8/22/22
Newsletter80
The Crack of Dawn
Alas, darkness.
As a kid I dreamed that Hollywood was a magical place filled with rabid movie fans like me. When I moved there I slowly came to realize that not only are the folks in the film business not movie fans, they seemed to actively disdain the product they made and the customers who bought it. People in the film industry, it seemed to me, were like the carnies at the circus who knew that every game was rigged and every customer who paid for them was a gullible sucker. I also slowly came to understand that any studio executive who would take a meeting with me was so low on the food chain that their entire job consisted of doing nothing but saying no. They didn’t have enough power to even say maybe, let alone yes. In any case, it took a hundred pitch meetings for me to finally understand the situation.
I had a pitch meeting at a long-defunct company called Cinetel. I prided myself in that my pitches were short and sweet, never exceeding ten minutes. Five minutes would have been too long, but I didn’t know that yet. So I’m pitching to a woman in her 40s, and literally one minute into my pitch she dropped her head straight back and began to gurgle and moan like she was in dreadful misery. I quickly truncated my story out of pity for the awful condition I was clearly causing her.
At Disney, the worst of all studios, I drew some geeked-up asshole executive in a running outfit. After a long wait, the guy came out and told his secretary, “No calls.” We went into his office, made chit-chat for a minute, then I started my pitch, “OK, there’s this guy—” The phone rang. He answered, said, “I told you no calls. Oh, him? I’ll take it.” This happened five times and I never got past, “There’s this guy . . .” When this shmuck felt that I was sufficiently humiliated, he ended the meeting with, “I think we have a script just like it.”
At 20th I got a slim, attractive gal who flatly stated at the outset, “We’re looking for brainless entertainment.” I was fucked before I started. All I could say was, “I like using my brain.”
At Warners the executive had me wait for over an hour. Oddly, he had a middle-aged female secretary, as opposed to a young hottie. After about forty-five minutes I asked the secretary, “Where was Darryl Zanuck’s office?” This woman’s level of contempt could not have been more extreme. With vitriol dripping from her words, she said, “Darryl Zanuck was at 20th Century Fox.” I said, “After he was head of production here at Warners.” She shook her head, said, “No he wasn’t,” and left the office. She returned a minute later with a big book that was the history of Warner Brothers. She went to the index, found Darryl Zanuck, appeared surprised, went to that page and goddamn if Zanuck wasn’t the head of production there in the early 30s. I only mention this because being right about a bit of inconsequentia was the best thing that ever happened at one of those meetings.
This is my friend Ron’s pitch story, also at Cinetel. Just as he was about to begin, the executive said, “I hate act ones, start with act two.” Well, if want to throw a wrench into a writer’s head, that’s how you do it. Ron said, “There’s this guy you haven’t met, at a place you don’t know about, talking about a situation I haven’t mentioned . . .” Once Ron bumbled his way through acts two and three, the executive said, “Now tell me act one.”
My writing partner, Scott, and I were hired to rewrite a script called Hell to Pay. Scott is a funny guy and said, “Is it about a haunted hairpiece?” The director appeared puzzled. Scott said, “The Hell Toupée.” The next time we got the script it had been retitled to, Hit List. I innocently asked, “How would you like us to work in the hit list?” The director, a 300-pound New Yorker, said, “There doesn’t have to be any fucking hit list, that’s just the title.” And I know this is the unwokest of all unwoke comments, but this guy actually said, “Look, I make my pictures for 12-year-old niggers.” He actually made the film, too, but boned Scott and I out of our credit and our last payment. Don’t miss it, Hit List (1989), with Jan-Michael Vincent, Lance Henriksen and Rip Torn. The film wasn’t released, it escaped.
It’s 5:44 and there’s not a hint of sunlight yet.