Hollywood Animal (7 page)

Most young women, I found, had seen the movie. Some liked it; others disliked it … but almost all of them were fascinated by and on some sexual level
drawn to
the man who wrote it.

If I was a cheating husband before I wrote
Basic
, I became a kind of sexual stuntman after it was released in the theaters.

It all led, finally, to what Evans considered his ultimate compliment: “I saw the movie and thought, ‘Damnit, this cocksucker knows more about pussy than I do.’”

(I don’t.
No one
will ever know as much as Evans.)

My advice to screenwriters: Be careful what you write. Because what you write … can come back and
rewrite you!

It’s possible that in that post
-Basic
period, I was trying to live up to the definition of the Hungarian word
Eszterhás:
“a vagabond who sleeps on a different roof each night.”

XIV

I couldn’t deny that I was a “rogue elephant” of a screenwriter (the
Los Angeles Times
). I not only didn’t respect most directors but didn’t respect most screenwriters, either.

Which screenwriters were worthy of respect? William Goldman maybe? The Bill Goldman who wrote
Butch and Sundance
, sure, but that was a long time ago and now Bill Goldman was advising young screenwriters to take notes during a meeting with a producer and pretend to like the producer’s ideas—even if they were imbecilic—just to get the job. That sounded a whole lot to me like the madam telling the girls how to turn tricks at her bordello, so I told the London
Times
that Bill Goldman was “a hooker from Connecticut.” (And Bill, a proud New Yorker, called the
Times
angrily after the piece appeared and said, “Did Joe really say I was from
Connecticut
?”)

Or, how about Ron Bass, who rewrote Barry Morrow’s
Rain Man
and earned a secondhand ricocheting Oscar? Ron was one of my first attorneys, working for one of the most powerful showbiz law firms in town. (It didn’t hurt to still be on the firm’s stationery when Ron was seeking screenwriting jobs; one way of looking at it was that studios could curry favor with the law firm hoping to get a break during the next Cruise negotiation by hiring one of its lawyers to write a script.)

Ron was a good lawyer when he had represented me, doing whatever I asked, and he had the same lawyerly attitude working with a director on a script. “My function is to
service
directors,” Ron told the press, “to help them realize
their
vision.

“I’ve got to make the director’s vision my own in some way,” Ron said. “I’ve got to find the thing in the director’s vision that I’m not just willing to help him with, but that really excites me, so that I can get inspired along his line of thinking. … The director was so generous to listen to me. … Once I’m
commissioned
I have a vision that squares with my studio executive’s and my director’s—whomever I’m working with—and then I’m relaxed. I’m on this job. … The director is the author of the film. … I wasn’t smart enough to get it right away but Steven Spielberg was extremely patient with me. He talked with me until I started to realize this was not only something to get behind but was really a much better way than I’d be doing. … These are like the nicest guys, these directors. They’re not only great directors, they’re also really great people to work with.”

As I reread all of Ron’s words, I realized that these were really not
lawyerly
terms: “
Servicing … the director’s vision … the director was so generous to listen to me … the director is the author of the film … Steven Spielberg was extremely patient with me … these are like the nicest guys, these directors
.”

No, to me these were words neither lawyerly nor writerly, these words were theatrical moans.

Were screenwriters like Tom Schulman (
Dead Poets Society
) or Michael Blake (
Dances with Wolves
) or Michael Tolkin (
The Player
) worthy of respect? Sure, but they wrote one great script but didn’t have lengthy careers.

What about Robert Towne and Alvin Sargent? Were they worthy of respect? Yes, back in the day … although Bob, even then, had
talked
his stories to his pals and agents instead of writing them … and now he was a “script doctor,” a “fixer,” a scene assassin hired by the bosses weeks before a film begins shooting to replace the original writer’s scenes and ideas with their own. Bob found it relatively easy to do that because, at heart, perhaps he didn’t feel like a writer anymore, although way back he had written two masterful scripts:
Chinatown
and
Shampoo
. And Alvin Sargent?
Way, way, way
back in the day, Alvin was something … but he wasn’t really Alvin Sargent anymore, he was Alvin Sargent Ziskin, the husband of a studio exec and/or producer, the same way that the director of my film
Jade
was Billy Friedkin Lansing. Alvin, like Billy, kept working.

What about Herman Mankiewicz (
Citizen Kane
)
?
Well, yes sort of … Ben Hecht? Yes of course. Ben Hecht wrote over a hundred scripts, but he ground them out one after the other, sometimes working on three or four at a time, sometimes having three meetings a day pitching three different projects—which is something that Ron Bass did, too.

I worked on one script at a time and mostly I wrote spec scripts. That meant I didn’t have a deal when I started writing. I finished the script and then sent it to my agent to sell to the studios. It was a
finished
script by the time the studios got it.

I wrote mostly spec scripts for three reasons:

If a director tried to change my script without my agreement—either by himself or with another screenwriter, I tried to stop him by hook or crook, by baseball bat or heart-attack-inducing memo.

If I couldn’t stop a director with a direct assault or by going over his head, I threatened to take my name off the movie.

With
One Night Stand
, I took my name off when the director Mike Figgis made my script unrecognizable to me. Took my name off
after
New Line had paid me $4 million for the script. (I was amazed that New Line allowed Figgis to make so many changes in the script after having paid so much money for it.)

I knew how much I galled some directors and studios. Every other screenwriter could take his name off every other movie in town and nobody cared. But if I did it, it would be on the front page of the trades and jump from there into the dailies and the magazines, which cannibalized the trades for Hollywood news.

And I knew that studio executives believed that bad publicity about a movie—
any
kind of bad publicity—would hurt a movie fatally. Bad publicity gave a movie “the clap.”

The studios knew the kind of wildlife they were going into business with whenever they signed a deal with me. It was right there in front of them in black and white—the name of the company I had set up for income tax purposes.

I was
Barbarian, Ltd
.

Naomi and I called our little boys our “barbarians.”

The reason New Line allowed Mike Figgis to completely rewrite a script the studio had paid a record amount of money for was explained to me years later, by a New Line executive:

“We loved your script when we got it. People in the office were memorizing lines and saying them to each other. When Figgis first said he was interested, we told him we wanted him to shoot the script. He agreed.

“Then
Leaving Las Vegas
, which Figgis had directed, came out. It was the unexpected smash of the year. Each year there’s one unexpected hit that gets a million dollars’ worth of publicity. That year it was
Leaving Las Vegas
. Oscars, Second Coming reviews. Figgis was suddenly the hottest director in town.

“Every other studio wanted to sign him up—to shoot the phone book if that’s what he wanted to do. And
we
had him with
One Night Stand, your
script. Figgis came to us and said he still wanted to do
One Night Stand
, but he wanted
to
rewrite it. And we
still
tried to defend your script. ‘A little rewrite, okay,’ we said to Figgis, ‘a polish, but not a major rewrite.’ He agreed.

“And then, just then,
your
picture
Showgirls
came out. The critical disaster of the year. You got the Sour Apple Award, you got several Razzies. And here, at this same time, was Figgis rewriting your new script—a script probably raunchier than
Showgirls
—Figgis the artiste of the hour with his Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Did you see him in his beret at the Golden Globes?

“He turned in his rewrite. It wasn’t just not a polish, it wasn’t just a major rewrite, it was a tidal wave of a rewrite.
Everything
in your script had been washed away. Many of us hated his rewrite. But Figgis had us. What were we supposed to do? Tell Mike Figgis—think Cimino at the height of his glory, Figgis as the Orson Welles of the month—that we were going to junk his script to find another director to reverentially shoot a script written by the man who’d written
Showgirls?

“We thought about the publicity
that
would have gotten. We would have looked like idiots. At that particular moment, with the furor of
Showgirls
’s failure, we didn’t even like stories which pointed out that we had paid $4 million to the author of
Showgirls
. Many of us felt that was really embarrassing, like—I don’t know—did you ever see Steve McQueen in that Ibsen play—
An Enemy of the People
?

“Some of us were actually hoping you’d make a big deal out of being rewritten by Figgis. We knew the kind of publicity together you and Figgis would get and we knew it would only help the movie—especially since the publicity would focus on how the sleaze-meister who wrote
Showgirls
was rewritten by a high-class Oscar nominee.

“It worked, too, for a while. We got exactly that kind of publicity when you announced that you were taking your name off the movie. And for the first couple days, the movie did well. Then, of course, the roof fell in and the movie tanked. Many of us weren’t surprised. We knew Figgis’s script stunk. Mike is a brilliant and brilliantly atmospheric, stylistic director with an awesome visual sense. But he isn’t a writer. He can’t write any more than Cimino can or probably Welles could.

“Even you have to admit it would have been impossible to tell Mike that at the height of his days of glory. As I said, every studio in town was offering him everything. He would have taken one of those other offers if we would have said anything to him about not liking his script.

“It helped this company’s prestige that he directed a movie for
us
when he could have directed a movie for anybody. In retrospect, from the corporate point of view, it helped us greatly that, at the moment he was the hottest thing in town, he did a movie for us—even if that movie later wound up being a critical and box office failure.”

XV

By 1998, when
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
was released, I had become too big for my own britches. Here I was writing a ruthless satire of the industry itself, a savage piece which even used as many real names and situations as legally possible.

I had attracted Sly Stallone and Whoopi Goldberg and Jackie Chan, among others, to my script—but the ads for the movie didn’t headline them—they headlined me: “FROM JOE ESZTERHAS” the poster said.

And then, in the making of this movie about power and control in Hollywood, I had persuaded the studio to dump the director’s cut and let me
sit in his editing room working with his editor to do the final cut of the movie
.

This wasn’t just any director who was getting stabbed in the back either: Arthur Hiller was the former president of the Directors Guild and the present president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! He was the symbol of the director as titan. He had
led
all directors; he was now
leading
the Academy. And, with the studio as my accomplice, I had stuck a shiv in his back. (At least he hadn’t suffered, like Bob Harmon, a real-life heart attack.)

The Directors Guild was so angry at me that they debated changing the name “Alan Smithee” to some other name as their designation for a movie where the director took his name off it. I immediately did a gleeful interview pointing out that a mere screenwriter had stolen “Alan Smithee” from the all-powerful Directors Guild.

Even Paddy Chayefsky—if I was Che, Paddy was Trotsky—hadn’t been able to accomplish
that
, although the posters for his movies didn’t just have his name on them—they had a
picture
of Paddy in the corner of the poster beating on his typewriter.

I was never able to pull that off, though I did put the actual manual typewriter I used up on the screen in
Jagged Edge
. I don’t think any other writer in Hollywood history was ever able to put his typewriter—his actual weapon—up on-screen.

Paddy Chayefsky began working in Hollywood in the fifties, a time when the dean of American screenwriters, Ben Hecht, was quoted as saying: “A screenwriter is a cross between a groundhog and a doormat. … All you have to do to make a screenwriter behave is gag him with thousand dollar bills.”

Paddy was at dinner once at a studio head’s house and he felt the hostess was condescending to him. When he was leaving, she air-kissed him on both cheeks and said good night and thank you.

Paddy air-kissed both of her cheeks and said, “Good night, thank you, and fuck you.”