Hollywood Animal (9 page)

Since the movie I wrote for Billy,
Jade
, was a failure, I reckoned Billy wouldn’t say that about me: Billy would say he shot every word of my script.

John Monk Saunders, one of the first screenwriters to win an Academy Award, hanged himself.

XVIII

Are screenwriters ever …
triumphant?

Well, yes, in our evil little ways.

Ben Hecht, the most successful screenwriter in Hollywood history, demanded $5,000 a week from Samuel Goldwyn. This was at a time when houses in Beverly Hills sold for $25,000. He demanded that $2,500 of his weekly payment be made every Monday and the rest every Wednesday.

Goldwyn, one of the most powerful studio bosses in Hollywood, agreed to Hecht’s demands.

Then Ben Hecht demanded that if Goldwyn spoke just one word to him the deal would be null and void and Hecht could keep all the money he’d been paid so far. Samuel Goldwyn agreed to that, too.

The weeks went by. Ben Hecht hadn’t turned in a page but he’d collected his weekly $5,000. Samuel Goldwyn called him and said, “Ben, this is strictly a social call.”

Ben Hecht said, “This cancels the deal,” took the $30,000 he’d been paid so far, and was gone.

Charles MacArthur was a celebrated playwright/screenwriter who believed that studio executives were some of the dumbest people he’d ever met and didn’t know anything at all about writing. He decided to prove it.

At the gas station one day, he started chatting with the young Englishman who was filling up his tank. The young man lamented that he was only making $40 a week and Charles MacArthur asked him if wanted to make $1,000 a week. The young man said, “Whoever I have to kill, I will happily do it.”

Charles MacArthur bought him a new tweed suit and a curved-stem pipe. He took him in to the studio head and introduced him as “Kenneth Woolcott, the well-known English novelist who is against doing any movie writing because he insists there’s no room for creative talent in the movies.”

The studio boss did everything he could to persuade Kenneth Woolcott, the well-known English novelist, to be a screenwriter at his studio. He finally offered him $1,000 a week. The gas station attendant grudgingly accepted the offer.

The studio was so pleased with Woolcott’s work that they kept him under contract at $1,000 a week for a whole year. After which Kenneth Woolcott went back to pumping gas.

We were going to celebrate the fact that Carolco Pictures had bought my script of
Showgirls
and was going to make the movie with Paul Verhoeven directing it.

The producer, Charlie Evans, Bob’s brother, was going to throw a lavish party that night at his house in Beverly Hills, complete with mariachi band and Chasen’s special chili.

That morning, Paul Verhoeven and I had a script meeting in the dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel. Paul had a suggestion that I rejected. Within minutes our tempers had flared.

“Fuck you!” I said. “I’m not rewriting the script!”

“Then I don’t go to party!” Paul yelled in his Dutch but very German-sounding accent.

“Fuck the party, too,” I said. “I’m not going to the party, either!”

“Then I get another writer, ja?” Paul yelled.

I got up and stormed back upstairs to my suite.

An hour later, Carolco called my agent to say that, at Paul’s direction, they were going to bring in another writer to make changes in my script.

Charlie Evans called my agent nearly in tears. “What’s going on?” Charlie said. “What about the party? I can’t cancel the mariachi band!”

I called my lawyer, who looked at the Carolco contract and called me back with the news that I hadn’t signed it yet. My agent then called Carolco and said
I
owned the script, not them. My agent also said that I wanted another director on the project or I was going to sell my script to another studio.

Charlie Evans called me and said, “What about the party? What am I going to do about the chili?”

During the course of the afternoon, my agent and my lawyer had several volatile conversations with Carolco Pictures. The outcome of these conversations was:

By the time Naomi and I got to the party, Paul Verhoeven and his wife, Martine, were already there. The chili was superb. The mariachi band was sensational. The tequila flowed.

Naomi and I were on one side of the room, Paul and Martine on the other.

I was sitting in a thronelike antique chair when Paul came over. He told me he was sorry he’d talked about bringing another writer in to rewrite my script. He said he really wanted to direct the movie. He knelt on the floor in front of my thronelike chair as he said these things. Someone took a picture of the director kneeling in front of the screenwriter.

Paul and I laughed.

He said he’d changed his mind about the suggestion he’d made this morning at the Four Seasons.

Paul and I toasted each other. His wife, a chamber violinist, played some Franz Liszt and dedicated it to me.

I allowed him to direct the movie.

I signed my Carolco contract.

True to his word, Paul made no changes to my script. All the words were mine.

Showgirls
made film history.

Right alongside
Ishtar, Waterworld
, and
Heaven’s Gate
.

XIX

The worst best-intentioned advice I ever got about screenwriting came from Richard Gilman, the distinguished literary critic, at a party in New York almost thirty years ago.

“Whatever you do,” said Dick Gilman to the beginning screenwriter, “don’t put your heart into your scripts. You’ll get it broken.”

For almost thirty years now (and thirty scripts, and fifteen produced movies), I’ve put my heart into my scripts … and my heart is unbroken.

My advice to beginning screenwriters is this:

Put every ounce of heart and soul and guts and passion that you possess into every sentence of every screenplay.

And laugh
.

· · ·

She was a fiery, street-smart woman with a nasty temper who’d come to Hollywood out of the world of marketing. She was sexy and no-bullshit with a hank of hair you wanted to press your face into. She had a commercial eye and used it (and her sexiness and toughness) to become first a VP and then head of production. She got a golden parachute, got married, and gave birth to a little girl.

I hadn’t seen her for a while and when we had dinner at the Ivy, what struck me was how gloriously happy she was. With her husband, with her little girl. With her life as a wife and a mother. We didn’t talk business all night. We talked about our kids.

She wasn’t in a hurry anymore. She didn’t speak at the rate of a thousand miles an hour. She wasn’t looking through me to see who else was in the room. She was almost serene.

I’d always liked her and when I hugged her good night outside the restaurant, I thought—Yes, there
are
happy endings, even real ones, in Hollywood.

A few months later, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

And not much later, Dawn Steel died.

My advice to everyone is this:

Put every ounce of heart and soul and guts and passion that you possess into every nanosecond of your life.

And pray!

CHAPTER 2

[Flashback]

Ragamuffin

JONES

What the fuck do you know about what happened half a century ago in some goddamn part of the world you never even been in? What the fuck does anybody know about their parents?

Music Box

I WAS BORN
in Hungary. On the 23rd of November in 1944 in a village near the Austrian border called Csákánydoroszló. American bombs fell. Hungary was a Nazi ally.

The bombs denuded Hungarians, stripping them of their clothes. Women were left wearing nothing but the rubber band inside their panties. They were also left dead, as were many men and children.

My paternal grandfather, Jozsef Kreisz, was a Hungarian teamster. He loved his horses, his beer, his wife, and his three children. He was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and fought on the Russian front. He fell into a hole, nearly froze, and was captured by the Russians. When he was released, he was half blind. He had aged so much that his wife didn’t recognize him.

Hungary had been taken over by a Communist government, run by an angry Hungarian named Béla Kun, whose leather-jacketed, Lenin-capped followers hanged many Hungarians on lampposts. My grandfather took my father, who was a little boy, out into the streets of Budapest and showed him the bodies on the lampposts.

It was my father’s earliest memory. He remembered the corpses up there and that they had been hung there by Béla Kun, who was a Communist and a
Zsido
… a Jew.

My father grew up in Kispest, a Budapest working-class district, not far from the canning factory where my grandfather now worked, since he was half blind. My grandmother, a devoutly religious Roman Catholic, prayed and raised the three kids, my father and his two older sisters.

They were dirt-poor. When he was a little boy, my father contracted scarlet fever, which infected his hip. Surgery was required. My father had surgery eleven times on his hip without any anesthetic. There was no money for anesthetics, which, after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, were in short supply. The surgeries left him with one leg shorter than the other and a pronounced limp.

He was the baby of the family, doted upon by his mother and two sisters. He stayed in bed and read much of the time. He read
The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers
, and his favorite, the German writer Karl May, who wrote of the American West he had never seen (but which my great-grandfather had). My father’s favorite Karl May character was the gunslinger called Old Shatterhand.

And there was another little boy living not far away from my father, in Austria, whose favorite writer was Karl May and whose favorite character was Old Shatterhand. This little boy’s name was Adolf Hitler.

My father thought, reading so much about Old Shatterhand and the Count of Monte Cristo, that maybe he could write, too. He began writing short stories and sending them to the Budapest newspapers. They were, in the time-honored way, all rejected.

He went to school and excelled, knowing he couldn’t support himself with physical labor. He kept writing the stories which kept being rejected. He became a mailman but his hip couldn’t take the walking. He got a law degree and was the world’s worst lawyer.

Then a story was accepted by one of the Budapest newspapers. And another. And another. A book was published which became commercially successful. And another. And another.

He became an adviser to the Hungarian prime minister. He paid for the eye surgery which restored my grandfather’s sight. He was a successful Hungarian writer. A short, balding young man so heavy that a half circle had to be cut out of his desk so he could reach it. He loved Westphalian ham, Csabai kolbász, hard salami, black bread, palacsinta, and dark beer. He still lived with his parents and two sisters, a hardworking responsible young man who only occasionally lapsed.

Like the time he was in a small town on the Hungarian Plains and was arrested for shooting out half the town’s traffic lights.

He saw my mother in a Budapest church one day and fell in love. Her name was Mária Biro. She was ten years younger than he, twenty-seven years old, a classic Hungarian beauty: tall, high-cheek-boned, her dark hair highlighted by slanted, deeply brown Eurasian eyes. He inquired about her, discovered that she was a secretary in the Hungarian government’s secretarial pool, arranged that she be assigned to his office.

She was the daughter of a tavern-keeper on the grounds of Budapest’s largest military academy. Her father was an alcoholic, the size of a swollen buffalo. Her mother, a chain-smoker, had died when she was fifteen. Her father put the extremely shy, fifteen-year-old girl behind the cash register at the tavern—the only woman among the young and sexually aggressive recruits of the military academy.

Six months after her mother’s death, her father advertised in the Budapest newspapers for a new wife. He married a prostitute and soon contracted gonorrhea from her. My mother saw her father in the parlor one day: he was trying to clear his penis of pus with a long needle.

She had a nervous breakdown and was sent to live with a Belgian family for a year. When she returned, she moved into a tiny apartment of her own and became a secretary. She was intensely religious. She wore a scapular. She said the Rosary twice a day. She went to Mass every morning.

My parents married in early 1944. She towered over him. He stood on a stack of encyclopedias to match her height. They were startlingly different people. She was inward. He loved the limelight and the applause at the end of a speech. She was deeply private. He was a public figure. She read religious journals. He was literary and political. She was a chain-smoker who liked an occasional sip of brandy. After his arrest for shooting out the streetlights, he was a teetotaler.

I would very much become
their
son. I was her height and I inherited her cheekbones and her slanted eyes and his jowls and tendency to fat. I was a chain-smoker who liked more than occasional sips of bourbon and beer and wine. I was shy and hid my shyness with a strutting, macho bravado
.

I became a public figure whose private life became, on occasion, fodder for tabloids. I felt ambivalent about the limelight, at times reclusive, but at all times enjoying—and then blaming myself for enjoying—the applause at the end of an appearance
.