Hollywood Animal (6 page)

Yeah, I know, this wasn’t Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini, and the women weren’t Anna Magnani or Silvana Mangano, but the real star of the movie for me was Jerry Lee Lewis, who was already one of my true childhood heroes—along with Rocky Colavito of the Cleveland Indians, Shondor Birns, a dapper Hungarian gangster, Lou Teller, a Hungarian bank robber who was from the West Side, too, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, the most famous Hungarian in the world and the reason my
pimpli
(it was what we called it in Hungarian, okay?) was so red raw I could hardly move.

Jerry Lee Lewis, his long blond hair flying, stomping out “Open-up-a-honey-it’s-your-lover-boy-me-that’s-a-knockin” on top of a piano that he’d already literally set on fire.

Rock and roll! Switchblade knives! Tight angora sweaters with hot milky titties underneath ’em!
That’s what
High School Confidential!
was about, an obvious precursor to a movie about an ice pick and a tight white dress with milky white stuff underneath it that I’d write many years later.

Russ Tamblyn, too, was close to my heart. Not just because he starred in
High School Confidential!
, the movie that influenced me more than De Sica and Rossellini. But because he also starred in
The Kid from Cleveland
, which featured the entire Cleveland Indians world championship team of 1948!

I met Redford and Hoffman and Cruise and Max Schell and Kevin Bacon and Jeff Bridges and Debra Winger and Glenn Close and blah blah blah over the course of twenty-five years of writing screenplays … but I never met Russ Tamblyn.

It is my great Hollywood regret. Mailer never nailed Marilyn and I never met Russ Tamblyn.

My only other Hollywood regret is that I never met Zsa Zsa Gabor, the most famous Hungarian in the world and the dominatrix of my boyhood
pimpli
, either.

When I was already a famous or infamous Hollywood screenwriter, I asked a mutual friend to call and tell Zsa Zsa that I would be calling her soon.

“But no, dahlink, no,” Zsa Zsa said to my friend. “I will not speak to such a dangerous man.”

I called, left a message, and she never called me back.

I fell in lust for the first time at the Lorain Fulton Theatre, where I’d sneaked in to see a movie the Catholic Church was trying to stop from being shown.

I was an altar boy and this movie was all that the older altar boys were talking about.

And God Created Woman
was the title.

Her name was Brigitte Bardot. She was a “sex kitten.”

I watched her walk. I watched her eat with her fingers. I watched her pout. I watched parts of her body, which seemed more naked than they actually were.

I heard lines of dialogue like: “She does whatever she wants whenever she wants.”

And: “What are you afraid of?” “Myself.”

And: “You’d make a good wife.” “No, I like to have too much fun.”

I sneaked back in to see it two other times and when the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
arrived each morning I attacked it to find anything written about her.

I found that she had held a press conference in New York. Someone had asked her, “What was the best day of your life?” And she said, “It was a night.”

Someone asked why she wasn’t wearing lipstick. And she said, “I don’t like lipstick. It makes trouble. I like to kiss. But if I kiss anyone when I am wearing lipstick, it makes trouble.”

I saw a photograph of her in
Life
magazine. She was in a swimming pool wearing a tiny little bathing suit. The pool was filled with milk. According to the story, she had insisted it be “ass’s milk.”

I marveled at that. I still didn’t know the English language very well and the only “ass” I knew about didn’t have milk coming out of it.

By then, of course, I was already going crazy.

Hair grew from my palms.

I was going blind.

Even though I loved movies, I never wanted to be a screenwriter. I wanted to write novels.

There was a secondhand paperback bookstore down the street from our apartment on Lorain Avenue which was really a front for a bookie’s wire. The bookie let me use the place as a library.

The first book I got from there was William Faulkner’s
Sanctuary
. I picked it because of the cover: a young woman who, as the guys on Lorain Avenue said, “was built like a brick shithouse.”

I had no idea what being built like a brick shithouse meant.

As a matter of fact, I still don’t.

And I had no idea you could do that with a corncob, either.

But I do now, don’t I?

I’m a writer whose view of women was permanently affected by Temple Drake on a lurid paperback cover. Just another writer ruined by the influence of the alcoholic, mostly impotent Bill Faulkner, failed screenwriter, who never nailed his Marilyn, who slept with the girl in the secretarial pool.

Heh heh heh
.

Come to think of it, I made ice picks as famous as he made corncobs, didn’t I?

A casting director at the studio who had read
Sanctuary
told William Faulkner, screenwriter, that she understood that an author always put himself in his books.

“Which character are you in
Sanctuary?”
she asked.

“Madame,” Faulkner said, “I am the corncob.”

And I am the ice pick
.

XII

What, you might well ask, is all this talk about Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Mailer coming from a screenwriter? Why all this high-toned babble about
novelists
in a book about Hollywood? Why not compare myself to other
screenwriters?

Say what?

Compare myself to other screenwriters? On what basis? Most screenwriters don’t even have a body of work that amounts to five let alone fifteen movies. Most screenwriters do adaptations of novels and rewrites of other scripts: they rarely write original screenplays—that is—novels written directly for the screen in screenplay form.

Truth to tell, bottom line, most screenwriters don’t want to be screenwriters: they want to be directors so they can tell other screenwriters who want to be directors what to write. For most screenwriters, screenwriting is hopefully nothing more than a temporary stop on the way to the mountaintop, on the way to big bucks, pussy, fame, and auteurhood:
Directing!

Trouble is, screenwriting, for me, has already led to all those all-American jackpots. I became a famous screenwriter making millions, scoring A-list pussy, picked as one of the hundred most powerful people on Hollywood.

Never mind that most powerful list, but …

Godalmighty, a screenwriter scoring A-list pussy?

That drove some people in Hollywood nuts, beginning with writers (usually film reporters and critics) who hadn’t sold a screenplay yet and ending with directors
—directors!
—who
weren’t
as famous as I, who were paid less to direct the film than I’d been paid for the script, and who, judging from the trophies on their arms at the wrap parties, weren’t scoring the quality pussy that I was, either.

Can you imagine
the hubris of this?

I was a screenwriter who didn’t want to be anything else. I didn’t want my own production company. I didn’t want my own office at a studio. I didn’t want my own parking space on the studio lot. Hell, I didn’t even want to go on the damn lot.

I didn’t want to be reached. I was busy.
I was writing!
And I didn’t want to hear anybody else’s ideas while I was writing because I was the writer and they weren’t. I didn’t want to hear the producer’s ideas, the studio exec’s ideas, the star’s ideas, the director’s ideas—especially not the director’s ideas because it was usually the director who had the
lamest
ideas.

I understood why. Because the director felt pressured to be creative even when there was nothing for him to do yet—when he wasn’t shooting yet. He had to do something and there was nothing to do except make “creative” suggestions to the writer.

I sent a screenplay I’d written to the director Brian DePalma, whose work I sometimes admired.

He called me the next day and said, “You’ve written a perfect script. I love it. It’s ready to go.”

I was so happy. “You’re going to direct it then?” I said.

He said, “No.”

I said, “But why not?”

He said, “It’s done. There’s nothing for me to do.”

I said, “You can cast it, shoot it, direct it, edit it.”

He said, “But there’s nothing for me to write.”

I said, “But you’re not a writer.”

He said, “I’m the director. It has to be my baby. I have to feel that it’s my baby. I have to make it mine. I can’t make it mine when it’s perfect.”

I said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have written the perfect script.”

He said, “You probably shouldn’t have.”

I said, “What if you run through it and make it less perfect and then you direct it?”

He said, “I’d always remember how it used to be. It’s too late to do that. Its perfection would be in my head.”

I said, “Maybe I should have sent it to you in its rough draft.”

He said, “Yes, before it was so good.”

I said, “Before it was too good for you to direct.”

He said, “Yes, next time send me the rough draft.”

I didn’t even want to go on the
set
of my movies. Most screenwriters begged and pleaded and groveled to be allowed on a set, but I’d never wanted to be there—because I’d learned that if I was there, producers and directors and even the actors—Jesus, even the
grips!
—would approach me with their script ideas—which I absolutely, categorically did not want to hear.

Because of my wild-eyed and frenzied notion that
I
was the writer and that
my
ideas—which were already in the script—were better than
theirs
and that my words on the page should be left the fuck unchanged.

So that when a grip approached me on the
Betrayed
set in Canada (I had to be there because the script I had written was too long and had to be cut), approached me in the lobby of my hotel as I was going up to bed after a long unhappy day eliminating my own words, approached me with “an idea” for the last scene of the script, I did what any screenwriter in that situation
should
do but none ever do.

I picked the pissant up by his shirt and bounced him off the wall and hit him with a beautiful left hook to the liver.

I didn’t view the screenplay as a collaborative process. I viewed it as my creation. The rest of the movie was a collaboration between the director and the actors and the editor and some of the technicians.

I viewed myself as the composer. The director was the conductor. The others were part of the orchestra.

It is true that with this attitude I had almost
killed
a couple of directors.

Robert Harmon was the idiot who directed
Nowhere to Run
. He turned my screenplay inside out and I wrote him a long memo explaining his genetic failings to him. He read the memo and suffered a heart attack afterward. Such a young man, too,
tsk-tsk!

And Arthur Hiller, a very old man, sat next to me in an editing room as I recut the movie he had shot and edited,
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
. He was suffering chest pains as I did my cut and finally got up and drove himself to his cardiologist.

A very tough old man, Hiller took his name off the movie, turning an
Alan Smithee Film
into a real Alan Smithee film, and tsk-tsked jovially when the critics and the public hated my cut.

One director I’d worked with
had died
just before the release of the movie he and I had made. But I hadn’t killed him.

I’d urged him to forget the movie we’d just made.

“It’s only a movie,” I said to him, “it’s not worth all this pain.”

But Richard Marquand didn’t believe me and he had died at forty-eight.

Or maybe I had killed him after all, maybe I had indeed really killed Richard, one of my best friends.

Because the script I had written for him for
Hearts of Fire
was, in my estimation (not in Richard’s), awful.

XIII

I realize there is a distinct possibility that the most famous moment from any of my films will be that split-second viewing of Sharon Stone’s itty-bitty little hairs in
Basic Instinct
.

More than a quarter century and at least fifteen movies … all bubbling down to a few touched-up pubic hairs!

Even more amusing is that that moment—
the most famous moment of any of my films
—wasn’t even in the script.

Paul Verhoeven decided that the scene would be more fun if Sharon didn’t wear any underwear that day.

In other words, the most famous moment of any of my films … was Paul Verhoeven’s.

I am a militant … and militantly insufferable screenwriter … who insists that the screenwriter is as important as the director … who insists that the director serves the screenwriter’s vision … and whose most famous and most memorable screen moment … was created by the director, Paul Verhoeven.

That
scene in
Basic Instinct …
the one I didn’t write … the one Sharon was now claiming Paul tricked her into, was picked as one of the one hundred greatest moments in the last fifty years of film by
Entertainment Weekly
.

“When Stone’s femme fatale uncrossed her legs during an interrogation,” the magazine wrote, “she went where few actresses had gone before—straight to Hollywood’s A-list.”

Other greatest moments: Brando bellowing in
Streetcar;
Kelly dancing in
Singing in the Rain;
Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea in
The Ten Commandments;
the shark attacking victims in
Jaws
.

I loved that: Sharon’s itty-bitty little hairs had the same impact upon the world as the parting of the Red Sea.

I also loved this image: Sharon’s itty-bitty little hairs attacking other itty-bitty little hairs.

· · ·

I have no doubt that writing
Basic Instinct
helped speed up the end of my marriage to Gerri Eszterhas.