Essays From Exile

SHANE BLACK

If Shane Black now looks out on an overheated, youth-obsessed screenwriting market where age 37 looks a little long in the tooth, he has partly himself to thank. After selling his “Lethal Weapon” script to Warner Bros. for a quarter-million dollars before his 25th birthday, Black inadvertently entered the spec script derby of the 1990s, with screenwriters earning unprecedented sums and Black reaping a record $4 million for “The Long Kiss Goodnight” in 1994 (an amount eclipsed last month when Disney reportedly paid writer-director M. Night Shyamalan almost $5 million for a script, “Unbreakable”). Black has not written a screenplay since. “I’m still sweating away and trying to find out what I want to say,” he says. The “Lethal Weapon” sequel machine has continued to grind out fresh schnitzel, with Black’s participation limited to cashing the occasional royalty check. He is now co-producing a friend’s screenplay, “Tin Man.”

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Every time someone speculates about the balance of power shifting toward the writer, it turns out it isn’t happening. They said writers would get all this new respect because the prices of scripts were rising. I don’t see anything coming from that.

It’s all about glamour. Writers don’t get any appreciation because they’re in no way glamorous. When the director shows up at a party, or he’s at the Cannes Film Festival, he’s got a woman on his arm. He’s tall. He’s in a nice suit. He looks good. He seems very vivacious. The writer’s always the one in the corner. They’re always the ones whining about something or other that’s been inflicted on them this week. If there’s anything writers could do to improve their lot, it’s to stop acting like victims. Of course the studio can do anything with your script after they buy it! Does that mean they have to? No, you can argue persuasively. You can be firm and resilient. Choose your battles and persevere as a human being. You don’t give up.

If anything, Hollywood is getting younger. I have heard about ageism among screenwriters. I’m just deciding about whether I should lie about my age; I hope my own work speaks for itself, and that they’ll understand that I’m still a kid at heart. It’s the treasure hunter syndrome. Executives want to stand out now. They want to rise through the ranks. So it’s not enough that you hire a director for a movie--they have to find someone. So they’d rather hire a guy who’s never directed before on the chance that they’ll have discovered the new Spielberg, even if he might botch it up completely.

There is no way around it. The best of what is in a script will never make it to the finished product unless the writer acquires some kind of respect and contractual obligation. The biggest movies of all time, if you look at the scripts--”Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “The Godfather”--if you erase them from existence and then, in 1999, you walk into an office with these scripts that nobody has ever seen and plunk them on a desk and say, “What do you think?” they’d say, “We’ll buy them. Now let’s go rewrite them.” The shooting script of any movie that’s made $100 million would be rewritten again and again and again. The studio executives will flag things that they think will offend people, or limit its commercial appeal. If a character makes a choice that’s not heroic, they get nervous. Or if it’s a gay character, they get nervous. In my original notes for “Lethal Weapon 2,” I killed off Martin Riggs. I basically sent away the bread truck that earned them another half a billion dollars. If they had followed my instructions, they would have lost that money. [Black didn’t write the screenplay.] I just look at a time in the ‘70s where films, even if they were successful, they didn’t run out and make a sequel, just because it made someone money. Now, you can’t have the hero die in a $100-million movie.

Some writers say, “I saw this TV show, it was awful. Why is that on TV when my work isn’t? I could write something at least as good as that.” But what they’re saying is that it would be OK to them to be only slightly less awful than someone else. In other words, Hollywood owes them a career because they may write something horrible but it’s slightly less horrible than someone else’s? The goal should not be to just fool people and get over the hump. It’s still people painting themselves as victims instead of saying, “I’m going to write something good and blow everyone away.”

RAY STARK, PRODUCER

One of the most profitable postwar independent producers, Ray Stark made his reputation adapting Broadway comedies and musicals, which, as Hollywood properties, were already faltering when he was just getting started. In 1964, Stark’s “The Night of the Iguana” was one of the last original Tennessee Williams adaptations, while Stark’s first musical, “Funny Girl,” appeared in 1968. He triumphed in these otherwise failing genres by allying himself with Barbra Streisand and playwright Neil Simon, two overwhelming talents who themselves defied the general decline. During an 18-year span, Stark produced 11 Neil Simon plays, among them, “The Goodbye Girl” and “The Sunshine Boys.” His 1982 John Huston-directed “Annie,” vilified by some critics, was still among the last Hollywood musicals to make money.

Stark, 82, never ran a studio, but by the late 1970s, his box-office reputation had made him a Hollywood influence of Michael Ovitzian proportions--at Columbia, where he personally produced 17 films and is a major stockholder, and elsewhere. Although Stark no longer wields clout over an entire industry, his boutique company, Rastar Productions, remains active, most recently producing the Harrison Ford vehicle “Random Hearts,” and soon embarking on a remake of “The Night of the Iguana.”

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Theater is going through a transition, with subject matter not attractive to Hollywood. The theater has always been a great source for films and will be again. Hollywood has only one thought in mind: What will work on screen? What will have meaning for movie audiences? I think Broadway is the best answer--what great plays have been staged in recent years that would be right for motion pictures?

I don’t want to sound like a veteran of the wars, but we have been going through a period of lesser works. No one is out there defining the times like Neil Simon, and no one is writing on the awesome scale of Tennessee Williams. The trend on Broadway has been toward the sociological drama and the sitcom. Neither has the strength to make it into films. I think once we get past this phase of plays and look at our world in larger ways, Hollywood will be there. There have been recent exceptions, of course, like David Mamet, whose plays almost always make it to the screen. I think the best theatrical source is off-Broadway, which is where I found the small comedy-drama “Steel Magnolias” a few years ago, which became a very successful movie.

In discussing movie musicals, the rude thing to say would be: Where are composers like Jule Styne, who did “Funny Girl” for me, or Leonard Bernstein? But I won’t say that. Stephen Sondheim is there by himself, but I would say his lyrics far outweigh his music. The big spectacles are not of interest to Hollywood, since Hollywood creates far greater spectacles. “Evita” had an interesting story and so it got made. The reality is that tastes have changed--music works today on screen when it’s source music or part of the plot, as in “Still Crazy,” the fictional teaming of an old rock group.

Obviously, it’s not healthy for movies to have swollen budgets, and those who finance movies are becoming more resistant to the idea. Neither high budgets or decreased output has any relation to quality. There seems to be a seesaw effect out there. As films get more expensive, conversely there is a growing movement of smaller-budget films, and at Oscar time, those films are frequently in the running. “Titanic” was a freak event; no studio will ever gamble again with that big a budget. In the end, what worked for that film wasn’t so much its costly technical effects, but the core story that had an impact on its audience.

My obvious position is that I would like to see studios place more confidence in the producer; let him or her make the picture. But that is a simplification: With budgets as high as they are, it is understandable that they cannot abdicate responsibility. Perhaps there should be more of a balance of story-driven films, with less expensive actors, less expensive directors and smaller budgets. The various festivals are creating an audience interest in these smaller films that frequently do quite well at the box office.

I’m very happy that there’s been a decrease in violence and mindless action. Pouring huge amounts of money into this sort of nihilistic film seems very wrong. I love movies that play against conventional wisdom, like “Forrest Gump,” “Schindler’s List,” “The English Patient,” “Mask of Zorro,” or are wickedly inventive, like “Men in Black.” We have a film in the works that I hope would fall into this category. It’s based on a very particular time in the life of Houdini. It sort of marries mysticism and romance. Very suspenseful and intriguing.

American films are only going to get more popular around the world, which is a double-edged sword, because those who finance films will very likely consider what actors and stories work well overseas before making a film, which could lead to a strong homogenization of movies. Films work best when they’re specific; oddly enough, the more specific, the more universal the story. For example, check those artists who’ve had impact on films: Orson Welles, Chaplin, Bergman, Hitchcock, John Ford and writers like Neil Simon, Ben Hecht, Tennessee Williams. They never tailored their works for the largest audience possible. Instead, the largest audience came to them.

PETER BOGDANOVICH, DIRECTOR Peter Bogdanovich began his career as a film critic and historian, a discipline he has returned to with his weekly film appreciation column in The New York Observer. Although he now makes his home in Manhattan, Bogdanovich was among the first to blossom in the creative directorial flowering in early ‘70s Hollywood. By the time Martin Scorsese had made his first acclaimed film, “Mean Streets,” in 1973, Bogdanovich’s reputation was already secure. He had followed up the “The Last Picture Show,” his elegy to small-town Texas youth, with “What’s Up Doc?” the 1972 Barbra Streisand screwball comedy, and the Depression-era tone poem “Paper Moon.” But then Bogdanovich suffered critical and commercial reverses, beginning with 1974’s “Daisy Miller.” He has since declared bankruptcy twice. Currently, Bogdanovich is preparing three independent pictures: “Wait for Me,” “Squirrels to the Nuts” and “The Cat’s Meow.” And his latest book, titled “Movie of the Week,” charts a yearlong home-video festival of 52 classic films, each illuminated by affectionate commentary.

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Hollywood filmmakers today are not generally as limited by time and money as previous generations. They are limited, however, in the peculiar way that too much time and too much money can be limiting to the imagination. But there is a certain decadence in all the arts at this time. Some of the least interesting stuff now is being done with the most money, and some of the most interesting is being done with the least.

By the mid-1970s, most of the directors who had arisen at the end of the 1960s had spent too much money and blown it; many of us made movies with almost complete freedom and bombed. And then, after a while, the current era of the star dawned. Stars these days, mostly male, can dictate the movie to a greater degree than at any other time in film’s short history.

Of the days when studios ruled the industry, director Howard Hawks said, “Actors under contract to studios had almost nothing to say about what they did or did not do, and yet in those years we had the biggest array of stars in the history of the world.” Of course, there weren’t just actors under contract, but writers and directors and producers: all the best in the world creating roles to suit the identifiable personas of the stars. Each star player had a peculiarity, a certain voice, look or quality--Gable, Cooper, Wayne, Cagney, Bogart, Stewart, Katharine or Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant--and their parts were based often on what this talent seemed to represent to the audience. Today actors want to be versatile. Ever since the Brando revolution of the 1950s took root, along with the fall of the studio system in the early ‘60s, young actors don’t want to be typed with specific personas; they want to test and challenge themselves, show their range. And there is no organization of any kind looking for the potential personality-star, as the studios used to do year round.

After the old system collapsed--between 1962 and 1968--Universal still had a few people under contract, but everybody started realizing what the hell had happened, that there was no longer a movie industry as we had known it. A few years before, the New Wave filmmakers had taken on the entire French film industry and triumphed, and a decade later, American directors and producers began following their example. In 1969, Paramount had four $25-million pictures and they all tanked, while a $900,000 film called “Easy Rider” became a runaway hit. The year before, John Cassavetes had shot “Faces” in his back yard, and had considerable success with it, and Bob Rafelson scored big with “Five Easy Pieces” in 1970. Coppola, Friedkin, Scorsese and I followed. Suddenly, it was the beginning of a New Hollywood.

By the mid-’70s, this was replaced by the blockbuster principle, as a result of what happened with “Jaws,” the first A-budget picture ever to have exploitation-film distribution, opening in 2,000 theaters nationwide as opposed to the usual 100 or so that were first-run in those days. By the beginning of the 1980s, with excessive spending and poor box office, the more personal kind of filmmaking was finished. Today, as a result of the popularity of “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” we have the domination of special effects, which are expensive and time-consuming. On the other side, we’ve got burgeoning independent filmmaking, with very good talent, who will do well if they continue to keep things modest. Quentin Tarantino was very smart. When he made his third film--the first after his low-budget mega-hit “Pulp Fiction”--he didn’t go crazy: “Jackie Brown” was not expensive, so it didn’t have to be a gigantic grosser to make a lot of money, which it did. This was an intelligent way of handling success.

I think people might be getting tired of movies being too slick. They don’t mind the rough edges, which was apparent from the amazing popularity of “The Blair Witch Project.” It feels like movies have been improving lately, at least fitfully. “Shakespeare in Love,” which won the Best Picture Academy Award, was certainly off-the-wall in terms of subject matter. The Renaissance, of course, followed the Dark Ages. History is cyclical, and there’s certainly nothing new about the movies equating size of budget with quality. This whole out-of-control emphasis on the opening weekend has turned movies into a weekly horse race, which in preparation tends to again dilute the ultimate potential of a given work. Some films need to build an audience, but only the lower-budget movies go that route now.

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Compiled by Ed Leibowitz