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Authors: Joe Eszterhas
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director, couldn’t change one word of Paddy’s script. Not one word.
By contract
.
And he didn’t.
But something got lost in the movie, which was a critical and commercial disaster. Critics blamed not Russell nor the actors but, as one critic said, “the oratorical style” of Paddy’s dialogue.
Paddy was heartbroken. He had accomplished what no other screenwriter had ever accomplished. He had protected, by contract, the sanctity of his words—but for what?
“Man, I’m tired of fighting,” he wrote a friend. “I truly am.”
Within a year, he was dead.
His last words to his wife were “I tried, I really tried.”
These words will be on my tombstone: “I tried, I really tried.”
Some critic will say: “Even the words on Eszterhas’s tombstone aren’t original. For most of his career, he lived in penis envy of Paddy Chayefsky (and possibly William Goldman).”
I was discovered as a screenwriter by a studio executive named Marcia Nasatir who’d read a book I’d written and thought I had great potential as a screenwriter.
She was famous in town for writing this memo about a screenplay: “No hope … no hero … all madness and bullshit philosophy. Script is too wordy. Everything is punched home twice or even thrice.”
Marcia was writing about Paddy Chayefsky’s script
Network
, for which Paddy later won an Oscar.
I was pleased that she preferred me to my hero, Paddy Chayefsky.
XVI
One of my favorite American novelists never did work in Hollywood, though he wanted to.
“I have listened to writers,” Thomas Wolfe said, “who had a book published shudder with horror at the very mention of Hollywood—some of them have even asked me if I would ever listen to an offer from Hollywood—if I could possibly submit my artistic conscience to prostitution by allowing anything I’d write to be made into a motion picture in Hollywood. My answer to this has always been an enthusiastic and fervent yes. If Hollywood wants to prostitute me by buying one of my books for the movies, I am not only willing but eager for the seducers to make their first dastardly proposal. In fact, my position in the matter is very much that of the Belgian virgin the night the Germans took the town: ‘When do the atrocities begin?’”
When Thomas Wolfe arrived in Hollywood on a visit, Dorothy Parker threw a party for him where she told a roomful of people that Wolfe “was built on a heroic scale” and that there was no one else “built like him.”
Word about his “heroic build” got around quickly all over town and when Wolfe said all he wanted to do was to meet Jean Harlow, Harlow agreed. He met her on the MGM lot and watched her on the set for hours and at the end of the day Harlow, who wore fur-lined tin bras so her nipples wouldn’t show through, asked if she could drive the Writer Who Was Built Like No One Else home to his room at the Garden of Allah Hotel.
Everyone on the set noticed the next morning that Jean Harlow and Thomas Wolfe were dressed in the same clothes they had been wearing the night before, but Thomas Wolfe turned down all of MGM’s lucrative but dastardly screenwriting proposals and left town the same day.
When William Faulkner, “book-writin’ man,” first arrived in Hollywood to be a screenwriter, he went to the studio, took a good look around, and fled … to Death Valley, where he wandered the desert for a week on a monumental binge.
He went back to the studio, worked in an office for ten hours a day, and stopped by the Hofbrau at night to listen to German music and drink beer. He also played miniature golf and drove down to Santa Monica to watch the surf.
A married man with his wife back home in Mississippi, he went to bed with the secretary at the studio he dictated his scripts to. He wrote poems about her.
He wrote that “her long girl’s body was sweet to fuck.”
He called her “my heart, my jasmine garden, my April and May cunt, my sweet-assed gal.”
Bill Faulkner,
By contract
.
And he didn’t.
But something got lost in the movie, which was a critical and commercial disaster. Critics blamed not Russell nor the actors but, as one critic said, “the oratorical style” of Paddy’s dialogue.
Paddy was heartbroken. He had accomplished what no other screenwriter had ever accomplished. He had protected, by contract, the sanctity of his words—but for what?
“Man, I’m tired of fighting,” he wrote a friend. “I truly am.”
Within a year, he was dead.
His last words to his wife were “I tried, I really tried.”
These words will be on my tombstone: “I tried, I really tried.”
Some critic will say: “Even the words on Eszterhas’s tombstone aren’t original. For most of his career, he lived in penis envy of Paddy Chayefsky (and possibly William Goldman).”
I was discovered as a screenwriter by a studio executive named Marcia Nasatir who’d read a book I’d written and thought I had great potential as a screenwriter.
She was famous in town for writing this memo about a screenplay: “No hope … no hero … all madness and bullshit philosophy. Script is too wordy. Everything is punched home twice or even thrice.”
Marcia was writing about Paddy Chayefsky’s script
Network
, for which Paddy later won an Oscar.
I was pleased that she preferred me to my hero, Paddy Chayefsky.
XVI
One of my favorite American novelists never did work in Hollywood, though he wanted to.
“I have listened to writers,” Thomas Wolfe said, “who had a book published shudder with horror at the very mention of Hollywood—some of them have even asked me if I would ever listen to an offer from Hollywood—if I could possibly submit my artistic conscience to prostitution by allowing anything I’d write to be made into a motion picture in Hollywood. My answer to this has always been an enthusiastic and fervent yes. If Hollywood wants to prostitute me by buying one of my books for the movies, I am not only willing but eager for the seducers to make their first dastardly proposal. In fact, my position in the matter is very much that of the Belgian virgin the night the Germans took the town: ‘When do the atrocities begin?’”
When Thomas Wolfe arrived in Hollywood on a visit, Dorothy Parker threw a party for him where she told a roomful of people that Wolfe “was built on a heroic scale” and that there was no one else “built like him.”
Word about his “heroic build” got around quickly all over town and when Wolfe said all he wanted to do was to meet Jean Harlow, Harlow agreed. He met her on the MGM lot and watched her on the set for hours and at the end of the day Harlow, who wore fur-lined tin bras so her nipples wouldn’t show through, asked if she could drive the Writer Who Was Built Like No One Else home to his room at the Garden of Allah Hotel.
Everyone on the set noticed the next morning that Jean Harlow and Thomas Wolfe were dressed in the same clothes they had been wearing the night before, but Thomas Wolfe turned down all of MGM’s lucrative but dastardly screenwriting proposals and left town the same day.
When William Faulkner, “book-writin’ man,” first arrived in Hollywood to be a screenwriter, he went to the studio, took a good look around, and fled … to Death Valley, where he wandered the desert for a week on a monumental binge.
He went back to the studio, worked in an office for ten hours a day, and stopped by the Hofbrau at night to listen to German music and drink beer. He also played miniature golf and drove down to Santa Monica to watch the surf.
A married man with his wife back home in Mississippi, he went to bed with the secretary at the studio he dictated his scripts to. He wrote poems about her.
He wrote that “her long girl’s body was sweet to fuck.”
He called her “my heart, my jasmine garden, my April and May cunt, my sweet-assed gal.”
Bill Faulkner,
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