A Battle-Scarred Veteran Spills His Guts About Hollywood Wars

In his tome about groveling through Hollywood, producer Art Linson summons what is a truly scary sight to those who habitually dine at the Grill and Barney Greengrass, the power joints du jour. This is “Jerry,” a ghost of moguls past, a man--actually a composite of men Linson has known--who once ruled Hollywood, now exiled to the outer realms of Malibu, a man Linson terms as the past “president of the Hollywood Venality Club.”

In the new book “What Just Happened? Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line,” it’s Jerry’s job to needle Linson, the producer of such films as “The Untouchables” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” about his slow slide from glory.

“After ten minutes with Jerry, I couldn’t avoid reflecting on my own Hollywood mortality,” writes Linson. “Let’s face it, time was running out.... For me producing hit movies had become an increasingly farfetched affair. And in this town, where ‘new’ is best, I could feel the black hole of Hollywood purgatory waiting for me.”

“What Just Happened” presents the Hollywood producer as a Willy Loman-like schlepper, hustling to make one more movie, before irrelevance sets in. Released this month by Bloomsbury, it’s a breezy anatomy of ritual humiliation, Hollywood-style.

Before too many tears set in, however, it’s best to remember that Linson stills lives in a beautiful, multimillion-dollar Craftsman house in the choicest section of Santa Monica.

Sitting in his spare, wood-lined home study, the 60-year-old producer-turned-writer is wearing faded black jeans and a black shirt, and manages to be both gruff and unexpectedly puckish.

He explains that “Jerry” is a riff on the Sidney Sheinbergs and Jon Peterses of the world, “the executive who once had power and no longer has power, and this is how he deals with his loss of power. He’s forced to either abandon himself completely from Hollywood, which no one seems to be able to deal with, or find a way to try to get his seat again, or stand on the sideline and talk about how he doesn’t care about ever having his seat again, but seems to know about everything that’s going on.”

“Jerry” serves as a sadistic father confessor to “a producer who’s still desperately trying to hold on--which was me,” Linson reports. “That’s what led me to want to do the book. My intentions are really to say ‘OK, this is how it feels. This is what it feels like when you run into Mike Ovitz. This is what it feels like when you want to make a movie one way and, afterwards, who you hired has a different take on what he thinks he should be doing, and you’re trying to reconcile it.

“And the conflicts are fantastic. Frankly, I didn’t try to make an explosive book, but almost everything that happens in Hollywood has a certain incendiary quality to it and everybody gets bent out of shape so easily here that I mean, if you talk about an agent who wore the wrong striped tie to dinner, it’s unforgivable.”

A Feeding Frenzy of Insider Tell-Alls

Ever since Julia Phillips’ memoir, “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” landed on bestseller lists in 1991, a veritable flotilla of Hollywood players and would-be players have deemed themselves important enough to churn out their memoirs, with varying degrees of insight and truthfulness, from Lynda Obst to Mike Medavoy, Sumner Redstone and Harry Knowles.

Unlike many, Linson is actually an amusing writer, and he even wrote the book himself. While Phillips ladled out her Hollywood dish with invective, Linson is more of an absurdist, focusing on the dashed expectations involved with making such intelligent but not particularly commercial fare as “Fight Club” (1999) and “Great Expectations” (1998) (from which one swift Fox executive tried to nix Gwyneth Paltrow because she has “no chin”).

As a producer, Linson concentrated on making a number of movies about macho men engaged in varying forms of mano-a-mano combat, from “The Untouchables” (1987) to “Heat” (1995) and “The Edge” (1997). In his own life, he’s a keen anthropologist of Hollywood one-upmanship, a decoder of the strange dances of power between studios and producers, agents and stars.

Describing Tom Rothman, the co-chairman of Fox, he writes: “Our first encounter was chilly. He talked. I listened. He conducted the entire meeting with his back to me while he was organizing some papers behind his computer. I suppose he was either showing me that he could do more than one thing at a time or else he was saying, ‘Since I couldn’t make a go of it as a producer, [don’t bother] trying.’”

He describes the Creative Artists Agency headquarters in Beverly Hills as a “hideous marble and glass mausoleum ... designed to punish. So sweaty was its need to express power, it inadvertently overwhelms the visitor. The lobby witlessly screams ‘We’re big, we’re significant, we’re indestructible ... you’re not.’”

He doesn’t even stint on himself, noting “a producer bursting with confidence can be a truly ugly sight.”

Linson tells of a long and hilarious battle to get Alec Baldwin to shave his beard for “The Edge,” and trying to nail down Robert De Niro for that same film, among a variety of other projects.

In “The Edge,” a photographer and the older husband of a fashion model have to fend off each other as well as the wilderness in which they are stranded. Their adventures include being attacked by a bear.

De Niro--a friend of Linson’s--deflected the enticement by suggesting that the bear have sex with the photographer: “That might be interesting.”

In the world not judged by Hollywood’s thin-skinned standards, Linson takes not quite potshots, but humorous nibbles at Hollywood’s culture of self-importance. Moreover, some fairly notable friends such as David Mamet (who is said to have modeled the rapacious producer in “Speed the Plow” after Linson) and “Panic Room” director David Fincher, with whom Linson now has a company, escape unscathed.

Linson has dabbled as a director (on the little-seen “The Wild Life”) and written one other book, “A Pound of Flesh,” about the nuts and bolts of what producers actually do.

He explains: “I always wanted to write. The problem is, selfishly, I didn’t want to take a cut in pay. You just do a lot better as a movie producer.”

Giving Credit Where

Credit Is Due

Unlike many producers, Linson is careful not to posture as the film’s auteur.

“It’s hard to find a producer or executive who doesn’t say, ‘I made this movie,’ and producers don’t make movies and executives don’t make movies and very few of them are qualified to make movies, but you need to be thought of as a creative guy. They forget what their role is. They’re basically smart money managers. But they have an attitude about an actor or performance, [an edit] or an ending, and they start to get involved. And that’s where the waters get muddy and the dissension starts out and that’s why you hear directors screaming, ‘I have to have final cut. I don’t care if I get paid.’”

Indeed, Linson, who’s now clocking over 25 years in the business, has a simple remedy for curing one of Hollywood’s worst ills: Take all the executives, producers and agents, and every two years, “like a graduate course, they should go make a 3-to-5-minute film of their kid’s birthday, or some dinner they had, or some vacation they had with their wife, cut it together, put some music on, and we all get to go to the Directors Guild, everybody in Hollywood, to look at their piece of work. It would give them a different attitude toward the people that make this stuff, because it’s so easy to tell a director what they think should be done, when you’ve never done it.”

In a town obsessed with success, it takes some pluck to write a book documenting your career growing cold. Linson takes to the task with gleeful insouciance and charm.

“I know I’ve [told] bitter Hollywood tales, but I’m not actually bitter. I think there’s something very compelling about Hollywood,” says Linson, who adds, “I candy-coated every scene. It’s actually much worse.”