Hollywood Animal (51 page)

“There is nothing to talk about except this,” Paul said. “I am not a racist! I am not a homophobe! I will make the movie I want to make! You will not tell me what to make! I will not accept censorship!”

It was the worst way to begin, exacerbated, I saw, by his style and his accent. The style was blazing hot and, to my ears, the accent awfully Germanic.

I knew Paul Verhoeven hated the Nazis, I knew he had even been the victim of Nazi bombings as a child, but he acted and sounded like the stereotypical screen Nazi.

“Paul,” I said, “I don’t think anybody here wants to censor you. I don’t think anybody in this room believes in censorship, but I, at least, as the screenwriter, want to hear how people here feel about the script. There can be no harm in listening.”

Alan Marshall was glaring at me.

Paul, I could tell, didn’t even want to look at me.

The people in the room had gotten the script somehow and started to talk about it. They viewed Catherine Tramell as a lesbian and felt her depiction to be negative.

Since she was, the script implied, having sex with a woman friend (Roxy) who was a convicted murderer, they saw
two
lesbian killers in my script.

They thought the reference to Catherine and Roxy by the George Dzundza character as “dykes” was offensive.

They believed Michael’s sexual scene with Tripplehorn to be “date rape” and
felt
that showing date rape on-screen would lead to real-life imitation of it.

I argued that neither Catherine nor Roxy were lesbians but bisexuals—
part
straight and
part
gay—so it wasn’t fair to view them simplistically as gay.

But as far as the group in the room was concerned, bisexual
was
gay.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “If someone is bisexual, he or she is not just homosexual—he or she is also heterosexual.”

“If they’re bisexual, they’re gay,” someone said.

“By whose definition?” I asked.

“By ours.”

“I don’t agree with the definition,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” someone said. “If you were gay, you’d know what you were talking about.”

“What does that mean?” I said. “Does that mean only gay writers can write about gay characters?”

“Yes,” someone said.

I said, “Aw, come on. That means Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee can’t write about
heterosexual
characters. That means they shouldn’t have written their plays.”

No one said anything to that.

Paul said to the group, “Do you mean that gay people on the screen can’t be
bad
people? Gay people on the screen have to be
saints?
Are there no bad people in real life who are
gay?”

“Why do they
always
have to be bad people on-screen?” Harry Britt said. “Why haven’t there been
any
movies where the good guy just
happens to be gay?
Why haven’t we seen any action heroes
ever
—who just happen to be gay?”

Harry went into a very moving description of his childhood in Port Arthur, Texas. “The only gay role model I had growing up,” he said, “was Liberace. Why aren’t there ever any gay role models in the movies?”

“You’ve got two lesbians in this movie,” somebody said to me, “they’re both killers.”

“Even if you view Catherine and Roxy as both lesbians,” I said, “and I disagree with you … that’s not true. By your definition, you have the police psychiatrist, the Tripplehorn character—by your definition, she’s lesbian, too, and she’s a victim, not a killer.”

Somebody said, “If we’re not killers in movies, then we’re victims. Why does it have to be that way?”

Somebody else said, “What do you mean the Tripplehorn character isn’t a killer? She’s revealed as the killer at the end of the movie!”

I said, “No, she’s not, Catherine’s the killer,” and I suddenly realized that
Basic
was such a
tangled
mystery that some people here didn’t know who the real killer was.

As I watched the young people in this group, I was moved by their passion and their conviction. I had always identified with blacks and Jews and gay people … the words “nigger” and “kike” and “faggot” weren’t far from the “greenhorn” and “hunkie” and “queer” that I’d heard as a child and as an adolescent.

“Why do we have to have these ‘dyke’ references in the dialogue?” somebody asked me.

I explained that the words came out of the mouth of a veteran, hard-boiled old-school cop and that, realistically, George Dzundza’s character would use that word.

“But why do we have to hear it on a screen?” someone else said. “We hear it so often in real life.”

I thought about those words that had hurt me so much as a kid and I suddenly said, “Maybe you’re right.”

Paul said to me, “What do mean she’s right? It’s part of
your character’s
language.
You
just said so.”

“He doesn’t absolutely have to use the word ‘dyke’ for us to understand his character,” I said.

There was silence in the room.

Paul and I were looking at each other.

His look said: Traitor, how can you be doing this to me?

Harry Britt looked at me and said, simply, “Thank you.”

“Let me look through the script,” I said. “Maybe I can find some changes that don’t affect the plot or the characterization.”

“No,” Paul said, his voice rising. “We will make no changes! I am the director! I am shooting the movie I want to shoot and I want no changes!”

“This isn’t your baby,” I said to him. “It’s mine. If I want to make changes to
my
script, I can.”

“You can make all the changes you want,” Paul said, “but I am not putting them into the movie.”

Then he turned to the group and he said, “I will not make a movie you will find offensive. I will not make a movie the public finds offensive to you. Your date-rape scene, for example—it will be obvious to everyone that scene will be consensual sex, not date rape.”

“How do we know that?” someone asked.

“Because I tell you,” Paul said.

“How do we know that’s true?”

“Trust me,” Paul said.

Harry Britt said, “That’s just not good enough.”

It was all over the television news in San Francisco that night—Eszterhas was willing to make changes, but Verhoeven wasn’t.

I saw myself interviewed, saying, “They made some points I agreed with.”

The next day the papers played Paul as the bad guy and said I’d become a hero to the gay community.

Mario Kassar called Guy and said, “That’s it! I’m suing him!”

“If you sue him,” Guy said, “you’re going to have every gay militant between California and Paris on the set of your movie.”

“Fuck him!”
Mario Kassar screamed. “I’m going to put a contract out on him!”

“What did you say?”
Guy McElwaine screamed so loudly that the secretaries down the hall heard him.

“Oh for God’s sake, Guy,” Mario said. “You know I’m not going to do anything like that.
But why is he doing this to me?
I paid him three million dollars to do
this
to me?”

The
New York Times
did a story about the San Francisco protests of
Basic Instinct
which pointed out that this was probably the first time a screenwriter was battling to change his own words … against a director who wanted to use the screenwriter’s words unchanged. The
New York Times
also pointed out that this was the
same
screenwriter who’d walked off the project because this
same
director wanted to
change
his words.

I sent Paul a series of changes which, I felt, violated neither the story nor the characters.

Paul once again said publicly that he would make no changes.

A columnist who applauded Paul’s position said this was the first known case of a director maintaining the integrity of a script against the efforts of a screenwriter who wanted to destroy what he’d written.

The protests began as the movie started shooting. The protesters carried signs and yelled loudly and blew whistles but were, I thought, harmless. Alan Marshall didn’t think so, however, and started making “citizen’s arrests” of kids in Queer Nation T-shirts and carrying them to nearby police vans.

I couldn’t believe that the producer of a Hollywood movie was actually carrying out “citizen’s arrests” on the streets of San Francisco and attacked Alan for using “Nazi tactics.” I referred publicly to a book in which Bill Cosby, who’d worked with Marshall, called him a “racist.”

My criticism of Alan Marshall caused a trash fest in the press. Michael Douglas, an icon of liberal politics who had become the main target of the protesters, called me a bunch of names in a national magazine, the nicest of which was “opportunist.”

Paul was quoted as saying that since I lived in the Bay Area, I was physically afraid of the wrath of the gay community. (When
Basic Instinct
was released, I heard Paul sandbagged parts of his Pacific Palisades home, afraid of being physically harmed by Queer Nation kamikaze squads.)

Paul kept filming. He suffered a nosebleed one day which required hospitalization and my spies said Michael Douglas had punched him, although Paul denied it. (Not that unusual in Hollywood: Sly Stallone broke several of director Ted Kotcheff’s ribs on
First Blood
.)

Stone and Michael were at each other’s throats.

I remembered Michael’s complaint that “she one-ups me every time” … when I heard that, in a scene near the end of the movie, he refused to move toward Sharon, but insisted Stone move toward him. Stone refused to do it and Paul was forced to shoot it both ways.

At the end of the shoot, still trying to mend fences, Michael attended a gala San Francisco AIDS benefit, sat on the dais, and announced a big-buck donation.

I was invited to no screenings and was left off the invitation list for the premiere. Gay groups announced massive protests in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles for opening night. T-shirts were made that said “Catherine Did It” and kids with Queer Nation T-shirts and loudspeakers walked up and down San Francisco streets saying “Don’t See It—Catherine Did It!” hoping to ruin the mystery and the box office.

I saw the movie on opening night in my local Marin County theater with Gerri and Steve and Suzi. I stood in line, paid money to see my own movie, bought everybody popcorn, and sat down. A bank of TV lights waited outside for my reaction.

When it was over, I walked outside and stepped to the cameras and said, “I loved it. Paul Verhoeven has directed a brilliant movie. My hat’s off to him. He was right when he said there wouldn’t be anything injurious in this movie to gay people.”

The public agreed with me. The movie opened huge—$15 million in 1992—against
sometimes
fulminating reviews. The protests ended after two days.

While protesters were right about harmful Hollywood depictions of gay people, many of them soon realized they’d picked the wrong movie as their target. They should have gone after
Bird on a Wire
with Mel Gibson instead of
Basic Instinct
.

I did notice, though, as I watched the movie, that Paul had removed all the references to “dykes” in the dialogue just as I’d suggested.

As we walked out of that Corte Madera Theatre, Steve, my fifteen-year-old son, seemed orgasmic.

“Dad! Dad!” Steve said. “How did you come up with that scene where she crosses her legs?”

It was the scene which my friend Robert Evans would refer to as “the hundred-million-dollar pussy-hair shot.”

I realized I was at a cathartic moment with my son.
Why oh why had I told my kids I’d never lie to them?

“I didn’t,” I said.

He said, “
What?
”

I said, “It wasn’t in the script. It was Paul’s idea. In the previous scene in the script, as Sharon was getting dressed, Michael saw that she wasn’t wearing underwear. But to have that flash of hair in the interrogation scene, that was Paul’s idea.”

Steve seemed shocked.

The most controversial, most talked about scene in the movie, wasn’t even his father’s idea.

I sent Paul Verhoeven a case of champagne congratulating him and told the
L.A. Times
that “Paul was right and I was wrong” about the points the protesters had argued.
Basic Instinct
, I said, was in no way a homophobic movie.

Now some of the leaders of the gay community were calling me a “traitor” and accusing me of “using and betraying” them.

I noticed that in the interviews that he did, Michael Douglas seemed somehow befuddled about the movie’s success. He kept talking about “redemption” and how this movie had no “redemptive value.”

I noticed, too, that a lot of people who had seen the movie were coming to me and asking whodunit? They’d enjoyed the movie but weren’t sure who the killer was.

It reminded me of
Jagged Edge
, where Siskel and Ebert had set off a national guessing game by saying they weren’t sure that it was Jeff Bridges who was wearing the ski mask in the final scene of the movie.

· · ·

A woman in Toledo, Ohio, who saw
Basic
killed her husband by sticking an ice pick into his heart.

She had seen the movie.

The media was all over me.

I told them he probably died a faster and less painful death than if she had used a butcher knife or a gun.

Basic Instinct
, the script I’d written in three weeks, went on to gross more than $400 million around the world. It was the number one box office hit of the year in both the United States and around the world. A French news magazine picked it as the event of the year. Not the
movie
event of the year. The
news
event of the year. The magazine said that a hundred years from now, 1992 would be remembered as the year
Basic Instinct
was released.

Ah, the French!
In France, Mickey Rourke is a superstar.

Thanks to
Basic Instinct
, Gerri, Steve and Suzi, and I were undergoing a very personal crisis in Tiburon.