They’ll try to beat it out of you—depress you, disillusion you, corrupt you.
Keep your mojo hidden deep inside yourself. It’s your heart and soul. It’s what makes you tick, what makes you write, and what makes you special. It’s the source of your work, your worth, and your talent.
Fight the fuckers with every breath of your being. And if, after you’ve fought the good fight, you lose—if your movie stinks or you’re rewritten by five other writers or you feel betrayed by people you thought were friends or thought cared about you—get a good night’s rest and sit down at your laptop the next morning and start making up a brand-new story. And fight the fuckers all over again with every breath of your being.
Because you’re a writer. And they’re not.
And if you fight hard enough, and write enough stories, one of these days you’ll see your work up on-screen just the way you wanted. And you’ll change the lives and better the lives and make more enjoyable the lives of the people who see it.
Your film. Your mojo. Up there on the big screen.
Epilogue
I had a three-script deal with United Artists. The first script was Betrayed, the second was Music Box, and the third was going to be Media Mogul, a roman a clef about Rupert Murdoch. But as I started writing the third script, it didn’t go anywhere for me, and I gave up on it. It had been producer Irwin Winkler’s idea anyway to do a filmic assault on Murdoch, not mine.
I started writing another script instead without telling anyone that I was writing it—not even Irwin, who was going to produce all three scripts. The new script’s genesis was my unwavering and no doubt naïve belief that someday America would have a president who would tell the American people the truth, no matter how difficult that truth was.
I wrote it as a black but Capraesque comedy. Sam Parr, in his late sixties, the liberal Democrat president of the United States, is running for reelection against a right-wing McCarthyite demagogue. Sam Parr has always screwed around on his long-suffering wife and he’s the kind of man who enjoys his Jack Daniel’s. One misbegotten day during the campaign when everything goes to shit, he finds himself on the Nebraska farm where he grew up, tilting his Jack Daniel’s bottle, and dozes off in the barn. He wakes up more than a little randy and does what he did as a boy. He, um, pops the nearby cow. Yes, cow—literally.
A right-wing spy takes a picture of him in flagrante. First the right-wingers try to blackmail Sam Parr to drop out of the race and then they release the picture to the tabloids. Sam Parr decides to tell Americans the truth. “Yes, I popped that cow!” he says. And, mirabile dictu, every farm boy or suburban ex–farm boy who ever popped a cow or a chicken or a cat in a boot votes for him.
Because he told America the truth, he is reelected to office by a landslide.
I wrote the script in 1989, during the Bush, not the Clinton, presidency; during the era of “Read my lips—no new taxes,” before Lewinsky’s lips and news of that infamous cigar.
I sent Irwin Winkler the script with a title page that said in big letters, SACRED COWS.
He called me when he received it and said, “I thought we were going to call this Media Mogul.”
“Well,” I said, “um, the piece, um, changed somewhat. You’ll see when you read it.”
When Irwin called me back, he was laughing. “You son of a gun,” he said. But he also said, “No one will ever make it. Even though I think it’s one of the funniest and most moving pieces I’ve every read.”
“Maybe somebody will take a chance on it,” I said.
“No,” Irwin said, “mark my words. A lot of people will read it. A lot of people will love it. A lot of people will say they want to make it. But no one will make it.”
“How do you think United Artists will respond?”
Irwin laughed again.
“They think they’re getting a piece about Rupert Murdoch called Media Mogul. Where’s Murdoch in this piece? Maybe he’s the cow, I don’t know.” Then Irwin added, “I’m afraid they’ll sue you for nonperformance.”
He was serious.
So, in order to avert a lawsuit, I put a new cover sheet on Sacred Cows. It was now entitled Media Mogul, but it was still about a president who pops a cow and fesses up.
Dick Berger was the head of United Artists.
“I started reading the script,” he told me later. “I got to about page twelve—where the president does the cow. I hurled the script across the room. I thought to myself, This son of a bitch Eszterhas! He takes our money to write this shit? He writes about fucking a cow and expects us to make the movie? I’m going to sue this son of a bitch!’ I seethed for an hour or so. But something made me pick the damn script off the floor. I finished reading it. I sat there crying when I finished it. I never cry reading a script. And I thought, It’s brilliant, but I still feel like suing the son of a bitch.”
United Artists didn’t sue me. Nor did they say they were making Media Mogul, as the script was officially called.
They left the fate of my script up to me. If my agents (or Irwin) could attract major elements—an actor, a director—United Artists would consider making it.
The first person Guy McElwaine, my agent, sent Sacred Cows to was Steven Spielberg. Steven read it and called Guy to tell him it was the funniest script he’d ever read.
He said he was directing it. He said it would be his next picture.
Steven called me and told me he was already working on the movie’s sound track. He said he thought all the music should be done by the Marine Corps Band.
I called Irwin and told him Steven was directing Sacred Cows.
“Never,” Irwin said. “Forget it. It’ll never happen.”
“He’s already making plans for the Marine Corps Band,” I said.
Irwin laughed again.
Steven called back a week later and said he anticipated “great flak” if he directed Sacred Cows. So, to cover himself, he had sent the script to Stanley Kubrick, asking that Kubrick produce it with Irwin.
“I know there’s going to be flak,” I said to Steven, “but you’re the top director in the world. Irwin Winkler is an internationally respected Oscar-winning producer. What do we need Stanley Kubrick for?”
“Oh,” Steven said, “having Stanley certainly wouldn’t hurt.”
Stanley Kubrick wrote Steven a note that said, “This may be the funniest script I’ve ever read, but I wouldn’t want to get within a thousand miles of it.”
Steven told me that the Marine Corps Band was still a great idea, but he didn’t want to direct Sacred Cows anymore. He still wanted to produce it, though. And he had sent it to his friend Bob Zemeckis to direct.
Steven called a month later to say that Bob Zemeckis “loved it” and was considering directing it.
A year passed as Bob Zemeckis kept considering. Then Bob Zemeckis decided he didn’t want to direct it.
Since Bob didn’t want to direct it, Steven decided he didn’t want to produce it, either.
Tony Bill, who had won an Oscar for producing The Sting and who had directed My Bodyguard, wrote me a note telling me that he had read Sacred Cows and thought it one of the funniest scripts he’d ever read.
David Anspach, who had recently directed the hit Hoosiers and whom all the studios wanted to work with, read Sacred Cows and flew up to Marin County to see me. I liked David, liked his affection for the script, and told him it was fine with me if he directed Sacred Cows.
He was so happy, he started to cry.
United Artists turned him down.
David may have been the hottest director in town, but he wasn’t hot enough to direct this baby.
Michael Lehman had just directed Heathers, a big critical hit. Everybody wanted to work with him. He read Sacred Cows, flew up to Marin to see me, and asked to direct it.
I said great, we celebrated, and he flew back to L.A. to have a meeting with United Artists.
They turned Michael down.
Michael may have been the hottest director
in town, but … a cow? The president of the United States and a literal, not metaphorical, cow?
Edward J. Olmos read it, loved it, wanted to direct it. We met at the Ivy. In the back room of the Ivy, because Eddie had pissed off some Latino gang bangers who were even now, as we spoke, looking for him so they could kill him.
United Artists said, “Who? Oh, that guy from Miami Vice?”
United Artists said no thank you.
Blake Edwards, in my opinion, was a creative genius who had made some of the funniest movies in Hollywood history. We had lunch at Orso’s.
He loved Sacred Cows. He was desperate to direct Sacred Cows.
“I wish there was some way to avoid the cow fucking,” Blake said. “You don’t show it in your script. We wouldn’t show it in the movie, either, of course, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I wish we could somehow avoid the fact that the president of the United States actually fucks the cow. I wish we could somehow give people the perception that he’d fucked it but reveal that he really hadn’t done it.”
“You can’t do that,” I said, “it would vitiate the power of the piece. The whole point is that he fucks the cow and then tells the truth about fucking it.”
“I know,” Blake Edwards said. “You’re right. I agree with you. But I still wish there was some way we could have it both ways.”
Blake went to United Artists and told them he could bring the movie in at a low budget. He mentioned James Garner and Bob Newhart as possible cowpokes.
United Artists said no. Granted, they told me, Blake had once made great movies. But he was too old now. He napped on the set and didn’t do enough takes of his scenes—the reason, they said, Blake always came in under budget.
It was the first time I’d heard a director bad-mouthed for coming in under budget.
Irwin got the script to Milos Forman, the Oscar-winning director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Milos said he liked the script very much and asked for a meeting at his apartment in New York.
United Artists said up front that if Milos committed to direct the movie, they would finance it.
I liked Milos and thought his ideas about the script were insightful. He wanted to broaden the scope of the piece and include a presidential trip to India, the home of the sacred cows.
I did a serious rewrite incorporating his ideas and thought the script was funnier and more poignant than it had been before. So did Milos. He thought I’d done an “extraordinary job” on the rewrite.
“Are you going to direct it?” I asked him bluntly.
“Give me two weeks to consider it,” he said.
“What do you think?” I said to Irwin later. “Will he direct it?”
“No.” Irwin smiled. “He won’t direct it.”
Two weeks later, Milos called and said, “I’ll tell you the truth. I love the script and I like you, but as much as I’d like to direct this movie, I can’t. My best friend in the world is Václav Havel, who is the president of the Czech Republic. How will it look if Václav Havel’s best friend makes such fun of the American presidency? We’re both immigrants, you and I—me from Czechoslovakia and you from Hungary. Two immigrants joining to make this kind of fun? If your name were Jules Feiffer, then I would direct this movie. But for both of us to be foreign-born? No, no, you must find an American director.”
Jim Abrahams was an American director of broad farcical comedies like Airplane and he wanted to make Sacred Cows with Lloyd Bridges as the cowpoke.
I realized I was pretty well charging through a wild gamut of directors with this script: Spielberg, to Kubrick, to Blake Edwards, to Milos Forman, to Jim Abrahams!
Jim Abrahams committed to direct Sacred Cows as his next picture and United Artists immediately agreed to make it.
Then Jim Abrahams went off to Hawaii to vacation with his family.
When he got back, he changed his mind. He loved his children, he said, and he didn’t want to direct anything his children couldn’t see.
Shortly afterward, Lloyd Bridges died.
Paul Michael Glaser, the actor, was on vacation in Hawaii, too, and ran into Jim Abrahams. Jim told him he was thinking about directing this crazy script called Sacred Cows.
Paul asked to read it and loved it.
When Jim changed his mind, Paul went to United Artists and asked to direct it.
And United Artists said, “Starsky and Hutch?”
The script was being mentioned in the media now as “one of the most famous unproduced scripts in Hollywood history.”
Even Michiko Kakutani mentioned it in The New York Times.
Somebody at United Artists sent the script to Robert Duvall, thinking of him for the part of Sam Parr. Robert Duvall passed.
Years later, when he met me and realized I had written Sacred Cows, Robert Duvall looked at me, shook his head, and kept laughing and laughing.
Betty Thomas was the newest directorial flavor of the month.
She read it, she loved it, and she wanted to direct it.
We had lunch and she asked me to tell United Artists that I wanted her to direct it.
I told Betty I’d tell United Artists that if she agreed not to change anything in the script.
“Anything?” Betty said.
“Anything.”
“What if we improvise something great?”
“No improvising,” I said. “You shoot the script. You change nothing.”
She laughed.
“You’re some piece of work, Esty,” Betty Thomas said, and agreed not to change anything in the script.
I told United Artists I wanted Betty to direct Sacred Cows and United Artists said they’d think about it.
Chevy Chase called and wanted to get together. He’d read Sacred Cows and wanted to be the cowpoke.
We had lunch. I liked Chevy a lot and thought he’d make a wonderful cowpoke.
I set up a lunch for Chevy with Betty Thomas, who, I said, I hoped would direct the movie.
Betty and Chevy had lunch and Betty decided that she didn’t want to work with Chevy.
United Artists decided that they didn’t want to make the movie with Betty or with Chevy.
I was standing outside the front door of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills with my wife, Naomi, when a black pickup truck drove toward me and stopped. Steven Spielberg was driving; Kate Capshaw sat next to him.
Steven said, “I was a real chickenshit not to do Sacred Cows.”
I said, “You sure were.”
We all laughed.
Steven waved and drove away.
Steven made an overall production deal with MGM/United Artists a few weeks later and walked into his first meeting with the studio to discuss projects he wanted to produce.
There was only one UA project he wanted to produce: Sacred Cows.
His friend Tony Bill, Steven said, who’d loved the script for a long time, would direct it.
A few months later, Steven informed United Artists that he wasn’t interested in producing Sacred Cows—again—anymore.
He and Kate had become good friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and while it was true that the script had been written a long time ago, during the Bush era, some people might think—considering Paula and Gennifer and Monica—that the president popping this literal cow might be …
So because of his friendship with the president who wouldn’t tell Americans the truth, Steven wouldn’t produce the script about the president who did.
The producer Rob Fried was playing golf with President Clinton one day at Burning Tree and on the way back to the White House in the limo, Bill Clinton started bitching about Paula Jones’s lawsuit.
“Jesus Christ,” Bill Clinton said, “one of these days someone’s gonna accuse me of fucking a cow.”
And Rob Fried said, “Mr. President, Joe Eszterhas has already written a script about that.”
He told Bill Clinton about Sacred Cows and Bill Clinton asked to read it. Rob Fried sent it to him. He never heard from Bill Clinton a
gain.
Irwin Winkler, all those many years ago, was right. A lot of people have read Sacred Cows. A lot of people have loved it. A lot of people have said they want to make it. But no one has made it. And I don’t think anyone will.
You can get almost anything that you write made into a movie. Almost anything. But not everything.
I think, though, that in Hollywood more people have read Sacred Cow than any other of my scripts.
Imagine that! You, too, can be best known in the industry for a movie that was never made.
P.S. In the summer of 2006, producer Craig Baumgarten thought that the time was right—George W. Bush’s low poll results may have had something to do with it—to try to launch Sacred Cows again. They were going to go to Robin Williams, Will Farrell, and Billy Bob Thornton.
INDEX
ABC Films, 60
Abrahams, Jim, 377
Academy Awards, 15, 73,
113–114, 124, 138–139, 180, 230–231, 241, 251, 258, 276, 309, 311–312, 313, 333, 352
directors, 230–231
accountants, 36–39
“a chocolate life,” defined, 361
action films, 145–146
actors. See also specific actors
critics and, 338–339
directors and, 249
producers and, 271
screenwriting and, 64
writers and, 64, 78, 86, 301–334
Addica, Milo, 14, 89
Adler, Jacob, 304
Adler, Polly, 275
“adrenalizer scene,” defined, 168
adverbs, writing process, 170
affairs. See also sexuality
directors, 242
“production fuck,” 218
warnings about, 63–64
Affleck, Ben, 64, 101, 140, 236
Agee, James, 239, 340
ageism, 34–35, 360–361
age level, 49
agents, 22, 40, 124. See also promotion and sales; specific agents and agencies
firing of, 198
Ovitz, Michael, 193–197
producers and, 270
relationship with, 190–193, 197–198
roles of, 187–190
selection tactics, 184–187, 191
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 36
