Stars are better with their mouths closed.
Screenwriter Robert Towne: “What was once said of the British aristocracy, that they did nothing and did it very well—is a definition that could be applied to movie actors. For gifted movie actors affect us most, I believe, not by talking, fighting, fucking, killing, cursing, or cross-dressing. They do it by being photographed. The point is that a fine actor onscreen conveys a staggering amount of information before he ever opens his mouth.”
Work with actors who are unknown.
Producer Sam Spiegel: “When actors are still comparatively unknown, they are easygoing and amiable. When they lose their sense of proportion, they become lionized and begin to believe their own publicity.”
A complete unknown can be better in a part than Robert De Niro or Gene (“the Hack”) Hackman.
Director Phillip Noyce: “Between a beginner and an experienced actor there is a huge gap. And often it’s better not to fill that gap, because someone with absolutely no experience, and therefore no technique, can be just as good as the most experienced actor. With experience come actorly tricks, acting techniques that can make a performance false.”
If you marry an actress, don’t write a script for her.
Arthur Miller wrote The Misfits for Marilyn Monroe. This is what she had to say: “Arthur did this to me. He could have written anything and he comes up with this. If that’s what he thinks of me, well, then I’m not for him and he’s not for me. Arthur said it’s his movie. I don’t think he even wants me in it. It’s all over. We have to stay with each other because it would be bad for the film if we split up now. … I think Arthur secretly likes dumb blondes. Some help he is.”
Find your own Marilyn Monroe and have a fling with her.
Mexican screenwriter José Bolaños found the actual Marilyn. He was one of her last lovers. This is what she said about him: “He’s the greatest lover in the whole wide world. I heard he writes some of the worst movies in Mexico. Silly romances. But what do I care? Everything else he does is incredible.”
ALL HAIL
Mercedes de Acosta!
Truman Capote designed a game that he called the International Daisy Chain. Its goal was to connect people through the people they had slept with.
Capote said that the best card to have in the game was screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta because she had slept with so many people, “you could get to anyone from Francis Cardinal Spellman to the Duchess of Windsor.”
You, too, can marry a movie star.
Paul Bern wrote screenplays for German films directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg.
That’s not what made him famous. What made him famous was marrying sex bomb Jean Harlow.
When Harlow married him, she said, “He doesn’t talk fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck all the time.”
He was just another impotent screenwriter.
Screenwriter Paul Bern killed himself after two months of marriage to Jean Harlow.
The studio wanted to make sure the public didn’t blame Harlow in any way for her husband’s suicide. They made up a story that Bern killed himself because he was suffering from “underdeveloped genitalia”—a real problem, considering he was married to the world’s greatest sex bomb.
Keep your casting ideas to yourself.
Novelist Margaret Mitchell suggested that Groucho Marx be cast as Rhett Butler in the film version of her novel, Gone With the Wind.
Don’t fly on the same plane with actors.
We were flying from Dubuque, Iowa, to Chicago in a puddle jumper after the F.I.S.T. premiere—Norman Jewison, the director, and I and the actors Kevin Conway and Cassie Yates.
We got caught in a thunderstorm and the little plane started to be buffeted about in the wind.
“Oh shit,” Norman Jewison said to me. “If this thing crashes, I’m only going to get the second paragraph. The actors always get the lead—and you, the screenwriter, will be mentioned somewhere deep in the middle of the story.”
Don’t have a movie star for a friend.
Remember that the word star spelled backward is rats.
LESSON 17
Just Say the Fucking Words!
Even Bill Goldman wrote a tell-all.
Bill Goldman wrote about going bikini shopping with Elizabeth Hurley; Norman Mailer wrote about his great lust for Marilyn Monroe; Arthur Miller wrote a play about Marilyn Monroe, his wife; and then there was the screenwriter who wrote about rolling around on the floor with Sharon Stone.
Movie stars are right not to trust writers.
Warren Beatty shouldn’t ever be without his watercooler.
When studio head Frank Wells denied director and star Warren Beatty’s request for a watercooler in his office, Beatty took Heaven Can Wait away from Warner Bros. and went to Paramount.
Actors are teenagers undergoing a sexual identity crisis.
Sir Laurence Olivier: “To oneself inside, one is always sixteen with red lips.”
TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA
Actors are like children and children are simple.
Stallone fights like a sissy and Sean Penn can’t fight.
When Sylvester Stallone claimed in interviews that he had written F.I.S.T. (it had taken me years to research and write the script), I challenged him to a fistfight by saying I’d been in more barroom brawls and claiming that he “fought like a sissy.”
My father, who loved me, said “I’ve seen Rocky. I’ve seen him fight. Challenge him to fight, yes, but do not under any circumstances fight him. He will beat you bloody.” I took my father’s advice.
At dinner one night, screenwriter/novelist Charles Bukowski told Sean Penn that his wife smelled “like she’d been sucking donkeys off all day.”
Sean jumped up and challenged Bukowski to fight. Bukowski, then in his seventies, said, “Sit down, Sean, you know I can take you.”
A Blood Star
An action star like Van Damme, Stallone, Seagal, or the governor of California.
Don’t get caught in a cross fire between two superstars.
When Sly Stallone was directing John Travolta in Staying Alive, they got into a hellacious battle royal over the script.
Sly wanted me to do a rewrite incorporating both of their thoughts. I had a meeting with the two of them in Sly’s trailer and saw that they were a thousand miles apart.
Sly and I had had a previous battle over F.I.S.T., so I said to him now, “Sly, you fucked me with a tree trunk on F.I.S.T. What do you want to fuck me again for?”
Both Sly and Travolta laughed—they thought that was really funny.
I didn’t do the rewrite.
You, too, can be a star maker.
Jennifer Beals, Sharon Stone, and Gina Gershon became stars playing the characters that I created.
All three of them denied it and said they became stars thanks to their own talent.
But none had any explanation for why they didn’t become stars after playing other screenwriters’ parts.
Actors know how to flatter you.
An actress in a Harold Pinter film said that saying Pinter’s words was like “blowing air into yeast when making bread.”
Liv Tyler is obsessed with me.
Liv Tyler did an interview in which she said she was the inspiration for Showgirls. She said I had become obsessed with her after seeing her play a stripper in an Aerosmith video.
She said, “Joe Eszterhas thought the video was brilliant. It gave him the idea for Showgirls. He tried to get me to take the lead in the movie, but I didn’t want to get into that kind of thing.”
It was news to me.
I’d never seen the Aerosmith video; neither had Paul Verhoeven, the director of Showgirls.
I’d never met or spoken with Liv; neither had Paul Verhoeven.
I didn’t even know that Steven Tyler had a daughter named Liv; neither did Paul Verhoeven.
ALL HAIL
Tim Robbins!
The actor thanked novelist Dennis Lehane and screenwriter Brian Hel
geland “for the writing of this amazing script” before thanking the director and producers as he accepted his Oscar for Mystic River.
THE HELL WITH TIM ROBBINS
In The Player, he plays a sleazy studio executive who murders the screenwriter.
Actors, like writers, don’t like to think of themselves as liars.
Actress Melina Mercouri: “My colleague says that all actors are liars. But my colleague is an actor. So he is lying, yes? So therefore actors are not liars. Therefore he speaks the truth and therefore actors are liars, so therefore he lies and so on and so on.”
You, too, can get even with an actor who treats you badly.
John Barrymore already had an opossum, a kinkajou, a mouse deer, and six dogs, which had been born during an earthquake—it was his theory that dogs born during earthquakes are more alert than others.
And then, as a gift from an English actress, John was given a monkey, which bit everyone in the house except him. The monkey would sit next to his feet for hours, gazing at him fondly. It was only after he’d been forced to give the monkey to the zoo that a vet told him the monkey had been transfixed not by his personality but by the booze he’d smelled on him. So John made weekly visits to the zoo to breathe on his monkey.
And then a screenwriter who secretly despised him gave John a vulture. Not just any vulture, but a king vulture, which became John’s best friend. He named the vulture Maloney. He’d take Maloney out on the yacht, and the crew would be horrified as the big vulture sat on John’s shoulders, nibbling at John’s eyeball, holding his beak out for a kiss. They sailed happily up and down from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara, but one day John realized that Maloney wasn’t happy. Maloney wasn’t eating properly. John realized he wasn’t able to feed Maloney what he required: partially but not completely decayed meat.
So he took Maloney ashore, kissed him farewell, and sailed away.
From then on, for the rest of his life, thanks to a diabolical screenwriter who hated him, John Barrymore did little but drink, a brokenhearted old actor pining for his vulture.
You can get even with an actress, too.
On the set of one of her earlier movies, Sharon Stone’s prima donna act pissed off the crew so badly that they pissed into a bathtub before Sharon got into it for her scene.
What you write can destroy someone’s career.
They told her she was going to be a big movie star and she almost believed it. She had done the television and the stage work, and here she was, at twenty-seven, costarring in a big movie with a big star at a cheap hotel out in the middle of nowhere, with only her pills and her little Baggies of coke to keep her company, to make her forget how much she hated the script. (They weren’t such little bags, really; they were pretty big bags, a last-minute gift from her agent in L.A.)
She had a 5:00 A.M. wake-up call, and here it was, 2:00 A.M., and she couldn’t get to sleep. She kept thinking about how awful this script was. She went out on her patio and practiced deep breathing for a while, noticing the balminess of this Iowa summer night, the softness of the corn-scented air.
She went downstairs, her pills and her Baggies in her purse, and got into her rent-a-car. Just a little drive around the blacktop and dirt roads was what she had in mind. But somehow she found herself flying down the interstate, popping another pill.
She lost track of much of the next couple of days. She woke up in the desert sun, out of pills, out of coke, trembling, knowing that it was over, that everything she had worked for was gone, knowing now that she would never be a star.
Beware of “serious” actors.
Laird Cregar was the best fiend you’ve ever seen on-screen. He was a talented actor with a weird, off-kilter face and a swollen body. Playing monsters and freaks, he’d go into makeup at the start of each film and ask them what they were going to do to his face, and they’d smile and say, “Nothing.”
He read a sensitive book about an inward young guy with an inferiority complex. At his suggestion, a studio bought the book, but then the people there turned the inward young guy into a rapist and a murderer and cast Laird in the part.
When the shoot ended, Laird had plastic surgery done on his eyes, his nose, his jaw, and his ears. He wouldn’t ever allow himself to be cast as a fiend again.
He was going to turn himself into a romantic lead. All he had left to do was to lose the weight.
He lost thirty pounds. Then he suffered a heart arrhythmia from the weight loss and died.
The pain, the pain …
Marlon Brando to Mike Medavoy: “Can you imagine going to work every day and pretending to be someone else?”
Just say the fucking words!
Faye Dunaway asked Roman Polanski about her character’s motivation in Chinatown.
Roman said, “Say the fucking words. Your salary is your motivation.”
Sharon didn’t like Billy.
Sliver director Phillip Noyce: “Billy Baldwin knew that Sharon Stone hadn’t wanted him in Sliver and their relationship was always tense. I ended up having to shoot many of their close-ups with only one of them in the room at a time, because they didn’t want to look at each other.”
Why didn’t Sharon want Billy to costar with her?
Because she wanted Billy’s older brother, Alec. Sharon said, “Alec can put me over a table anytime he wants.”
What did Billy Baldwin have to say about that?
Billy called Sharon “a paean to lipstick lesbianism.”
Comedians can kill you.
Producer Bernie Brillstein: “The words of comedy are death—‘I killed them, I laid them in the aisle, I blew their head off, I murdered them’—it’s all death—it’s how far you can take a human being.”
Who the hell is Hedy Lamarr?
Hedy Lamarr: “I enjoyed the location trips to desert towns in Arizona. The nights were mellow and romantic. Making love out of doors is so much more thrilling. Add a cowboy who never heard of Hedy Lamarr and the situation is ideal.”
My friend Phillip Noyce fell in love with Angelina Jolie.
Director Phillip Noyce, discussing The Bone Collector: “In the second half of the schedule I was shooting predominantly with Angelina Jolie. Usually in the morning when I woke up, I couldn’t wait to get to the set to work with her. I was impatient to continue what became a sort of love affair, being connected in this weird manner, through the lens, through the story, through the strange relationship between performer and director. I had the same connection with Nicole Kidman. I loved her, adored her; she was the angel who couldn’t do a thing wrong.”
The Crack of the Ass
The line at which most actresses stop when it comes to shooting nudity. There is usually a clause in their contracts that specifies that in a scene in bed, the bedsheet will be high enough so that a “crack of the ass” is visible.
My friend Phillip didn’t just fall in love; he went stark raving gaga apeshit.
Some directors can fall gaga apeshit over their actors.
Phillip Noyce, discussing Angelina Jolie: “When I first met Angie I felt a sense of discovery, of being there when something wonderful is being formed. You could see tremendous talent as well as hunger, a hunger for work, good work, a love of trying things, a love of giving herself up to the character, to the lens, to the moment. … Porcelain isn’t fine enough to describe how fragile she is. She’s not burned out with the joy of performing. She’s in her element because she can set parameters for a character, whereas I suspect she doesn’t know her own boundaries emotionally and physically. She’s very courageous as an actress. Angelina will go anywhere, or at least she’ll try going anywhere that the director suggests.”
Clint is Marilyn in drag.
Clint Eastwood’s ex-lover said that Clint listened to hours and hours of audiotapes of Marilyn Monroe—to get his hushed voice just right.
Dustpan Hoffman, movie star …
As a young actor, Dustin Hoffman was known to his friends as “Dustbin” and “Dustpan.” But afte
r he was cast in The Graduate, all of his friends called him “Dusty.”
Dennis Quaid asked God to take it all away.
Actor Dennis Quaid (Far from Heaven): “I wasn’t really prepared for the sort of attention I got. When it started happening, it was just too much—and I was also fueling it by getting loaded a lot. There was so much coming at me at one point that I remember just asking God to take it away from me.”
Tom Thumb’s boots …
Tom Cruise didn’t mind being cast with Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire, but he demanded that his costumer be allowed to make him boots that made him look taller than Pitt.
Her acting teachers killed Marilyn.
Marilyn Monroe’s drama coach, Michael Chekhov, told her to spread her arms wide and stand with her legs apart so she could imagine herself becoming larger and larger.
She had to say to herself, “I am going to awaken the sleeping muscles of my body. I am going to revivify and use them.”
Then she was to kneel on the floor and imagine herself getting smaller and smaller, until she became a speck on the floor.
She did these exercises every day for six hours.
Bogie was a wuss.
At a party he was attending with Lauren Bacall, his wife, Humphrey Bogart got angry when a sailor pinched Bacall’s butt.
Bogie and some friends locked the sailor in the bathroom and called the Shore Patrol to come and arrest him.
Billy Wilder, who witnessed it all, said, “That was Bogie, the hero of Casablanca.”
Michael Douglas looks better with Botox and surgery.
Bogart once said to his cinematographer, “I like my lines and wrinkles, so don’t try and light them out and make me look like a goddamn fag.”
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 31
