The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Read Online Free PDF Page A

and start sending it out—- someone will recognize that it is good and commercial.
    It is a town that runs on greed, filled with desperate people who will do anything to make money.
    If they think your script will make them money, they will option or buy your script.
    You can write your script anywhere. I suggest that you write it anywhere but in L.A.
    You won’t be able to write real people if you stay in L.A. too long .
    L .A. has nothing to do with the rest of America. It is a place whose values are shaped by the movie business. It is my contention that it is not just a separate city, or even a separate state, but a separate country located within America.
    Real Americans live in Bainbridge Township, Ohio.
    If you have to go to L.A. for a meeting …
    D o it as former Orion Pictures head Eric Pleskow advises: “Only as needed, like taking medication.”
    And Truman Capote gave this advice to Dominick Dunne: “Remember this—that is not where you belong, and when you get out of it what you went there to get, you have to return to your own life.”
    It’s still bedlam .
    A fter two weeks of writing scripts in L.A., screenwriter William Faulkner wrote home: “I have not got used to this work. But I am as well as anyone can be in this bedlam.”
    Don’t wind up weeping into your beer .
    N orman Mailer, writing to a friend in 1949: “Hollywood stinks. I’ll probably stay here the rest of my life and weep into my beer about what a writer I used to be.”

    A Lanzman

    A Yiddish term for a fellow Jew, it is used in Hollywood now to describe a good and loyal friend—being a lanzman is one rung above being a mensch (good people).

    They can snort you there .
    P roducer Bert Schneider took care of an ill friend for two years. When she died, he held a party and the guests snorted her ashes up their noses.
    Save the horses .
    S creenwriter William Faulkner bought a horse for his daughter in Hollywood. When he realized the mare was going to foal, he drove her home to Mississippi. “I’d be damned,” he said, “if I let a Faulkner mare foal in Hollywood.”
    This isn’t the kind of place where you want to raise your kids .
    I noticed our six-year-old, Joey, staring out the window of our Malibu house one sunny morning. Curious, I looked at what he was looking at.
    On the patio of the house next door, a gorgeous naked young woman was with another gorgeous naked young woman.
    Joey said, “What are they doing, Dada?”
    I thought about it and said, “Saying hi, I guess.”
    Joey said, “Like doggies.”
    I smiled and said, “Yup.”
T AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA
Do you want neighbors like this?
Actress and Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “Vera Krupp used to live next to me in Bel Air and they say that she got 25 million from her husband, the German armaments king, Krupp. With it, she bought the most unbelievable diamonds. Vera wasn’t in the least bit overwhelmed by any of her diamonds and used to wear them while gardening or doing the dishes. But Vera lost all her money when she went to Las Vegas, fell in love with a croupier there, married him, and gave him her entire fortune. When she died, she had her four black Great Danes cremated and buried in the coffin with her .”

    You’ll meet some mighty odd folks in L.A .
    A gent Swifty Lazar: “Now, as everyone knows, I have a legendary fear of germs. The problem isn’t really germs, it’s the proximity of dirt that annoys me, especially someone else’s dirt. Howard Hughes, on the other hand, did have a germ phobia. So that night, as I always do when leaving a public toilet, I reached for a paper towel to use on the door handle so I wouldn’t have to touch it. Alas, there were none left. A few seconds later, Howard made the same discovery.
    “So there we were, two germ freaks, both walking toward the door with dripping hands. I lingered, hoping to force Howard to deal with the door. But Howard saw that gambit and stepped aside, leaving me right in front of the