Hollywood Animal (37 page)

We started to talk about a director who’d be good for this project and I mentioned my good friend Richard Marquand. Irwin had liked
Jagged Edge
and suggested we meet with him. I told Richard about the project and he jumped at it.

But when I told him about Irwin Winkler producing it, he jumped back. “He’s a very powerful producer, Squire,” Richard said.

I agreed that he was, but told Richard my impression of Irwin.

“He sounds wonderful,” Richard said, “but I have no intention of working with him.”

I didn’t understand what he was saying.

“One Marty Ransohoff is enough for a lifetime,” Richard said.

“Irwin’s no Ransohoff.”

“No, he’s worse,” Richard said, “he’s more powerful than Marty is.”

I told Irwin what Richard had said and Irwin smiled.

“Well,” he said, “I like working with strong people. If I intimidate him before we’ve even met, he’s probably not the right person for me to work with.”

When Richard heard who was going to direct the movie instead of him, even he was impressed.

So was I.

Costa-Gavras, Konstantinos Gavras, at the age of fifty-three, was one of the world’s most respected directors. Born in Greece, he went to Paris when he was eighteen, graduating three years later from the Sorbonne with a degree in literature. He then studied filmmaking in Paris and after apprenticing to René Clair and Jacques Demy, he debuted with a classic suspense-thriller,
The Sleeping Car Murders
.

He followed it up with one of the most revered films in history,
Z
, a blistering, dazzling indictment of the Greek junta. He followed
Z
with two other hard-hitting political thrillers—
The Confession
and
State of Siege
.

His most recent film was the CIA exposé
Missing
, which had garnered a flock of Oscar nominations.

Costa, I found, as we began to talk about the script I had in mind, was a low-key, down-to-earth, gentle man with a passion for exposing political excess. He
knew
in his heart, probably from personal experience as a boy in Greece, that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

He was a left-leaning liberal but most important he was a great and practicing humanist … unafraid, for example, of going after the left in a movie like
The Confession
. He also fervently believed that you could do a movie about a political subject that at the same time could be entertaining.

That’s how he felt about the movie we would ultimately call
Betrayed
—its social impact, he felt, could be enormous: by calling attention to this new, burgeoning neo-Nazism in the American West, we would be doing something socially constructive.

At the same time, he felt that the piece’s underlying themes—rugged individualism and the American cowboy myth perverted into poisonous racism and anti-Semitism—would make for exciting drama.

The creative mix among the three of us was superb. Our discussions were egoless and stimulating. References were more literary than filmic. The sessions were fun. We laughed a lot and told a lot of stories.

“I am not a writer,” Costa said. “I am a director. I will not tell you what to write. I will try to direct as best as possible what it is that you have written.”

“I’m not a director.” Irwin smiled at Costa. “I won’t tell you how to direct. I’ll try to make your job as easy as possible.”

I almost felt off-balance with this good-natured camaraderie.

Was it possible that this was how movies could be made? Without Wild Boarishness? Without somebody twitching all over the place? Without backstabbing and ego?

“Go write your script,” Irwin said.

“Write it with passion,” Costa said.

On the way out, Costa asked me if I remembered the time he had called me nearly ten years ago.

I remembered very well. It was in the months after I had finished
F.I.S.T
. A man who spoke with a very thick accent whose name I had difficulty understanding said that he had read my script and loved it. He said he couldn’t speak English, but was taking Berlitz courses and would call me back when he had completed them.

“I finish all the courses now,” Costa-Gavras said with a smile. “Now we will do our movie.”

I traveled to Idaho and Montana and Wyoming, attending jamborees organized by the Aryan Nations Brotherhood in their effort to recruit new members. I posed as Joe Ezdras, a bartender from San Francisco who was looking for some answers.

Most of the people I met were not secretive about their beliefs. They were mostly blue-collar people, mostly rural, who felt that the government had become a cancerous behemoth invading their privacy and stripping them of their civil rights. They talked of destructive taxes and repossessed farms, of affirmative action denying their sons and daughters a chance, of a world where smoking had become a worse offense than drugs.

Their grievances led them to two villains: blacks and Jews. The government, they said, was a Zionist Occupation Government, ZOG, and the only way anything would change, they said, was if ZOG was brought down. Their obsession with blacks and Jews put them into a surreal and dark netherworld that encompassed and perhaps put into action the demented fantasies found in a novel called
The Turner Diaries
, in which black people were hunted down like animals and murdered.

I heard some dark and drunken ramblings about various “mud hunts” that had allegedly taken place in Idaho and Wyoming—but I was never sure whether the alleged participants were recounting reality or fantasizing.

What I found most bizarre and sometimes poignant was that most of these people discussing these ugly, heinous things led exemplary, all-American lives devoted to family and church.

Back in the Bay Area, I found a person who had once been part of a neo-Nazi group called the Order and, on the basis of my research at the jamborees and my interviews with the defector, I wrote the script.

I tried to be as realistic as possible. What I found most frightening and what I thought posed the greatest danger to society was the lethal and mind-boggling paradox: they loved their kids, they prayed every day, they had served (sometimes heroically) in the armed services, and they were capable of injuring and killing people just because they were black or Jewish.

When Costa-Gavras read the script, he said it was the best script he’d ever read. I was flattered and thrilled and when Irwin read it and said he felt the same way … we were ready to cast and shoot … I thought it was the greatest compliment ever paid to my screenwriting.

Costa had never been in the American Midwest, the farm country where the piece was set, and I agreed to accompany him and show him around. We went to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where Tom Berenger, who had been quickly cast as the neo-Nazi Gary Simmons, joined us.

Tom, who was originally from Chicago, knew and got along easily with Midwesterners, and he and I introduced Costa to hog farmers and iced tea lunches and hamburgers grilled in the backyard, drenched with ketchup.

We also introduced him to the drink known in Nebraska as “The Colorado Motherfucker,” but after the introduction, and half a tall glass of it, Costa went back to the Ramada Inn and left us alone to do further research for the evening.

There wasn’t a whole lot of other research to do at night. Tom and I drank oceans of beer and I’d find him in the pool each morning doing a hundred laps, trying to get rid of the aftereffects of the night before.

We were so desperate to find a really good meal that one night we crashed the local country club in our jeans and long hair, announced who we were to those in charge, and ate a great steak.

Costa, the sophisticated Parisian, seemed bemused the night we took him to the biggest local attraction. There was Costa-Gavras atop a Conestoga wagon! As it made its way back and forth across a dirt field in emulation of the Pioneers!

Tom Berenger, whose movie
Platoon
was still in the theaters, was the biggest star to hit the town of Scottsbluff, Nebraska. He looked the part, too. He was tan, slim, his outfit consisting day to day of a pair of worn jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap.

Word spread very quickly that Tom Berenger was in town and spending lots of nighttime at the bars. A lot of the cowgirls in their rhinestones would come by and ask us about Hollywood.

One day we had lunch at a hog farmer’s house. He had three daughters in their late teens and early twenties. They couldn’t keep their eyes off Tom. They rushed to bring him his hamburger, kept asking if he wanted more potato chips, and finally asked if they could take a picture with him. Tom looked embarrassed by the whole thing—Costa and I kept laughing at him—but graciously allowed it.

One of them went up to him and whispered something into his ear and I saw Tom blush, then laugh.

“Where?” he said, and she motioned toward the back of the house. The other two sisters were standing nearby, giggling.

“I’ll think about it,” Tom said.

“Don’t do it,” I said when she moved away. “This is farm country, man. They’ll bushwhack you. They’ll put you in jail. You’ll have to marry her.”

“All she wants is an autograph,” he said.

“What? In the back room.”

“For her and her sisters.”

“All three of you in the back room?”

“Well, she wants me to autograph their panties.”

He wandered into the back room after a while and Costa and I and her parents sipped some more iced tea and heard a lot of giggling. Tom emerged a couple minutes later.

“How was the autograph party?” I asked him later.

“Wet surface,” he deadpanned. “Tough to write.”

· · ·

Back in Hollywood, meanwhile, Irwin Winkler relayed disturbing news. Jerry Weintraub, the studio head who’d contracted this project, was out.

Costa and I were worried. Usually in Hollywood, when the studio head who’d contracted to do a project was fired, it meant that the project died with him.

“Don’t worry about it,” Irwin told us.

The new heads of the studio were Lee Rich, the former head of Lorimar, and Tony Thomopoulos, the former head of ABC Entertainment.

“Tony’s close to Mike Ovitz,” Irwin said. “So am I. Mike will work this out.”

When we got back to L.A., Lee Rich and Tony Thomopoulos told us that they were as committed to this project as Jerry Weintraub had been.

“I have only one suggestion,” Tony said.

Costa and I waited breathlessly. Tony was a TV guy, a nice guy, but a TV guy. We had no inkling what the suggestion would be. It could be
anything
.

“A tattoo,” Tony said. “I think the guy—the neo-Nazi, Berenger, should have a tattoo. Then when our girl, the FBI agent, is in bed with him, she discovers the tattoo and it is in that intimate moment that she knows that the man she’s falling in love with, the man she’s just had sex with, is the enemy.”

“Hmm,” Costa said.

“I don’t know,” Irwin said, “it’s pretty old. I’ve seen it before.”

“I think we can come up with something better,” I said.

“Well, it was just a suggestion,” Tony said.

We all smiled and thanked him.

“By the way,” Tony said, “I have some notes.”

“Notes?” I said. “What notes?”

“Script notes.” He handed Irwin a document that looked like it weighed a pound.

“I didn’t know you had any script notes,” I said. I kept eyeing the pages in Irwin’s hands.

“
We
do,” Tony said.

“It’s okay,” Irwin said. He quickly got up to say goodbye.

“Should we discuss them?” I asked Tony.

“
We’ll
discuss them first,” Irwin said. He looked like he wanted to race out the door.

“I don’t mind discussing them now,” I said.

“That’s okay,” Irwin said, “we’ll discuss them later.”

“Whatever you want to do,” Tony said.

Irwin led us out. When we got to the parking lot, I said, “They’ve got all those notes? Let me see ’em.”

“Are they formidable?” Costa asked Irwin. He pronounced it the French way—
for-mi-da-ble
.

“I don’t know,” Irwin said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter?” I said. “They’re the studio’s notes. This is how movies get screwed up.”

“Will you settle down?” Irwin said.

He took the notes and started tearing the pages into pieces.

When he was done tearing up all the pages, he smiled and said, “Good meeting, see ya later,” got into one of his antique Ferraris, and drove off.

Costa and I stood in the lot a moment and laughed.

“He is a very good producer,” Costa very formally added.

Our major piece of casting was still undone. Katie, the FBI agent sent undercover among the neo-Nazis, was the star of the movie.

We heard that Debra Winger—my attorney, Barry Hirsch, her attorney as well, had gotten her the script—was interested. Costa, Irwin, and I drove to Winger’s house in Point Dume one day and after a thirty-minute discussion, she agreed to do the movie.

Winger had a fearsome reputation and, while happy that she was in (we admired her work), we feared that we’d all get gray hairs in the course of the shoot.

“Well, so far so good,” Irwin said in his understated way.

“So far too good.” Costa laughed.

“Well, this is as far as I go,” I said.

I was finished with the script; Costa’s task was just beginning.

“The easiest movie to cast and get made,” Guy McElwaine told me, “is a sexual thriller set at a resort location in the tropics. Every movie star wants a paid vacation, tropical sunshine, swimming in the moonlight. Every movie star wants to have real sex on the beach with his co-star.”

I wrote a sexual thriller called
The Bouncer
set at a resort location on Maui. It was a story of seamy seduction with lots of hanky-panky on the beach and in the moonlight.

No star was interested. No studio was interested. I couldn’t sell it. It’s still in my drawer.

While Costa planned the
Betrayed
shoot, Richard Marquand flew up to Marin to tell me that he’d found the next film he wanted to make. It was a script called
American Rocker
by a songwriter named Scott Richardson.