Hollywood Animal (28 page)

I scrounged garbage cans, fields, and back alleys collecting pop and beer bottles to return to grocery stores for the pennies with which I bought bazball cards.

I collected the Indians—Al Rosen especially. I had six Al Rosens, but I also had six of Hank Sauer of the Cubs and Elmer Valo of the Philadelphia Athletics—because Sauer was Hungarian and Valo was Slovak.

I was laying my cards out in the concrete yard when Father Peter picked one of them up.

“Rosen,” Father Peter said,
“ez Zsido.”

On a weekend night when my father was gone making a speech and my mother and I were alone, two Hungarian drunks from Papp’s Bar came up the stairway and beat on our door.

They said, “Open the door, pretty Mari, we know you’re alone.”

They said, “We’ll make you feel good, pretty Mari, the boy can watch.”

They said, “Don’t you want to teach your boy?”

They said, “Our horse’s cock will enter your behind.”

They said, “Open the door, pretty Mari, you know how much you want to!”

They said, “Open wide! Open wide!”

Then they laughed and left.

My mother had said not a word, holding me tight to her, her arm around me, a rosary in her other hand.

Somebody passed me a note in class.

It said, “Why can Jesus walk on water?”

On the other side, it said: “Shit floats.”

Sister Rose saw me laughing and came over to my desk. She put her hand out for the note. I thought about eating it. But I gave it to her. She hit me so hard I almost fell out of my chair.

She called Father John and showed him the note. He slapped me so hard my mouth bled.

Father John called my parents down to school. He showed them the note. My mother slapped me so hard my face swelled up.

“It’s a very old and bad joke,” my father told me that night. “I heard it when I was a boy.”

“Did you laugh?”

“Of course I laughed.” He smiled. “I was young and stupid like you.”

My father told me a story to inspire me:

“When I was eighteen, I was picked as one of ten Hungarian students to be a guest of Lord Razmeer in London. Lord Razmeer owned the
London Daily Mail
, one of the greatest newspapers in the world. I met the lord and Ward Price, the editor of the paper. At the end of our visit, they gave us all gold watches.”

“What happened to the gold watch?” I asked. “Do we have it? Can I see it?”

“We traded it in the camp for a Polish ham,” my father said.

I hated Christmas each year. My parents told me there was no Mikulás or Kis Jézus—Santa Claus or Baby Jesus—that the gifts came from the money we didn’t have.

On Christmas Eve, the three of us took the bus to the May Company near the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland. We went to the bargain basement, where, after two in the afternoon, prices were the lowest of the year. We picked out one piece of clothing as our Christmas present for each of us.

We hurried to get the bus back to Lorain Avenue so we could stop at Gerzeny Brothers Movers before six o’clock. That’s where we bought our Christmas tree and they closed at six sharp. Between five and six on Christmas Eve we could buy a tree for one dollar.

We carried the tree the two blocks home and decorated it with strips of paper my mother had scissored from the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
.

When I was a young American man and a reporter for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
I wondered if anyone else on the staff had ever decorated their Christmas tree with the newspaper they now worked for
.

CHAPTER 6

Michael Eisner Pimps the Teamsters

TONY

Come on, give me a break here, willya? Even a prick deserves a break sometime, am I right?

DAWN

Never.

Showgirls

IN 1981, DON
Simpson, the head of production at Paramount, had a script called
Flashdance
written by a former journalist named Tom Hedley. Simpson thought the script needed a rewrite and sent it to me.

I’d been screenwriting for six years now, though I’d still only had one movie made. But I’d been in innumerable meetings and shucks and shine-ons … and I’d heard and told too many worn-out lies to and from too many producers, directors, and studio heads. By no means a Hollywood animal, I was no longer the fresh-from-the-underground,
Rolling Stoned
Hollywood naïf, either. Head honchos like Simpson didn’t scare me anymore.

I read the script and thought it needed not a rewrite, but a total re-creation from page one. It was about a group of kids at the Fashion Institute of Technology who band together against a Hells Angels–type cycle gang which is threatening their neighborhood. At the center of the piece was a young woman designer who falls in love with a married man in his sixties. What I liked about the piece, I told Simpson, was the title and the kind of arty fashion-oriented stripping that some of the girls did on the side.

“What would you do for the story if you redid it?” Simpson asked.

“I didn’t say I was interested in redoing it,” I said.

“I know that,” Simpson growled, “but what would you do?”

“If you make me an offer I can’t refuse, then I’ll tell you.”

“Fuck you,” Simpson said, “you want me to make a deal with you to rewrite it before I know what you want to do?”

“I don’t want to do anything until you make me an offer I can’t refuse.”

He hung up amidst a torrent of obscenities and called my agent. He wanted to pay me $125,000 for a rewrite and my agent told him he’d have to pay me my full fee for an original screenplay ($275,000 at the time), considering the work I’d want to do.

“You tell your client,” Simpson said, “that he is a greedy pig! I will
never—never—never
pay that kind of money for a rewrite.”

Simpson and I had a special bond between us. I enjoyed teasing him. He still talked about the time I sat down in his chair and put my feet up on his desk. And then, too, there was a more recent and painful (to Simpson) incident which took place at the bar of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York.

Simpson and I were knocking down Tanqueray shooters late one afternoon when we were joined by Hillary, a beautiful young woman who was an editor at the
Village Voice
. Simpson prided himself on being a stud—“I know more about pussy than anybody in Hollywood with the possible exception of Robert Evans”—but two hours later she left with me, not with Don.

He had called me the next morning, sputtering.

“You motherfucker!” he ranted. “I don’t get it. I’m the head of a studio, you’re just a writer. No, you’re a
screenwriter!
You’re
nothing!
and she leaves with you? The bitch! The fucking bitch!”

Three weeks after he told my agent I was a greedy pig, he called him back and made the deal with me. “Tell that pig I want him down here!” Simpson said.

He told me about the background of the piece and introduced me to the others involved. Peter Guber and Jon Peters had originally been involved; Lynda Obst had developed the screenplay with Hedley. Hedley had based the script on a particular kind of stripping/dancing that was being done in some of the clubs in Toronto.

They were all gone from the project now. Adrian Lyne, a hip Englishman who had directed a beautiful little movie called
Foxes
, was now involved to direct. Dawn Steel, a vice president of production at Paramount, was the executive in charge of the project. He filled me in on Dawn. She had begun her career as an assistant to Bob Guccione at
Penthouse
. She had then, on her own, started manufacturing Gucci toilet paper and made a lot of money until Gucci stopped her.

Now that we had a deal, Simpson said, now that he had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, maybe I’d condescend to tell him what I had in mind for the story.

Not yet, I said.

“Excu-u-u-u-use me?” Simpson said in a voice I was sure you could hear over the lot.

Well, I said, if Hedley based his script on something that was actually being done in Toronto—then why didn’t we begin by going up to Toronto and speaking to some of the young women who were “flashdancing.”

“Jesus,
Toronto?
” Don said. “You want to go to Toronto? We’re not talking about Miami Beach here or Vegas. Toronto is the boonies.”

I didn’t just want to go to Toronto, I explained. I wanted him to come with me, along with Adrian Lyne … and Dawn if she wanted to come.

“I am not going to
Toronto!”
Simpson said.

But a week later we were there—Don and I and Adrian and a young producer who would also be involved in the project, Jerry Bruckheimer, lean and sharp-eyed, who had produced a funny movie called
Young Doctors in Love
.

Toronto, we discovered, was sex-crazed. Not only were there dozens of clubs where “exotic dances” and “exotic acts” were performed, but the weekends were sexual extravaganzas.

A promoter would rent out a hall—I mean a hall with seating for ten thousand or so people, a hall where rock acts would usually perform, and into that hall the promoter would book a Penthouse Pet or a Playboy Centerfold. The Pets and Centerfolds would take most of their clothes off in front of this hooting, foaming-at-the-mouth, slobbering mob and receive $50,000 for the weekend. Sometimes there would be three of these arena-strips going at the same time and the papers would have ads for “The Battle of the Busts.”

We focused on the more intimate clubs where “flashdancing” was being performed. We discovered that several of these young women began wanting to be classical dancers. Some had even had formal training. Most regretted that they hadn’t followed that path for one reason or another—usually having to do with boyfriends and unexpected children and putting food on the table. One young woman cried as she spoke softly about not “following her dream.” Another told me of her very talented younger sister who could have been an Olympic skater had she only pursued it. What was her sister doing now? I asked. She was stripping, too, I was told, in a very grungy after-hours club where “she took it all off.”

After one of the flashdancers got off the stage, I ran my hands through her hair, sopping with sweat, and an aura of perspiration exploded into the bright lights and Adrian said, “I have to get that effect on-screen.”

On the way back to L.A., Don and I talked about it. What if our lead, I suggested to him, was a girl who had a dream to be a dancer? What if she was uneducated, blue-collar, and got sidetracked into stripping just to survive? What if the piece really was about “following your dream”?

What if we put the entire piece within a blue-collar context—if her love
interest
was also a blue-collar guy, who finally had to understand that it was more important for her to follow her dream than to marry him?

What if he loved her so deeply that he was willing, finally, not only to accept that most painful of all acceptances, but to help her realize the dream?

Simpson thought it was a good beginning but wondered what it was she actually did—blue-collar sounded intriguing, but what did she do?

“She welds,” I blurted, “she’s a welder.” All the research I had done with welders on
Rowdy
, the Alaska pipeline piece, suddenly came back to me.

Adrian, a visual wizard, loved it instantly.

“She has a torch in her hand,” he said, “she has a mask. The torch flares. She flips her mask up.”

I started working on the script and was summoned to L.A. days later. There was an … unexpected … problem. Don was out as head of production at Paramount. The project, I was told, was “up in the air.” He was now negotiating an independent production deal with the studio. If the deal worked out, he and his friend Jerry Bruckheimer would produce
Flashdance
. If the deal didn’t work out … nobody knew what was going to happen to the project.

Adrian, Jerry, and I talked about the script for a couple days with Simpson absenting himself from the meetings … sort of. He would occasionally chime in on the speakerphone from home, but he was wired and edgy.

The negotiations, I was led to believe, were not going well. Don said that Michael Eisner, in charge of the studio, was “a motherfucker.” Jeff Katzenberg, who had replaced him, was worse.

I went home to Marin County to continue working on the script and Don concluded an independent production deal with the studio. I thought he’d settle down then but he seemed to be more cranked up than ever before.

He’d call me at midnight or two o’clock in the morning with script ideas. He was full of words like “catharsis” and “epiphany” and “second act overdrive” and “redemptive arc.”

He sounded like he had been to some literary critic’s rummage sale.

“This is important,” he yelled into the phone. “I’ve got everything riding on this. This is the only movie I’ve got now! I don’t have a slate of them anymore. I’ve got this one.
I’ve got you!
I have to have a hit movie!”

The day after I sent him the finished script, he sounded ecstatic.

“It’s sensational!” he said. “It’s just what I wanted. We’re going to have a big hit movie! Thank you!
Thank you!
”

He sent me a case of Dom Pérignon.

The day after I got the champagne, he sent me a forty-three-page single-spaced memo. The memo literally took the script that he had thought “sensational” apart.

I felt like beating him to death with a bottle of Dom Pérignon.

What particularly galled me was the tone of the memo. It was supercilious and patronizing and command-like. “
We
” feel this and “
we
” think this should be changed.

I wrote him a twenty-four-page memo back that took apart his forty-three-page memo. I began by asking who the “we” was.

“You may not have noticed it,” I wrote, jabbing him about the fact that he no longer spoke for the studio, “but the emperor has new clothes.”

I also demanded a face-to-face meeting with him and Dawn and Adrian and Jerry Bruckheimer.

When we met in Dawn’s office, I immediately demanded a stenographer.