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

producer, studio execs, and any or all of their assistants, gofers, and secretaries will be bugging you all the time if you’ve got a cell phone.
    Tell everyone that you left your cell phone home so your significant other could use it. Then tell everyone that you always shut the phone off when you’re writing.
    If you’re Catholic, don’t go to Our Lady of Malibu church .
    W hen we lived in Point Dume, our church was Our Lady of Malibu. We’d heard of Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Fatima … but we’d never heard of Our Lady of Malibu.
    Lourdes and Guadalupe and Fatima were places of miracles, but we didn’t know about Malibu. What had Our Lady of Malibu done? Appeared at a bonfire on the beach to tell three quaaluded surfers the secrets of the perfect and holy wave?
    We went to Mass there one Sunday and I was sure the Beach Boys were making an unheralded benefit appearance, pounding out “Help Me Rhonda” to help the missions of “the Dark Continent” (as the sisters in grade school used to say).
    But it wasn’t the Beach Boys. It was a local Malibu group doing “Kyrie Eleison” surfer-style.
    If you’re staying in a hotel in Beverly Hills, don’t go for a walk at night .
    T he cops will arrest you and take you to jail.
    Nobody walks at night in Beverly Hills. Read Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian,” which is about a man who goes for a walk in Los Angeles and is taken to a mental institution. Bradbury wrote the short story in the 1950s !
    If you’re writing in L.A . …
    D rive down to the Formosa Café and get a whiff of what Hollywood used to be like. Elvis used to hang there; so did Robert Mitchum; so did Tuesday Weld. You’ll run into some people if you’re lucky.
    The last time I was there, I ran into Sean Young, no longer a movie star but still a fine woman who likes to drink beer.
    And stay away from the Rose Café . …
    I t’s where all the wannabe screenwriters hang out, exchanging ideas, talking about movies, popping their pimples, sharing their dreams.
    It is a stultifying, suffocating place fueled by ambition, greed, and envy.
    If you share your dream with anybody here, chances are it’ll be ripped off and wind up in a script that will never be sold.
T AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA
Don’t buy any parrots in L.A., either.
Actress and famed Hungarian femme fatale Zsa Zsa Gabor: “On my way to the kitchen, I passed Caesar’s cage. Our eyes met and the parrot fixed me with what, at the time, seemed to be an evil eye … and in the clearest voice possible pronounced the words ‘Fuck you!’ I fetched a piece of orange for Caesar, careful to avoid his eyes. In silence, he ate it. I breathed a sigh of relief. Prematurely. Because from that moment on, all Caesar would say to me, and to anyone who crossed the threshold of our house, was ‘Fuck you !’ ”

    Go shake Bob Walker’s hand .
    D rive out to Malibu and check out a little gallery in the Cross Creek Center called TOPS. It’s owned and managed by Bob Walker, also known as Robert Walker, Jr., who was going to be a big movie star—until one day he just left it all behind and decided to live like a human being. If you’re lucky, you’ll run into him and can shake his hand.
    Everything in L.A. is so inbred .
    R obert Walker, Jr., is the son of the actors Robert Walker ( Strangers on a Train ) and Jennifer Jones ( Duel in the Sun ).
    ALL HAIL
    Bob Towne!
    Yelling that he was being cheated by Warner Bros., screenwriter Robert Towne drove to Warner head Terry Semel’s house in the mideighties and screamed obscenities outside his bedroom window.

    The Auteur Theory

    It will be the bane of your existence as a screenwriter and is the biggest single reason why movies are so awful today.
    In France, where directors also write the scripts they direct, they are viewed as “the authors” of their films. They own the film’s copyright and distributors can only release their films, not interfere with