THE DEVIL’S GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD THE DEVIL’S GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD THE SCREEN WRITER AS GOD! JOE ESZTERHAS This edition 2009 First published in the UK in 2007 by Duckworth Overlook 90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF Tel: 0207 490 7300 Fax: 0207 490 0080 Email: [email protected] www.ducknet.co.uk Published in the USA by St. Martin’s Press, New York © 2006 by Joe Eszterhas The right of Joe Eszterhas to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ebook ISBN: 978 0 7156 3951 1 For Jenö Máté, Hungarian actor, who played bit parts in John Wayne westerns, and who sponsored my family’s immigration from the refugee camps of Austria to the United States of America … and for Naomi, Sunlight. “In the beginning was the Word …” —John 1:1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments Preface PART ONE: PURSUING YOUR DREAM Lesson 1. They Can Snort You Here! PART TWO: LEARNING THE BUSINESS Lesson 2. Use Your F-Bombs! Lesson 3. Don’t Let ’Em Fart at Your Ideas! Lesson 4. Beware of the Back Pat! Lesson 5. Don’t Let ’Em Bleed on You! Lesson 6. Don’t Take Your Clothes Off! PART THREE: GETTING READY TO WRITE THE SCRIPT Lesson 7. Avoid the Woodpecker! Lesson 8. Ideas Are Poison! PART FOUR: WRITING THE SCRIPT Lesson 9. Slit a Vein and Drip It on the Page! PART FIVE: SELLING THE SCRIPT Lesson 10. How Do You Feel About Going to Bed with an Agent? PART SIX: FILMING THE SCRIPT Lesson 11. Steal As Much Memorabilia from the Set As You Can! PART SEVEN: WORKING WITH THE DIRECTOR Lesson 12. He’s a Passive-Aggressive Snake! Lesson 13. Every Good Director Is a Sadist! PART EIGHT: WORKING WITH THE PRODUCER Lesson 14. Is His Heart Full of Shit? PART NINE: DEALING WITH THE STUDIO Lesson 15. You’re a Jackass in a Hailstorm! PART TEN: INSPIRING THE ACTORS Lesson 16. Their Shorts Have Skid Marks, Too! Lesson 17. Just Say the Fucking Words! PART ELEVEN: SURVIVING THE CRITICS Lesson 18. They Want to Kill You, Rape Your Wife, and Eat Your Children! PART TWELVE: THE HAPPY ENDING Lesson 19. Fight, Write, Throw Up, and Keep Writing! Epilogue Index ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For their help along the long and winding road, I thank: Guy McElwaine, Sam Fischer, Gerry and Gale Messerman, Patricia Glaser, Irwin Winkler, Norman Jewison, Craig Baumgarten, Ben Myron, Jim Morgan, Ed Victor, Alan Nierob, Richard Marquand, Paul Verhoeven, Costa-Gavras, Adrian Lyne, Alan Pakula, Steven Spielberg, Arthur Hiller, Ray Stark, Don Simpson, Jim Robinson, Dawn Steele, Arnold Rifkin, David Greenblatt, Jim Wiatt, Jeff Berg, Skip Brittenham, Bob Shapiro, Kevin Bacon, John Candy, Marsha Nasatir, Gene Corman, Patrick Palmer, Mike Medavoy, Barry Hirsch, Robert Wallerstein, Steven Bochco, Steve Roth, Richard Roth, Andrew Vajna, Mario Kassar, Lee Rich, Tony Thomopoulos, Michael Sloane, Peter Bart, Liz Smith, Army Archerd, George Christy, Michael Fleming, Lori Weintraub, Claudia Eller, Lynn Nesbit, Jerry Bruckheimer, Marty Ransohoff, Bob Bookman, Jann Wenner, Michael Viner, Alan Ladd, Jr., Frank Price, Robert Evans, Charles Evans, Sherry Lansing, Brandon Tartikoff, Jon Peters, Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, Debra Winger, Hunter S. Thompson, Pete Hamill, Jane Scott, Gary Kress, John Reese, Ted Princiotto, Vern Havener, Chris Matthews, Sonny Mehta, Jim Silberman, Jack Mathews, Bill Gross, Tova Leiter, Ira Levin, Tom Hedley, Scott Richardson, Gary G-Wiz, Father Bob Stec, Ron Rogers, Bob Landaw, Marshall Strome, Doug Hicks, Vernon Alden, L. J. Horton, Sue Mengers, Michael Marcus, Tom Wolfe, Philip Noyce, Karel Reisz, Bob Rafelson, Guy Ferland, Roseanne, Sam Kinison, Zelma Redding, Nelson McCormick, Paul Wilmer, Herb Caen, Bob Ranallo, Richard Rosman, Father John Mundweil, Alan Smith, Doug Buemi, Jeremy Baka, Rodman Gregg, Don Granger, Elizabeth Beier, and Matt Drudge. Special thanks to Naomi and to my children—Joe, Nick, John Law, Luke, Steve, Suzanne Maria Eszterhas, and Suzanne Maria Perryman. Finally, no Devil’s Guide to Hollywood would be complete without the diabolical wit and wisdom of the players quoted in this book, some captured by me and some by others. I thank all of those people and especially the insights of my fellow Hungarian, my secret adolescent crush, dahling, the magnificent, the regal, Zsa Zsa Gabor. PREFACE They’re out there by the dozens, telling you how to write screenplays, when they don’t know how to do it themselves. Robert McKee is the most famous of them, and while it is true that he has sold some scripts, he has had only one feature-length film produced on cable television. McKee’s Web site points out that, at the University of Michigan, his creative writing professor was “the noted Kenneth Rowe, whose former students include Arthur Miller and Lawrence Kasdan.” This is, of course, success by association, McKee elevating himself to the same creative peak where stand Miller and Kasdan by saying that he once attended the same school (which admits more than twenty thousand students each year) and had the same teacher. McKee is a former actor who, his Web site says, “appeared on Broadway with such luminaries as Helen Hayes, Rosemary Harris, and Will Geer.” He thus elevates himself to the same peak where stand those acting luminaries. Lo and behold, McKee miraculously turns himself into a luminary. He implies that he is as good an actor as Helen Hayes, the same way that he implied he was as luminary a writer as Arthur Miller. It is a great act, brought to life by an actor who barnstorms the world doing a one-man, three-day, thirty-hour show (like Hal Holbrook doing a marathon Mark Twain): Robert McKee playing the part of successful screenwriter, the actor reciting the same lines over and over again. “It is the same fundamental lecture I have been giving for twenty years,” McKee told the Melbourne (Australia) Herald Sun. “It never gets old.” Reviewing the act, Movieline magazine wrote, “He storms the stage like George C. Scott in Patton.” The New Yorker wrote, “McKee, who used to be an actor, rarely speaks a sentence that does not call for a word so stressed that he bares his teeth.” McKee performs in L.A., Vegas, Miami, New York, Paris, London, and Singapore “from a script that barely changes a word from one performance to another,” The New Yorker wrote. And McKee himself told The New Yorker, “I am an old actor and this is thirty hours of performance to a captive audience. It’s very satisfying.” In that same interview, McKee said, “Warner Brothers said, ‘Bob, we want Jagged Edge goes rock and roll for Cher. I wrote a thing called Trophy, for an embarrassing amount of money, about a rock star who murders her husband and gets away with it. They loved it. Loved it.” But alas, as much as they may have “loved it,” Warner Bros. didn’t make it. Nobody has made it. I was amused to read that Warner Bros. told McKee to write “Jagged Edge goes rock and roll,” since I’m the guy who wrote the original Jagged Edge. In other words, the great screenwriting guru, who tells the world how to write scripts, was assigned by Warner Brothers to sit down and imitate me. And imitate me he did: “A rock star who murders her husband and gets away with it” is how he described Trophy. That is a resounding echo of Jagged Edge’s theme of a prominent socialite who murders his wife and gets away with it. I am led then to this conclusion: If you want to know about screenwriting, you might be better off listening to the guy who wrote the original than the guy who imitated it. What you will read in this book is what I’ve learned in thirty-one years of writing screenplays. I have written fifteen films: F.I.S.T., Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Big Shots, Hearts of Fire, Betrayed, Music Box, Nowhere to Run, Basic Instinct, Checking Out, Sliver, Showgirls, Jade, Telling Lies in America, and An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. I am now working on my sixteenth and seventeenth. My films have grossed over 1 billion at the box office, and in 1992, Basic Instinct was the number-one movie of the year worldwide. I have been paid many millions of dollars for my scripts, more than any other screenwriter in Hollywood history: 4 million for a four-page outline of One Night Stand; 3.7 million for Showgirls; 3.7 million for an unproduced biography of John Gotti; 3 million for Basic Instinct; 2.5 million for Jade, and lesser seven-figure amounts for Betrayed, Music Box, and Flashdance. I have been called “the rogue elephant of screenwriters” (the Los Angeles Times); “the Che Guevara of screenwriters (Daily Variety); “a living Hollywood legend” (ABC’s 20/20); and “a force of nature” (The New York Times). My fa vorite quote about myself, of course, and one I use shamelessly to infuriate my critics, is a quote from Time magazine: “If Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Eszterhas?” (No, I will reluctantly admit that I am not Shakespeare; I am a refugee street kid from the West Side of Cleveland, in love with his wife, his children, movies, baseball, and America.) I lived for twenty-two years in Marin County in northern California; a year in Kapalua, Maui; eight years in Malibu’s Point Dume; and, for the past four years, back home in Ohio, where Naomi and I have decided to raise our four boys (so they, too, will grow up to be in love with their wives, children, baseball, and America).