April 15, 2003

TO LIVE AND DIE IN HOLLYWOOD - Gerald Petievich

Woody Haut (WH): Why do you think Hollywood destroys some writers but leaves others untouched?
Gerald Petievich (GP): I've never subscribed to the argument of 'what they did to my work', because movies are not art. Movies are entertainment. They're a medium that requires lots of people and lots of money. Writing a novel is pure art. It's like sculpture or painting. But movies are something else. They're a technological invention. So it's a business. It's nice if they can take your book, which is art, and turn it into some form of entertainment, from which you can make a lot of money. What changes writers is the money. Because there are about twenty writers who make a million dollars a book, and after that the list gets short. The money alters people and causes the problems. It alters the way you look at things. Sometimes it can affect what you do in your writing. Because the money is enormous. Suddenly you're rich. Maybe writers aren't supposed to be rich.When I was a US Secret Service agent, I started writing as a hobby. Eventually I published one novel, then another novel. To Live and Die in L.A. was my fourth novel.I've had another movie made from one of my books, Boiling Point, made by Jimmy Harris, which is a bad movie because it was a bad script. I didn't have anything to do with the script. For instance, I could tell you to Live and Die in L.A. could have been a better movie if the would have gone along with what I wanted to do with the script rather than what the director did. But there's no way to prove that. But To Live and Die in L.A. was pretty close to the story that was in the book. It wasn't as good as the best film noir made in the fifties, which were all made for $50,000. But as far as what's being made now it was pretty good. But I had no control over the script. The director insisted on changing scenes and doing things with it so he could get in on the money for the writing of the script, which is what directors do. The reason they want to write the script is they make money from writing the script. They make an extra three, four, five hundred thousand dollars. That's the reason they do it. It has nothing to do with them wanting to have their input. You see, the auteur theory is bullshit. That was created by some kind of reviewer that doesn't know anything about the business. It's like believing a Frank Lloyd Wright house was made great by the general contractor rather than the architect. And in the film business, it's the writer who is the architect. No one else really creates anything. Most Academy Award-winning directors go to other films and copy scenes. They actually bring the videotape machine to the set, and they watch the movie. In fact, it's not a bad way to make movies. Because movies are not art. When you see something done that's really great in a movie, it's usually a mistake.

WH: So you have to be fairly cynical l to work as a writer in the movies…
GP: Granted, I am a cynical person. I write cynical books. I write cynical movies. Out of all the people I've met in the movie business, I've never met anyone who has any creative ability whatsoever. I've met business people. The directors that I know, if it wasn't for the money, they would be in another business. It's about the money. It's not that they want to be in film or in something they think is art. There's more money in film than there is in cars. Where have you heard about someone in the automobile industry making $2 million for six weeks work? So you find people who come in who are very aggressive and who know a lot about other movies that have been made. But they are not really artists. It's about 'the deal'. The reason people don't like to go to the movies any more is because the stories don't make sense. And that's because there are no writers. If you look at who was writing film noir - Faulkner and James Cain - these guys aren't around any more, and they wouldn't be working here because the studio system no longer exists.

WH: Of course, they were imprisoned in factory-like condition.
GP: Well everybody's in prison. It's a business. It's the same thing if you worked for an advertising agency. They'd say, 'Sit here for eight hours a day and write.' They don't care if it's artistic. They just want a certain product. Nobody talked about film noir in the fifties. Nobody talked about the philosophy of film. They were just copying from one another crime movies based on pulp magazines of the thirties and forties. So it was just a fluke. You may not agree with me, but I don't see it as any kind of artistic statement. It just happened. I know all the films and watch them over and over attain. I love those films. There's some great writing there. And that's what made them great. It certainly wasn't the cinematography, because most of them were made on a stage set. There are two things that make a movie. One is a good story. Two is the acting. Even a good story will fail if you don't have good acting. And vice versa. The rest of it is window dressing. Nobody has said, I really love this movie because of the cinematographer. Or I really loved it because of the way the shots were directed.

WH: Do you think writing for films affects the way you write novels?
GP: Yeah, in a certain way it hurts you. What happens is you can get confused. Because there's nothing extra in a screenplay. You can't venture off, even for one second. Because it's a visual medium. Character development has to be done with one action and one scene. It's a very different medium. And when you write a book, you can't really think about anything else. You can't think about what kind of movie it would make. It's a big mistake to do that. The way a writer gets treated in Hollywood, it's usually an accident. If you've got a director who's a nice guy, he'll treat the writer nice. They might even let you write a draft of the screenplay y rather than steal the credit. But it's not very common, because it's a very competitive business.

WH: So what's the usual process of writing a film?
GP: The director may say, 'You write this scene, and I'll write that scene.' But I don't really believe in collaboration in art. An artist has one idea. It's either your idea or it is someone else's idea. And the amalgam seldom works. It works best in TV shows. Because TV shows are just the grind of two page scenes. There are a few words in each one and a little story. But to actually sit down and do a major motion picture with two people writing it, it's usually one person who helps and someone who does all the writing. And it's usually the writer who does all the writing. And then somebody sits there and changes a word in each sentence or changes of names to try and horn in on the credit. Because in a big movie there's lots of money involved. And there's lots of money in the residuals.

WH: What happens if you try to take that kind of practice to the Writers Guild?
GP: The Guild's rules generally favor the person who does the original screenplay. But it's so Machiavellian it's difficult to explain. Whenever there's a movie, because the people who make the movies don't know how to develop it artistically, because most of them don't know about art, what they do is, if you are the writer of the novel and they want you to write the screenplay, they hire two or three other people at the same time to write the screenplay, and they just pick what they want from each one. If it were for real, writers would be the directors. But it's not like that. It's all a bunch of people who don't know anything about art trying to figure out how to do it. It would be like me going to work in the shoe industry, and I'd say, "Develop a new shoe.' I wouldn't know what to do, so I'd say, 'You develop a shoe, you develop a show and you develop another shoe.' And I'd get all the shoes and see which one I liked best.

WH: What screenwriters do you admire?
GP: William Goldman is about as good as it gets. Robert Towne was great at one time. The only perfect screenplay I ever read was Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Gordon Dawson and Sam Peckinpah). Then there was Ben Hecht. This guy made one film after another with stories so tight they could not be altered. That's screenwriting. Did you ever see Paths of Glory? The screenplay was by Jim Thompson. The book was sort of boring, but it was a perfect screenplay. And done by a great director. Thompson is another example of a guy who had the ability to create these unique stories. Talk about a cynical guy. There's a real cynic, but a real writer.

WH: Have you ever seen Cockfighter?
GP: You know I've read the book. Charles Willeford is my favorite author of all. But I've never seen the movie. But he's the best when it comes to crime novels. There's nothing out of place in his novels. I remember when I was making To Live and Die in L.A., I was having lunch with the director, I happened to mention to him that the Secret Service, who I worked for at the time, which is in charge of investigating counterfeit money and such, was also in charge of protecting the President. Immediately he wants to film a scene about protecting the President, which has nothing to do with the movie or the story, and so I sat down and wrote out a scene. Then he got a motorcade and rented a motel and filmed this whole thing. Reviewers, when they saw the film, said, 'What is this all about?' It had nothing to do with anything.

WH: The thinking is, if the writer knows something about anything, then use it?
GP: The general contractor would say the same thing. 'I've got this great idea for a patio. Even though you're not building a patio, let's build one anyway.' But an architect would know that's not what you do, because it doesn't all go together. They don't really understand. When a movie is popular, most directors look at it superstitiously. Like, 'Why did they come? Because they are not like the people who go to the movies… They like different things. They have different values. Most of them are rich people. But most people who go to movies are not rich people. So they don't really know what people want to see. The biggest preview house in the country is on sunset Boulevard. Do you think the people who live near Sunset Boulevard and who go to the previews are indicative of the way people are who live in Missouri?

WH: When you write a novel, do you think about it cinematically?
GP: Having been involved in the motion picture business, I have a tendency to think cinematically. At least subconsciously. I don't really want to do that. I believe, like Balzac, above all else write clearly. I don't find that in a lot of literature these days. Even though I have a college degree, I don't know what a lot of novels are talking about. I can sit there and read the first twenty-five pages of two or three books on the best-seller list, and I have no idea of what the story is about. It's because somebody hasn't spent enough time figuring out how to make the story clear. My books have always been pretty clear. My stories progress chronologically. So nobody has ever said, 'I didn't understand what the first chapter's about. I think that's the reason I've had two of them made into movies.

WH: Do you think there are endless permutations to the genre, or do you think noir fiction and film will eventually become a parody of itself?
GP: There will always be crime novels, because all art, all movies, all novels are about good and evil. You can go back to every classic that's ever been written, and it's about good an evil. The crime novel is just the simple form of that. What's better as a moral and dramatic question than somebody who decides to murder someone? But the permutations in movies are permutations of whatever happens to make money at the box office. I remember having a meeting with a major producer. I had an idea for a movie and I pitched it to him. He cut me off and said, 'Let me explain something to you. The only crime movies that can do well are buddy movies.' And he named the movies. I said 'O.K. thanks a lot,' and that was it. He was right, by the way. But what he didn't realize was the only reason that those movies have been successful was because they were OK movies. When you say that, does that mean that all the people in the United States wouldn't want to see a good film noir, that they wouldn't want to see a straight caper movie? No, all he knows is the business. That's all he's concerned about. But in his perception, what was successful last week at the box office is what we make this week. Remember the movie One False Move? You take an unknown director, you get a decent story, and he makes this great movie on the cheap. That could be done today. But when you make a movie like that, you can't get it distributed. So it's destined to be a small movie. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you spend $60 million making the same movie, it wouldn't have any problem getting distributed.

WH: It's incredible when you think that someone like Samuel Fuller made movies in ten days on barely any budget at all. A film like Pickup on South Street….
GP: That's a great movie. In today's money that would be made for $400,000. Maybe more because they did have actors. So it would cost maybe a million dollars. But, still, that's absolutely nothing. They make documentaries with budgets of $4million. Television movies have budgets of $5 million. That was a great movie because of the acting and the story. I would love nothing more than to go out and write my own script and then direct it myself. You see, anyone can direct. People think it's like an art. I mean, what do you have to do, invent a camera? They have the camera. They have the crew. They have the guy who aims the camera. And he'll even give you suggestions about what the best shots are. So if you can't film a scene, there has to be something wrong with you.

WH: Now you have writers just out of film school with no literary background.
GP: Nothing is harder than writing a novel or a screenplay. If you copy some other movie, that's one thing, but creating an entire hour-and-a-half drama of three acts out of whole-cloth, nobody out of film school is going to be able to do that. They're going to have to copy someone else. That's OK, because that's what films are. I mean the guy that has the new body style for Chevrolets; he copied from the last one. He didn't just sit down and invent a car. But nothing's more difficult than writing a story. Because writing a story for a movie is a long-term project. I love it when someone says, 'Yeah, I really knocked myself out. I just wrote this movie. It took me three and a half weeks.' Three and a half weeks? It should take three or four months just to come up with the outline.

WH: Do you get the same satisfaction from writing a screenplay as you would from writing a novel?
GP: Nothing is like the satisfaction of writing a novel. Because that's my work. And for the two movies that were made, if anyone wants to find out what they were about, they have to read the book. The movie, what comes with that, is glory. Suddenly, after I became involved in To Live and Die in LA, I became a great writer. I'm writing the same stuff I've been writing for years, but now everyone loved me. Everyone wanted to meet me. Everyone wanted me to write movies for them. But it's all meaningless. It's a throw-off of the marketplace, and it has nothing to do with my talent as a writer. I never really got any thrill from it. I loved the money. You can buy anew car, and people listen to you. But so what? Writers aren't in it for that, unless you're like Norman Mailer, and you want to be a caricature of yourself. Well, I'm not interested in that. I'm just some guy who likes to write. I'm not interested in dealing with a lot of people every day, so what I do is I write. That's why I chose it. I don't want to sell shoes. I want to write. But people in the movie business, they want to sell shoes. I remember I was doing a movie in Canada with NBC, which Billy Friedkin directed. One morning he said, "Last night I met this fascinating guy while I was taking a steam bath.' He said, 'He could only breath air from an ionizer.' I said what do you mean, an ionizer?' he said, 'It filters the air into ions. And this guy won't go anywhere without this ionizer. So I want the villain to have this ionizer.' The screenplay had already been written and we were actually filming the movie. So I wrote a scene. And if you get this film on video, you'll see a scene in which they go to the villain's house and they search it, and somebody walks outside holding this machine, and somebody says, 'What's that?, and somebody says,'Oh, that's an ionizer.' It doesn't fit with anything else in the movie. But you can't agonies over things like that. That's just the way it is. I mean, first I was a civil servant, then I was a writer making what people make when they write mystery novels. Suddenly you write a scene about an ionizer and you get paid a lot of money.

WH: You'd think Hollywood would have some understanding of what the writing process entails.
GP: I have never seen anyone in Hollywood who has any understanding at all, at all, of the creative process entailed in writing. It's like they've never even read a magazine article on it. Because a writer is concerned with the total work - as an artist you have to be concerned with the whole thing. Not just the hands but the entire statue. The second thing they don't understand is that you can't hurry it up. Speed kills all art. And the third thing they don't understand is rewriting. As you know, all things that are written must be rewritten many times to make them good. There's been a couple times when I've had directors beg me, 'Please show me your work in progress.' I'd say, 'Look, you've got to understand, this is a work in progress and it will change fifteen times within the next two or three months.' And they'd say, 'Please! If you'll just let me see it.' I remember showing a work in progress to this one producer and you know what she said? She said 'there's a misspelling on the first page.' Another time a director looked at it and said, 'Oh, I don't like this. This just doesn't cut it.' I said, 'Didn't you hear what I said? This is the first draft.' But they don't understand that. There are jokes about this among screenwriters. It's like the sign in the studio that says 'Write faster'. Because that's all they can tell you. They think you're just going to make some changes, and they'll tell you what to do, and then they're going to go out with it. They don't understand that isn't the way creative things work. It takes time. And, you know, writers are willing to spend the time, but no one allows you to make the time. It's a business, so there's always a production schedule. The mistake that screenwriters make is they take it too seriously. So you'll find that many screenwriters now have three or four friends to help write the script. They'll have a secretary. They turn it in. They get the notes back. And they have their friends work on it again. And they turn in a mediocre or crummy screenplay, and go on to the next project for another million dollars. Because they realize it's nothing more than a business and they don't strain themselves. The problems occur when you start taking things seriously in Hollywood. You go to Hollywood and you think you're going to make your story the way you want your story to be told. But they're going to make it the way they want it told. If you want to put up $20 million, you can make it your way. Though, because of the distribution system, nobody loses in the movies any more. You make a movie for $20 million; you are not going to lose money. You'll recoup your money through worldwide rights. There's a lot of money to be made here. Every country in the world buys nearly every movie. So the rights are sold ahead of time. The more the movie costs, the more a foreign country will pay for it. It's a sure-fire business. It's no different than making soap. You go into a store, there's a certain kind of soap there. Why is it in every store? Because someone bought the distribution rights. Is it better than other soap? No. There may even be a better soap. But the other soaps don't get in there. It's a product. It's a video store product, that's what movies are.

WH: Most writers seem fairly embittered about Hollywood.
GP: I have never met any writer in television or movies who likes their job. They love the money. But they hate ever day of what they have to do. Because whatever you write, someone is going to come along and rewrite it. That's the kind of medium it is. Maybe it has to be that way. But since it is that way, none of them like it, they all complain, they all feel put upon, they all go to psychiatrists, and feel out of control and question their abilities about whether they'll ever be able to write again. When I'm writing a movie I feel the same way. You feel like a second-class citizen, and you know when you walk out of the room the producer is talking behind your back. They just want you to hurry up and write your draft so they can get in and get some other guy to write it. You know, writers take all this too seriously. You think the guy that works for Tide's soap agonizes over whether he's going to get his soap into Ralph's Market? It's the same thing in movies. 'That's another movie. We got six others coming out this week.' And here's some writer who's worried about whether the villain is going to be killed in scene three. In that way, it's absurd. And like I've told writers who've asked me about it, who say, 'What should I do? Should I get a lawyer to sue to keep the story my way?' You know what I tell them? 'Don't sell it! That way you can keep it perfect.' And, by the way, I know writers who do that. I know writers who will not sell. For any amount. Why? Because they know what will happen, that someone else will do a bad movie, a horrible movie, a movie so bad that it will be embarrassing to watch, and their name will be on it. And everyone will say, 'That was a terrible book you wrote, because it was a terrible movie.'

Copyright 2003 Woody Haut Heartbreak and Vine - The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood (Serpent's Tail Publishing)