The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Read online

  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).

  But while I’ve lived in all these places, in my head I’ve lived in Hollywood all this time, beginning my days by reading Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter—and then The New York Times (starting, like George W. Bush, with the sports pages).

  The lessons that I am about to pass on to you were learned in many and varied places: in so-called (and oxymoronic) studio creative meetings; on tension-laden sets; on luxurious Learjets headed for European locations; in limos moving like bulletproof armored vehicles down Sunset Boulevard in the L.A. night; on family vacations to movie-family vacation spots like the Kahala Hilton on Oahu and, later, the Four Seasons on Maui; at poker games in the Hollywood Hills and in Bel Air; at craps tables at Caesar’s Palace, the Mirage, and Bellagio in Vegas; at innumerable parties in Aspen, Malibu, and the Hamptons; and at myriad power breakfasts, lunches, and dinners at Morton’s, the Ivy, Elaine’s, the Four Seasons Grill Room, Spago, Crustacean, Frida’s, Citrus, Orsini’s, the Friar’s Club, the Daisy, Ma Maison, Café Rodeo, the Swiss House, Scandia, the Brown Derby, Palm, Patrick’s Roadhouse, Michael’s, the patio of the Bel Air Hotel, the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel and the Peninsula, the lobby bar at the Chateau Marmont, the Sky Bar, the Monkey Bar, On the Rox, La Dolce Vita, Jimmy’s, La Scala on Little Santa Monica and La Scala at the beach, Nicky Blair’s, Granita, Eureka, Dan Tana’s, the Padrino Room at the Beverly Wilshire, the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Grill on Dayton Way, and Nobu in L.A. and in New York.

  In the world of Hollywood, the true battlefields are restaurants and bars in L.A. and New York. I have fought many battles in those places and have learned some hard-won, hilarious, and painful lessons.

  I pass them on to you because my creative life has been dedicated to the belief that we screenwriters are not “schmucks with Underwoods” (as Jack Warner once called us) but that through hard work, strength of will, treachery, God’s help, and big balls, we can write good scripts, protect them from being mutilated on-screen, make millions, and live lives that are self-respectful and fulfilling.

  I am convinced the day will come when screenwriters will no longer be at the bottom of the Hollywood totem pole; the schmucks with laptops will be kicking ass.

  Hollywood has often been a hellish place for screenwriters, but I think that with my Devil’s Guide in hand, you’ll feel less pain.

  —Joe Eszterhas

  Bainbridge Township, Ohio

  PART ONE

  PURSUING

  YOUR DREAM

  LESSON 1

  They Can Snort You Here!

  Why do you want to be a screenwriter?

  The answer I get from most young wannabe screenwriters is, “Cuz I want to be rich.”

  I tell them what Madonna says: “Money makes you beautiful.”

  And I tell them that I’ve made a lot of money but that I’ll never be beautiful.

  Why do you want to write a screenplay?

  Screenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler (The Blue Dahlia): “Where the money is, so will the jackals gather.”

  You, too, can be a star.

  My biggest year was 1994. I wrote five scripts in one year. I made almost 10 million. I had houses in Tiburon and Malibu, California, and in Kapalua, Maui.

  I made half a million dollars for writing a thirty-second television commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume.

  I fell in love. I got divorced. I married my second wife. Our first child was born.

  I had the best tables at Spago and the Ivy and at Granita, Postrio, and Roy’s. I had limos in northern California, in Malibu, and on Maui.

  I ate more, I drank more, I made love more, and I spent more time in the sun than I ever had. The world was my oyster.

  I became the screenwriter as star.

  “Ben Hecht,” his friend Budd Schulberg wrote many years ago, “seemed the personification of the writer at the top of his game, the top of his world, not gnawing at and doubting himself as great writers were said to do, but with every word and every gesture indicating the animal pleasure he took in writing well.”

  Robert McKee makes money, doesn’t he?

  When a student interrupted a McKee seminar with a question, McKee roared, “Do not interrupt me!”

  A few minutes later, McKee shouted to the student, “If you think that this course is about making money, there’s the door!”

  I’ll say this right up front: This book is about making money.

  Money is not the best thing about screenwriting.

  The best thing about screenwriting is this: I sit in a little room making things up and put my conjurings down on paper. A year and a half later, if I’m lucky, my conjurings will be playing all over the world on movie screens, giving enjoyment to hundreds of millions of people.

  For two hours, the lives of hundreds of millions of people will have been made better by something that I conjured up in a little room out of my own heart, gut, and brain.

  By then, my conjurings will have become a megacorporation employing thousands of people—from gaffers to makeup people to ticket sellers.

  And it will all have begun with me, with my imagination and my creativity, literally communicating with the whole world.

  That’s the best part of screenwriting.

  The money (almost) doesn’t matter.

  Screenwriter Jack Epps (Top Gun, Legal Eagles): “You do it because you love the movies. The money gets in the way. I think that if you’re a good writer, the money will follow. But if you’re writing for money, I don’t think it’s going to work. I think that very few people can make that happen.” I’ll s
ay this right up front: This book is about making money. Without losing your soul.

  Ben Hecht is no role model.

  Wrote Ben: “The fact that the movie magnate is going to make an enormous pile of money out of my story and that I am therefore entitled to a creditable share of it seldom, if ever, occurs to me. I am, to the contrary, convinced that my contribution is nil. The story I will provide will be a piece of hack work, containing in it a reshuffling of familiar plot turns and characterizations.”

  TAKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

  Actress and famed Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “Money is like a sixth sense that makes it possible for you to fully enjoy the other five.”

  Getting to the Tit

  An old Hollywood expression for making some big money.

  If you sell a script, you’ll be part of a fun and glamorous business.

  When he got back to London after the Lawrence of Arabia shoot, screenwriter Robert Bolt told the London Sunday Times that the shoot had been “a continuous clash of egomaniacal monsters wasting more energy than dinosaurs and pouring rivers of money into the sand.”

  Dream Street

  Hollywood legend: If you walk down Dream Street and somebody notices you (or buys your script), you can be a star overnight.

  We have no role models.

  When asked by reporters why he was a screenwriter, Ben Hecht, the most successful screenwriter in the history of Hollywood, said, “Because I was born in a toilet.”

  Screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men) described himself in the twilight of his career this way in his book Hype and Glory: “Couldn’t walk, couldn’t read, couldn’t do a goddamn thing but stare the night away and block out the past.”