Hollywood Animal (36 page)

I found Ivan Reitman, the directing king of big-budget Hollywood comedies, to be one of the most humorless men I’d ever met. Getting a laugh out of him was like getting a reaction out of Frank Price. The man was downright dour—in his dress (all black), in his style (nervous, angst-ridden), in his attitude (he seemed to
drag
himself around).

He would read a scene in the script and say “That’s funny” deadpan, straight-faced, as though he were saying “I’m dying.”

“Why does the kid say ‘sausage’ all the time?” Ivan asked me. He seemed morose, depressed, almost prosecutorial as he asked the question.

“I don’t know. My boy says it all the time and his friends say it all the time. It’s just a kid thing, I think.”

“But why ‘
sausage
’? People don’t eat much sausage anymore.”

“They don’t?”

“It’s not healthy for you,” Ivan Reitman said gravely. He paused a moment and looked out his window. “Maybe it has some significance,” he said.

“
Sausage?
”

“Yes.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” Ivan Reitman said, carefully choosing his words, looking ponderous and suspicious. “But it must have significance.”

“I’ll ask my boy,” I said.

The next time we met, he brought it up right away.

“Did you ask your boy about ‘sausage’?”

It was like he was trying to unearth the identity of Deep Throat.

“I did.”

“And?”

“He said it was just a word that all his friends use.”

He nodded.

I knew the explanation wasn’t good enough for him. I almost felt like he was waiting for me to
confess
something.

I tried to make him understand it—judging from the seriousness of his expression, the stakes were awfully high here.

“It’s a kid thing, you know? Like when we were kids, we’d use certain words and phrases all the time because they were cool.”

“Like what?” Ivan Reitman grilled.

“I don’t know.” I laughed.

I stopped laughing.
He
wasn’t laughing. And he didn’t seem to like the fact that
I
was laughing.

“Like—‘It’s no big thing.’”

“
It’s no big thing?
” He seemed to be dissecting the words.

“Yeah.”

“
It’s no big thing?
”

He didn’t like what he was dissecting.

“I’ve never used that phrase,” he said.

“Well, I did, all the time.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

Ivan Reitman looked at me for five seconds, his face stony, and shook his head.

“‘Sausage,’” he said. “‘Sausage.’ I don’t think that’s cool.”

“The
kids
think it’s cool.”

He stared at me for another ten seconds and said nothing.

When I saw Craig I said, “This guy is
weird
. He’s got some thing with ‘sausage.’”

“He eats a lot of sushi,” Craig said.

“No,” I said, “with the word. With the word ‘
sausage
.’ In the script. He keeps asking me about it.”

“Change it,” Craig said. “Use ‘sushi’ instead. He’ll like that.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “The kids don’t say ‘sushi,’ they say ‘sausage.’”

“I’ll bet the kids in Beverly Hills say ‘sushi.’”

“We’re not making this movie for the kids in Beverly Hills.”

“Well, we’re not excluding kids in Beverly Hills, are we?”

“Don’t you think that kids in Cleveland, for example, will relate to ‘sausage’ better than ‘sushi’?”

“I don’t know,” Craig said, “that’s a market research question.”

The director that Craig and Ivan agreed on was Bob Mandel. In his thirties, thin, Mandel was as grave as Ivan but his super-seriousness was offset by a jittery, nervous twitchiness.

If Reitman’s expression read “We’re all dying,” then Bob Mandel could have been an underpaid professional mourner. Mandel, a child prodigy with the violin, had directed a hit movie,
F/X
—a movie, I noted, with no kids in it.

I looked at his other movies and realized that no movie that he had ever directed had kids as stars in it. It also became quickly apparent to me that while Bob Mandel was always nervous, being around Ivan Reitman made him
very
nervous. Maybe it was the fact that Mandel would be working for another director, maybe it was Ivan’s leaden prosecutorial style, but when Bob was around Ivan, he didn’t just twitch … he nearly
twittered
twitching.

At our final script meeting, Ivan said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought.” He stopped and gave whatever it was he had given a lot of thought to … even more thought. “Take the ‘sausages’ out.”

“What do you suggest I replace the sausages with?”

“Nothing.” Ivan Reitman said, “Just take them out. Nobody will get it.”

“I think it’s funny,” Bob Mandel said.

Ivan glared at him. “I don’t.”

“Fine,” Bob Mandel said, looking away, his hands skittery on the table, his crossed legs tap-tapping the air.

“Maybe Craig should market-research it,” I said.

Ivan thought about that. He even closed his eyes a few seconds to think about it.

“No,” he said.

Lorimar launched a nationwide hunt for kids to play Obie and Scam. As the search went on, Gerri came by Ivan’s office one day with Steve and Suzi to pick me up.

Ivan kept staring at Steve, and before we left, asked to speak to me alone a moment.

“He’d be perfect as Obie,” Ivan said.

“Steve
is
Obie,” I said. “Every nuance of Obie is Steve.”

“Let’s cast him,” Ivan said.

“No way.”

“He’d be great in it.”

“He’s a kid. He’s a normal, well-adjusted, happy kid who lives in Marin County, rides his skateboard, and collects baseball cards. I’m not going to mess
his
life up by putting him into a movie.”

“We’d have tutors on the set,” Ivan said.

“Give me a break,” I said.

“You’re really that against it?”

“Duh!” I said.

“What?”

“‘Duh!’ It’s what kids in Marin say when they want to say ‘No shit.’”

“Duh!”
Ivan Reitman said. “
Duh!
I like that.
Duh!
Put it in the script.”

On our way out, he said to Steve: “Why do you say ‘sausage’?”

Steve looked at me.

I nodded and then he looked at Ivan.

“I don’t know,” Steve said.

“But you say it?”

Steve nodded.

“Say it for me.”

Steve’s look to me said: Dad, who is this crazy guy and why do I have to be talking to him?

Steve said, “
Saw-sage!
”

Ivan stood there a moment, never cracked a smile, and said, “I still don’t get it.”

Lorimar found two very talented child actors to play Obie and Scam and I went down to the set with Gerri and Steve and Suzi on the last day of the shoot. We took some pictures with our kids and the two actors and as the pictures were being taken, the kid who played Scam said to me—“Man, this is the most fun I’ve had all the way through the shoot.”

I thought to myself: If
this
is the most fun you’ve had, we’re all in trouble here.

When I saw the rough cut, I knew we were in big trouble. There was no zip between the kids. In a movie that was about the relationship, the kids were flat and seemed to be going through the motions.

The movie came out and failed miserably. I saw it on the Friday night it opened, with Gerri and Steve and Suzi at the Montecito Theatre in San Rafael. In a theater that held four hundred people, there were twelve people there—including the four of us. Of the other eight, four walked out during the movie.

Afterward, in the parking lot, trying to soothe our depression, I said, “Well, the hell with it, let’s go get a pizza.”

Steve turned to me with a big smile, his braces gleaming, and said:
“Sawsage!”

Thanks to Ivan Reitman, Dustin Hoffman and I were having a story meeting at
a
table on the terrace by the pool of the Westwood Marquis Hotel.

Ivan was there with us telling us his idea of a hit movie: Rip Van Winkle as a Vietnam vet, set free thirty years after the war.

Three attractive young women came to the patio and sat at the table next to ours. They recognized Dusty and started whispering excitedly to each other.

Dusty saw them recognize him, turned halfway their way, unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt, and lounged back on the chair sexily.

I turned halfway to them, too, unbuttoned the top three buttons of
my
shirt, lounged back on the chair sexily, and smiled into Dusty’s eyes.

After our meeting, Dusty told Ivan he had another writer in mind to write the Rip Van Winkle story.

I had an idea for a new script and I called Guy to tell him about it. He told me his days at Columbia were numbered. Of some fifteen movies that he had put into production, only one—
Jagged Edge
—turned out to be a hit.

That was somehow emblematic, considering our friendship, but it wasn’t good enough as far as his production record was concerned.

I asked him what he was going to do and he said he thought he was going to go into business with Jerry Weintraub, whose
Karate Kid
movies had made him one of the most successful producers in Hollywood. He suggested I take my idea to Jerry, who had just been made the new head of United Artists.

My idea came from walking around Marin County’s playgrounds with Steve. I kept seeing racial epithets like
“Kikes!”
and
“Fuck the Niggers!”
and
“Die Nigger Die!”
scrawled into benches and graffitied onto playground walls.

And Marin County was one of the liberal bastions of California, a place where liberal left-leaning candidates usually got 70 to 80 percent of the vote. I wondered what was going on in the rest of the country.

I had been involved in the civil rights movement as a journalist. I had even found myself one sunny day in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a shotgun pressed against my stomach. It was held by a deputy sheriff named Cecil Price who had been indicted for the killings of the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. I was there to try to interview Deputy Price about the charges and his response was to stick the shotgun into my belly across an office counter and tell me to “get your ass out of Neshoba County.”

Two sheriff’s cars had followed me to the county line
.

Now, many years later, I thought we had put that kind of ugliness behind us. But the newspapers were saying that groups of neo-Nazis, styling themselves as American patriots, were robbing armored cars and killing people in a guerrilla terrorist movement aimed, ultimately, at toppling the American government. They had even murdered a liberal talk show host in Denver.

My idea was to write a script which would show us the insides of this movement.
I
hoped that by putting it up on-screen, I would draw attention to the dangers it posed and that the attention would force a crackdown by the government and the populace.

I loved America, felt a chill go down my back when returning from abroad or hearing the national anthem, and felt that my involvement in the antiwar and civil rights movements had helped make the country I loved a better place.

I called Jerry Weintraub, whom I’d briefly met, and told him that I wanted to talk to him about what I thought would be an important script. He sent his driver to pick me up and thirty seconds after I told him what I had in mind, he said, “Let’s do it. It’s a great movie.”

I asked him who the executive at UA would be in charge of the project and he told me it would be Robert Lawrence, newly hired at UA, the Hall Mouse Who Went to Heaven, the executive who queered
Jagged Edge
with Fonda, the executive whose knees I’d threatened to break.

I told Jerry that Robert Lawrence would be unacceptable to me and told him why.

He picked the phone up, said, “Get in here right away,” and within moments a very pale Robert Lawrence was standing there as Jerry said to him, “I’m making a deal with Joe. If you fuck with Joe … if you get in Joe’s way in any way, if you get near this project in any way, I’m gonna throw you out this fucking window.”

He then dismissed Lawrence (whose knees, I thought, seemed to be shaking), walked me to the elevator, and his chauffeur drove me back to my hotel.

My phone rang immediately when I got back to the room.

“I want to get you together with a producer, he just called me with the same idea. Do you know Irwin Winkler?” Jerry Weintraub said.

I didn’t know him, but I would have to have been deaf, dumb, and blind not to know about him. He was one of the most successful producers in Hollywood. He had produced the
Rocky
movies and had even won an Academy Award for Best Picture. He had produced
Raging Bull; New York, New York;
and ’
Round Midnight
. His reputation was that he was smart, shrewd, and had great taste.

Irwin and I clicked instantly. There was a special communication between us. As I began to talk about what I had in mind with the script, he was almost finishing my sentences for me.

A poor kid, he had worked his way up. He had begun as a hired “laugher” for live TV shows and had then become an agent, representing Jackie Mason in days when he and his wife were so poor that Irwin had to take his agent’s cut at the door so they’d have something to eat. He had been married to the same woman for thirty years and they had three grown sons.

He had made so much money with the
Rocky
movies that he didn’t need to do anything anymore. He was probably the most selective producer in town. He had very close relationships with people like Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro and CAA agent Ron Meyer, the number two man to Michael
Ovitz,
whose agency was now representing me. Irwin was close to Ovitz as well—two of his sons had served internships at CAA.

We found that we agreed on most things. We both were voracious readers and we both liked sports. We had a great many things in common—backgrounds, kids, liberal political beliefs. I liked his style, his sense of humor, and his sensitivity. There was a shrewdness and a toughness to him, sure, but there was great gentleness as well. He spent much of his time in Paris with Margo, his wife. He wanted to keep his horizons broad and stayed mostly away from the Hollywood party circuit.