The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (2 page)

For their help along the long and winding road, I thank: Guy McElwaine, Sam Fischer, Gerry and Gale Messerman, Patricia Glaser, Irwin Winkler, Norman Jewison, Craig Baumgarten, Ben Myron, Jim Morgan, Ed Victor, Alan Nierob, Richard Marquand, Paul Verhoeven, Costa-Gavras, Adrian Lyne, Alan Pakula, Steven Spielberg, Arthur Hiller, Ray Stark, Don Simpson, Jim Robinson, Dawn Steele, Arnold Rifkin, David Greenblatt, Jim Wiatt, Jeff Berg, Skip Brittenham, Bob Shapiro, Kevin Bacon, John Candy, Marsha Nasatir, Gene Corman, Patrick Palmer, Mike Medavoy, Barry Hirsch, Robert Wallerstein, Steven Bochco, Steve Roth, Richard Roth, Andrew Vajna, Mario Kassar, Lee Rich, Tony Thomopoulos, Michael Sloane, Peter Bart, Liz Smith, Army Archerd, George Christy, Michael Fleming, Lori Weintraub, Claudia Eller, Lynn Nesbit, Jerry Bruckheimer, Marty Ransohoff, Bob Bookman, Jann Wenner, Michael Viner, Alan Ladd, Jr., Frank Price, Robert Evans, Charles Evans, Sherry Lansing, Brandon Tartikoff, Jon Peters, Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, Debra Winger, Hunter S. Thompson, Pete Hamill, Jane Scott, Gary Kress, John Reese, Ted Princiotto, Vern Havener, Chris Matthews, Sonny Mehta, Jim Silberman, Jack Mathews, Bill Gross, Tova Leiter, Ira Levin, Tom Hedley, Scott Richardson, Gary G-Wiz, Father Bob Stec, Ron Rogers, Bob Landaw, Marshall Strome, Doug Hicks, Vernon Alden, L. J. Horton, Sue Mengers, Michael Marcus, Tom Wolfe, Philip Noyce, Karel Reisz, Bob Rafelson, Guy Ferland, Roseanne, Sam Kinison, Zelma Redding, Nelson McCormick, Paul Wilmer, Herb Caen, Bob Ranallo, Richard Rosman, Father John Mundweil, Alan Smith, Doug Buemi, Jeremy Baka, Rodman Gregg, Don Granger, Elizabeth Beier, and Matt Drudge.

Special thanks to Naomi and to my children—Joe, Nick, John Law, Luke, Steve, Suzanne Maria Eszterhas, and Suzanne Maria Perryman.

Finally, no
Devil’s Guide to Hollywood
would be complete without the diabolical wit and wisdom of the players quoted in this book, some captured by me and some by others. I thank all of those people and especially the insights of my fellow Hungarian, my secret adolescent crush,
dahling
, the magnificent, the regal, Zsa Zsa Gabor.

PREFACE

T
hey’re out there by the dozens, telling you how to write screenplays, when they don’t know how to do it themselves.

Robert McKee is the most famous of them, and while it is true that he has
sold
some scripts, he has had only one feature-length film produced on cable television.

McKee’s Web site points out that, at the University of Michigan, his creative writing professor was “the noted Kenneth Rowe, whose former students include Arthur Miller and Lawrence Kasdan.” This is, of course, success by association, McKee elevating himself to the same creative peak where stand Miller and Kasdan by saying that he once attended the same school (which admits more than twenty thousand students each year) and had the same teacher.

McKee is a former actor who, his Web site says, “appeared on Broadway with such luminaries as Helen Hayes, Rosemary Harris, and Will Geer.” He thus elevates himself to the same peak where stand those
acting
luminaries. Lo and behold, McKee miraculously turns
himself
into a
luminary
. He implies that he is as good an actor as Helen Hayes, the same way that he implied he was as
luminary
a writer as Arthur Miller.

It is a great act, brought to life by an actor who barnstorms the world doing a one-man, three-day, thirty-hour show (like Hal Holbrook doing a marathon Mark Twain): Robert McKee playing the part of successful screenwriter, the actor reciting the same lines over and over again. “It is the same fundamental lecture I have been giving for twenty years,” McKee told the
Melbourne
(Australia)
Herald Sun
. “It never gets old.”

Reviewing the act,
Movieline
magazine wrote, “He storms the stage like George C. Scott in
Patton
.”
The New Yorker
wrote, “McKee, who used to be an actor, rarely speaks a sentence that does not call for a word so stressed that he bares his teeth.”

McKee performs in L.A., Vegas, Miami, New York, Paris, London, and Singapore “from a script that barely changes a word from one performance to another,”
The New Yorker
wrote. And McKee himself told
The New Yorker
, “I am an old actor and this is thirty hours of performance to a captive audience. It’s very satisfying.”

In that same interview, McKee said, “Warner Brothers said, ‘Bob, we want
Jagged Edge
goes rock and roll for Cher. I wrote a thing called
Trophy
, for an embarrassing amount of money, about a rock star who murders her husband and gets away with it. They loved it. Loved it.”

But alas, as much as they may have “loved it,” Warner Bros. didn’t make it. Nobody has made it.

I was amused to read that Warner Bros. told McKee to write “
Jagged Edge
goes rock and roll,” since
I’m
the guy who wrote the original
Jagged Edge
. In other words, the great screenwriting guru, who tells the world how to write scripts, was assigned by Warner Brothers to sit down and
imitate me
. And imitate me he did: “A rock star who murders her husband and gets away with it” is how he described
Trophy
. That is a resounding echo of
Jagged Edge
’s theme of a prominent socialite who murders his wife and gets away with it.

I am led then to this conclusion: If you want to know about screenwriting, you might be better off listening to the guy who wrote the original than the guy who imitated it.

What you will read in this book is what I’ve learned in thirty-one years of writing screenplays.

I have written fifteen films:
F.I.S.T., Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Big Shots, Hearts of Fire, Betrayed, Music Box, Nowhere to Run, Basic Instinct, Checking Out, Sliver, Showgirls, Jade, Telling Lies in America
, and
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
. I am now working on my sixteenth and seventeenth.

My films have grossed over
1 billion at the box office, and in 1992,
Basic Instinct
was the number-one movie of the year worldwide. I have been paid many millions of dollars for my scripts, more than any other screenwriter in Hollywood history:
4 million for a four-page outline of
One Night Stand;
3.7 million for
Showgirls;
3.7 million for an unproduced biography of John Gotti;
3 million for
Basic Instinct;
2.5 million for
Jade
, and lesser seven-figure amounts for
Betrayed, Music Box, and Flashdance
.