Hollywood Animal (43 page)

“No,” I said.

For a moment his smile disappeared as we looked at each other evenly. Then his face broke into a broad grin. He leaned forward over the desk, leaning closer to me.

“You know what, Joe?” he said quietly. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re not leaving this agency.”

His grin was frozen now, his eyes right on mine, his voice soft, friendly, avuncular. I could hear my own heart beating like an echo chamber in my ears. He went on in a calm monologue. It almost sounded rehearsed to me. I glanced at his desk to make sure he didn’t have notes in front of him.

He said that he was going to sue me.

“I don’t care if I win or lose,” he said, “but I’m going to tie you up with depositions and court dates so that you won’t be able to spend any time at your typewriter. If you make me eat shit, I’m going to make you eat shit.”

When I said I had no interest in being involved in a public spectacle, he said, “I don’t care if everybody in town knows. I
want
them to know. I’m not worried about the press. All those guys want to write screenplays for Robert Redford.”

I knew that he (and Barry Hirsch) represented Redford.

He said, “If somebody came into the building and took my Lichtenstein off the wall, I’d go after them. I’m going to go after you the same way. You’re one of this agency’s biggest assets.”

He said, “This town is like a chess game. ICM [Guy’s agency] isn’t going after a pawn or a knight, they’re going after a king. If the king goes, the knights and pawns will follow.”

He facetiously suggested that maybe he’d make a trade with ICM. He’d keep me and give ICM four or five clients.

Almost as an aside, he said that if I left, he’d damage my relationships with Irwin Winkler, who’d become a close friend, and with Barry Hirsch, whom I also viewed as a good and trusted ally.

“Those guys are friends of mine,” he said. “Do you think they’ll still be good friends of yours if you do this?

“I like you,” Michael Ovitz said. “I like your closeness to your family. I like how hard you work. I like your positive attitude. I like the fact that you have no directing or producing ambitions. You write original screenplays with star parts—your ideas are great and so are your scripts.

“I like everything about you,” Michael Ovitz said, smiling good-naturedly, “except your shirt.” He looked at my shirt, the floral Hawaiian knockoff I’d picked up at a roadside T-shirt shop facing the beach in St. Pete.

“You know what you’re like?” Michael Ovitz smiled. “You’re like one of my kids. He builds these blocks up real high and then he knocks them all down. I’m not going to let you do that to yourself.”

I couldn’t believe what he had said. I felt like leaning over his desk and hitting him.

Who in the fuck did this smug, self-absorbed asshole think he was?

But I realized another part of me was scared.

He was the most powerful man in Hollywood—that’s who this asshole was
.

He was telling me he’d put me out of business and, knowing from many years of experience what a chickenshit town Hollywood was, why did I think that he couldn’t do that?

That he
wouldn’t
do that?

· · ·

“You’re not leaving, Joe,” he said, “that’s all there is to it.” His smile broke into a sneering little laugh.

I stared at him and didn’t say a word. I felt frozen.

I felt like I’d been witness to some obscenity that would come back in flashes till the day I died.

He was watching me assessingly, his smile gone, like a referee watching a guy on the apron of the ring, eyeing him for signs of life.

“Think about it,” he said, his words quiet as a whisper.

He put his hand out to shake hands. I hesitated a second in shocked disbelief and then, may God forgive me, I shook his hand.

He gave me a big grin and said, “I’ll walk you out.” He opened his door for me and we walked down some stairs and through the full lobby. People stared.

Michael Ovitz, I suspected, didn’t walk clients to the front door himself very often. When we got to the front door, he cut the black doorman off and opened that door for me, too.

“You’re not going anywhere, Joe,” he said again. “Call me.”

He slapped me on the back as I stepped out the front door, his grin so toothy now I could almost see his molars.

My friend Ben Myron, who had been waiting for me in the lobby, stepped quickly around the black doorman …
what was CAA, the model of liberal political correctness, doing with a black doorman in 1989?
… took one look at me and said, “Are you okay? You’re white as a sheet.”

“No,” I told Ben, “I’m not. I’ve just been fucked by a thousand-pound gorilla.”

When we got to Ben’s car—a long, antique white Cadillac with fire-red interior—we sat there for ten minutes as I told him what had happened. It was now Ben’s turn to pale.

“Is he nuts?” Ben said. “He sounds like Captain Queeg. Did you see any brass balls?”

“He might have ’em in his pocket,” I said, “but he wasn’t playing with ’em.”

Ben said, “What are you going to do?”

I had no idea what I was going to do, I was still reeling, but I knew I had to tell Guy what had happened as quickly as possible.

Ben drove me over to Guy’s house high in Beverly Hills, just down the street from Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbank’s legendary Pickfair estate. Guy was watching a football game with a bunch of the Monday Night Regulars—Alan Ladd, the producer, was there … and Jim Aubrey, the famed “Cobra,” former television mogul, and a cherubic man named Mr. Katz, Bookie to the Stars.

They were all in Guy’s den, where the cocktail table was littered with hundred-dollar bills (these guys bet handoff-or-pass) and where the walls
were
lined with framed photos of Guy with Peter Sellers and Yul Brynner, Burt Reynolds, and Sinatra, Sinatra, Sinatra.

I drew Guy away from the others and told him what Ovitz had said. He was stunned. He kept shaking his head.

“I can’t believe this fucking guy,” he said. He noticed the expression on my face and added, “You need a drink.” I glugged half a glass of straight gin and Guy said, “Lew Wasserman would pull some hard-assed shit in the old days, but nothing like this.”

He called Jeff Berg, the head of International Creative Management, gave him a summary, and handed me the phone.

Jeff, known to friend and foe as “the Iceberg,” asked me to give him a detailed rundown and I did. Jeff wasn’t surprised.

“It’s their old game,” he said. “Ovitz sits a guy down who wants to leave and threatens him. They run it all the time. I think they hold on to half their clients this way. Most people soil their drawers and stay. I’ll tell you this, Joe. If you leave there and they try to hurt you, this agency as an agency will do everything it can to protect you. And we can do a lot.”

I thanked Jeff, hung up, and told Guy I was seeing Rand Holston that night for dinner. I’d scheduled it earlier to tell him in person that I was leaving.

“He’ll play good cop,” Guy said. “They’ve got it down to a cabaret act. Ovitz beats the shit out of you. Holston’s going to tell you how much he loves you … all Hungarians, your kids, your pets, whatever.”

Guy understood how shaken I was. “I want you to do whatever you want to do,” he said. “If you’re not comfortable leaving there after what he told you, then don’t do it. It’s not worth it to me to see you this upset. Just do what feels good to you. But remember this—if you write a good script that people in this town think they can make money off of, Michael Ovitz and all his yuppie wimps won’t matter.
This town runs on greed
. If people think they can make money with a script, they’ll go with Eszterhas over Ovitz—no matter how many stars Ovitz or CAA represents.”

That made me feel a little better.

“Are you sure about that?” I smiled.

“Well.” Guy grinned. “It’d better be a
real
goddamn
commercial
script.”

I went to meet Rand Holston at Jimmy’s, CAA’s quasi-official clubhouse. Holston, whose usual style was humorless and robotic, was waiting for me in the bar when I got there, looking grim. It didn’t look to me like Guy’s good cop/bad cop prognostication was going to happen.

Holston said that after his meeting with me “the veins were bulging out” of Ovitz’s neck. He added that Ovitz was the best friend anyone could have and the worst enemy.

If I left, Rand said, “Mike’s going to put you into the fucking ground.”

He listed the particulars. If I left CAA, no CAA star would appear in any of my scripts. “You write star vehicles,” he said, “not ensemble pieces. This would be particularly damaging to you.” In addition, no CAA director would direct any of my scripts. Ovitz would go out of his way with studio executives and company executives “like Martin Davis”—Paramount—to speak about me unfavorably. He would tell them that while I was a “pretty good writer,” I was difficult and hard to work with. He would say that I wrote too many scripts and cared about none of them.

“There’s no telling what Mike will say when he’s angry,” Holston said. Ovitz would make sure, Holston said, that studio people knew that I was “on his shit list.”

Since most studio executives desperately wanted to use CAA’s stars in their pictures, Holston said, executives would “avoid me like the plague” to curry favor with Ovitz and his CAA stars, who were the biggest names in town: Redford, Streisand, Stallone, De Niro, Cruise, Hoffman, Scorsese, Sally Field, Kim Basinger, Bill Murray, Barry Levinson, Sydney Pollack.

Holston added that since I was late turning in my latest script to United Artists, I was technically in breach of contract on my overall six-picture deal.

He said that if I left CAA, United Artists would sue me.

Rand and I never got to the dining area at Jimmy’s. I lost my appetite. I had another double Tanqueray and went back to my suite at the Westwood Marquis, paid for by United Artists.

Three messages from Barry Hirsch—all marked urgent—were waiting for me. I put a “Do Not Disturb” on my phone, plunked a Willie Nelson cassette into the player, and stretched out on the living room rug.

I had a headache.

I had a very bad headache.

It was particularly exacerbated by the fact that Gerri and I had just bought, but hadn’t yet moved into, a big new house in San Rafael—a house that would steeply raise our mortgage payments each month.

How could I leave CAA, I thought as I fell asleep on the rug, and live in our expensive new house after what Ovitz and Holston had said they were going to do to me? But … damn it … I’d already bought the house … Gerri and the kids were overjoyed. We were so badly cramped in our old one that two of the bathrooms were unusable because they had become storage areas.

If I left Ovitz after what he’d said, I’d have to get rid of the new house, hope for not too much of a loss on it, and break my kids’ hearts. If I stayed with Ovitz, I’d have none of these problems.

But what about Guy? Could I look him in the eye?

And what about me? Could I look myself in the eye?

I woke up on the floor shortly before dawn, sat at a little secretarial desk for the next two hours in the living room of the suite, and wrote detailed notes of everything that Ovitz and Holston had said. I wasn’t sure why I was doing this but an inner voice told me it was important to note all the details while they were still fresh.

Then I went down to the pool area of the hotel and watched the sun cut through the L.A. smog. When I got back to the suite there were two more messages waiting from Barry Hirsch.

“We’ve got to talk,” Barry said when I finally called him. “Michael’s going crazy.”

I met Barry in his office that morning. Michael had called him several times since our meeting.

“He was screaming into the phone,” Barry said, “I’ve never heard him like this.”

When I related the specifics of what Holston had said, Barry said, “I guarantee if he puts the word out it’ll have the same effect on producers. No producer will want to hire you if—right off the top—it means he has no chance for Cruise or Redford or the others.”

I sat there, still somewhat in shock.

“You can’t do this,” Barry said. “You just can’t. I can’t let you do this, Joe.”

Now even more disturbed, I went over to Guy’s house. He got dressed and, as he nearly sputtered with anger, we went back over to Barry Hirsch’s office.

On the way over, Guy said, “This doesn’t have to do with me. Don’t think about me in this, think about you. But this is wrong. What they’re doing to you is wrong. I know this is Hollywood and I know this is a mean town, but this isn’t a fucking Mafia town.”

By the time we got to Barry’s office, Guy was red-faced mad. Barry sat there cool as a cucumber, inheld, almost remote.

“Let me understand something, Barry,” Guy said. “You’re Joe’s attorney. You’re advising Joe to give in to all of it, is that right?”

Barry said, “I’m acting in my client’s best interest. Joe’s my client,” he said icily to Guy. “My client of more than ten years. And my friend of more than ten years.”

Barry then mentioned the dangers of the prospective United Artists suit against me.

“It’s a bluff,” Guy said. “It’s bullshit and you know it. No studio is going to sue anyone just to make Mike Ovitz happy.”

Barry smiled. “How much do you want to bet on that?”

“Anything you want,” Guy said.

“Do you want to bet his career?”

Guy’s face darkened even deeper. He got up and walked to the window in Barry’s office. He stared out, his back to us. His shoulders looked slumped.

Under his breath, I heard him say, “You son of a bitch.”

Barry pretended that he hadn’t heard it.

“Are you going to give me a piece of paper?” Barry said to Guy, “from ICM that says ICM will cover all of Joe’s legal costs if United Artists sues him? Will you give me a piece of paper that says if Joe has to return any of the moneys UA has advanced him—that ICM will pay those moneys for Joe?”

Guy turned from the window and said, “You know I can’t do that. ICM as a corporate entity will never do that.”

“My case is closed,” Barry said.