My Life as a Mankiewicz (44 page)

Unfortunately, I smoke when I write. My hero was Scott Fitzgerald. I loved
Gatsby
and
Tender Is the Night.
He was a big drinker. And Hemingway. They were always drinking and writing. I can't drink and write. I write about four hours, nine to one, or eight to noon. I get up very early, around four thirty or five in the morning. I didn't always, but I do now. I read the paper, and then go write. I have to do it when my mind is relatively blank, and, hopefully, before the phone starts to ring. If you're writing, you don't answer the phone. There are some days when it just comes, and it's wonderful. And some days when it just doesn't, and it's painful to write two pages. And they're not good. Other days, six pages are easy. It just flows. One thing I notice is at night, if I have a couple of Jack Daniel's and I suddenly think of a wonderful line—I'm almost laughing out loud it's so good—and I write it down, in the morning, when I get up and look at the line, it's not so wonderful. When you've had a few drinks, everything looks fabulous. But as a writer, with a couple of drinks in me, I'm nowhere near as funny as I am stone-cold sober at nine in the morning.

When I'm really writing for four or five hours, I am exhausted at the end. I haven't gotten out of bed, except to pee. But I'm exhausted. My mind has been working and characters have been talking and things have been going on. I might as well have been on a treadmill for an hour, in terms of how tired I am. Then I get a good boozy lunch with some wine, followed by a nap. I'm a great believer in the Mediterranean lifestyle. Everybody has a big lunch and takes a nap, and they open the stores again at four. Then they're open from four to eight, and then they go out to dinner. It's such a sensible lifestyle, and they live longer than we do. Obviously, when you're shooting, you can't take naps. Any day I could take a nap, I thought was the greatest day. My old expression is, “My cats and I go pawsup for an hour and a half.” They know naptime is coming when I return from the Palm. Everybody onto the bed. I love that, and I think it's a wonderful way to live.

By the way, with the European filming schedule, you get twice as much done. I'm used to the American system. In Europe, you shoot eight hours straight, like eleven to seven. There's a rolling buffet on the set. You can go get a sandwich while you're waiting for them to light. In America, the minute you go to lunch—which is supposed to last one hour—people dribble back onto the set, and some are five minutes late, ten minutes late. It's never an hour. When I was shooting, especially in television, I used to work late. I would say to Aaron and Leonard, “Let me work two hours' worth of gold time as opposed to breaking for dinner and coming back. Once you break for dinner, Jesus, it takes you forever, so let's just work straight through.” I'm a great believer of if you're there, do it. It's like writing. I could not write for forty-five minutes in bed on a yellow pad, get up, and go to a dental appointment, come back, and start writing again. I can't do that.

Brandon, Leonard, and Gavilan

Next, another everything-done-for-the-wrong-reason project, though it didn't take much out of my life. In 1982
Hart to Hart
was a big hit. NBC was being run at the time by Brandon Tartikoff. He was the nicest guy in the world and really bright. He was putting on wonderful shows. He said to me one night at a party, “Why don't you guys come over and do a series with NBC?”

I said to Leonard Goldberg, “This is too good to pass up. We've got to do this.” I thought of a premise—an ex-Navy Seal who lives at the beach and works with an older guy who's a conman. I called him Gavilan because there was a fighter named Kid Gavilan and I thought it was a great name. Robert Urich, who was a big television star at the time on
Vega$
, was available.
Vega$
had run out, and that had been an Aaron Spelling show. Leonard may have had extra joy in taking him from Aaron. Anyway, I wrote a premise, we went down to Brandon Tartikoff's office, we pitched the show, and Brandon said, “Okay, you guys have thirteen on the air. You don't have to do a pilot or anything. Goldberg and Mankiewicz.”

Again, this was done for all the wrong reasons. I wasn't burning to do a series about a Navy Seal. I was just trying to think of what can we do so we can get a show on the air. I met Bob Urich, who's a very nice guy, but very scared about doing a new thing because he had done
Vega$
for five or six years and just settled into it. He kept calling me day and night as I'm starting to write the script, asking, “Do you really think I should drive a Porsche? I don't know about a Porsche. You mean an old Porsche, not a new Porsche.”

I said to Leonard, “Listen, I don't want to stand in the way of this, but it's getting crazy here.” I realized that my heart wasn't in it. So they got some guy Urich really liked from
Vega$
, and Leonard said, “It'll say created by Tom Mankiewicz and let this guy go ahead and write the script. Bob loves him, and it won't cause you any problems.”

The one joy was Fernando Lamas, who played the old conman and was an absolute hoot. I just loved him. He came from the era of MGM as the Latin lover from the forties and fifties. He was married to Esther Williams. He would say, “You know, Tom, there was Esther, so beautiful, so wonderful. And you know, in America, you have such beautiful women, but they're not fucked properly.”

I had to suck it in, call Brandon, and say, “My eyes were too big for my stomach. I have a movie to do.” Gavilan came out, created by Tom Mankiewicz. Single card to start the show, and was off in six episodes. I got a check for eleven dollars from the Philippines for the six episodes. I don't think anybody's heart was in it. I don't know that Bob Urich really wanted to do it. Leonard probably thought, I got thirteen on the air, Bob Urich and Fernando Lamas, maybe this is gonna be a hit.

A year later at the Golden Globes, I went to the men's room, and I found myself peeing next to Bob Urich. I said, “Hello, Bob.”

And he said, “Is it too late to tell you, you were right? I should have just said, ‘What do you want me to do?' and then just done it.” He was very nice. I liked him very much. But he was so nervous at the time. He had his first really big hit with
Vega$.
He carried that show. Now, he thinks, what happens if that was just
Vega$
and the audience doesn't like me as anything else? I've got no place else to go. He wound up doing four or five different series. They always recycled Bob Urich. He wasn't a great actor, he wasn't a bad actor. But again, when you do things for the wrong reasons…

Dr. Mankiewicz Is In

Frank Wells, who's no longer with us, was the president of Warners at the time of
Superman.
He apparently said, “We wouldn't have this picture—I mean, Dick Donner did an unbelievable job—but we wouldn't have this picture without Mankiewicz; let's sign him.” That's why Warners signed me. They lied a little bit, saying, “Guess what, Mank, we want you to make your own movies.” In fact, they wanted me to fix everything on the lot. I had a nameplate on my desk that read Dr. Mankiewicz. The big script fixers at the time were, if you wanted a drama, especially grown men sinking to their knees and roaring, Robert Towne. If you wanted silly, sophisticated comedy, Elaine May must have fixed a dozen movies. If you wanted action/adventure with humor, you'd go right to Dr. Mankiewicz. It gets exhausting because there's a lack of satisfaction. Most of the time, you don't get credit, and that's a condition of your employment. That's why they pay you more. So inside the industry they know, but nobody else does. The other thing is, if you rewrite it and it's not a good picture, the original screenwriters would say it was just great until Mankiewicz got on it. So it's very difficult to win. Actors get so besotted by you when you show up on location, because if you change their shoes from green to red, they say, “Isn't he great? I got red shoes now. I used to have green shoes.” Almost like any change is better. Other than that, the producers give you a beautiful hotel suite, you fly first class, and the actors are always calling you saying, “You know the scene where the girl gets in bed with me? That could be a little bit better now.”

Steven Spielberg, who had the bungalow next to me, was doing a picture called
Gremlins
, directed by Joe Dante. It was Dante's first movie of any consequence. Steven gave me the script, and I gave him some ideas. He said, “Can you give them to me, because Joe Dante is very sensitive and I'll tell him the ideas like they were my ideas, and then he'll take them from me.”

I said, “Okay, that's fine.”

Then, Dick Donner and Spielberg were shooting a picture called
The Goonies
and they needed four scenes, so off I went to work on
The Goonies.
Warners, who kept saying to me, “Oh, God, we can't wait for you to start making your own pictures,” were happy as clams I was fixing all this stuff.

I wrote a script called
Rainbow
about a conman in the 1920s, and that was going to be a picture that I was hoping to direct. Bob Shapiro, who was head of production at Warners, said, “I've got good news and bad news.”

I said, “Give me the good news.”

He said, “Clint Eastwood loves
Rainbow.”

“What's the bad news?”

“Clint Eastwood loves
Rainbow.”

I had lots of meetings with Clint, and he was going to do that as his next picture. Unfortunately for Warners, Clint's
Bronco Billy
was not a big hit. It was a soft part for Clint. Then he did a wonderful little picture about the Depression,
Honkytonk Man
, with his son, but it didn't do very well either. Warners convinced him, it's time for Dirty Harry to come back. So my script kept getting postponed, but he would never give it up. When somebody wanted to direct it and take it away from him, he said, “No. If anybody ever directs this, it will be Mankiewicz or me.” He wouldn't let anybody have it, and he wouldn't make it. Actually, I think Clint would have been a little miscast, because it should have been Jack Nicholson or Warren Beatty, somebody with a lot of teeth and a shit-eating grin.

In 1983 Blake Edwards was going to do a picture with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds that he had written,
City Heat.
He was having real disagreements with Clint. Blake was used to getting his own way, but Clint was King of Warners. Terry Semel—again, when the mountain went down to Mohammed—came to my office and said, “Here's the script. Blake's directing it, but he and Clint are not getting along. Clint likes you and he likes you as a writer. If you could just do some writing for us.”

I said, “Yeah, but Terry, it's a Blake Edwards script; he's directing it too.”

He said, “Wait for Clint to call you.”

So Clint called me and said, “You know the kind of stuff I do well, and I'm really thrilled that you're going to be doing this.”

I asked, “Well, Clint, does Blake know about this?”

He said, “He's thrilled.”

I said, “Do you mind if I call Blake, because I know him.”

Clint said, “Well, what would you want to do that for?” Pause. “Do whatever you want.”

I got really scared. So I called Blake because I thought, I'm not going to go on this picture with Blake Edwards, for God's sake,
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, every goddamn hit in the world—
10.
Blake said, “Oh, my God. Are they asking you to rewrite it? I thought it was a piece of shit they were going to ask. Boy, they're pulling out all the stops.”

I asked, “What is the situation?”

He said, “Well, Mr. Eastwood and I don't agree. Mr. Eastwood suggested they get another writer to ‘help me.'” Now, Blake was a great screenwriter. He said, “And I suggested maybe we get another actor.” That was impossible at Warners if Clint wanted to do it. Blake said, “If you guys want to get another writer, that's fine with me. If I think whatever he or she is doing is better than mine, I'll shoot it.” And I thought, oh, my God.

I got Terry and said, “Terry, there is a huge, immovable force named Clint Eastwood in the west, and in the east, there is a giant, unforgiving mountain named Blake Edwards. In between is something called a ‘Mank Burger.' I'm not going to do this; this would be a disaster for me. Disaster.” So he said okay.

I called Clint. “Clint, I'm so sorry I can't do it.”

He said, “All right, send all the stuff back right now.” He hung up.

Annie, my assistant, said, “Oh, my God, we're going to be killed.”

A week later, Blake Edwards was off the picture. Warners paid him off. It turned out Blake was being very crafty too. He didn't mind getting paid off because he had a picture already set up at Columbia. Terry came back and said, “Here's the deal. How about if you rewrite this and you direct it?”

I said, “Terry, let me think about it.” I sat down with Annie, who was the only person I could really talk to, and said, “Listen, people may think I'm fucking nuts, but I think this would be a disaster for me.” Clint had directed four or five films, and Burt Reynolds had also directed a few pictures, including one about dying,
The End.
I said, “Those guys will have me for fucking lunch. I'll just stand on the set while they shoot. I've got two huge stars who are both directors and I've never directed a feature.” I'd done
Hart to Hart.
I said, “And I'm supposed to come on the set with them. I think I'd slit my throat. They'll say, ‘Thanks, Mank, for your opinion. Now, here's what we're going to do.'” So I wrote a couple of scenes for free. I redid the opening for them.

Burt Reynolds, as it turns out, was the last to know everything. He apparently waltzed into Terry's office and said, “This is great. Is Mankiewicz still writing?” This is way after I'd already turned down Clint. They clued Burt in last because Clint was Warners and Burt wasn't.

But that could have been my first picture. In a conversation to which I was not a party but I'm sure took place, Clint said, “Listen, Burt and I can take care of ourselves. We'll get a rewrite out of Mankiewicz and the picture will be a lot better because he'll be writing for himself as director. And don't worry about Mankiewicz on the set; we'll take care of everything.” I know that conversation took place somewhere. I wrote a few scenes as my penance for not doing it. By the way, I saw Clint half a dozen times after that, and he was just wonderful to me. He's a total pro.