth it for the one fee involved, but the man comes back if he gets this kind of service, and thus I am assured of a continuing income.”
Those old lefty screenwriters really were hacks.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “I am obliged to warn you in advance that an original screenplay, designed for sale on the local market, involves a combination of prose and conviction and sentimentality that appalls even me, who am used to it, and would appall you even more. The only thing which makes it possible for a self-respecting writer to engage in such an enterprise is that the story is never published, and is read only by Hollywood.”
Those old lefty screenwriters had some big balls, too.
Dalton Trumbo: “And so it chanced in Hollywood that each blacklisted writer, after swiftly describing that long parabola from the heart of the motion picture industry to a small house in a low-rent district, picked himself up, dusted his trousers, anointed his abrasions, looked around for a ream of clean white paper and something to deface it with, and began to write. Through secret channels, and by means so cunning that they may never be revealed, what we wrote was passed along until finally it appeared on a producer’s desk, and the producer looked upon it and found it good, and moneys were paid, and the writer’s children began contentedly to eat. Thus the black market.”
Free at last, free at last.
Blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, writing to a friend: “Perhaps I should not be as angry as I am against the weaklings, cravens, and liars who have succeeded in banning me from motion pictures. For I feel a sense of relief and a sense of buoyancy at no longer being an employee, at no longer being under the absolute necessity of earning, say, 75,000 a year. I’m sure I should never have had the courage—or perhaps one should say foolhardiness—to have left it voluntarily. My feeling now—as of today, that is, with the hope of succeeding elsewhere still strong in me—[is] that I shall never return to films, that if Metro asked me back tomorrow with all forgiven, I should refuse. Hunger, of course, could in time alter that decision. But for the present it stands.”
There are no heroes.
Said agent Ingo Preminger: “Nobody used blacklisted writers for the sake of giving them a chance, or for being interested in justice—everybody—whether it was Kirk Douglas with Spartacus or my brother Otto with Exodus—they all did it for business reasons. These blacklisted writers were bargains. You go to a bargain sale and the blacklist was a bargain.”
My friend Phillip Noyce is part of a vast Commie conspiracy.
When he read the script of his novel Patriot Games, author Tom Clancy faxed the producer, expressing his belief that “Hollywood was under siege from Communist infiltrators.”
Said director Phillip Noyce: “As soon as Clancy read the script he sent us a massive fax accusing us of running some sort of Hollywood, left-wing, liberal fellow-traveling club.”
If your film wins an Oscar, they’ll probably “forget” to thank you.
On Forrest Gump, everyone involved with the film who went up onstage forgot to thank the man whose novel it was based on: Winston Groom.
And on American Beauty, the director and the star forgot to thank the man who wrote the original screenplay, Alan Ball.
An Oscar is a pain in the …
Steven Spielberg, his Oscar in hand: “You know what gets tired? You think it’s your legs that’ll get tired, but it’s not. It’s your arm. Your arm gets tired holding it.”
Listen up, Michael Moore.
Paddy Chayefsky said this when accepting an Academy Award: “I would like to say, personal opinion, of course, that I’m sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal propaganda. I would like to suggest to Miss Vanessa Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple ‘Thank you’ would have sufficed.”
If you’re walking down a red carpet and the paparazzi are taking your picture.
Goldie Hawn: “Just turn your head and smile, but don’t stop. Never stop.”
At least your script can’t get flashlighted.
Until a few years ago, at Aca
demy screenings for best documentary, committee members voted with flashlights. If, at any given point, three-quarters of the flashlights in the room were on, the documentary was stopped and shitcanned.
Make sure you’ve really won the Oscar before you go up there to get it.
Will Rogers, host of the 1933 Academy Awards, announced best director by saying, “Come on up and get it, Frank!” Frank Capra got up and was on his way to the stage when he realized that the award was Frank Lloyd’s.
Make ’em use their rubber bullets.
The Academy Award producers have a serious contingency plan in case someone flips out up there in front of 600 million people and won’t stop talking.
They begin with blinding spotlights and end with rubber bullets—really.
His nomination got Trey Parker laid.
Screenwriter Trey Parker: “I was in a strip club in Vegas at four o’clock this morning. I was pretty fucked up, but I do remember looking at a stripper and yelling, ‘Hey, you wanna go with me to the Academy Awards nominee lunch tomorrow?’ And she looked down and yelled ‘Sure!’ ”
If you desperately want an Oscar …
Three statuettes ripped off in the late 1990s were never recovered by police. They’re out there somewhere—all you need are connections.
If you win an Oscar, display it proudly.
Screenwriter Ben Hecht used his as a doorstop in his home in Nyack, New York.
If you’re not nominated for an Oscar …
Hungarian composer Béla Bartók said, “Competitions are for horses, not men.”
I’ve never been nominated for an Oscar, but …
Jon Bon Jovi asked me to fly to Budapest, Hungary, with him and introduce the band onstage in the Hungarian language. And Sam Kinison dedicated a CD to me.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a screenplay!
At the sixty-sixth Academy Awards, a screenwriter hired an airplane that towed a banner behind it proclaiming WORLD’S FUNNIEST SCRIPT, along with a phone number.
It didn’t do him any good. The script remains unsold.
PART THREE
GETTING READY TO
WRITE THE SCRIPT
LESSON 7
Avoid the Woodpecker!
Inhale a writer you admire.
Knowing nothing about writing a play, Paddy Chayefsky taught himself playwriting by sitting down at the typewriter and copying Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour word for word.
He said, “I studied every line of it and kept asking myself, Why did she write this particular line?”
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW … F.I.S.T.
I grew up on the west side of Cleveland among working-class folks, many of whose parents were involved in the union struggles of the 1930s and 1940s.
The first script I wrote was called F.I.S.T. and was about a union’s struggles in the thirties and forties.
DO YOUR RESEARCH … BASIC INSTINCT
When I was a police reporter in Cleveland, I knew a cop who was also a television cameraman on his days off. He’d been involved in several police shootings. He craved action. He couldn’t stand to be away from the scene, even on his days off, which is why he did the cameraman gig. He liked it too much. He got sucked too close to the flame. I remembered him twenty years later when I wrote the burned-out cop Nick Curran, who got sucked too close to the flame in Basic Instinct.
ALL HAIL
The Old Macho Bastard!
Selznick told Ernest Hemingway that, as an homage to him, he would give him fifty thousand dollars from the profits of A Farewell to Arms, even though that was not in the contract.
Hemingway wrote him a note back, telling him that since Selznick’s forty-one-year-old wife was playing Hemingway’s twenty-four-year-old Catherine Barkley, any profit on the movie was unlikely.
But if a miracle somehow occurred and the movie did go into profit, Hemingway told Selznick, he could change the fifty grand into nickels … and shove them up his ass … until they came out his ears.
High Concept
The best high-concept definition of a film I’ve ever heard is producer Robert Evans’s description of his film The Cotton Club: “Gangsters, music, pussy.”
Don’t pitch a story; write it.
Don’t sit there like Willy Loman with a roomful of imbeciles who see shoe salesmen pitching their wares all day. If you do this, you’ll demean yourself and it will harm your creativity.
If you really believe in your story, believe in it enough not just to chatter about it but to sit down and do the hard work and write it.
It is the only honest way to sell a script. With a pitch, you’re trying to convince the studio that you will write a good script. Instead, just write the good script.
If they buy it, chances are good that they will piss in it less … because it’s all done and ready to be cast and produced.
And, too, if it’s already written and ready to go, they will pay you more for it than as a “pitch”—especially if you can get other studios interested in buying it.
One of the reasons I’ve made so much money on my scripts through the course of my career is that most of my sales have been scripts I just sat down and wrote and then sold … instead of “pitching” them to the imbeciles.
Real writers sit down and write: wannabe writers sit around and talk.
In a town full of cons, writing a spec script is an act of integrity.
It’s the honest way to go for both you and the studios you are trying to sell it to.
As a spec script, something that you have already written in toto for no compensation, it’s right there in front of your potential buyers. You’re not selling them a hustle: your promise in a pitch meeting that you’ll write and your promise how you’ll write it.
You’re selling the thing itself—boom!—it’s right there on the table, take it or leave it.
It’s the most honest way for you to deal with you, too. You can sell it to a whole bunch of possible buyers in a script auction instead of the one or two you’d pitch it to. If you get two or more wannabe buyers bidding against each other, the sky is your limit.
I sold Basic Instinct for 3 million because every production entity in town except one was bidding on it.
The greatest fun in screenwriting is not getting paid a lot of money … and it’s certainly no fun trying to hustle the Neanderthal who doesn’t even read and barely watches movies into being impressed with your pitch; the great fun in screenwriting is writing your first draft without anyone else’s ideas cluttering or polluting it. Just you and your muse and the empty page or blank screen. Creating. Playing God.
Why would you turn down being God for playing Willy Loman selling his shoes to an imbecile studio exec?
Pitching your script can hurt your writing.
Director David Lean: “These American screenwriters really frighten me. They talk so well and write so badly. I have now worked with five of them, and not one has come along with a big original idea. We need an original idea. Hence my fright.”
There is no risk to writing a spec script.
Not selling it is not a risk.
I didn’t sell several—Magic Man, Blaze of Glory, Platinum—but by writing each one I got better at writing scripts; I learned form and structure on each one. It was like going to school.
And even though no one bought those unsold-at auction scripts, a lot of people read them and admired them—which is how many years later I sold Magic Man (I retitled it Telling Lies in America). A producer who’d read it during the failed auction recommended it to a young director, who fell in love with it.
Ron Bass is Willy Loman.
Screenwriter Ron Bass (Rain Man): “I was sitting with David Madden [a studio executive] and I was pitching him. At the beginning, I used to have fifty different ideas, a carpetbag; I would go and I would pitch six or eight things at a time. I pitched him, over the course of a day, about six or seven ideas and two different main ideas. … I work in this very strange way where I book myself way
, way, way ahead. I’m usually booked for two or three years in advance; that’s the way I work. I have a lot of things going at the same time. I’m usually writing six or seven things at the same time, different drafts at different stages.”
Here comes the woodpecker!
One studio exec gave writers three minutes to pitch their stories. He had an aluminum pole in his office with a woodpecker on top of it. When the writer began the pitch, the exec prodded the woodpecker and it made its way down the pole—hammering away loudly with its beak—as the writer chattered on about his idea. The woodpecker got to the bottom of the pole exactly three minutes later, when the writer had to finish his pitch.
You don’t want to do your work at a urinal.
Ben Hecht walked into a restaurant rest room and found Sam Goldwyn standing at a urinal. Ben stood at the next urinal and pitched Sam a story. Goldwyn had prostate problems, so Ben had a long time to pitch. When Sam finally shook off, he told Ben he’d buy it for 125,000.
Don’t become “a good meeting.”
John Gregory Dunne: “Screeenwriters known in Hollywood as ‘good meetings’ are those with the gift of schmoozing an idea so successfully—as if getting that idea down on paper was only a matter of some incidental typing—that studio executives pressed development funds on them.”
Don’t listen to morons like this.
In his book Screenwriting from the Heart: The Technique of the Character-Driven Screenplay (the reading line of which describes it as “An Indispensable Guide to Developing Dramatic and Passionate Screenplays Based on Compelling Characters”), Professor James Ryan writes: “To begin a pitch you should first lure someone with a tease, such as ‘Did you ever think what it must be like to have sex with someone in your office? It doesn’t just happen in the Oval Office. Maybe your girlfriend has dumped you and you are hurt and vulnerable, or maybe you found out that your lover is two-timing you.’ The pitch then continues to the story. … You may notice that I tied the tease to the current events of that time in the Oval Office. … However trite it may seem, it’s good strategy. Giving a pitch … is about being simple and shameless in your effort to grab the listener’s suggestion.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 12
