My Life as a Mankiewicz (55 page)

He said, “You can't do that.”

I said, “Yes, I can, and I will.” The unit production manager, Fred Blankfein, was there. I said, “You're a member of the Directors Guild. You're going to put up with this?” He had made a deal with Gary, and they had told Showtime they could make it for less money than it actually was going to cost. We didn't know we were going to have Alan Arkin. The experience was just like Chinese fucking water torture. I said, “Who are these people?”

I knew and accepted the fact that my career was not anywhere near as stellar as my dad's, loaded with Oscars and accolades. But now, I also had to face the fact that I was just tired, and I was tired of the people that I had to deal with. In retrospect, I never should have left CAA. I never should have been outraged that they lied to me, that they set me up. I got one of the actresses they wanted, and then they decided five different ways I'm not going to make this picture without ever telling me. I should have just said, “Okay, guys, you don't want me to make the picture? What do I get next?” But I have a sense of morality and I don't like to be lied to. So I dug my heels in. Maybe I thought I was a little bigger than I was and I could get away with it. It was like reading your biorhythms, you just know there's something wrong.

Even though I liked Frank Price, Bob Daly, and Terry Semel, I probably would not mention an executive or an agent among the highlights. I would mention actors and composers and other writers and cameramen, but nobody who sat in an office. I couldn't think of one. There were other writer-directors who became disillusioned with people in offices who don't make the movies. John Hughes disappeared for the last ten years of his life; my guess is for much the same reason. He was very disillusioned. He disappeared at the height of his powers. He'd done those wonderful kids' movies, which were the soul of that generation, and pictures like
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
, where Hughes and Candy as writer-director and actor, respectively, could break your heart and make you cry. In every obituary of Hughes, it said he grew disillusioned. I think it's with all the suits. They wanted different kinds of pictures from him than he wanted to make. He did go ahead and make
Miracle on 34th Street.
When Fox offered me that picture, I was smarter than John Hughes because I said, “If I can't get Sean Connery or Jack Nicholson for Kris Kringle, I ain't doing it.” It had a cute girl, it would have been foolproof. I can't imagine that a guy whose screenplays were so original would want to remake
Miracle on 34th Street.
It's a classic. It was a strange career choice for him, and, maybe, disillusioning, because the picture was not a big critical or financial success. Even Hughes's moderate successes like
Weird Science
were big successes with smart people and kids. Nobody over thirty went to see
Weird Science
, but everybody under thirty got it.

11

The Tag

Out of Film

High concept is the enemy of the writer. The friend of the writer is the human being, the full-blooded character interacting with another character.

—Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Team Players

When I was at Warners, it was almost a privilege harking back to the forties and fifties when everybody was under contract to a studio. It was like major league baseball before free agency and Curt Flood. You were on a team. You were with Fox, MGM, Warners, Paramount, or Universal. Then, all of a sudden, there was free agency. Kirk Douglas had his own company. My father was one of the first independent companies, Figaro. They made
The Barefoot Contessa
and
I Want to Live
, which Robert Wise directed. Burt Lancaster had his own company. The Mirisch brothers became very famous because they said to filmmakers like Billy Wilder, “You do your film through us. We'll handle all the bullshit. You're not working for a studio. We're working together. You write and direct the film, and we'll get you the stage space and so on.” United Artists was the studio everybody wanted to work for when I was first starting in the sixties. United Artists didn't have a studio lot, per se, but they made the Beatles films, the James Bond films,
Tom Jones
with Albert Finney, the Woody Allen pictures. They would get the right deal for you in the right place, and they would leave you alone and let you make the picture. Studios always charged 10 or 15 percent overhead just to run the studio, and it was added on to every budget. United Artists had much less overhead because they didn't have a physical plant. So on
Diamonds Are Forever
, we shot mostly at Universal when we were in Los Angeles. They had the bungalows, the stages, and the back lots that we could use at the right price.

After that big burst of independent fervor, studios started to make housekeeping deals so that Dick Donner would have his company at Warners, I would have my company at Warners. You were not exclusive to Warners like the old days, but they had first call on you. You had to tell Warners if you wanted to do something somewhere else. They could suspend you, pick you up again, or talk you out of it.

Warner Brothers was at its best when Steve Ross was running the company from New York. He said, “Let's get the best people and treat them in the best way.” So at its height, Warners had Richard Donner, Steven Spielberg with Amblin Productions, Clint Eastwood with Malpaso, Goldie Hawn, when she was a huge star, and Billy Friedkin for a while. Bob Daly and Terry Semel were the chairman and president, respectively. They treated everybody really wonderfully. There was a nominal head of production, Mark Canton. They all worked together so well. Bob and Terry sometimes would share a car to the studio together.

Warners was famous for having eight private jets. One night, Stefanie Powers and I were shooting at Columbia because Spelling-Goldberg had sold
Hart to Hart
to Columbia. Columbia shared the same lot with Warners in those days. For a few years, Stefanie and I bred Arabian horses. We wanted to go to the Arabian Nationals, which started at nine o'clock in the morning on a Saturday in Albuquerque. We were shooting late Friday night until midnight and couldn't get out. There were no flights to Albuquerque. I called Terry Semel's office and asked, “Can I get a little plane just to take us to Albuquerque?”

“Absolutely.” They would treat you so wonderfully. You were a member of the Warners family. Steve Ross would insist on that. Clint had first call on the big plane. I didn't take advantage. I only took a plane twice. They would fly you everywhere if you were a talent with them.

The exact opposite of that was when I was at Universal. Lew Wasserman ran the whole joint. And Lew was amazing. He knew everything that was going on, and this was his kingdom. Johnny Carson used to joke about the big black office building—”If you ran a studio, would you stick this in the middle of the San Fernando Valley?” But then again, it only takes one man. So this was Lew's place. Sid Sheinberg was his second in command. Universal was not making moneymaking movies at the time. It had hit bottom, financially speaking, with a movie called
Howard the Duck
, which cost a fortune and grossed nothing.
Dragnet
was its first moneymaker in a long time. There was an opening for a new head of production. Frank Price had been head of production at Columbia during
Ghostbusters
and
Gandhi
. Lew wanted him. Sid Sheinberg didn't want him, because Sid thought he was number two and Frank was going to take over at the studio. Lew won. Frank came.

Immediately, there was a big unspoken fight involving two movies. Frank brought
Out of Africa
with him, and it was made. Lew had
Back to the Future
. They came out the same year. At Universal, the question was who you were with. Sid Sheinberg was very close to Steven Spielberg, whose company produced
Back to the Future
. Oscar time came;
Out of Africa
won Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Score, Best Photography. It won seven Oscars. Things were very uncomfortable at Universal. Not everybody was rowing in the same direction.

The housekeeping deals disappeared because studios found them too expensive like everything else. You'd make a housekeeping deal with John Travolta, who becomes a star again. Now he's got his own chef and martial arts expert and everybody goes on salary, and all of a sudden, it's costing you a fortune. Maybe that year he does one picture that doesn't gross a lot of money, and the studio is saying, “Jesus, I'd rather hire him on a picture-by-picture basis.” On the other hand, Dick Donner makes
Superman
for Warners. Then he makes all four
Lethal Weapon
movies for Warners. He makes
Conspiracy Theory
for Warners. He makes
Ladyhawke
for Warners and Fox.
Free Willie
and all those movies he produced with Lauren Shuler. He had twelve people on salary. But Warners was happy because, my God, it's making so much money off him. The
Lethal Weapon
movies alone made billions—not millions, billions.

A Vast Wasteland

It's so expensive now to open movies that you would rather give somebody a piece of the gross than to give them $20 million or $30 million up front. The salaries got so high: Hanks was getting $25 million; Mel Gibson got $25 million when he was really big as an actor. So now studios say, “Look, if we give away 5 or even 10 percent of the gross, at least we're giving away a piece of what we're getting. Whereas, if this picture turns out to be a big flop and it was made for $140 million and $40 million of that is two actors' salaries, then we can't get that money back.” Everything is just so bleeping expensive now. That's why reality television is on. It's too expensive, on a steady diet, to do
NCIS
, because you've got actors in the fourth or fifth year of their contract, they're making a lot of money, you've got writers, you're paying directors, special effects, scoring. That costs you a lot more than if you do “The World's Tallest Nun,” or “Fat People Fall in Love.” H. L. Mencken had the classic quote, “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” And son of a bitch, there is an audience out there for
The Bachelorette
. I see five minutes of it and I want to throw up. It's so stupid. But it gets the ratings, so somebody's watching it.

Most studios agree Will Smith is worth $20 million, but his last couple of pictures were not hits. Years ago, if it was a Jerry Lewis comedy, you could predict X. Clint Eastwood was the biggest star in the world, but when he did
Bronco Billy
and that little movie about the Depression with his son, they didn't make any money. It wasn't the Clint Eastwood the audience wanted to see. Paul Newman probably delivered more than anybody, but I could run you a festival of
The Drowning Pool
and
Winning
, and you don't hear about those movies. So I don't think anybody's infallible, even the biggest names—Paul Newman or Tom Hanks or, back then, Jimmy Stewart. Steven Spielberg made
Always
, which didn't make any money. But if I could have the rest from
Jaws
to
E.T
. to
Close Encounters
to
Schindler's List
to
Private Ryan
, I would be rolling in it. They're all different kinds of films, and they're all wonderful films. He had a certain eye for it. I love Steven Spielberg, he's one of the three or four best directors that ever directed. Any kind of film is his kind of film, except what Robert Shaw said, a love story between a man and a woman or a comedy. After
Jaws
, everybody got sequelitis. I'll bet you when Spielberg was making
1941
, somebody was already drawing up the plans for
1942
. Then the picture came out.

Francis Coppola said recently that the major studios are almost out of the quality filmmaking business. Just like the
World's Biggest Loser
, world's greatest blah-blah-blah, they know if they do
Transformers VI
, they can just keep going until finally one of them doesn't make it.
Iron Man III. Spider-Man IV
. There will be an audience out there that's going to run to it. I give credit to J. K. Rowling. She said, “There are seven
Harry Potter
books and it's over. It's finished. You can make seven movies out of it.” I'm sure the studio will try and make a deal with her, since she owns the character. “Can we make new ones?” I don't know what she'll say. Harry and the Magic Bachelorette. The only guy who really stayed true to it was J. D. Salinger; never let any of his books be made as a movie. Somebody made a movie that steals from
Catcher in the Rye
, and it's done as an homage, but Salinger's estate is suing him.

What terrifies me (and I'll probably sound like a snob for saying it) is the Internet has made everybody so ubiquitous and so omnipresent; Facebook, Craigslist—almost nothing is special anymore. It's the dumbing down of America in terms of entertainment. Not that great films aren't made every year, but not as many great films. The films I'm talking about, the
Shanes
and the
High Noon
s and
From Here to Eternity
s and
On the Waterfront
s, those were mainstream major studio films. And the people who made them were fucking proud of them. Also, somehow, adults were in those films. Look at
Roman Holiday
. Audrey Hepburn's twenty-three and Gregory Peck's thirty-four, but they look like a man and a woman. Today, everybody looks like a kid, even at fifty-five. Judd Apatow makes a semiserious film,
Funny People
, and it's not serious and it's not funny, and the problem is, he should have made me cry. But everybody in it is a big kid, even Adam Sandler. They're just all big kids. You wouldn't call anybody a man in that film. Even now, when they're in their forties or fifties, they're big, shaggy kids. Maybe George Clooney is a man. He looks like a guy. But there are damn few. He's had a wonderful career. He's made a fortune and he directed a movie,
Good Night, and Good Luck
, the Edward R. Murrow movie. One of the reasons that no great operas were written after the twentieth century was that Mozart or Rossini were sitting in their house and they had nothing the fuck to do except this opera. Today, you've got radio, television, the Internet, you're Twittering, you're texting. How does anybody have the time to concentrate on a great piece of work? You have to have such willpower to sit down and work on it.

Everybody feels as if they could be, in fact, famous for fifteen minutes. All they have to do is put the right thing on their blog. Newton Minow, the famous head of the Federal Communications Commission in the late fifties, called television a “vast wasteland.” A reporter said, “You know, Mr. Minow, one day there are going to be three or four hundred channels.” And, he said, “Good God, what on earth are they going to put on it?” Well, we're getting the answer right now. I've got
Project Runway
. You don't like that?
America's Next Top Model
. I got three other model shows and cooking shows. Make sure it's show business. The chef gets angry, and I want to see him throw a cleaver because you've got to have a little drama. My chef show's angrier than your chef show. Horse racing is dying, but there are two racing channels. We've got Santa Anita and Hollywood Park.

One of the reasons that politics has gotten so hostile is that if I'm Sean Hannity, or I'm Keith Olbermann, take the left or the right, or I'm Glenn Beck—who I think needs professional help, he's a psycho—I have to fill an hour every night. How do I do that? That's why Larry King did eighteen straight hours of Michael Jackson coverage. There aren't that many interesting people. So now you have, “Tonight, for the whole hour, Barbara Eden.” And, you say, “No, please!” Jermaine Jackson has been seen more on the Larry King show in the last year than he has been seen in the last ten years anywhere. It's just insane. And that's what worries me. There are fewer and fewer truly fine films every year. There used to be many, many more. When I was growing up, if you lived in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Saint Louis—any big city—every year you would see an Ingmar Bergman film, a Claude Chabrol film, a Truffaut film, a Fellini film, a Visconti film, an Antonioni film. There was a whole world of cinema out there. Today, you can't even find a film from any other part of the world except if you go to Little Tokyo, where they have films in Japanese. They were all fine films by wonderful artists. That just doesn't exist anymore, because “Fat People Make Love” gets a 45 share.

A studio will make a picture like
G.I. Joe
, which gets derisive reviews and, apparently, hoots from the audience, but it still does $59 million the opening weekend. So they have private-label studios—Fox Searchlight—that make the films that literate people would want to see. An amazing statistic is, of the last fifteen films nominated for Best Picture, fourteen of them were not made by a major studio. Now the Academy is doubling the number of nominees. You can say they used to have ten in the thirties, but there was no television. Now
Transformers
can be one of the ten even though it's not going to win to generate more TV ratings. What happens now, with these mass entertainments, is somebody like Marion Cotillard wins for
La Vie en Rose
and there's a collective “Who?” sucked in around the country. Nobody's seen the fucking movie and she wins the Oscar. The public says, “These are specialty awards now.” But she did the best work. She should have won it.