Hollywood Animal (91 page)

You pay a man more than $3 million to write a script—that’s what this total deal is—and then you don’t read it? It’s something out of Orwell or Kafka
.

My appeal to you, Mr. Schulhof, is that you read my script and my rewrite … that you read it
yourself …
don’t ask a “reader” to read it for you … don’t read someone else’s “coverage” … read it yourself … please
.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask. I put my heart and soul, all of my creative innards, into
Gangland.
I wrote something I am proud of. My words attracted two of the best directors in the world
.

My hope is that your reading will save my script. My hope is that you will stop the morons from doing their moronic pitiful dance at the cost of an original and successful movie. A few years ago, they danced with a script of mine called
Pals,
which was transmogrified into an awful movie called
Nowhere to Run.

Perhaps, as part of your reading, you should check the grosses for
Nowhere to Run.

P.S. Please forgive the vagaries of my manual typewriter. It does feel strange writing a letter to the chairman of Sony on a manual typewriter, but I’ll make a deal with you. If you read my script, I’ll do my best to learn to write on a computer
.

Mickey Schulhof never responded to my letter, but Columbia didn’t sue me, either. Many other screenwriters were brought into the project for rewrites. The movie, to this day, hasn’t been made.

At the height of my battle with Columbia, Jon Peters took me out to lunch again and urged me yet again to make the changes I refused to make.

“Come on,” he said, “this is
me
talking now. This is the guy who got them to pay you more than three million bucks. I stuck my neck out for you. Come on, make the fucking changes. As a personal favor to me.”

I said, “I can’t. The changes would destroy the script. The changes are stupid.”

Jon said, “So what?
They’re just words
.”

I said, “I’m a writer. They’re not
just words
. Words are what I do.”

Jon said, “I’m asking you as a favor to me—to your friend. Change the fucking words!”

I said, “I can’t.”

He said, “You can but you won’t.”

“All right,” I said, “have it your way. I
won’t
.”

Jon said, “You know what that means, you cocksucker,
it means we’re not friends anymore!
”

“Jon,” I said, “you don’t get it.”

“No!” he said. “
No!
” He stuck his finger at me like a gun.

“
You
don’t get it!” he said, got up, threw his napkin down, and left the patio restaurant of the Bel Air Hotel.

They came right after the last fire, the one that took out much of Malibu east of the Pacific Coast Highway. They came in armies.

The big mucky-muck multi-zillionaires of Malibu were sitting on their glass-walled patios or watching the sun set in their wrought iron gazebos when they saw them traipsing across the lawn or scampering around the palm trees.

Squirrels? No, they weren’t squirrels. They were Norwegian rats. They got under the houses and into the walls. They chewed holes through the screens and got into the kids’ rooms. At night you could see them in the moonlight, seemingly getting fatter by the hour.

The big mucky-muck zillionaires of Malibu fled. Those who also had houses in Beverly Hills or Bel Air went there. Those who didn’t went into Beverly Hills and got a suite at the Four Seasons or the Peninsula.

They paid fortunes for exterminators to come immediately and do whatever had to be done. The exterminators made them bid against each other, made some of them wait three days, even a week.

It became a status thing. If you were really powerful, if you really had money, you didn’t have to wait.

I didn’t have to wait at all, although I wasn’t a big mucky-muck zillionaire. I was one of the first whose house was exterminated, whose walls were cleaned
out,
whose attic and crawl spaces were cleared.

Why was I one of the first? Why did I get faster, better service than Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz and Jerry Perenchio and Irwin Winkler?

Because
my
exterminator wanted to be a screenwriter. He had some scripts he asked me to read. He wanted me to give him career advice after I’d read them.

I read his scripts quickly. I told him he had promise. I asked if he had others I could read.

Thank God he didn’t.

I had heard rumblings from both Evans and Craig Baumgarten,
Jade
’s producers, that Billy had made some changes which I “might not like.”

My interpretation of that was that the changes must have been so serious that neither Evans nor Baumgarten could tolerate them—though they would never say so (considering that Billy was married to the studio head).

I asked Billy to lunch in Malibu, looked him in the eye, and said, “When am I going to see the rough cut?”

Billy said, “In about a month.”

I said, “Look. If you’ve changed things I don’t know about, tell me now—so I can get used to the idea somewhat before I walk in there and get kicked in the gut.”

Billy said, “Joe, Joe—I give you my word—I shot your script. I’m not stupid. I know how you are about your words. We’re going to do a lot of other movies together. I’d tell you if I changed anything.”

I was a little calmed by that but Billy’s next sentence set off all my shit-detectors.

“I’m telling you, Joe,” Billy said, “this movie that
you created
is really something.”

I had never heard a director use that phrase to a screenwriter:
This movie that you created
.

And I was convinced that any director who used it was trying to cover up something truly awful that he had done.

I finished another spec script … this one about the soul singer Otis Redding that I called
Blaze of Glory
.

I’d been working on the script a long time and had secured the rights to Otis’s music, and to the “life rights” of his best friend and manager, Phil Walden, and of Otis’s wife, Zelma.

I’d always been drawn to Otis’s music and was the last person to interview him in Cleveland before his plane crashed into a Wisconsin lake in the late sixties.

I felt that the script was more than just another script about a rock star. By focusing on the relationship between Phil Walden and Otis Redding, a white
man
and a black man in the sixties, I hoped I was telling a story that was a metaphor for the civil rights movement.

Guy and Jeff Berg read the script and loved it and so did my lawyers, who agreed with ICM that the script would sell for $5 million.

Boy, I thought to myself, that would keep Gerri Eszterhas’s wolves away from our door for a long time.

We had a strategy session at my house. Guy said he was going to send the script out on Wednesday and set a Monday deadline for responses.

“By the way,” he announced, “I’m leaving for Palm Springs Wednesday afternoon.”

I was incredulous. He was sending the script out
Wednesday morning
and leaving for Palm Springs
Wednesday afternoon?

“You’re doing what?” I said.

“I’m in a golf tournament,” he said. “Last year I won ten grand.”

“You’re going off to a golf tournament the same day you’re sending my script out on auction?”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I can call people from there. They can reach me on my cellular.”

I gaped at him.

When agents send a script out for auction, they call and schmooze the potential players, trying to get one to bid against the other. It is the moment when the agenting process turns into a Byzantine fine art, a political and manipulative game that has to be played subtly and intensely. It is a mammoth and time-consuming task, especially when you’re sending the script to thirty some production entities—as we were doing with
Blaze of Glory
.

I couldn’t believe what Guy was saying to me. He knew how to run a successful auction. He knew the focus which a successful auction requires.

He was going to do this auction from his golf course. He was literally going to
phone this one in
. On his cellular.

I felt my blood pressure rise.

“You can’t go out of town when you’re auctioning my script,” I told him.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m telling you. We’ll be fine.”

“What if somebody just loves it and wants to preempt everybody else and buy it immediately? How are you gonna make a deal?”

“On the phone,” Guy said.

“From the fucking golf course in Palm Springs?”

He shrugged and lit a cigarette.

“It’s too late to move the auction back,” he said. “I’ve already let most of
them
know it’s coming on Wednesday.”

“It’s not too late for you not to go to your golf tournament.”

“I won ten grand last year,” he repeated.

“Guy,” I said, “I’m not asking you not to go. I’m
telling
you.”

He looked down and flicked the ash of his cigarette into the ashtray with his thumb.

He said, “Okay.”

The script went out, no one bid, and I fired Guy McElwaine, my close friend of so many years, the man I’d defied Michael Ovitz for.

Not because he couldn’t sell
Blaze of Glory
—I had written several other spec scripts through the years that went unsold.

I fired Guy because he had let me down at a crucial time in my life … when I literally couldn’t afford to be let down. I fired him because he
knew
what a crucial time in my life this was.

I fired him because he wanted to play golf when my new family’s welfare was on the line.

I fired him because of the way he had flicked the ash into the ashtray and said, “Okay.”

I fired him because I had risked
everything
for him with Michael Ovitz and now, five years later, he didn’t want to give up a golf tournament and a possible ten grand for me.

“Remember this,” Guy had said to me a long time ago, “there is no heart as black as the black heart of an agent.”

I remembered
.

I told him I was firing him at lunch at a Malibu restaurant. We both sat there with tears in our eyes.

Guy said, “I hate this town.”

I said, “So do I.”

Guy said, “We had fun, didn’t we?”

I said, “We sure did.”

No longer my agent (still my friend?) he started advising me on which agent I should switch to.

“Whatever you do, don’t go to Rifkin,” Guy said.

Arnold Rifkin had revitalized the somnolent William Morris Agency and was ICM’s biggest competitor.

“I won’t,” I said.

I felt sick about firing Guy. I remembered too many moments through so many
years
and so many drinks. I remembered Guy saying to me, through so many crises, “Well, I’m back in the bunker again
—incoming! incoming!
—waiting for the next plane to Paraguay.”

I didn’t know then what I would learn with the passage of time: firing Guy McElwaine was the biggest mistake I ever made in Hollywood. I never had as much fun again. His heart wasn’t black; he loved me like a brother. I had fired my own brother the way Johnny Kovak had killed his own brother in my original draft of
F.I.S.T
., the first screenplay I’d written.

By firing Guy, I had become a Hollywood animal. I had bought into the whole
ethos
of the town—an
ethos
I had resisted for so long: Guy screwed up, so
Fuck Guy!
He had to pay the price.
Fuck Guy!
I would
make him pay the price!
He would never work in this town (substitute: for me) again.

I should have forgiven him, of course. I should have understood that he was human, too, that he was coping with the wolves at his own door and with his own divorce. He needed the ten grand he might have won in Palm Springs.

And there was the gold bracelet Gerri had bought him with my money. Did I feel that he’d betrayed me … by accepting the bracelet … while I
hadn’t
betrayed him … by leaving Ovitz? Was it my star-sized ego that he had wounded by accepting that bracelet and by wanting to go to that golf tournament? Was I making him pay the price by starlike behavior?

Ultimately, I hurt myself by firing him. An unlikely pair, the Golden Beef and the Refugee from Cleveland, we had jousted at all the windmills and had had uproarious fun … until I pushed him from his saddle and left him trampled on the side of the road.

Fuck me!

On the playing field of deal-making and strategy, I was alone now without my mentor and swordsman (“two Iagos,” the director Phillip Noyce had called us) … just another Hollywood animal scuttling from Morton’s to the Ivy to Spago … just another hotshot
player
who remembered too well the wild and exhilarating joy of jousting at windmills with the brother he’d left behind on a mean and bloody road.

When I got home from lunch with Guy, I immediately called Arnold Rifkin.

The William Morris Agency released a press release when I became a client.

Arnold Rifkin was quoted as saying, “Joe Eszterhas has redefined the status of the screenwriter in Hollywood. His movies have grossed more than a billion dollars. His name brings people to the theaters. We are thrilled to be representing him.”

I was quoted as saying, “My decision to leave ICM has nothing to do with
my
close and continuing friendship with Guy McElwaine.”

Those words had an echo of the statement Guy had released for me when I broke up with Gerri Eszterhas: “His great friendship with Naomi Macdonald has nothing to do with the marital problems that led to his separation.”

I liked Arnold Rifkin. He had come out of the fur business, had once sold Frye boots even … he was full of a lot of New Age malarkey his friend Tony Robbins pumped into him … he butchered the English language extraordinarily in a town filled with masterful butchers of the English language … and he bragged all the time about his low body-fat count … but I
liked
him.