text Paul Cullum and Tim Merrill illustration Brett Colvin

One of the reasons Los Angeles may be so closely identified with natural disaster and the apocalypse is its apparent intolerance of the fragile artistic temperament. Hollywood’s creative element – the writers, directors and actors which constitute its combined assets – represent a subclass given to flights of optimism that can defy both logic and gravity, but only for a finite period of time. And the rank seduction and casual brutality to which they are routinely subjected, decade in and decade out, finds its only relief in the slashing profiles of the place they leave behind after they’re gone. Whatever distinguishes F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Bruce Wagner as authors, the overriding quality that The Last Tycoon, The Big Sleep, The Day of the Locust, Deer Park, Slouching Toward Bethlehem and Force Majeure have in common is that all were written by frustrated, or failed, screenwriters.

Confront any prospective writer, director or actor and they’ll tell you that all they need is that first big break. Kismet and momentum will carry them the rest of the way. They take it as an article of faith that at the first flowering of success, their struggle will finally be over. 
     The fact is that their troubles are only just beginning. Those fortunate enough to have their prayers answered in the form of a spec sale or distribution deal aren’t in for a mere stroll to the bank. They are in for a tidal wave of expectation and adulation, hype and glory, the demands of business and the temptations of success. And, lest we forget, no one escapes the inevitable characterizations as just another “flavor of the month.”
     In the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, the slavering studio head intones to the neophyte screenwriter, “We’re all expecting great things.” The words are pure threat, and it’s understood that poor Barton is destined to wither and collapse under the weight of those words. All too often, reality doesn’t set in until well after the sale, after the deal...when the party ends, the Hot Young Writer/ Director/Whatever is alone in front of the computer, and there is serious, copious work to be done.
     “The first letter you get from the Writer’s Guild after you join,” notes screenwriter Scott Rosenberg, “the very first contact they have with you after you’ve been paid by a signatory company, starts out ‘Dear WGA Member: You are no doubt flush with the first enthusiasm of entering the writer’s life. It is probably prudent, then, to take a moment to realize that one in five of you will never sell a script again. Two in five will earn less than the minimum wage,’ and on and on. And this is their letter of congratulations to you! I know they want you to save your money and approach things wisely, but...man.” (The Writer’s Guild denies any knowledge of such a letter. Rosenberg explains thus: “They’re lying to you.”)
     Almost as a byproduct of the industrial process of making films, there is no shortage of anecdotes about those who didn’t make it, who couldn’t stand the pressure. Or, worse still, those whose talents were so distended by the birth process that they were ultimately midwifed as something unrecognizable, grotesque even. Such stories litter the path to success, talismans of everyone’s own mortality.
     Donald Cammell was a talented and successful painter at the giddy heights of Carnaby Street London in the mid-sixties. At age thirty he wrote a crime comedy screenplay called Duffy, and sold it to Columbia Pictures. A few years later, Cammell’s friendships with Brian Jones and later Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones – combined with a romantic view of the East End criminal element then suffusing London society – led Cammell to Warner Bros. He wrote and co-directed Performance, a drugged-out exploration of sex, death and identity as they formed a collusive cornerstone of the sixties. Filmed in 1968 but kept from general release until 1970, the finished product became a true cult classic, one of the most elegantly surreal statements of the sixties youth culture, a movement that reinvented cinema for the next decade. British Film Institute critic Colin MacCabe proclaimed Performance “the best British film ever made.”
     Yet despite Performance’s unique stature and abiding influence – and the fact that it launched the career of co-director Nicolas Roeg – Cammell managed to direct only three more features over the next twenty-eight years. Relocating to Los Angeles to oversee a new cut of the film with editor Frank Mazzola (who wasn’t credited, but was duly praised by Cammell in later interviews), he wound up staying in an impressive aerie at the top of Laurel Canyon. During those decades, Cammell suffered a litany of doublebacks and betrayals, owing to the moneyed caprices of studios and the crushing gravity of stars. Demon Seed (1977) was brutally recut by MGM. White of the Eye (1987) was threatened with an X rating, hobbled by bankruptcy, and at last released to critical praise and box-office death. Two projects with Marlon Brando – Fan Tan, a South Seas pirate adventure written by Cammell as a novel, and Jericho, a bloody CIA thriller – collapsed under the weight of the eccentric actor’s whims.
     Mitch Solomon is an executive at Film Roman who, in his youth, worked for the Weinsteins at Miramax during their pre-Disney piss-and-vinegar days. This is comparable to a merchant seaman who unknowingly set sail aboard the Pequod, or a draftee who arrived in Vietnam just in time for the Tet offensive. “I watched Harvey tell someone to call him God,” Solomon recalls today.     
     “There are classic stories of writers, many of them in the last decade,” Solomon says, “who wrote very successful spec scripts, saw the movie, and realized the movie was an utter piece of shit. At least one of them – I won’t say who it is – went on to become quite the A-list rewrite guy: ‘Hey, man, can you help me with this assignment? I’ll pay you $300,000 for a week’s worth of work.’ A guy who everyone turns to. Meanwhile, his partner basically just fell into disarray – everything fell apart. Very quickly, their partnership dissolved.”
     It may be the ultimate Hollywood mixed blessing, the life of the professional rewriter. A big spec sale or two can present many possibilities, perhaps even that of a movie being made. Often, however, what results is a low-visibility, high-yield career in polishing the work of others. While the sums to be earned from such shadowy script doctoring are vast indeed, the anonymity can sometimes become insurmountable – a money trap of little creative satisfaction. But at least the pay is steady, and the work never dries up.
     Far worse-off are those who assiduously place themselves front and center of the parade, creating their own hype. 
     “It’s so easy to buy into the hype,” Solomon continues. “There’s a director now who a year ago made a short that everyone freaked out about. And he was, when I met him, just a great guy. But he recently finished a movie, and I’ve heard nothing but horror stories – about his behavior, the movie, studio dealings. I don’t know if they’re true or not, and I’ve had no problems with him on my own. But they’re the kind of horror stories that make studios nervous about working with first-time directors.” 
     There’s also talk of the director from a recent Sundance who managed to alienate everyone he met with his arrogance. His mantra reportedly sounded something like, “I’m looking for a go project, I only want to read stuff that’s been greenlit, and I only want to read stuff with a budget of $75 million or more – because I don’t want to waste my time.”
     One executive at a major studio offers a firsthand account of complete meltdown, involving a young screenwriter who’d hit with two huge spec sales. The executive repeatedly requested anonymity, no doubt due to the extremity of his example.
     “I was involved with a writer who had two deals with the crème de la crème of producers in town. He was signed to a top agency. And, for whatever reason, he just couldn’t come through. He couldn’t actually do the work. He literally went through hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in a six-month period, while doing almost no work. The slight amount of work that he did turn in was crap, because he was on drugs and drinking. He would miss meetings with studio heads, and his excuses were almost on the level of ‘The dog ate my homework’ or ‘My alarm clock was broken.’ For a while, they believed his bullshit. And he had all these people around him, professionally, who vouched for him. But it got so bad that the agency and the producers finally let him go. The studio had him in violation of his contract. The guy was more interested in talking about his deals than he was in actually realizing them.” 
     “The point is,” Solomon says, “everybody talks. And if you get a bad reputation, you’d better have the talent to back it up. Nobody’s going to give you a hard time as long as you deliver. If you’re Dennis Rodman, you’re Dennis Rodman. But, literally a week after he stopped delivering, he was cut. It’s no different than what happens in this town.” 
     Jim Wedaa, who currently runs producer Tom Jacobsen’s company, has sold fourteen of the eighteen projects he developed under his own Parallax banner. “Primarily, I’d find writers who were raw, or didn’t have an agent, and spec them out,” he says. In that capacity, he has observed that pipeline of new talent which endlessly spills out into an unsuspecting industry. 
     “The problem with new writers or new directors, when they have had some measure of success,” he says, “is one of two things. Either they buy into their own hype, or they don’t take advantage of their own hype. I’ve seen a writing team I worked with, who sold a script for half a million dollars, go out and buy matching Porsches. And six months later, they were selling those Porsches, because they’d spent all their money. Or writers who fire the agent who got them their deal to try to get a better agent at a better agency. That disloyalty is read quickly by everyone involved in a person’s life. In Hollywood, people assume arrogance is rewarded.”
     Mike Medavoy, Chairman of Phoenix Pictures, has probably seen more hot young talent come down the pike than anyone currently working in Hollywood. His three decades of industry experience yield this advice for those whose attitudes get the best of them: “If you’re successful once, don’t get so imperious to think that you’re not going to make mistakes – and make terrible movies. Because invariably people have.”
     However, all the honesty, loyalty and thrift in the world are of no use if the goose can’t continue to lay golden eggs.
     “The other side of that coin is somebody who sells a script for half a million dollars and then doesn’t have anything to follow it up with,” Wedaa says, “or else doesn’t follow it up well. Whenever you’re going out with a spec script, if you don’t have at least one pitch and three ideas you’re ready to share when the studio president calls you in, you’ve just wasted the biggest career opportunity of your life.” 
     Not to say that the house advantage sends everyone home without the shirt on their back or the shoes on their feet. Screenwriter and occasional director E. Max Frye was initiated into the fraternity via one of those experiences that keeps hope alive in the rest of us. While still in film school, his script for Something Wild found its way into the hands of Jonathan Demme. He committed within 24 hours of reading it. It was filmed more or less as written, even as Demme shielded Frye from studio politics, and was released to favorable critical response (if lukewarm box office) in 1986.
     “I was lucky,” Frye says today, after long enough in the business to have seen its less hospitable side. “I was thirty by the time Something Wild came along, so I pretty much already had my voice. I avoided the pitfalls of the rewrite business, and I moved back as soon as I could to New York and continued to write spec scripts. But I’ve taught film at NYU enough that I see promising screenwriters take the three-picture deal with Disney, and they just disappear after two years of intense grinding and studio manipulation, notes, and people kicking the shit out of them. Before they know what’s going on, they have no voice left – if they ever had one to begin with. Or their nascent kind of voice that attracted the studios and producers in the first place gets stomped right out of them.”
     Donald Cammell’s final film, Wild Side (1995), was made for the straight-to-video company Nu Image. It had the dubious distinction of featuring Joan Chen and Anne Heche in a protracted lesbian sex scene, shortly before Heche joined girlfriend Ellen DeGeneres in their public display of affection. Starring Christopher Walken, once again as an over-the-top crime czar, Cammell’s version was said to have given the infamous Bad Lieutenant a run for its money. Instead, as Cammell must have learned to expect, the producers recut the film: they consistently chose softer takes, extended the lesbian encounter to a ridiculous length, completely disemboweled an elaborate flashback structure, and sold the entire mess to Showtime as a piece of softcore titillation. 
     Strapped financially, his marriage collapsing, and forced to watch his work raped before his eyes for the last time, Cammell had apparently had enough of Hollywood. One night in April of 1996, at the age of sixty-two, he put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. He then lived for another forty-five minutes; among his last words were “Can you see the picture of Borges now?” Doubtless this was a reference to the climax of Performance, in which a bullet pierces a brain and then shatters a portrait of author Jorge Luis Borges – a prominent influence on Cammell’s life and work. The director’s final act was to ask his wife for a mirror, that he might observe his own last breath.  
     A documentary titled Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, which premiered recently on the BBC, hints that Cammell shot himself as a spiritual consummation of his lifelong fascination with suicide. Yet the fate of his final work is far less in doubt. Amazingly, Nu Image has resold Wild Side to private investors, and Frank Mazzola is currently restoring it to the director’s original specifications. It will air on the BBC, part of a posthumous wave of interest in Cammell and his work, which also includes an upcoming biography.
     Whatever ultimately becomes of such poignant figures – obscurity or perhaps rediscovery – is a mystery written and rewritten every day in Hollywood. Some may take their money and run. Some may stay and slog it out to the end. Max Frye has, rather wisely, split the difference between the two.
     “I have selectively worked with directors on rewrites. That’s a whole different thing from taking studio assignments and doing rewrites on these huge page-one jobs. I’ve done that a couple of times and, except for cashing the checks, I’ve always regretted it. I think that’s a soulless endeavor that just leads to creative bankruptcy. I don’t know whether what I’ve done is good or bad; I certainly haven’t made as much money as some of these guys. But I live in Paris, I have a view of the Eiffel Tower out my writing room window, and I can pretty much do what I want. So it can’t be all bad.”
     Frye’s rule for survival is simple: “I think that anyone who’s successful should write a spec script every couple of years, to keep them in touch with who they really are.”  
     Oftentimes, however, the temptations aren’t as simple as absurd sums of money. Sometimes they’re far more insidious. Rosenberg, who operates with equal success on projects large and small, explains: 
     “All of a sudden it’s, ‘Well, wouldn’t you like to work with John Travolta?’ Or they call you up with, ‘Hey, here’s a job – it’s Bruce Willis.’ There’s something very seductive about working with these elements that you grew up on. It’s a huge thing. Any one of us with any independent spirit at all, you get so seduced by the dark side that you can’t write specs. When I first came here, I was writing six or seven specs a year. Now I’m dying to write one.”      
     Aside from the aberrations – the ones who walk too close to the edge or opt for the impulsive choices – perhaps most of the creative pitfalls in Hollywood are, like most other things there, a tad more complex. For every glittering prize held just out of arm’s reach, there may be the gnawing inclination that it’s a trap; that it’s too easy, or too hard; that it comes too soon, or too late. Or that once retracted, its kind won’t come back again. And that once conditioned to chase the prize, you’ve given yourself over to the rules of the game, and judgment is someone else’s to pass upon you. 
     Each new success also brings with it a new set of problems, since there is always a bigger table to play at, with matching stakes. 
     Roger Avary, who with Quentin Tarantino shared the 1994 Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction, reflects back on a decade-long career that is filled with the sort of seismic activity which characterizes Hollywood at its most chaotic. Having co-written parts of Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Natural Born Killers as well, Avary’s contribution to what was effectively a revolution in low-budget filmmaking is limited to a single story credit on Pulp Fiction – and that in exchange for finishing funds on his own first directing effort, 1994’s Killing Zoe.
     “[Winning the Oscar] was the great pitfall of my life,” says Avary, currently in preproduction on a biography of Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. “That’s when I made all the mistakes. It was actually a confusing time. I think winning an Academy Award is very confusing. I don’t know that it’s a curse, per se; it certainly hasn’t affected a lot of people. It hasn’t cursed Tom Hanks or Robert Zemeckis. But when you’re young and you win something like that right away, it almost happens too soon.”
     Which brings up what some in the industry have termed the “Rock Star Syndrome.” Often comic and sometimes tragic, it’s the most glaring example of what can befall creative types whose pre-Hollywood lives may have been less than fulfilling in some areas. The instant infusion of big money, and perhaps some measure of power, does tend to create a glow. That glow attracts...well, whatever one may be looking for. And, all of a sudden, Joe Spec Sale from Dubuque has turned himself into the next Axl Rose.
     The aforementioned studio executive, in relating his experience with just this type of unfortunate soul, almost laughs. Because, after all, he is talking about a screenwriter – hardly anyone’s idea of an archetypal party animal.
     “This guy immediately went into celebrity mode. He changed his appearance, started going out all night every night, hanging out with the wrong crowd, doing drugs. He was supposed to be working, and would show up at these Hollywood parties with a cell phone, wearing sunglasses like some rock star. He truly became a legend in his own mind. He was interested in getting laid and getting high. Where is he today? Out. Gone. The guy was set. All he had to do was do his work. But he couldn’t handle his own success. All the work he and his representatives had done in giving him his career was for naught.”
     Despite such horror stories, and they are uncommon, Avary doesn’t necessarily caution against taking a walk down the path of youthful recklessness – creatively speaking, that is.
     “Actually, what I would say to young Hollywood is the best thing they could do is to take risks and chances, now that you’re established. The worst thing to do is to listen to other people’s advice and start falling into patterns. The best thing to do would be to be careless – especially when you’re young. When you’re young is the time you should make mistakes; that’s when you should be risky and chancy. That’s when you’re not carrying the baggage of a life, and you still don’t have anything to lose. So that’s when you should roll the dice.”
     When pressed for specifics on how exactly his profession’s highest accolade could prove a mixed blessing, Avary is succinct.
     “Let me put it this way: I’ve had women ask me if I would fuck them with my Academy Award. You can imagine what it’s done for my work life.”
     Mike Medavoy, who began his career as an agent for such luminaries as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, remembers: “When I first started, I started with people like Spielberg and Lucas, John Milius, Hal Ashby, Monte Hellman. I tried to figure out which ones would be the ones that made it and which ones wouldn’t. And, invariably, I would be wrong.”
     As it happened, Spielberg and Lucas went on to become industries unto themselves. John Milius and the late Hal Ashby forged perfectly respectable, if uneven, directing careers. But Monte Hellman was more or less run out of town after his grandest statement – the intense, existential road opus Two-Lane Blacktop – failed to find an audience in 1971.
     Opinions as to the tragic fate of Donald Cammell remain mixed. “He was a nice guy,” says a production source who worked with him in the late eighties. “He was this kind of nervous, stammering, obvious acid casualty kind of guy. Not very organized, pretty impulsive and improvisational, but basically harmless. He was revered by some as this kind of genius, but then it always seemed to be with an asterisk: Performance was him and Nic Roeg. ‘Well, it was Donald, but Nic got all the credit...’ There seems to be some carnival of hope about clinging to that kind of kaleidoscope plasticity of Performance. I just wonder how specious the claim of genius is.”
     Were Cammell still alive, his reputation as a genius might have been borne out. Or, perhaps due to his fundamentally bizarre sensibilities, the fringe canvases on which he worked, he would never have found a home for his art. But opting to stay in the dissipated Hollywood milieu would prove, quite literally, to be several kinds of suicide.
     “He just felt a film was like a child,” opines Mazzola, Cammell’s editor and friend. “There’s a line in Performance: ‘You’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater; you can’t do that.’ He was so desperate, and they kept stringing him along. He was holding on, he passed on other films, and he got into heavy financial straits. And everything was looking dark...there’s some mighty big holes you can find yourself in. That’s why it’s so important to get this work done.”
     “It’s not for everyone,” argues Jim Wedaa. Localizing his argument to screenwriters, he claims, “It takes some time getting used to the fact that you have to write essentially a fresh script in ten or twelve weeks, when you may have had ten years to write your first one. A lot of people can’t write quickly. Also, a lot of people write great scripts by themselves and can’t work collaboratively. It doesn’t mean they’re bad people; it just means they’re like a novelist, with one voice...it’s tough to learn who to listen to. As a writer, you have to learn who is the smartest voice in the room. And there’s nothing worse than a desperate screenwriter trying to pay the rent. You can smell it.”
     The word “desperate,” it goes without saying, describes ninety-nine out of a hundred aspiring writers, directors and other creative types striving away in Los Angeles. But this desperation, quiet or otherwise, will eventually propel a select few to the very heights of success and acclaim. And that will never stop – every week the trade papers provide another inspiration, another lucky break story. Whether these newcomers can survive the great expectations, the thrilling temptations, the crushing pressures and the sheer superhuman workload is an open question. There will always be money to make and adulation to soak up. But those in need of more profound creative fulfillment, or some sort of sweeping approval to satisfy their innermost child, will likely never find it.
     “In a nutshell, Hollywood is the worst place in the world to find an approving parent,” says Dr. Dennis Palumbo, a psychiatrist specializing in the creative professions. “And that’s what most creative people are looking for. To me, actors, writers and directors are the sun; agents, producers, managers and studio executives are the moon – they shine by reflected light. And they forget that sometimes. Because artists have to stay in touch with the childlike part of themselves, the sense of wonder, they’re often left feeling like they’re the children, and the structure in Hollywood is the adults.”
     But Alan Gasmer – who as a top William Morris agent is certainly an “adult” in the Hollywood equation – has a basic rule for the “children” whose careers he guides. “When you look at the people who have succeeded, who have lasted, they have stuck to their guns. They have continued in the face of adversity, and they’ve had a point of view. I think it’s rare when someone has gotten by telling lies; the people that make it tend to have made it on merit. Be true to the people you’re talking to. It’s not about today or tomorrow – it’s about five years from now. Where do I want to be five years from now?”
     Sympathy for those who can’t hack it, whatever their reasons, is offered by one whose job is inherently unsympathetic: the anonymous studio executive.
     “It’s very sad that sometimes people with talent, when they finally get that break, aren’t able to see it through and realize their potential. I think a lot of it has to do with self-doubt, and fear. Maybe if you haven’t ever had any success before, you feel you don’t deserve it. I think it has to do with the degree of adulation – everyone starts telling you you’re great, you can do no wrong. Your ego can grow so large that it consumes you...I would say that ego, especially among younger filmmakers, is the biggest detriment to a career.”
     The pressures are just as likely to come from above as from below; the product of success as much as failure. A spectacular flameout and fall from a great height may ultimately have the same outcome as twenty years of indentured leisure and the velvet coffin of privilege. You just never know until you’re done with it...or it’s done with you.
     “Even though Hollywood has a reputation for being a bunch of money-grubbing, backstabbing assholes, it’s really not,” Wedaa insists. “Being a nice guy is often very helpful – not in dealmaking, perhaps, but in making friends who will give you jobs. I’ve been in the business for eleven years, and almost everybody I know is a great person. There are a few people I can name who are just awful, but they’re the exceptions. And if you’re going to become one of those awful people...most people are going to say life is too short.”
     Of those “awful people” – or those who failed to stay the course of success due to bad timing, bad luck or bad upbringings – Medavoy makes a simple observation. “Well, they didn’t grow and learn. You’ve got to learn from your mistakes, and you don’t get too many chances. Because you’re playing with a lot of money...
     “I’d say consider yourself lucky if it all works,” Medavoy concludes. “And the next time around, if it works again, consider yourself luckier still.”
     Success, it would seem, can be a harsh mistress. When she does arrive, be on your best behavior...and hire a good financial planner.