6/27/22
Newsletter24
It’s black as midnight.
I love Hollywood jokes: two screenwriters are talking. One says to the other, “My agent came over to my house last night, shit on the floor, wiped his ass with the curtains, then fucked my wife.” The other screenwriter says, “Your agent comes to your house?”
Two producers are crawling through the desert dying of thirst. They see a fountain gushing crystal clear water and both run to it. Just as they’re about to drink, one producer says to the other, “Wait, let me piss in it first.”
On the plane to Rome to shoot “Ben Hur” in 1959, director William Wyler asked writer Gore Vidal, who had been hired to do the final rewrites on the enormous script that had already been written and rewritten a dozen times by a dozen writers, “What do you think?” Gore Vidal said, “It doesn’t make any sense.” Wyler asked, “What do we do?” Vidal said, “I can give you one suggestion that fixes all the problems. Make Ben Hur and Masala former lovers, then all of Masala’s cruelty to Ben Hur and his family is a spurned lover’s spite.” Wyler thought about it for a while, nodded, then said, “Makes sense. Whatever you do, don’t tell Chuck Heston.”
In 1946 producer Frank McCarthy returned to Hollywood after WWII and pitched studio head, Darryl Zanuck, the story of General George Patton. Zanuck loved it and said, “Get a script written.” Twenty years and twenty writers later, still without a working script and now in desperation, McCarthy took a shot in the dark, went to USC film school and asked, “Who is your most talented student?” They said, “Easy, Francis Coppola.” McCarthy visited Coppola, whose career was at its bumbling beginning, and asked if he’d like to rewrite the script for a good fee.
Coppola agreed, read the previous scripts, then quickly knocked out a rewrite. Darryl Zanuck loved it and green-lit the film. After Writer’s Guild arbitration, the writing credit was given to Francis Coppola and Edmund H. North, who had previously written, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” When “Patton” won the Oscar for Best Adapted screenplay, Coppola and North went up on stage, shook hands, and said, “Nice to meet you.”
President Dwight Eisenhower golfed over 800 times during his presidency, but he never went to war.
Teddy Roosevelt was shot in the chest right before he was to give a speech. The bullet lodged in his glasses case. Teddy went on and gave his speech.
When President Harry Truman grew up in Independence, Missouri, by the time he was fourteen he had read every book in the Independence library. Historians later double-checked that and it was true.
The biggest trees in the world are: Sequoia, Redwood, then it used to be Kauri trees only found in New Zealand. Unfortunately, they cut them all down.
For many years Ben Hecht was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood. He was also the highest- paid script doctor. My favorite script of his was for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious.” Ben Hecht did a one-week rewrite on “Gone With the Wind” right before it started shooting. I couldn’t read the book in a week. When Hecht was a young journalist in Chicago in the teens, he’d hang around one of the big mobster’s restaurants hoping for a story. At one point a heavy-set thug came up to Hecht and said, “The boss wants to see you.” Hecht said, “I haven’t seen you before. What’s your name?” The thug said, “Alphonse Capone.”
During the American Civil War, General Lew Wallace was the third-highest ranked Union officer. After the war he became the first governor of the Arizona-New Mexico territory. He met with Billy the Kid and tried to talk reason to him, but Billy didn’t listen. While Lew Wallace was stuck in Santa Fe with nothing to do, he wrote the book, “Ben Hur,” which became the largest-selling book for the next fifty years until “Gone With the Wind.”
Although the sun hasn’t yet risen, the sky is light. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.