Hollywood Animal (99 page)

The script was about a sixteen-year-old Hungarian kid named Karchy Jonas who lived on Cleveland’s West Side and went to Cleveland Cathedral High School, where he was bullied by a bunch of snobbish elitist idiots.

It was about how Karchy got into the WHK High School Hall of Fame by sending in a bunch of postcards forged with his classmates’ names. It was about how Karchy dreamed of becoming an American writer and about his relationship with a disc jockey named Billy Magic and a young, working-class woman who worked at the West Side Market named Diney.

When no one wanted to buy the script, I knew that getting even for high school humiliations wasn’t the most lofty and literary reason to write something.

One day, years after Guy McElwaine had tried and failed to sell the script, I got a call from a producer named Carol Baum who ran Dolly Parton’s production company.

She—and Dolly—had read and been moved by
Magic Man
and wanted to produce it.

It didn’t mean that they were financing it. It meant that they would look for a financing entity as well as a director and stars … in return I would authorize them to produce the movie.

I said, “Does this mean I’m going to be meeting Dolly?”

Carol said, “Probably.”

It wasn’t true. I never met Dolly.

But I did meet their first choice to direct it—the successful director of many “hot” MTV videos.

We had dinner at Morton’s and the video director started telling me how I should rewrite the script. I listened until he was finished and then said, “You’ve never directed a movie, have you?”

He said no but went into a rap about how each MTV video was “a movie in miniature” with its own “dramatic arc.”

“Do I tell you how to make your MTV videos?” I asked him.

He smiled and said no.

“No,” I said. “I don’t tell you because I’ve never done an MTV video and I would feel like an asshole if I started telling you how to do one. Yet you—you’ve never done a movie, but you don’t feel like an asshole telling me how to write one. How come?”

He looked at Carol Baum for help. Carol smiled at me. She wasn’t going to help him.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “I
know how come!
You’re an asshole but you don’t feel like you’re an asshole because you don’t know you’re an asshole. Just like most directors. But I’m telling you: You’re an asshole.”

He didn’t know what to say. He tried to laugh it off and left shortly afterward.

Joe Roth was the next would-be director of
Magic Man
. He had just directed a movie with an immigrant theme,
Streets of Gold
, written by Richard Price, and said that while he hadn’t intended to do “another immigrant story,” he’d been “charmed” by my script.

Joe and Carol and Dolly tried to get financing for it but weren’t getting anywhere and one day Joe Roth asked to meet me in the bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and told me he was moving on to another project:
Revenge of the Nerds II
.

I was disappointed, but I liked his honesty. In a town where no one ever does anything for the money, Joe Roth said, “I need the paycheck.”

Chris Cain was a down-to-earth, folksy man who was most interested not in Karchy, the kid, but in Billy Magic, the disc jockey. He had just directed Jim Belushi in
The Principal
(a moderate hit) and the two were interested in working together again.

Chris sent the script to Jim, who wanted to play Magic, and Chris and Jim and Carol and Dolly went out looking for financing again.

Everybody passed again.

The Principal
, I was told, hadn’t been a
big enough
hit to justify financing
Magic Man
.

Even though it had been a hit, that didn’t mean Jim Belushi was a star.

After my very public conflict with Michael Ovitz in 1989, Carol Baum and Dolly Parton faded away from
Magic Man
.

Carol stopped calling me.

I wasn’t surprised.

Dolly, I knew, was represented by CAA and Ovitz. Not that I suspected Ovitz of saying to them: “I don’t want you working with Eszterhas.” I knew that in Hollywood people were so afraid of Ovitz that they wouldn’t take the chance of giving him apoplexy by working with me.

A couple of months after the newspapers wrote about my letter to Ovitz, I was at dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s Eureka in Santa Monica with Gerri and Steve and Suzi.

Sitting at the next table with a group of people was Dolly Parton.

She kept staring at me all night. It looked like she was studying me, like she was trying to answer for herself this question: Why isn’t that suicidal lunatic sitting over there wearing a straitjacket?

For a while I tried to ignore her awestruck and awful stares but then I gave up.

When Gerri wasn’t looking, I winked at her.

Dolly saw the wink and looked for a terrifying moment like she was going to spit her food across the tables at me.

But Dolly stopped staring.

At about the same time, I ran into Joe Roth, who had chosen to direct
Revenge of the Nerds II
instead of
Magic Man
.

I was sitting at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York. Joe came in the bar door and looked right at me. I was only a few feet away from him.

I grinned and waved. He turned right around and went back out the door.

I thought we were friends. He had even introduced me to his father-in-law, the zany impresario Samuel Z. Arkoff, a man who wore a hat with a propeller on top of his head.

Post-Ovitz, it seemed, Joe wasn’t my friend anymore.

Fran Kuzui had directed
Tokyo Pop
, an international film festival smash, and Guy McElwaine sent her
Magic Man
.

She wanted to direct it and was certain that, after
Tokyo Pop
’s critical success, she could get the financing for it. She was considering making it with Burt Reynolds.

Six months later, she was still looking for the financing.

A year later, she admitted defeat.

Sam Goldwyn, Jr., who ran his own production company, got the script from Guy and asked us to a meeting at the Friars Club. Sam loved
Magic Man
. He wanted to buy it. He was willing to pay $750,000 for it.

But I’d have to make one change.

Just one.

I’d have to make it a contemporary piece instead of a piece that took place in the sixties. And, in keeping with making it contemporary, Karchy Jonas would have to be a Latino kid in L.A. instead of a Hungarian kid in Cleveland.

In other words, Karchy Jonas couldn’t be
me
anymore.

I said no soap.

Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars wasn’t enough money to make me forget about getting even with those idiots at Cathedral Latin.

I didn’t say
that
to Sam Goldwyn, of course.

I said I couldn’t make the changes because the script was “too close to my heart and my roots.”

That was a noble reason and not a petty and vindictive one.

Sam Goldwyn even said he admired me.

“I don’t know a lot of writers who’d turn this kind of money down because of their hearts,” he said.

He didn’t know how angry I still was at Cathedral Latin, either.

Guy gave the script to his client John Candy, who asked me to meet him at his office, which I was amazed to see was a bar. His
own
bar! A fully stocked and decorated barroom with stools, chairs, tables, neon decorations, and a jukebox.

John was the bartender, standing behind the bar as I sat on a stool in front of him.

I thought I was a heavy smoker but I was a baby compared to John Candy. A cigarette was
never
out of his hand. Once he had two of them lighted up at the same time … and smoked them both
… at the same time
.

I thought I could drink, but I was a teetotaler compared to John Candy. I drank five bottles of Heineken while we were in his bar. He drank thirteen rum and Cokes.

(Guy had warned me: “John and I were in Monte Carlo. He was doing publicity. I came back to L.A.—he was supposed to be back the next day. A week later, he called me. He was still in Monte Carlo, still partying.”)

We went from his bar to dinner a few blocks away on San Vincente. I drove. At dinner I had two more beers. John had eight more rum and Cokes.

“I’m begging to do this movie,” John said. “Please. You’ve got to promise me you’ll let me do it.”

He said he was trying to change his image from the goofball funnyman to a real actor. He’d starred in several movies that had tanked recently.

“You’ve got it,” I said. “I promise you.”

He hugged me. He didn’t just have tears in his eyes. He was nearly sobbing.

I was sure he was drunk.

I knew
I
was.

A couple of weeks later, as we were trying to get financing for
Magic Man
with John Candy attached to it, John fired Guy as his agent. He went to CAA.

I knew right away that John’s next step was to bail out of
Magic Man
.

I was right.

Ronnie Meyer, his new agent at CAA, informed Guy that John didn’t want to do
Magic Man
anymore.

I was furious. I called John and, to my amazement, he took my call. Standard Hollywood behavior in such cases is to pretend the telephone has not yet been invented.

“How can you do this to me?” I screamed at him. “You gave me your word—I gave you mine! I
lived up to
mine!”

He started to cry.

“Call Ronnie Meyer,” he said. “He’s the one who told me I can’t do it!” John was
blubbering
now. “He said it would hurt my career. Call Ronnie. Talk to him. Maybe you’ll change his mind. I hope you do. I want to do
Magic Man
. I want to be Billy Magic. It’s a great script. Call him!”

I called Ronnie Meyer at CAA, never thinking it even possible that he’d take my call. I knew how close (then) Ronnie and Michael Ovitz were.

But I got right through.

I screamed at him, too. “You tell Candy that it would hurt his career if he did
Magic Man?
” I said. “Bullshit. You don’t want him to do it because it’s
my
script! Because of me! Because of what happened with me and Ovitz!”

Ronnie started screaming right back at me. “You hurt CAA!
You hurt my business!
You expect me to help you after you hurt my business? Fuck you!”

He hung up. Here he was, years later,
admitting
that CAA was still after me because of my letter to Ovitz.

Ronnie Meyer was a tough, no-bullshit ex-Marine. I had forgotten his reputation for always telling the truth … in a town where, at best, truth was ambiguous.

Nearly ten years went by.

Magic Man
was as dead as Burt Reynolds’s career … as Wolfgang Puck’s Eureka … as Cathedral Latin High School, razed and the site of a parking lot … as dead as my marriage to Gerri … as dead as John Candy.

· · ·

Naomi asked to read all the scripts I’d written.

Her favorite was
Magic Man
.

“It’s sweet,” she said. “It’s moving. It doesn’t have any violence. Even the sex is gently done.”

She had a suggestion.

“I’d like to see more of the boy’s father,” she said. “He’s too much in the background for me.”

I rewrote the script, focusing on Karchy’s father, who was somewhat—but only somewhat—patterned after my father.

Naomi loved the rewrite: “I think you can get four really strong actors into this now,” she said. “For Karchy, Billy Magic, Diney, and now the dad.”

She also loved the new title I came up with for the script:
Telling Lies in America
.

I changed the title not because I didn’t like
Magic Man
but to make it appear that this was a brand-new script.

It had been around for so long that there had been a change of generations at the top studio levels.

Many of today’s executives wouldn’t remember a script called
Magic Man
but if they went to their computers, they’d find it, along with readers’ reports, which would or wouldn’t be friendly.

By changing the title, I made sure that no studio readers’ reports would be uncovered.

At about the same time, Fran Kuzui, the director of
Tokyo Pop
, whom I hadn’t seen in all this time, was having lunch with a friend: a young director named Guy Ferland.

Guy told her he was working on a coming-of-age piece that he hoped to get financed and direct. Fran told him about the best coming-of-age piece she’d ever read:
Magic Man
.

Guy was incredulous. The author of
Basic Instinct
and
Sliver
and
Showgirls
had done a coming-of-age piece that Fran thought was the best she’d ever read?

“I’ll send it to you, read it,” Fran said.

Guy read it and called her. “
This
is the piece I want to direct,” Guy said.

Fran said, “I’ll call Joe.”

Guy Ferland and I met and I told him about the new draft I’d done called
Telling Lies in America
. He read it and was very excited. I was, too. I liked Guy’s sensitive approach to the piece.

He agreed with Naomi: he thought it possible that we could get four topnotch actors.

Financing wouldn’t be easy, but Guy thought he could do the movie on a bare-bones budget and shoot it on location in Cleveland.

Fran Kuzui (my angel) and her husband had a production company of their own and Fran thought they could provide some of the financing.

Guy Ferland took the script to some friends of his at a new company called Banner Entertainment and they agreed to provide the bulk of the financing
—if
we would all agree to take very little money for our efforts.

I agreed to take $100,000 for the script.

I insisted, however, that since my rewrite was Naomi’s idea, Naomi be made executive producer (at no fee, but with her own director’s chair).

Casting came together quickly.

Brad Renfro, only fourteen years old but already an actor of enormous talent and potential, agreed to play Karchy Jonas.

Kevin Bacon, a superb actor who had somehow never been nominated for an Oscar, agreed to play Billy Magic.