Hollywood Animal (16 page)

Norman Jewison was a very, very rich man.

The next morning, on his deck, we resumed the battle over the script. After I’d said something particularly obnoxious and probably insulting, he got up and stretched. He looked at the crashing surf for a while.

Without looking at me, he said, “Did you open it?”

I said, “What?”

“You know what.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do,” he said, “and if you’d just listen to me sometimes and stop being so goddamn pigheaded, it’s just possible that you’ll be worth that kind of money someday.”

I said nothing and, as we both looked at the crashing sea, we both started to laugh.

· · ·

We finally finished the script—it had taken us almost six months working together. I liked it. I knew it was as much his as it was mine, but I liked it.

“It’s a good script, kid,” he said. “I’m proud of you. You did good.”

I said, “Thank you. Does this mean you’re going to direct it?”

“Maybe.” He smiled.

“If,” Pat Palmer said, “we get the right budget and good casting.”

“What if you don’t?” I said to Norman.

“Well,” he said, not cracking a smile, “we had a lot of fun, didn’t we?”

I felt nauseated when he said that, but as I got older and wiser I understood that we’d had more fun than movie people usually do.

Norman sent the script to Robert De Niro. We waited. Weeks went by … a month went by … another month went by. De Niro didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. His agent said he hadn’t yet had a chance to read it.

At the same time, we ran into budget problems with United Artists. Norman needed $14 million to make it the way we wanted to make it: a big, epic, three-hour-long movie with an intermission in the middle. UA would only go as high as $11 million. Norman asked to have the project in turnaround, making it possible for him to take it to any other financier. UA agreed.

Norman took it to every financier in town. Everybody passed (a classic Hollywood word: projects pass the way kidney stones and people do).

He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He went back to United Artists and begged and pleaded. He got nowhere. He got on a plane and flew to New York to meet with Arthur Krim, the corporate head of United Artists, a nearly mythical elderly man known for his taste and liberal political beliefs. And he talked Arthur Krim into making the movie … but only for the $11 million they had earlier agreed to.

It meant we had to cut the script. It meant that our three-hour movie would be down to two hours and some minutes. It meant that the intermission was gone. It was a very painful process.

“Is it worth truncating this script?” I asked him.

“We’re not truncating it,” he said, “we’re cutting it.”

“Is it worth cutting it radically just to get it made?”

“Would you rather it sit around in a drawer?” he asked. “That’s our only alternative. You’ve spent years on it. I’ve spent more than a year on it. But if you tell me that it’s better it sit in a drawer, we’ll stop right here.”

“No,” I said, after a moment’s thought, “I’m not telling you that.”

“I didn’t think you were.” He smiled.

Then he said, “I think you’ll have a long career in this town.”

· · ·

We cut forty pages out of the script and then, suddenly, Norman cast it. His agent was Stan Kamen at William Morris. Stan was also representing the hottest actor in Hollywood, an actor whose face was on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
, whose last movie,
Rocky
, had become an American icon: Sylvester Stallone. Through Stan, Norman persuaded Sylvester Stallone to star in
F.I.S.T
.

The day after Norman and Stan and Stallone met and agreed, Robert De Niro’s agent called to say that De Niro wanted to do the movie. It was too late. There was a verbal agreement with Stallone.

The day after De Niro’s agent called, Norman, Pat, and I were sitting at Norman’s patio in Malibu. All three of us were muted. Robert De Niro was the best actor in the world. Nobody really knew whether Stallone could act. We had the most publicized young star in the world and none of us were happy.

I went back home to Marin County and Norman started pre-production on
F.I.S.T
. Thanks to Stallone’s involvement, it was suddenly the most publicized movie being made in town. The whole world had wondered what he’d do to follow up
Rocky
.

I suddenly was being hustled by agents and producers who, in most cases, hadn’t even read my script, but were aware of the fact that I’d written a film starring Sylvester Stallone.

Gene Corman mailed me a clip from Army Archerd’s column in
Daily Variety
. Army, the dean of Hollywood columnists, devoted most of his column to the fact that Stallone was going to star in
F.I.S.T
. He talked a lot about Jewison, too, and even mentioned me.

He said that I “would stop playing for the Rolling Stones” and would now be doing screenplays full-time. That, of course, was news to me, but then so was the fact that I’d stopped singing with Mick and Keith. Corman had yellow-penned the parts of the column about me.

What he did not yellow-pen, but what came leaping out at me, was this line: “Stallone plans to immediately begin working on his rewrite of
F.I.S.T
. with director Jewison.”

What? WHAT?

I called Norman in a near lunatic state. He sounded busy, distracted, but blasé.

“Oh, that,” he said, “don’t worry about it.”

“But—but—is it true?”

“No, not really.”

“Not—really?”

“Stallone considers himself a writer, not just a star. He wrote
Rocky
. He’s got his ego in writing, too. He’s going to be on the cover of
Writer’s Digest
. It’s a part of his deal.”

“What—deal?”

“His acting deal. I had to agree to let him do a polish to get him to star in the picture. I’ll let him do a polish, so what—it’s not going to make any difference to the script.”

“But it’s
my
script.” I said. “
I
wrote it. I spent nearly three years on it, now he’s saying—”

“It doesn’t matter what he’s saying. Everybody in town knows it’s your script. It’s just star ego. Everybody in town knows what that’s about.”

I didn’t say anything and Norman knew I was seething.

“Aw, come on,” he said. “You’ll take it to the Writers Guild. You’ll get sole screenwriting credit, I promise you.”

I tried to settle down, but just when I thought I was handling it, I read an interview with Stallone in the
Pacific Sun
. The
Pacific Sun
was my hometown Marin County paper. And in the
Pacific Sun
, Stallone was quoted as saying: “
I’ve written a new script called
F.I.S.T.”

“Is it a sequel to
Rocky?
” the interviewer asked him.

“No, I know it sounds like a boxing movie,” Stallone told the
Pacific Sun
, “but it’s about labor unions.”

I had a routine doctor’s appointment and my doctor said, “Why did you tell me you’d written that movie—
F.I.S.T
.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I did write it.”

“I know who wrote it,” he said. “I read it in the paper.”

On the way out of his office, I was afraid he’d ask me to pay him in cash.

I seethed and seethed and just at my boiling point, I got a call from a writer named Saul Pett who wrote features for the Associated Press. Pett was interested in writing a nice cuddly human interest story about how it must feel for a novice screenwriter writing his first script to attract the hottest star in the world.

I said: “Sylvester Stallone is a thief.”

I said: “He is trying to steal my screenplay.”

I said: “He’s Apollo Creed. I’m Rocky Balboa here—I’m the refugee kid who was born in Csákánydoroszló, Hungary.”

I said: “I’ll fight him anyplace, anytime.”

I said: “Besides, I’ve been in more barroom brawls than he has. He fights like a sissy.”

Saul Pett wrote it all down and the story appeared on the front page of more than two hundred newspapers that Sunday.

My father read it in Cleveland and called me. “It’s okay if you threaten to fight him,” he said, “but I saw
Rocky
, too.
Threaten
to fight him, but don’t fight him.”

Norman called, laughing. He said “Sly”—as he was calling him now—was ballistic.

“You’ve really done it now, kid,” he said.

Norman said he was sorry, but for the sake of the production, he couldn’t allow me on the set of the movie.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this, Norman,” I said.

“I’m not doing this,” he said,
“you
did.”

On the set that I wasn’t allowed to visit, in Dubuque, Iowa, Norman Jewison was having his own problems with Sylvester Stallone.

The first problem was that some of the town fathers were getting very upset about the number of cheerleaders who were seen entering and leaving the star’s hotel suite. The second was more serious. In the script that he signed on to, the character that Stallone plays, Johnny Kovak, dies. He is shot to death by the forces who were once his allies. He is forced to go to the mob for help against the bankers and the companies … but the mob, twenty years later, feels forced to kill him.

It was Greek tragedy, the logical ending to a tragic story. Except …

Sylvester Stallone did not want to die.

He argued it with Norman over and over again: “The public will not accept me dying,” he said. “I’m Rocky. I’m a hero. It’s going to hurt the movie commercially and it’s going to hurt
me
. It turns the movie into a
downer.”

Norman dug his heels in. “You have to die,” he told Sly. “We’re not making
Rocky
here, we’re making a tragedy about the labor movement. Without your death, there is no ending to the movie. It won’t hurt your career, it’ll help it, it’ll show your range.”

“I’m a star,” Stallone said.

“You’re an actor,” Norman said.

Stallone went to his agent and then he went to the studio. They told him he had read the script which he had agreed to do. He had signed a contract.

“I’m not doing it,” Stallone told Norman.

The day they were supposed to shoot the scene where Johnny Kovak is shotgunned to death and falls down the stairs, Sylvester Stallone said he couldn’t work. He had hurt his neck, he said.

Lawyers got into it now. Stallone threatened to walk off the movie. He threatened not to do any publicity for the movie. The studio threatened to sue. Norman threatened to sue. Two orthopedic specialists were flown from Beverly Hills to Dubuque to examine Sylvester Stallone’s neck. One was chosen by the studio, the other by Stallone. The studio’s specialist said there was nothing wrong with Stallone’s neck. Stallone’s specialist said he had sprained his neck muscles and couldn’t work.

Filming stopped for a day until Norman and Stallone and the agents and the studio people and the specialists and the insurance company and the completion bond people worked out a compromise.

Stallone would do the death scene once.

Just once—that was it.

If Norman somehow blew the scene, that would be it. We’d have to redo the ending of the movie.

So Norman shot the scene just once.

He shot it perfectly.

And Sylvester Stallone died the way he was supposed to.

Norman showed me the rough cut. I liked what I saw for the most part. Yes, I missed the forty pages we had cut out at the end and I kept wondering what De Niro would have been like in the part, but I liked the movie. I even liked Stallone in it most of the time.

The big change that Sly had made to the script involved the killing of his best friend and near-brother. In my script, Johnny Kovak ordered that his lifelong brother be killed. In the movie, the mob did the killing
without his knowledge
.

“There is no way I could get him to play it that way,” Norman said. “He didn’t want to even die, let alone look like he was orchestrating his best friend’s death. It’s a star thing.”

As far as my credit was concerned, Norman, Patrick, Marcia and Gene all believed that I would be awarded sole credit by the Writers Guild on the screenplay.

Norman had kept his word: except for the “star thing” change prettying his character, Stallone hadn’t been allowed to, as Norman put it, “put his fingerprints on the script.”

Since Stallone indicated through his attorneys that he wanted screen credit, I made plans to submit the issue to the Writers Guild.

Meanwhile, my book agent in New York, Lynn Nesbit, astounded the world by selling the novelization of the screenplay for a record $400,000. Part of the high price, I understood, was because publishers liked the script and thought it would make a good paperback novel. Part of it was they thought I could write it:
Charlie Simpson
had been a National Book Award nominee. And part of it, no doubt, was because Sylvester Stallone was an overnight, huge star and his picture on the cover of the book would really sell it.

That overwhelmingly good news was tempered by the fact that I had signed a first-time screenwriter’s contract with the studio which gave them 90 percent of any novelization money. No one, of course, at the time that contract was
signed
could imagine that Lynn Nesbit could transform a novelization into this kind of money.

I called my lawyer in Los Angeles, Barry Hirsch, one of the industry’s most respected attorneys, and explained the situation to him. I had worked for nearly three years on this script for $80,000. I used up a good part of that money just for the research.

Was there anything we could do, I asked, to get around the 90-10 contract with UA?

He asked me for time to think about it and then asked me to come down and see him at his office.

Barry Hirsch is a low-key man with his own gestalt psychology practice on the side. Outside his office door is a framed pair of blue jeans. His usual dress is jeans, a checked shirt, and tennis shoes. When I saw him at his office in L.A., the first thing he said was “I checked the contract, there’s nothing we can do.”