Settling the Script Part II

Last time, we connected Airplane! and the atomic bomb. This time, we’ll take a look at the similarities and differences between two of Paramount’s juiciest off-screen dramas, with a certified USSR Communist in 1930 and a certified SNL cokehead in 1982.

Ivor Montagu’s book With Eisenstein in Hollywood is set in 1929-32. Bob Woodward’s biography of John Belushi, Wired, is set in 1972-82. For all their differences, they have surprising, ironic similarities. Set fifty years apart in time, they’re both stories about writing screenplays and varying reasons why some movie deals fall apart.

Silent director Sergei Eisenstein was permitted to leave the Soviet Union to learn how Hollywood was handling the new world of sound films, which began only two years earlier. Englishman Ivor Montagu, a rich leftist and minor aristocrat, was one of his traveling companions, in effect the business manager for the group of Russians.

To Montagu, America, especially Los Angeles, seemed to be a very church-ridden, puritanical place in 1930. At the close of the silent era, Hollywood was much more easily impressed with foreign dukes and counts than it would be later. They vaguely knew that Eisenstein was regarded as some kind of great director in Europe.

For some time, newcomers have been amazed at how spread out Los Angeles is and how long it takes to go anywhere. For a non-motorist, even a simple day’s itinerary, like “Pitch meeting at Fox, lunch at Warners” was a daunting challenge. Many of the studios were located an hour or more away from each other. Ivor Montagu talked his team into a tenuous production deal at Paramount Pictures based on little more than genteel, old-fashioned formal letters of introduction to Charles Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks from H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw — hard to picture that happening later.

Both scriptwriting teams, Eisenstein’s in 1930 and Belushi’s in 1982, would be led by outsized egos whose successes went to their heads. Neither man was really a writer; they were idea men. Their working methods were similar: long all-night sessions, creating new pages while simultaneously reshaping last night’s, last week’s, and last month’s pages.

Eisenstein and Montagu wrote an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s glum An American Tragedy, but Eisenstein, working in a language he barely spoke, was still at heart a silent movie maker, and the results on paper were self-consciously “monumental,” “serious”, and “important.” Paramount pulled the plug. Eisenstein would point the finger at politics and Montagu partly agrees, but the latter admits the studio was simply disappointed with prospects for a dull, expensive film.

About Wired: Any bio of the recently famous, especially if they’re also recently dead, tends to treat their subject as if they’re self-evidently important figures in history. People of 1982 kept telling Bob Woodward what a tragedy it was to lose John Belushi’s towering talent. I’ve laughed at Belushi’s jokes, and I’m not insensitive to his moments of goofy charm, but be real, folks: he is mainly remembered for erupting like a boorish slob in a couple of movies 45+ years ago. We’re talking Bluto, not Plutarch here.

Of course, John’s biggest break was NBC’s Saturday Night (as it was called in 1975). It might not have led to much, the ratings weren’t great. But in the late spring of 1976 the show won Emmys, making it all but cancel-proof for the time being. And best of all for John, his on-air rival, Chevy Chase, quit the show before the second season began.

The other crucial piece of luck that came his way that year: meeting Dan Aykroyd, who’d become his main artistic partner for the remainder of his short life. Belushi was an expressive comic performer with funny ideas, but he couldn’t tell coherent stories. Aykroyd could. So when the two of them came up with their Blues Brothers act, it was Belushi who came up with on-stage somersaults, but it was Aykroyd who turned the gimmick into a saleable feature film script.

Belushi was a character actor in Going South and Old Boyfriends. He was the unlikely, allegedly romantic lead in Continental Divide. He and Aykroyd co-starred in the notably non-funny Neighbors. Other than the TV routines that made him famous, John Belushi’s run as a Hollywood comedy star rests on Animal House, 1941 and The Blues Brothers. Animal House is the only one of his films that made it into profit.

Dan Aykroyd’s straightforward working methods were much more orderly than John’s, which placed creative unpredictability under manic pressure as a high priority. At the time of John Belushi’s death in March 1982, Aykroyd was already working on Ghostbusters and Spies Like Us, both meant to co-star Belushi.

That winter, Belushi made periodic trips to the West Coast to confer with SNL writer Don Novello, “Father Guido Sarducci,” one of the gentlest Catholic jokes on late-night TV.

For decades before the Eighties, when writers were empowered by personal computers to do their own typing and editing, a West Hollywood storefront business called Barbara’s Place had a distinctive in-betweener’s role. Sometimes, the patient ladies of Barbara’s would even be thanked at writers’ awards ceremonies, for tireless, yeoman’s (yeowoman’s?) service. Other support agencies provided stenographers and tape transcriptions for Belushi’s wildly unstructured thought process.

His work methods were surprisingly close to Sergei Eisenstein and Ivor Montagu’s, fifty years earlier: simultaneously dictating scene 5, arguing over ideas for scene 6, making scribbled corrections on scene 4, examining the corrected scene 3, and sending it to the studio while reading and arguing over the studio’s written notes about scenes 1 and 2. All in the same room at the same time, while phones rang, typewriters clacked, and messengers, stenographers, and deliveries of Chinese food rushed everywhere. It was like the famous overcrowded stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. But the Marx Brothers were funny. The pages that were beginning to reach Michael Eisner, supremo at Paramount, were not. His sense of concern was, shall we say, quickly communicated to Bernie Brillstein, John Belushi’s agent and manager.

Belushi and Novello were rewriting someone else’s script, Sweet Deception, a romcom about jewel thieves and the naïve young heir to a winery. They turned it into a harder, Bluto-style comedy, Noble Rot. The title is a winemaker’s term for the slightest touch of fungus that helps fermentation. In context, it suggests that it takes a small bit of cynical, wised-up “bad” to turn an innocent into a resilient, realistic man. At least, that was the idea.

But all of the patient magic of the typists at Barbara’s Place couldn’t turn Noble Rot into a coherent screenplay, because Novello, a respected writer of brief comedy sketches, was hopelessly outmuscled in the creative process by Belushi, who added incoherent scenes at random, set at the Playboy Mansion, Hollywood parties, and wildly costly stunts in the lobby of the World Trade Center. Why couldn’t Novello counter this the way Aykroyd would have? The answer seems to be that nobody would have backed Novello up — and he knew it.

Bernie Brillstein knew on first reading that the script was flat-out unproduceable, which is really saying something considering the quality of some of the produce-able ones. So he and Eisner made the best deal they could: delay Noble Rot with endless rewrites indefinitely (like, forever) while switching John’s play-or-pay deal to Penny Marshall’s romcom version of The Joy of Sex. Creatively, this was insane ("Belushi," "joy" and "sex" do not really belong in one sentence), but it would have been a shrewd business move had Belushi not suddenly died of an overdose.

This book was controversial in its day, largely because of its remorselessly detailed account of hard drug use, especially cocaine. Critics of Wired, mostly angry friends of Belushi, are left with the tough job of arguing that, yeah, Bob Woodward got his facts right, but the overall picture was wrong. Dozens of celebrities were aghast. They regretted being so open and honest in their interviews with Woodward. Habits that they’d mistakenly seen as common, even routine in the mid-to-late Seventies, were suddenly dreadfully embarrassing in the “Just Say No” days emerging in the Eighties. John Belushi’s shocking death was part of the reason.

In 1982, the year Belushi died, Arthur C. Clarke sent script pages of 2010: The Year We Make Contact to MGM overnight, via his Kaypro computer, from his home in Sri Lanka to director Peter Hyams. A new era in the process of screenwriting had dawned.