Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman Page B

movie and hope the business guys know how to sell it." Such words are not much uttered nowadays. . . .
    THE THREE S's
    Hollywood has always been a caste-system town. An ancient survivor told me: "When I was a fifteen-hundred-a-week writer, it was understood I didn't associate with another guy who only got seven-fifty. And the twenty-five-hundred-dollar guys didn't want me contaminating them. And it's the same with the other jobs-top directors knew top directors, big stars didn't pal around with unknowns. Oh, maybe they'd keep them as gofers, but when it was a heavy social situation that needed attending, the gofers were gone."
    Of course this holds true with studio executives. They tend to know each other-they may have worked at the same agencies at the same time. And naturally, they are all competitive, one with the other. Out of this situation comes their reliance on stars. And that need can be divided into thirds, which can be called the three S 's.
    S Number One: Social
    This is more than one executive or his wife being able to say, casually, "Just made a two-picture deal with Burt." Or "Clint just signed on, we go in April." This is important in and of it- self. If you've got nobody to talk about, it can make for grim going at a cocktail party.
    A deeper need for parity comes not from individual social needs but from those of a studio itself.
    One example: When the Arthur Krim group left United Artists to form Orion, there were rumors all around the industry that the new United Artists people weren't in the big time any- more. This was dangerous to United Artists because it meant that major "elements"-stars, directors, producers-might avoid going to UA with their projects. (Studios rarely initiate projects anymore. A package of sorts will be put together and brought to them and they will decide whether to put up the money. This abdication of what was once the essential role of the studio is as big a change as any in Hollywood.)
    Anyway, here's UA, shunned and forlorn. So what did they do? They bought, for the record-breaking sum of two and a half million dollars. Gay Talese's sex book, Thy Neighbor's Wife.. There was great publicity and the studio announced they would make not one but two major films out of the material. (They have made, to this date, a grand total of none and things seem likely to stay that way.)
    Now, the thing that made the Talese buy remarkable wasn't just the incredible sum. The book was famous long before publication, and the logical assumption would be, to grab such a
    property at such a price, you have to outbid competition. I mean, the reason you pay two million five has got to be that someone else bid two million four.
    Well, the rumor around town was that nobody else bid anything for the Talese.
    UA paid that amount for two reasons: The first, obviously, was to acquire the property. But the most important was the second: They were announcing to the Hollywood community, "Hey, we 're still here. " Probably they could have bought the book for half or less than half of what they spent. But that wouldn't have served their purpose-they needed to blow the money. It served to put them back up there with their peers.
    A sadder example of this social need for equality was a move the Orion people made. They also had to prove they were still heavyweights, so they made a zillion deals. Including one where they gave John Travolta control of any movies he did for them. Travolta was then maybe twenty-five with two leads be- hind him. Giving someone with that lack of track record control only betrayed Orion's desperation. Which was sad, at least for me, because they were, when at UA, maybe the top group in the business. But maybe it was worth it to them, since they could then say, "Look, everybody, we've got John Travolta."
    S Number Two: Shorthand
    It speeds things up when you have stars. If you say, "We're do- ing a Goldie Hawn picture," you don't have to go on. The per- former sets the framework of the