Hollywood Animal (34 page)

At that moment Richard turned to me and said, “We’ve got a hit movie.”

The next day festival goers picked
Jagged Edge
as the festival’s “audience favorite.”

Our next stop was at the Mill Valley Film Festival on my home turf, in
Marin
County. Glenn had agreed to fly in—she had not yet seen the picture.

I also flew my father in from Cleveland. I warned him before the screening: Glenn, we were hearing, was still very nervous about the picture’s ending. She was, she was telling Columbia, unsure about doing any publicity for it. She had a movie called
Maxie
scheduled to come out two weeks before
Jagged Edge
and, from what we were hearing, she was putting all of her efforts behind
Maxie
.

“So,” I said to my father, “whatever you do, don’t say anything to her about ‘revenge’ or ‘vigilantes.’”

Glenn sat next to me at the theater in Mill Valley. Sitting near her was Craig Baumgarten, whom Richard and I had invited to the festival. Still unable to find a job, Craig had been our ally from the beginning and we wanted him here now at the end.

Richard and I said a few words to the audience, introduced Glenn and Craig, and then sat down to watch it with them. The response was identical to the one in Toronto. They literally jumped out of their seats, stayed through the final credits, and applauded for a full minute.

When the applause ended, I turned to Glenn and asked, “What did you think?” Richard, a few seats away, was intensely watching our conversation.

“I thought my ass was too big,” Glenn said.

I saw Richard put his head in his hands and start to giggle.

That’s all Glenn said. Period. Not a word about her performance, the others’ performances, or the movie itself.

At dinner afterward, I introduced her to my father, who went through the elaborate Hungarian hand-kissing routine I had seen him perform too many times through the years.

But Glenn was charmed. I heard the two of them talk about the years I spent in the refugee camps and then I heard my father, at his most charming, say: “You were wonderful. You were unbelievable. With your hair—your hair wet and then the gun …”

I was agape at what I was hearing my father saying and I turned to him as he finished the thought:
“You were an avenging angel!”

“A what?” Glenn said. Her smile was frozen and her mouth was open.

“
Avenging angel!
” my father repeated, very loudly this time so others could hear it.

“Did you think so?” Glenn said, her smile gone.

“Absolutely,” my father said.

“Avenging angel,” Richard repeated, a smile on his face, “well I guess that pretty well says it, doesn’t it?”

He started to laugh and reached for his glass of champagne.

It was no surprise to us then that Glenn informed Columbia that due to her other movie,
Maxie
, she would do little publicity for
Jagged Edge
.

We watched her do every big and piddling TV show as
Maxie
came out and had mixed feelings when it died a mean box office death its first weekend.

We were concerned about what effect the death of one Glenn Close movie would have on another one opening right behind it.

Marty’s opinion was not a surprise.

“She sucks, that’s what it says. The public doesn’t want to see her. We’ll die the way
Maxie
died.”

“A lot of people saw her on a lot of those shows,” Guy said. “Maybe they like her but didn’t like
Maxie.”

“If they like her they would have gone to see
Maxie,”
Marty replied.

The weekend
Jagged Edge
opened, the numbers were flat—a little better than
Maxie
, but not much. The reviews, for the most part, were dismissive and negative. The
New York Times
took care of us in about seven paragraphs.

And then, suddenly, it was like
Flashdance
all over again—the second weekend, the numbers jumped up, miraculously up—and
Jagged Edge
was the number one movie in America.

The third weekend the numbers were up again. We stayed number one for four weeks and played for six months.

Once again, I had an “audience movie,” a movie that defied the critics and spread solely on word of mouth. And it was the ending that Frank Price wanted to change so ferociously that seemed to startle people the most.

Siskel and Ebert, reviewing the movie late, spun off an entirely different phenomenon. Once the ski mask came off the killer at the end, they said, it wasn’t clear to them who the killer really was—was it Jeff? Or was it actor Marshall Colt, who played the part of the red-herring tennis pro, Bobby Slade.

The exhibitors began reporting that people were going back to see it a second or third time just to be sure that it was Jeff when the mask came off.

Various lawyers’ groups began attacking the movie for “inaccuracy,” claiming that lawyers never had affairs with clients—a charge the public found absurd.

And a knife shop in Saginaw, Michigan, sued us, claiming that we’d gotten the title of the movie from the name of their shop: the Jagged Edge.

A very nervous Columbia lawyer asked me, “Have you ever been in Saginaw, Michigan?”

I told him that, thankfully, I had not.

“Did you ever buy a knife from a store called the Jagged Edge and use either a credit card or a check?”

I told him that, thankfully, I had never bought anything from any shop in Saginaw, Michigan.

While Richard and I reveled in the fact that we had a hit movie, Marty Ransohoff and Frank Price were unyielding.

“We got lucky,” Marty was telling people, “the script overcame the acting and the direction.”

And Frank was saying, “If they would have used my ending, they would have done thirty million dollars more. Their ending cost them thirty million dollars.”

“You’re a screenwriter,”
my lawyer, Barry Hirsch, said to me, “but you’re a star.”

I had had two big hit movies, now.

“I’m a screenwriter,” I said, “
screenwriters aren’t stars
.”

“You are,” he said. “You need a PR person.”

“What for?”

“To deal with the interviews you’re doing.”

“I’m doing them,” I said, “what more is there to it?”

“Plenty,” he said.

He took me to lunch with Pat Kingsley, the most successful PR woman in town. She represented a lot of stars, including Jessica Lange and Julia Roberts, but she’d never represented any screenwriters.

“What can you do for me that I’m not doing for myself?” I asked.

“I can get you profiles in the
New York Times
and in the big magazines,” she said.

“I’m doing those already.”

“I can pick the writers,” she said.

“
You can pick the writers?
”

I was astounded. I was under the impression that editors picked writers to do stories. “How can you do that?”

“I can pick a writer that I know will be friendly to you.”

“How?”

“They all want interviews with my
other
star clients. I can tell them they can get someone like Jessica or Julia
if
they interview you. They know that if they write a negative profile of you, they’ll never get Jessica or Julia.”

“The magazines let you do that? Pick the writer?”

“Sure. They want Julia or Jessica on their covers. Julia and Jessica sell magazines. The magazine editors want to be very nice to me.”

“What if a writer lies to you and stabs me in the back?”

“Impossible. He’ll never get interviews with any of my other clients. He won’t be able to make a living.”

“I guess that’s why I see so many star profile puff pieces,” I said.

She laughed and said, “I can do something else for you, too. In some cases I can get you the story before it gets to the editors. If you don’t like something in it, we can change it or take it out.”

“You mean I can edit the guy’s story?”

“Yes,” she said. “Officially he can say he sent it to me and I sent it to you just to make sure your quotes are accurate. It’s all done in the interest of journalistic accuracy.”

“Don’t the writers care about the fact that they are being censored by the people they’re writing about?”

I was curious. I was a former journalist who had fought an editor sometimes if he wanted to change
punctuation marks
in my story.

“No,” she said, “they care about getting access to big stars. The better access they have to big stars, the more money they’ll make.”

“I guess they don’t have a real strong sense of artistic integrity,” I said, laughing.

Pat Kingsley laughed with me. “Not yet,” she said. “They all want to be screenwriters. They have scripts they leave with my clients during interviews. What they really want to do is direct. Then they’ll develop some artistic integrity.”

I was going to sign up with her but not long after our lunch I had an ugly public disagreement with Michael Ovitz, the most powerful agent in town, whose agency, CAA, represented most of Pat Kingsley’s clients.

I ran into Sean Connery at the Warner Brothers commissary. A studio executive introduced us. He was wearing a safari jacket, jeans, and sandals. We shook hands.

He looked me up and down. I was wearing a red Cleveland Indians T-shirt, jeans, and mud-splattered tennis shoes.

“Do you act?” he asked.

“I write,” I said.

“You should act,” he said, smiled, and walked away.

I worried that maybe he’d read one of my scripts.

There is no better feeling than sharing a hit movie with a director who is your friend (and no worse feeling than sharing a disaster with a director who is your friend: Norman Jewison and I had never even had one phone conversation since
F.I.S.T
.).

But Richard and I raged on together as our movie raged on week after week at the box office. We took innumerable meetings as a team.

“I’m only directing it if Joe’s writing it,” he told studio heads.

“I’m only writing it if Richard’s directing it,” I told producers.

One memorable evening at Morton’s, in the company of three studio executives trying to involve us in a project, we drank six bottles of Cristal champagne … then moved to the El Padrino Room of the Beverly Wilshire, where I was staying, and started on the cognac.

John Madden and Howard Cosell, the TV football announcers, were at a nearby table and for a while we carried on with them—they had both seen
Jagged Edge
and were full of questions.

“Jeez, Glenn Close was great,” Madden said.

“You didn’t think her bum was too big?” Richard asked, his eyes merry.

“Her what?” Madden asked.

“Her ass,” Cosell translated.

“Christ no,” Madden said, “I thought she was great.”

And then, after they left, we were joined by two young women who had been sitting at the bar and had overheard some of the conversation. They were, naturally, would-be actress-models and they had, naturally, loved all of my movies and Richard’s.

Richard left with one of them for more drinks in his suite at the Westwood Marquis and I took the other one upstairs for drinks in my suite. The suites, naturally, were compliments of Columbia Pictures.

At seven o’clock the next morning, Richard called me.

“Can you get up here right away?” he said. “I need help.”

I raced over to his hotel and banged on his door, unprepared for what I saw when he opened it. He was stark naked. His hands were handcuffed behind his back. He had an erection.

I started to laugh.

“This isn’t funny,” he said.

I said, “
Oh yes it is!
”

“I fell asleep,” he said. “When I woke up, she was gone. It took me a half hour to figure out how to call you. Have you ever tried making a phone call with your hands handcuffed behind you?”

“You dumb fuck,” I said, “you didn’t know her well enough to let her handcuff you.”

“Please don’t be judgmental,” Richard said.

“Where’s the key?” I said.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” Richard said. “I don’t see it anywhere. I think she took it. I think she took my wallet and my watch, too.”

“How come you’ve got a hard-on?” I said. “Does this situation turn you on?”

“I
always
have a hard-on when I wake up,” Richard said.
“Always.”

“It must come with being a director,” I said.

“Will you just shut the fuck up and help me look for the damn key?” Richard said.

We looked everywhere. The key was gone.

“What do we do now?” Richard said, pacing around the suite stark naked, his hands handcuffed behind him, his penis still standing at attention.

I said, “I’m stumped.”

He said, “You’re the damn screenwriter. Figure something out!”

I put his pants on for him, then his shoes and socks. I called hotel security and said we needed help.

Two security guys came up and I told them who we were and what we did for a living and said we’d been trying to act out a scene in my script where a man has to free himself of handcuffs.

The damn prop department, I said, had given us real handcuffs accidentally and of course we didn’t have a key.

The security guys stared at us, glanced at each other, and one of them said,
“Oh—kay.”

They first tried to pick the lock on the cuffs with a toothpick and then with the innards of a ballpoint pen. Then they called hotel engineering.

“Handcuffs,” I heard one of the security guys tell hotel engineering. “That’s what I said.
Handcuffs.”

Two men from engineering came up. I saw them try to hide their smiles.

I didn’t even want to think about what they were thinking.

They tried to pick the lock on the handcuffs with various pliers. No luck.

“These are real high-quality cuffs,” one of the engineering guys said admiringly.

“Can’t you call your prop department at the studio?” one of the security guys said. “Maybe they’ve got the key for it.”

“It’s Saturday,” I said quickly, “the prop people are closed Saturday.”

Richard said, “Christ, can’t you just saw the bloody things off?”