To borrow the overheated prose of vintage film posters, David Freeman and Hollywood were probably made for each other. In certain respects, Freeman has modeled his craft and style on that of Ben Hecht, the flamboyantly cavalier newspaperman who considered nothing sacred-particularly the facts if they threatened to sabotage a good story.
A journalist and playwright (“Jesse and the Bandit Queen”) with an admittedly Hechtian disregard for the truth, Freeman drifted out to Hollywood in the ’70s from New York, where he was notorious for creating fictional characters-a Times Square pimp, for example-and passing them off as real people in his articles for New York magazine.
As Hecht, Nunnally Johnson, Herman Mankiewicz and other illustrious news hounds did a half-century earlier, the agile and inventive Freeman has found steady and highly rewarding work as a screenwriter-or, more precisely, as a screen rewriter, what is commonly known as a script doctor (though the writers don’t like the label, claiming it’s outdated).
“It’s a weird kind of skill,” Freeman says. “You need to be a dramatist, but I’ve found that writers with experience in journalism are often good at it. A great deal of what you write gets changed at the last minute, things come and go quickly, and if you worry endlessly over it, you’ll never get it done.”
Where script doctoring parts company with journalism, dramatically and stratospherically, is that screenwriters are paid “lavish sums of money,” as Freeman puts it, more often than not for work that either doesn’t make it to the screen or carries no credit for the writer who salvaged (or destroyed) the script.
Freeman has three originals to his credit-most notably “Street Smart,” based on his own “shenanigans” as a magazine writer who fabricated stories-but for each of those he has numerous rewrites on which he was an anonymous contributor.
“We all understand it, we all live with it,” Freeman says of the process by which screen credit is assigned or withheld. “That’s the bargain one makes, a bit with the devil.”
But the big paychecks make it a practical bargain, Freeman adds. And though he declined to discuss fees, they can, according to most reports, range from as low as $10,000 a week for relatively unskilled practitioners to $100,000 for such top hands as Robert Towne, Elaine May and William Goldman.
Presumably occupying some middle (or lower-middle) ground on that salary scale among the thousands of screenwriters in Hollywood are two refugees from Chicago journalism: Terry Curtis Fox, a former theater critic for the Reader who turned to legitimate playwriting with “Cops”; and Eliot Wald, a reformed Sun-Times TV critic and cultural reporter, who detoured into TV with “Sneak Previews” and “Saturday Night Live” before crashing Hollywood.
Like Freeman, Fox also used the word “weird” (along with hundreds of other highly descriptive adjectives) to describe the process of rewriting film scripts.
Fox has written five original but unproduced feature-film scripts. During an interview in his office, a comfortable sanctuary on the lower level of his hillside home in woodsy Beverly Glen, between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, he said: “It’s astonishing to realize that you can go for years writing unproduced screenplays. It’s very difficult, very frustrating.”
Possibly more difficult and frustrating, however, are the rewriting jobs that do get produced, which Fox described in convoluted but often seriocomic detail, starting with his experiences on “Hill Street Blues” during its seventh and final season on TV.
Naturally drawn to “Hill Street” after scoring with “Cops” in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, Fox wrote a number of free-lance installments, then became a staff writer for the show, which meant he was rewriting the scripts of other free-lancers. In the meantime, his own original scripts were being rewritten by the executive producers, as was their practice.
“I was getting credit for the episodes I wrote that got rewritten,” Fox says, “but not the ones I was rewriting. In general, this is very fair because when you’re on the staff of a TV show, you’re paid a lot of money, which is basically for rewriting.”
Although Fox calls TV “a great place to learn about rewriting, because everything gets rewritten,” he has also learned some valuable lessons from working on feature films. After his first three originals either failed to sell or died in “development hell,” he connected with “Perfect Witness,” an HBO movie, only to have it substantially reworked by another hired hand.
“It was very hard for me to watch,” Fox says of the film. “There was no question that I had an enormous amount to do with the picture, but there was also no question that it was a different movie from the one I wrote.
“It was a sobering and very instructive thing,” says Fox, who found his position reversed when he was asked to perform surgery on “Slamdance,” a screenplay by Don Opper. Fox says Opper “had been writing this thing for years and years and years and just got lost. It was a matter of focus.”
After Fox refocused the script, it went back to Opper, “who actually called me up and said thank you, which is very unusual. He then rewrote my rewrite.
“There’s not much left of my rewrite there,” Fox says of the finished film, for which he got no screen credit (rightly so, he adds).
After 12 years in Hollywood, during which he has had far more misses than hits, Fox reports, “My luck has changed.” The best indicator of that is “Fortress,” a futuristic action film due in theaters this summer and made from a “pick and shovel” rewrite he did for Stuart Gordon, founder of Chicago’s Organic Theater, who staged the first production of “Cops.”
When “Fortress” stalled in preproduction, Gordon sent the script to Fox for his take on it. ” `It’s a great premise,’ I told him. `But it has no characters and no real story.’ `Can you fix it?’ he asked. `In two weeks?’
“I left the first page alone,” Fox continues, “and in three weeks I rewrote the whole damn thing, to the point where it was castable and ready to go into production.” Fox says his cobbling continued “until a week into shooting.”
Fox calls his efforts on “Fortress” (for which he received second screen credit, a position that shows he was responsible for the final script) a “prize” assignment: a “production rewrite . . . the one that gets the money to go ahead with the production.”
A focus on problems
When a screenwriter is working on his first draft, Fox says, he’s “concerned only with getting the best possible version down on paper. . . . But with a production rewrite, it’s always problem, problem . . . finding the problem, finding the way to fix it, and going on to the next problem.”
To illustrate, Fox describes one problem that came up on “Fortress,” which involved a $100,000 shortfall in the budget. Fox says he solved it simply and expeditiously by revising a night shot that called for an explosion.
” `See this scene?’ I said. `It will work better in the daytime.’ So I went over to the computer, replaced `NIGHT’ with `DAY,’ and that saved the $100,000.”
Fox may find himself facing the most severe test of his adaptability with the film version of “Cops,” which is to be shot in Chicago this summer, with Gordon directing and Jim Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in the leads. What happens if Gordon decides the script needs a “new sensibility,” as directors so often do, and hires someone to rewrite Fox’s script?
“It’s not likely, but there’s always that possibility,” Fox says, knocking on his teak desk.
Unlike Fox, Eliot Wald makes his headquarters in New York, regularly commuting to Hollywood for brief but concentrated spells of script doctoring. Operating outside the Hollywood nexus-away from the parties and screenings, the casual encounters with producers and directors-can be a handicap.
“But if you’re good, the assignments aren’t hard to get,” says Wald, who works as a team with Andrew Kurtzman, a New Trier graduate formerly of Winnetka. “It’s getting them made into films that’s incredibly hard.”
Calling himself and his partner “comedy commandos” because they’ve been facilely typecast as jokemeisters, Wald says they did a “classic rewrite” on “See No Evil, Hear No Evil,” resuscitating a script for Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor that had been “dead for years.” For their doctoral work, they were not only well-paid but also rewarded with screen credit.
Some credits heard, not seen
Their names don’t appear on “The Distinguished Gentleman,” however, even though they punched up the script for Eddie Murphy, with whom they’d worked on “Saturday Night Live.”
“We added several big scenes,” Wald says, “but we didn’t change the structure, the characters and a lot of the dialogue, and it seemed legitimate that the credit go to Marty Kaplan, who wrote the original.”
As Wald spoke, he and Kurtzman were temporarily back in Hollywood repairing “The Scout,” a screenplay by Andrew Bergman (“Honeymoon in Vegas”) that had problems in the second act. The three-week assignment had gone sour after three days when the star, Walter Matthau, pulled out. “But the producers said, `We like what you’ve done, Jonathan (Lynn, the director) likes what you’ve done, go ahead with it.’ “
Although it’s uncertain whether they’ll get credit for “The Scout” in the unlikely event it reaches movie screens, Wald says, “There’s a saying out here that even if you don’t get credit, everybody in the industry knows you wrote it.”
Via that network, the industry knows, for example, about Robert Towne’s rescue efforts on “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Godfather,” Tom Mankiewicz’s late heroics on “Superman” and, more recently, William Goldman’s overhaul of “A Few Good Men,” among the hundreds of other legendary, but covert, rewrites.
“The most famous overworked script,” Wald says, “is `Tootsie,’ which went through an incredible number of writers. And I know someone who took a crack at `Backdraft,’ and he was sure that his was one of at least six versions.”
Considering the many scripts that David Freeman has retouched, he might have been one of those anonymous contributors to “Backdraft.” But Freeman isn’t talking about any movies except those on which he got credit for his original screenplays-“The Border” and “First Love,” in addition to “Street Smart.”
“There aren’t any famous or hugely successful ones” that he has rewritten, Freeman does say, while relaxing in the living room of his Southwest-style home on a hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard, not far from the chic industry commissary Spago. “I didn’t do any secret rewrite on `Jaws’ or anything like that.”
An oddly familiar patient
Freeman, who has written two volumes of fiction about filmmaking (including “A Hollywood Education,” short stories patterned on real producers, actors and writers) and a memoir, “The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock,” is working on his fourth book on the movie business.
Though not nearly so lucrative, the books provide Freeman an escape hatch from screenwriting, a profession in which, he says, “you spend 90 percent of your time on projects that never become movies, credit or no credit.”
Freeman says he realized how much he needed to escape when a producer asked him to rewrite a script that seemed “strangely familiar. I keep reading and reading, and finally it dawned on me: I had rewritten this very script for another producer three years earlier.
“I was tempted to make a deal, hand him this thing I’d already rewritten, and get paid twice. But of course I told the producer what happened. He dug out my script and decided to use it. But he still couldn’t get the damn thing off the ground.
“I remember thinking, `This is just nuts.’ And at that point, I pulled back and wrote another book.”
