How to get ahead in Hollywood – or not
The fall of Troy
Hollywood history is littered with stories of ambitious directors broken on the wheel of studio indifference. But they haven’t all been misunderstood artists. Sometimes they deserve it. In 1997, fresh from the box-office bonanza of Pulp Fiction, legendary cigar smoker and Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein took a $300,000 gamble on a script penned by one Troy Duffy, an LA bartender. Duffy, Weinstein announced, would also direct the picture and record the music with his bar band The Brood. This lottery win prompted Duffy to brag: “We have a deep cesspool of creativity here!” Hmm. And all the cess went straight to his head. In the great tradition of showbiz nepotism, Troy got friends and family on the Miramax payroll, took a master class in bullying from Harvey himself, shouted down the phone to anybody who wouldn’t hang up, “I am Hollywood’s new hard-on!” – and refused to even meet Brad Pitt, because he didn’t think he could do an Irish accent.
The film crew on hand to chronicle Troy’s rise and rise ended up with a very different story when Weinstein cancelled the project. Duffy managed to scrape the money together to make his film, a low-budget indie starring Willem Dafoe and Billy Connolly, but after it sank without trace at the box office, he was soon back behind the bar. He even fell out with the former friends making a documentary about him. The final insult? Their film Overnight, a cautionary tale of Hollywood hubris, proved a much bigger critical hit than his own.
A part to kill for
When he wasn’t butchering people – including actress Sharon Tate, the heavily pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski – mass murderer Charles Manson had ambitions in show business. He once recorded songs with Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys, and wanted another Dennis – Hopper – to star in the film version of his life story. A curious Hopper visited Manson while the latter was on trial in Los Angeles. Outside the courthouse, Manson’s devoted disciples were camped on the lawn in tents. Manson had cut his cross into his forehead and, in sympathy, his lawn army had all followed suit. When Hopper asked him why, Manson replied: ‘All my followers cut themselves like this, man. When the black revolution comes, they’ll know which ones are mine.’
Hopper assumed Manson had chosen him for the part because he’d seen him in Easy Rider, the actor’s biggest hit, and a key movie for drug-crazed counter-culture types. Wrong. Hopper had caught Manson’s eye in a TV show called The Defenders, playing a man who brutally killed his own father. The Manson movie never saw the light of day, but the killer has since been played by actors Steve Railsback and Jeremy Davies (of Saving Private Ryan fame) in two made-for-television adaptations of Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s non-fiction book Helter Skelter, the first in 1976, the second in 2004.
What’s up, Doc?
At the tender age of 32, film-mad critic turned director Peter Bogdanovich was hailed as a wunderkind in the mould of Orson Welles when his second feature The Last Picture Show hit the cinemas in 1971, receiving a mighty eight Academy Awards nominations. A brace of hits followed – What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973), which won 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. And to cap it all, Bogdanovich had the beautiful Cybill Shepherd – his ‘discovery’ for The Last Picture Show on his arm. No wonder he had such a high opinion of his own genius, which he was happy to share with anyone who’d listen.
That was when things started to go wrong. His next partnerships with Shepherd, Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975), were both savaged by the critics and ignored by the public. After splitting up with Shepherd in 1978, Bogdanovich took up with 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten, and set about the uphill struggle of turning her into a movie star in the lamentable They All Laughed (1981). At the time, Stratten was married to a low-life hustler, Paul Snider. When she moved in with Bogdanovich, Snider killed her, sodomised her corpse and committed suicide, a scandal that became the subject of a film, Star 80 (1983), with Mariel Hemingway as Stratten and Eric Roberts (brother of Julia) as Snider.
Bogdanovich’s career as an A-list director was in the toilet – a low point was his 1996 directing gig on the made-for-TV sequel To Sir With Love II, starring Lulu. His personal reputation, meanwhile, took a beating when he married Dorothy’s 20-year-old half-sister Louise Hoogstraten, who was 29 years his junior. Unkind gossips compared Bogdanovich to the James Stewart character in Alfred Hitchcock’s necrophiliac masterpiece Vertigo (1958), trying to remould the living doll into the image of his deceased beloved. They divorced in 2001. While still directing, Bogdanovich is now more likely to be recognised as an actor, thanks to his recurring guest role as smug shrink Dr Elliot Kupferberg on The Sopranos. What’s up, Doc? One might well ask.
Billy the kid
‘Arrogance and pussy were the double-pronged temptress for guys in our position,’ said William Friedkin in a reflective moment, looking back at the career that might have been. ‘I really thought directing films was the most important job in the world. We were endowed with some kind of magic.’ He certainly had the magic touch at the start of his career, when he followed The French Connection (1971) with The Exorcist (1973), both smash hits with seven Oscar winners between them, including the 1971 statuette for Best Director; at 32 he was the youngest person ever to win the award. When you’re as hot as that, people have to put up with your tantrums, and young Billy’s fits were almost as scary as Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist.
In the wake of the S&M box-office flop Cruising (1980), though, his career slowed to a standstill. The 1980s’ new breed of business-oriented studio executives weren’t ready to forgive cocky directors like Friedkin who showed contempt for the front office on their way up in the 1970s. Soon enough, he found it hard to get his pictures made. It would be easy to write off this cruel fate as the fruits of spite, but Friedkin had lost his talent to tell a good picture from a bad one. See (or rather, don’t) Deal of the Century (1983), The Guardian (1990), Blue Chips (1994) and especially Jade (1995) – a curiously apt title for one of his later projects, given its alternative dictionary definition: ‘An old overworked horse; nag; hack.’ Much of Friedkin’s work is now for TV, and the features he has managed to get off the ground in recent years have tended to be at Paramount, where – quite coincidentally, of course – his wife Sherry Lansing, one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, happens to be CEO.
Movie Idols, excerpt from Chapter 9, © John Wrathall & Mick Molloy 2005, All Rights Reserved
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