Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood
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The strain on our marriages would have been intense enough had the four of us not all been writing for the show. Consider the dynamics. Marshall and I were writing about Michael and Hope raising a newborn while Liberty and I were raising a newborn. Liberty, meanwhile, was writing about Michael being too obsessed with work and that he wasn’t sharing the burden of raising a newborn. As showrunners, Marshall and I gave Liberty notes suggesting that she wasn’t being fair to me, I mean Michael, who was overwhelmed by work. Liberty was also overwhelmed by work, simultaneously writing for a TV show ...more
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Susan, meanwhile, was writing about Elliot and Nancy’s troubled marriage and their decision to go into therapy while Marshall and Susan were in therapy. Marshall thought Susan’s depiction of… er… Elliot was a bit harsh but was reluctant to say so, so he deputized me to give his wife notes. Susan knew full well that I was giving her Marshall’s notes and confronted Marshall about it in therapy. A fictionalized version of their confrontation in therapy emerged as a wonderful scene written by Susan, directed by Marshall, and starring Marshall as the therapist.
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Meanwhile, Ken Olin and Patty Wettig were married to each other in real life but married to Mel Harris and Tim Busfield, respectively, on the show. Having to watch each other play intimate bedroom scenes with someone else’s partner wasn’t easy, but possibly added a certain charge to a union that was already tempestuous enough, given the inevitable volatility of a marriage between two actors. Peter Horton and Polly Draper played Michael and Hope’s single friends, which was no small irony since Peter’s marriage was falling apart, and Polly’s would soon follow. Tim Busfield was recently divorced ...more
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When asked what it was like to direct Barbra Streisand in the 1976 version of A Star is Born, Frank Pierson replied, “I wouldn’t know.”
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Meanwhile, rehearsals with Denzel, Morgan, Jihmi, and Andre had begun. It’s possible that four other actors might have had the kind of chemistry they did, but I doubt it. It was mesmerizing. Everybody had something to contribute to the scenes. I had sent them copies of a book that moved me, a collection of excerpts from slave diaries and oral histories called Bullwhip Days. Morgan, who would someday buy the plantation on which his family had been slaves, was a repository of stories, some moving, others chilling.
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At one point, while trading on the privilege of sitting among the orchestra, I happened to glance back toward the engineer’s booth and, at various times, saw that Paul Mazursky, Bob Zemeckis, and Steven Spielberg had stopped by to observe. It felt like my bar mitzvah. In some sense, I suppose it was.
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Saul Zaentz, the legendary producer, once told me he’d lived through 1967’s Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury, read the Kama Sutra cover to cover, and believed he knew everything there was to know about getting fucked. Then he came to Hollywood.
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It puts me in mind of an epigram to one of Saki’s black-hearted tales. “Never be a pioneer,” he writes. “It’s the early Christian that gets the hungriest lion.”
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When the movie succeeds it’s the director who gets all the credit. When it goes over budget, it’s the AD who gets fired.
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The legendary actor insisted on having holes cut in his pants pockets so he could hold his genitals while acting. One day the wardrobe mistress innocently sewed his pockets closed. In the middle of a take, he discovered the lack of entrée, began cursing, and stomped off the set. The wardrobe mistress was fired the next day.
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Try recording a conversation when people are unaware, then transcribe it. Real speech is fragmented and redundant. Sentences without subjects, paragraphs full of ellipses. If your dialogue sounds like writing, cut it. Your most clever, articulate lines should be the first to go.
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Nothing is more grating than expository dialogue. In life, no one says something to somebody who already knows what they’d say. Jim Brooks is the master. From Broadcast News: “I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time.” Genius.
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A campaign worker from Global Witness taught me a lesson he believed to be the one unifying truth about Africa: that throughout the history of the continent, whenever anything of value is found, the locals die in misery, their sons become child soldiers, and their daughters are made into sex slaves.
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As Steven Soderbergh once told an executive, “You confuse having an opinion with having an idea.”