But now, his hard-on was making him so uncomfortable that he couldn’t even sit at his desk anymore. He lay down in bed and tried to figure out how to get himself unblocked. After awhile, he found himself unblocked with one thing but not with the other.
Don’t try to write classic lines of dialogue.
If you write them, you’ll write them accidentally, not purposely. They’ll pop out of the material.
I’ve written two famous, or infamous, lines through the course of fifteen scripts.
Flashdance: “When you give up your dream, you die.”
Showgirls: “How does it feel not to have anyone comin’ on you anymore?”
Twenty years after I wrote that line (the former, not the latter), my parish priest told me it had been the inspiration of his life.
TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA
At all costs, don’t write lines like this.
Actress and famed Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “I adore George [Sanders] in that movie because he was so rude with women, saying the words of Somerset Maugham, like: ‘All women are like little beasts. You have to beat them and that’s when they love you.’ ”
No one can predict what will become a classic line of dialogue.
The studio felt strongly that the last line of Jagged Edge would be an oft-repeated one.
After a bloody, nerve-racking battle between a masked Jeff Bridges and Glenn Close, private eye Robert Loggia looks at Jeff’s body on the floor and says, “Fuck him. He was trash.”
Nobody remembered or repeated the line. Some people, focus groups showed, didn’t even hear it.
A Three Beat
Three lines of dialogue—the last line (the three beat) pays the first line off.
Read your dialogue aloud to yourself.
When you think you are finished writing your script, organize a reading with your significant other and your friends. The more you hear the words you’ve written, the more you’ll want to polish the words to get them just right.
Play your dialogue back to yourself on tape.
I’m convinced that the really smart wannabe screenwriters driving aimlessly around the 405 or the 10 in L.A. aren’t doing it because they read Play It As It Lays.
They’re doing it because they’re listening to tapes of themselves reading their screenplays.
You’re better than a tape recorder.
Paddy Chayefsky: “I’d like to find a tape recorder as clever as I am in dialogue. The whole labor of writing is to make it look like it just came off the top of your head.”
If you can come up with a good title, you’re halfway there.
To boffo box-office heaven, that is, although the road to a good title, even a bad title, can be a circuitous, even byzantine one. Consider the following.
While everyone involved with the production agreed that F.I.S.T. was a great title, it didn’t matter. The movie itself didn’t work and F.I.S.T. tanked.
Flashdance was a great title. Indeed, while most of his script was gone in my rewrite, Tom Hedley, the original screenwriter, had come up with that great title.
Jagged Edge was a great title, but it wasn’t mine. My title for the movie was Hearts of Fire—a crazily misfired title for this tough courtroom drama. The title Jagged Edge was the brainchild of a studio assistant who pored through every word of my script and found the description “knife with a jagged edge” for the murder weapon.
I used Hearts of Fire again years later for a rock-and-roll movie with Bob Dylan and Rupert Everett. It didn’t work for that movie, either. Nobody saw it. The movie was so bad that it literally killed the director, my friend Richard Marquand.
My favorite title was Telling Lies in America, an offbeat piece about a young Hungarian man who wants to be a writer. The original title was Magic Man, and I changed the title so that studio execs reading Telling Lies in America wouldn’t know it was the same script they’d read ten years ago.
The only way to outwit their computers and avoid old readers’ reports was to change the title. I was pulling a scam, and the scam gave me the best title I’d ever come up with.
What do you expect from a young man who wound up making millions for the made-up stories—the lies—that he told to the world?
My worst title was probably An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. Too clumsy, too gawky, too geeky. I like the movie (I’m one of the few), but I hate the title.
That was God speaking to me.
My script entitled Love Hurts was in its brown envelope and I was almost out of the house on my way to Federal Express to send it to my agent, when I suddenly thought of another title for it: Basic Instinct.
I ran back inside the house, unsealed the envelope, and typed up a new cover page.
Did you see Anhedonia?
Woody Allen wanted the title of Annie Hall to be Anhedonia (“the inability to feel pleasure”). His cowriter, Marshall Brickman, wanted the title to be It Had to Be a Jew.
Save your titles.
I wrote a script about two little boys who go off on an adventure together. I called it Pals. I sold the script with that title to Lorimar Pictures. The studio didn’t like the title and came up with a new one: Big Shots.
Years later, when Richard Marquand and I were talking about making a movie about a hardhearted man and his relationship with two little kids, I called it Pals. The title was again changed by the studio, this time to Nowhere to Run, although the studio had previously called it Lion on the Lam (yup, you read it right).
Since all these years have passed, and since I have four little boys now, I am planning to write a new script about a hardhearted man and his relationship with four little kids and calling it Pals (just kidding).
You can recycle your titles.
My movie Betrayed was first called Sins of the Fathers, then Father of Lies, then Heartland, and then Eighty-Eight.
My movie Music Box was at first called Sins of the Fathers and then Father of Lies.
You can’t copyright a title.
In 1927, Ben Hecht wrote an original screenplay called American Beauty.
In 2000, another American Beauty (1999) won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
They can steal your title.
The producers were working on a script with playwright Bernard Slade, who also had a play running in London that was called Fatal Attraction.
The producers decided not to make the script Slade was working on, then went on to work with a young writer named James Dearden on a thriller. The thriller became a hit movie.
It was called Fatal Attraction—nothing but a coincidence, of course, nothing at all to do with Bernard Slade’s play.
HOW TO DEAL WITH WRITER’S BLOCK … THE BROKEN TOE SOLUTION.
My wife bought me a heavy rock at an art fair. On it were written the words Writer’s Block.
I kept it on my writing desk.
One day, blocked on a script, I smashed my desk with my fist and the Writer’s Block fell on my big toe.
It hurt like hell. I put ice on it, but it still hurt like hell.
I went to the doctor and he said the toe was broken. There was nothing he could do, though, except put a bandage on it and tape that toe to another one.
I hobbled back home, sat back down at my desk, and found myself, miraculously, unblocked!
I moved my Writer’s Block from my writing desk to my bedroom nightstand as a possible talismanic weapon in other creative situations.
My big toe still hurts, six years later, when cold weather sets in. The doctor says I’ve got arthritis in it.
There are obviously pluses and minuses, ups and downs, to a Writer’s Block.
You’re finished writing your script—this is your greatest moment as a screenwriter.
Playwright Robert Anderson: “I feel best about a play when I finish writing it, just before I send it off to anybody. I’ve written it, but no one has seen it, no one can say anything about it, no one can piss in it.”
Hold on to the first draft of your scri
pt as well as all notes you may have taken in longhand.
You never know. Most scripts will rot away in storage somewhere, but …
I still have my rough draft of Basic Instinct, written on my manual typewriter and entitled Love Hurts, with notes to myself (in the second draft) in the margins.
Last year, a French movie memorabilia freak who loved the film offered me 500,000 for it. I turned him down. I figure that by the time my grandchildren sell it, it well be worth more than the 3 million I got for writing it.
I know that sometime in the future, the director of Basic Instinct, Paul Verhoeven, will be able to finance a movie with what he’ll get for my first-draft script of Showgirls. Not because of the value of my script, but because each scene of his script is scrawled over with his pencil drawings of the way he saw the scene on-screen. Paul’s script is an erotic comic book of breasts, butts, and vaginas, accompanied by my words translated into Paul’s Dutch.
I know Paul also has, but probably won’t sell, the scented pair of panties Sharon took off and handed him the morning he shot the beaver in Basic Instinct.
Once you finish your script, you don’t have much control.
Novelist/screenwriter George Pelecanos: “There are so many things that are out of your control as a screenwriter. It’s not just the ‘evil producers.’ It’s also actors, directors, editors, cinematographers, the crew—anything that gets between you and your words, from when you’re sitting in your room to the time it’s up on the screen.”
Make lots of copies of your script.
Thinking about posterity, send your script to friends and relatives and as many libraries as will accept it.
Screenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler: “There is no available body of screenplay literature because it belongs to the studios, not to the writers, and they won’t show it.”
What can you do to prevent being ripped off?
It’s not easy to do anything about it. You can do a few things to protect yourself, but not many. The day that you finish an outline or a script, send it to yourself in the mail. When you receive it, make sure not to open it and make sure you put it away in a safe place. That way, if you’re ripped off somewhere along the line, your lawyer can dramatically open the envelope in a courtroom and prove (a) that you wrote it and (b) when you wrote it.
Just as important: You can send an idea, a script, or an outline to the Writers Guild of America and register it—even if you’re not yet a member of the Guild. (You can even do it on-line. It will cost you twenty dollars if you’re not a member.) If you’re ripped off, you can then refer to the contents and the date in court.
If you are about to have a meeting with a studio executive, a development person, a producer, a director, an assistant to any of the above, or an agent to pitch a story, as soon as you get home from the meeting, write a memo describing the details of the meeting as well as the details of the story or stories that you pitched. Same drill as before: Put the memo in an envelope, send it to yourself in the mail, and don’t open it when it comes back to you.
Besides these things, there’s not much you can do if you’re ripped off except sue. But suing is probably worth it. There are law firms that will take your case on a contingency basis. Studios and production entities usually don’t want to go to court. So the chances are better than even that you’ll make some bucks with a settlement.
Don’t ever tell the press what you’re writing.
I was ripped off with my very first movie, F.I.S.T.
Shortly after stories in the trade papers reported what F.I.S.T. was about, an Oscar-winning screenwriter—ironically, from my hometown—made a deal with a network to do the same story on television.
Because TV movies take a much shorter time to make, his film—Power—came out before F.I.S.T. did. So when F.I.S.T. came out, it appeared that I’d ripped off Power.
I was pissed, especially because I knew that this same Academy Award–winning screenwriter had been fired from my hometown newspaper—where I, too, had worked, albeit many years later—for stealing a watch from the scene of a jewelry store robbery that he was covering.
Interestingly, I, too, was fired from that same newspaper—not for stealing a watch, but for calling my editor some bad names in an article in a national publication.
A pox on both our houses, I say: He’s a thief; I’m an ingrate.
The best way to avoid being plagiarized.
Jay Leno: “You have to write faster than they can steal.”
Parallel Creativity
The phrase that will be used by someone who has plagiarized you.
PART FIVE
SELLING THE SCRIPT
LESSON 10
How Do You Feel About Going to
Bed with an Agent?
You’ve written your script. You need an agent or somebody in the business to read it. What can you do?
If you’ve read other screenwriting books, this is where everyone fudges. “Well,” they say, “it’s hard”—or they tell you to look up some agents’ names in Writer’s Yearly and send your script around.
This is what you do if you are a sexy, relatively good-looking man or woman willing to do anything to succeed.
You buy a plane ticket to L.A. You check yourself into a cheap motel in the Valley. You rent a car. You dress yourself up good to show your assets. Then you drive down to the bar of the Four Seasons or the Peninsula or the Mondrian in Beverly Hills or Hollywood and you pick out someone who looks like an agent or a development person (not that difficult to pick out: Prada or Armani black uniform, Cristophe haircut). And then you let yourself be picked up by him or her and you go home or upstairs in the hotel and you fuck that person’s brains out. You fuck like you’ve never fucked before. You fuck like it’s the bang of the century in Basic Instinct.
And before you leave, you give the person your script.
Let’s go over that again.
Did you hear me right, though? Was I actually saying … was I advocating whoring there?
No, no, no! Forget everything you’ve just read. That’s truly diabolical advice and I’m not the devil, am I? Am I? I’m a former altar boy, a devout Catholic. I even carry the cross on some Sundays at the Church of the Holy Angels in Bain-bridge Township, Ohio.
The kind of diabolic advice you’ve just read is given by the most jaded and corrupt Hollywood veterans, the kind of nontalents who tell you that it’s not what you know but who you know that will make you successful.
So I was just kidding, okay? Playing a devilish joke on you. I was kidding the same way I was kidding when I told teenagers to bring their fake IDs to see Showgirls. I was kidding then, too, but America didn’t get the joke. So I thought I’d put it into boldface type this time: You do not—do not, do not—have to pop an agent to make it!
What you have to do is much less demanding (both physically and morally). You have to sit in a comfortable chair and make up a story that hundreds of millions will want to see.
And while you don’t have to sleep with an agent, nobody is saying your story can’t include a bit of sex and violence. You can still carry the cross to the altar, even after writing Basic Instinct and Showgirls. You don’t have to be cynical yourself to write about corruption and corrupt people (either in a script or in a book cynically entitled The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood).
Don’t follow Madonna’s example.
She appeared in the office of Barbara Boyle, Orion’s head of production.
She dropped to her knees and sexily said, “I’ll do anything to get this part.”
Boyle said, “I’m happily married and I’m straight.”
Madonna said, “You should try everything once.”
Madonna got the part in Desperately Seeking Susan.
Don’t follow Warren’s example, either.
When Warren wanted to convince studio head Jack Warner to make Bonnie and Clyde, he grabbed Warner by the knees, fell to the floor, and said, “I’ll kiss your shoes here. I’ll lick ’em.”
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Jack Warner was not convinced.
He said, “Yeah, yeah, get up, Warren.”
If you need the home address and phone number of an agent who’d be perfect to help you, this is what you do.
Go to Variety.com and read stories about screenwriters selling scripts to the studios for big bucks. Make a list of five screenwriters.
Call the Writers Guild of America West and identify yourself as an assistant to producer Scott Rudin (or Joel Silver, Jerry Bruckheimer, or Edward Pressman). Ask the Guild to tell you the names of the agents representing the five screenwriters you picked from the Variety.com site.
Armed with the names of the five agents, get in touch with a Los Angeles private eye and make a deal with him to get you the home addresses and phone numbers of the five agents. (There will be a fee involved here, but it will be well worth it.)
Send your script to the home addresses of the five agents and wait a week. After a week, call them at home and ask if they’ve read your script. If you get any kind of positive (or frightened) response, convince the agent to meet with you at his office.
If you get a rude refusal to read your script, take it in stride and keep sending your script to the agent’s home once a week.
Always be very polite. Most agents are abject cowards. If you keep bugging them (nicely), sooner or later they’ll read your script—or have it read by an assistant—and see you just to be rid of you.
A more traditional way to find an agent.
Screenwriter/director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham): “The best way to get an agent is to send the manuscript to every agent ten times. That’s how I got an agent. I spent three years sending my script to everyone who would read it and knocking on doors. I sent it everywhere. Everyone in town is always looking for something they can sell. Get a list of the agencies that read unsolicited manuscripts.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 18
