Episode 731: Fatal Beauty (1987)

we go along. So if you haven't seen Fatal Beauty and don't want anything ruined, please turn off the podcast and come on back after you've seen it. We will still be here.

is a female version of Beverly Hills Cop. Maybe that just has to do with certain sort of casting scenario. Obviously she's a comedian and Eddie Murphy as well, but just it's a good, little least procedural. And this was in that era when Sam Elliott was quite handsome and I remember as a.

of these films all scrambled together. They were all quite similar to me, and there were a lot of overlap with scenes with her taking on these different personas and Stufe it could be her character from Bergner, it could be her character from Jump with Jack Flash. But that was my main takeaway was that this was a really violent cop movie and not at all what I expected, and I enjoyed it then and on this rewatch I enjoyed it even more.

movies were. It just works.

But Hillary Henken, it feels like she is the one once she got assigned this that she took it across the finish line, because there's a draft out there from Milius which is even more violent and is pretty shocking when it comes to some of the violence in there.

to remember what else he wore. But then also I am pretty sure that Tom Holland, the director, not the actor who Rob and I were talking about how negative aged he must have been at this point, a young spider man. No, the director, Tom Holland. It seems like his mark is on there as well, because it feels like it's what ninety nine percent of what we see on screen. It's very close.

he's doing. And this movie starts with Whoopi Goldberg. This is so unusual for a female cop to play a prostitute. That never happens in the movie. So she is completely dulled up. And the way that she's fragmented during these opening credits where you see the shoes and then you get the ass, and then you get the glasses and then finally you get Whoopy And here she is putting on a complete character of this prostitute. But yet she's really torn because she's a prostitute, but she's really a cop.

So when she sees violence happening in this bar where she's supposed to be making this drug deal, she has to step in and that really blows her cover. And it took me a long probably until the last time I watched this the other night to realize that one of the guys that sees her on the street makes her as a cop. When she says it freeze police, I know that that's when fred Asparagus realizes the gang member. I was like, oh, I didn't realize that this kid

was here. And also at the end of the movie, I don't know what the hell was going on, but yeah, and then I just real quick, I have to call out fred Asteragus as dig Ado. I guess his name is. I just talked about him last month when we were talking about the Three Amigos, and he plays the bartender at the little sleepy town and he looks completely different. It's amazing the transformation of him from the skeezy bartender.

was maybe a male character. I don't know. This is maybe some way in which there's some sort of community that's built with her character in that way, and I really like that. At the same time, I had a note here about in that opening because of some of the stereotypical pieces, and I was talking about the queer code character and things like that. As I wrote here, I go, is mega, I'm like anti Mexican talk heard

the cheech as the bartender. So there are some kind of cringey racist jokes in here that but you have to remember it's nineteen eighty seven.

And the other thing is that her introduction to the script is the same scene, but in the film when she walks into the bar, she starts monologue again, she starts putting on a persona and that's all ad libbed based on the differences between the script and the film, and that immediately just puts me at ease. It's, Oh, she's having fun, she's here, And I just say it is a bit of a safe the cap moment where she sees somebody in danger or indeed, and she blows a

cover to protect them. But yeah, I was instantly on board. I was like, I like this. I like the vibe, I like the look of it, I like the tone, and I like the character that she's putting on.

you're like, oh, she's the undercover person. She likes to do this kind of stuff, and it's just fitting for her and for the whoopee persona that we've seen built over these last few films.

of scenario. Or then I sorted to think to myself, I'm like, maybe Dennis Hopper was right in True Romance.

up buying the bad drugs. I believe now please correct me if I'm wrong, but I want to say she ends up getting the bad drugs and then is going to take them to headquarters, and this land mover or dump truck or one of these type of industrial machines crashes into her car and they steal the drugs. They end up kidnapping her, tying her up arms of kimbo.

The first time I read it, I thought they actually raped her, but it's just the Brad Dwarf character, yeah, who comes over with like I was going to rape you or whatever, and I was like, oh shit, this is like a rape prevenge film, but it's not quite that. But it is her fucking up and allowing these drugs

to go on the street. That does not happen in the final movie, which I'm glad for because she's already got a lot of emotional baggage in this and I appreciate it that she is such a well rounded character in this film. Even though this is a cartoon shoot them up ultraviolet movie from the late seven sorry late eighties, when this was de rigueur. I'm sure this kind of got lost in the shovel of all of the action films that were happening at this time.

basically take him down. It becomes a real vengeance type of story for her, And I like to your point that we don't know why she's that driven until towards the end, and then that scene. That scene just can got you. She is such a great actress and just shows it in that one particular scene. Especially.

couple of things, a couple of changes. There's three major changes that they make that I think one of them is good, which is that change that they make with their personalize her reason for wanting to take down this whole empire. But the other two I think are solely missed and I'll talk about them later. But in the script, she talks about her sister and it's something that happened to her sister that made her want to be a cop, which is confiding all this into Marshak, the Sam Elliott character.

But in the film, it seems they must have written that on the day, or they must have rehearsed or something, because that's not there at all in the draft. There's nothing about her having lost a kid. And the thing that I noticed is that she feels a little skitzo in the film because of that, because she's so glib, she's so enjoying her job, bantering with all the guys.

She seems to be a carefree character. And then that reveal where she's no, she's somebody who's having a deep wound that she's masquerading, and that this is very personal for it's a big change. And I noticed as well that in the Cisco A Needbit review that I saw that's the scene that Ciskel highlights as the saving grace of the whole film. That it really reminds people that, regardless of what you think of these films, what po go Bog is a great actress.

the marsh that character. He had a whole other scene where he was going back to Kroll and he was laying the plan and he knew quite clearly that he was setting her up and he was trapping her, and it was playing against these scenes where he was falling for her, and I do love the relationship that they have. It's nice to see her falling for somebody. And they've got some great pattern as well that isn't in the script.

These these funny little back and forth where he's inelegantly flirting with her and she's trying to bat them away. I loved all that stuff, which again feels like it was ad libbed on the day, But those changes, I was like, what's going on here? This is a huge change to the character that they seem to have made while in production.

There's almost a feeling that maybe in my first viewing, i'd say early on, there's this little thing where it's and it could just be a little scene, it could be a line. I don't know that could have sured that up just a little bit. For me, it just felt like, I don't understand why you would allow yourself to drop the professionalism here with this person that obviously you're I don't know. I don't know what your take

on that was. Later it's fine, Like when you get towards the third act and all that, I'm like, I can buy it there, But in the early go I'm like, I'm not getting it.

to go with it for the movie to work. I think.

I'll get used to it. I just love that kind of like back and forth for it's just an acknowledging. Yeah, I still think you're an asshole, but I'm sure I'll get used to it.

but we're still far away from that. And apparently at one point it was supposed to be Sharer and then they changed it to Whoopy Goldberg, and then the Marshak character was supposed to be Billy d Williams, and so it was like, okay, good, no misagenation. We can't have that because people think, oh, of course, interracial kisses have been fine since Kirk and Aura all that time back. Yeah, Beverly Hills cop perfect example. We're taking this romance. Write

the fuck out of here. It's amazing that there is romance in this at all, that there is a kiss at the end, and there was supposed to be apparently a sex scene at one point. It's note, we can't have that. They were going to give this movie an X rating if there's going to be a sex scene between Sam Elliott and Whoopee Goldberg. How do you like that? Nineteen eighty.

it's basically like, how can you let this slide? Marshack? Look at what drugs have done to this woman who you are falling in love with, who we are about to have sex with in one version of it, how can you let this happen? And I love that. It's just she hits him a few times and she's really angry and mean about it, and I'm glad because he

deserves that. He's the dynamic character in the second half of the film, changing his ways from working for a drug dealer to helping out Risoli and taking a bullet for literally taking a bullet for her.

played kind of fun and it's it's almost like a class thing. But when you realize that she's coming from a place of I cannot understand you. Why would you be that way? You want son, you're more concerned about playing tennis? The rage is justifoied Oh.

into my house? And especially when Rizzoli touches her, and you just get the feeling that there is a massive racist thing going on. Not only is it how dare this cop touch me? How do this other woman touch me? But how dare this black person touch me? Is how that moment feels to me, and that she has to overcome all of that in order to see what's right. And it takes her own son, the James Lgrow character

off screen committing suicide or attempting suicide. Sorry that it takes that to wake her the fuck up and finally allow that the last little bit of connection from the drugs to this what's his name? Denny Mifflin. I kept thinking of dunder Mifflin to Denny and then to Kroll. She's that lynchpin for it. But it takes so much to get that information out of her.

calling you out. I actually think it would be a good thing for it to be more prominent because you have these double like you were talking about, there's double or triple layers there in which this character has to move within the world and how they do their job and how they live their life. And I think that's more accurate of how someone would be a navigating world.

But that was another change from the script. And I don't know if you guys noticed that as well, but I found that quite notable. Where it feels like that was probably change because of test screenings as well, where it felt like it's much more impactful to end on that, even though it's a weaker line, but that sort of kiss off line of Smith and Weston asshole than what was in the script. But I loved that scene in the script.

The Big You know, he plays dumb really well. So it's really nice that he's in here as this henchman character and that they get the other guy taller than him. Pellegrina already looks tall, and then the other dude, the glass chewer guy, is even taller than him, and I'd like that. It's Dorf just basically, oh, he's the muscle. I'm the one in control. It's almost like a master

blaster situation. I'm surprised he doesn't right on top of this guy's shoulders and just like, oh yeah, kill that guy, open that door, twist this person's neck off, like those kind of things, because Dorf is just fricking wild. And yeah, to your point, mark the change in the script of because Dorof does not kill the Harris Ulen character. He ends up. Ulen or Kroll just shows up out of nowhere in this movie. It's just like, oh yeah, I happen to be here too. It's oh okay. And then

Brad Dorpe kills him. Because there's a whole extra scene at the end of the script where.

and he dies through his own supply. But there was another thing that I want to mention as well, which was shocking to me. That the drugs are laced with fentanyl. And I didn't know that fentanyl was such a big thing until the last four or five years. And it's going back to the eighties where it's whoa. This is as timely as ever thanks to that one edition. But that's the big dangerous element that adding to the drugs is cut fifty to fifty with fentanyl and some PCP.

great designer drug. And you see the one the black guy walking out of the apartment building and they're just bubba, Yeah, they're just shooting all of shooting them so much. And then even actually I take it back because I thought Dwarff had taken it and that's why he was indestructible at the end, but then he's kevlar bitch.

here is that the cops actually look like cops. We haven't gotten into the swat team era of cops in America. Like I was looking at footage of the white riots in San Francisco. Harvey Milk was killed just for fun, just happened to be part of a documentary. I think I was watching Lifetime to Harvey Milk, and I was like, look at those cops. They look like regular cops, just blue shirts. Sure like they're gonna wear like a motorcycle

helmet to deal with the rioting. But they don't look like they just got off the plane from Iraq or Afghanistan. And I was just like, wow, I'm like, now cops in America look like super soldiers. They don't look like normal people.

guy in the fucking face, but just massive violence. Meanwhile, this kid is laughing his head off through the entire scene. I thought that was a great touch that it almost felt almost like a Tony Scott kind of thing. Had there been feathers flying or something, I guess that would have been more of a Tony Scott thing.

wanted to make sure he's fine. He says, Blades is his last name, not necessarily blot As. He'll accept Blatas, but Blades. I love when he gives that little thing where he tells someone to freeze and if they run and he goes man they never stop. And then later on in the movie he says freeze and these two kids stop and he gets that little quick smile on his face.

little arc as well. Someone took him seriously for once.

girl inside who's like fixing up the window display. And I love when she's five thousand dollars, five thousand dollars for that dress and the woman gives her a little sympathetic I know, it's crazy, right, And I was so afraid that the one was going to be like if you can't afford it, get the fuck out of here.

She is so in control. I love how cool she plays it when Zach the James LaGrow character acosts her at the deli, and that scene is they're in the Millia's version and it's so different. There's there isn't a deli. But I love the whole thing of her interacting with the guy behind the deli kuind of Max I think his name is, and just there back and forth and

you can tell she's been there a thousand times. And how cool she plays it with pickpocketing the grow taking his knife, and I want to say, when she shows a little bag of drugs, I'm like, oh, I think she just had that and just did a real quick press the digitation. I don't think that was inside of La Girl's pocket at all, and she just was like, oh look what I found. I'm like, yeah, she's in

complete control of the situation. She's laughing at this kid who thinks he's such a badass, even though he's coming at her with a knife, just bursts out laughing. I'm like, this is She's a cool cucumber.

They go for a little bit more of a Groun did softer approach. That really balances out the more grubby and gnarly aspects of the shoot outes and the violence.

I'm going to go off for a swim. He comes back in all of his friends are dead, and you get to see all of these dead teenagers there, and I'm like, wow, I was tempted to laugh when I first they had that hard cut to the teenagers, just because it is a funny situation for me seeing all of these dead teenagers all in like their party and everything.

But he sells it. When Lagro starts to tell that story, he really sells it and makes me care for this kid who could have just been a complete punk, Like you don't want you don't give a shit about this guy because he's just a little privileged white boy. But no, I actually cared about him and I care for him when they said that he tried to commit suicide, because can you imagine the survivor's guilt that this kid's going to have for the rest of his fucking life.

We talked about how she plays characters and how she doesn't play a ton of characters in here, but the other one I forgot. You mentioned the Richard Gear drug dealer.

I always enjoy it. She's such a charismatic character. The thing that I noticed as well from reading a book that I think maybe is worth mentioning, is that she was dealing with substance abuse herself at this time, and

that's why she was so skinny. She was doing coke and she knew that if she gave up the coke, she was going to gain weight, and she thought at some stage the trade off was, Okay, if I gained twenty pounds, it's worth it, rather than my daughter finding out that her mother was an addict find out that

her daughter was an addict. But when you see how I think she is in this film, how spry she is, and she's playing this character where she's talking about having lost her child to coke and it's not in the script, I'm wondering how much that was weighing on her that she felt the need to put it through this character's point of view before she processed it herself. But she

talks about in the book where she's very forecoming. It's a brilliant book, actually her book, bits and pieces, but she talks about how she was always the second choice in all these films, that it was never anyone wanted her that she would come in, and she was constantly trying to convince people that she was good enough, and she just felt that she could never get the same respect that others would get as a lead, like they didn't have the right makeup people, they didn't have the

right hair people, and did come in and they spray her hair with water and she'd be like, oh my god, you do not know what you're doing. And meanwhile she was like doing lines and lines of coke in order to stay thin. It adds to the performance.

to fit in. And then she made the choice to cut with all those friends and move in different spaces and make that departure from that life soole that she was living. But yeah, it's interesting. It's a very good book. I enjoyed her.

a bad case of pudding pups. I just remember being I don't know, six seven years old and talking to a neighbor kid. And I grew up in a working class, working poor neighborhood, but it was still like I didn't realize that the time is rather segregated. And I remember talking to as kids do you're six, seven, eight years old, and it's what is it? Do you watch? It's oh, we like the show and that, and I would talk about, oh,

we watched Cosby show. And I remember the kid just said, as playing as day, like you were telling the time or the weather. It's Oh, we don't watch that show because there's blanks on it.

just like, yeah, to your point. If I was a little black girl at this point, like in the early to mid eighties, I got nothing, like I'm not gonna i have no other than maybe one person or two people on Sesame Street. I had nobody who I'm looking at. Like, until The Cosby Show came along, it was really tough to see black people on television other than the very menior roles or the one of a group of people like Ron Harrison, Barney Miller. Yeah, there wasn't that, and

that's a black man. I'm trying to think of the last time i saw black woman on Barney Miller. It's very rare.

that way. And so I always posited that for US gen xers that it was the Cosby Show that changed the culture a bit, that allowed something like Obama to be elected president because people could visualize and go, oh, black guy could be president too. Even my grandfather, who was in his eighties and was casually racist, said yeah, I got to vote for the colored fella instead of voting for John McCain. So it showed this evolution. I don't think people understood how representation changed the way in

which people engaged in media. That became a cultural crossover. And like he we was saying, if you can't see it, then you can't be it. And there was part of that. And even for me growing up working poor, where it was like, I want to be a writer. I want to have a creative life. And wasn't that my parents and had books in the house. They did, but I may as well have told him I wanted to be

a fucking astronaut. Because they didn't know anyone who was a writer, and they didn't know anyone who was an astronaut, so they had no vision for how you could live a creative life. They were like, just don't work in the factory. Just go do something else. It's interesting to see the dynamics through that lens. I don't think that if a younger person was watching this movie today that they would even maybe pick up on those kind of things.

segregation and all that stuff. But we grew up just loving black culture and loving the black exports we're watching like Fresh Prince of bel Air and not batting an eyelid about it, or kidd and Play or whatever music was. It always just felt normalized. And that was in a country which was predominantly white Catholic. It's an interesting difference.

And I grew up around so many kids like that who had no respect for black people and on the whole, but they would just eat their culture with a spoon daily anyway. So yes, welcome to three white guys talking about racism a racial politics.

I don't know if it is her piece of shit car though, because it's not her what Axle drives a crappy blue Chevy Nova, but she's got hers where you can hear the yeah, just whineing like crazy.

have stuck to the ending in the script. That the ending in the script was just it tied up a lot of loose ends, and I liked it rather than that freeze frame, where I guess they just thought, look, cut your losses, now we don't get out.

pick it up. And I'll tell you why, because some of those older reviews the movies that you have seen, it's kind of like chatting with an old friend. And then the movies that you haven't seen yet. Well, Mike will add about another one hundred to one hundred and fifty movies that you're going to have to see before you die, you can give him a wedgie or something. Next time you see them, thank them for that one. It's Cinema Detours. You can get it over at our website,

projection dashbooth dot com. You can get it at Amazon dot com, and you can get it in either payper form if you're old school, or you can get it for your kindle, your e reader. So there's no reason to detour. Cinema Detours from Mike White. And of course you can always learn more about what we do about the books and everything else at projection dashbooth dot com.

I hated just sitting in the bus hour on end. So I started writing a play and don't ask me why, I just did. And I found I liked writing. So I wrote some plays, had a couple things done off off Broadway. And then a friend of mine an ancent in California, I knew who was originally started in the theater. He says, why don't you write a screenplay? So I checked out what screenplays were and wrote one. Find out found out I really liked it, and so I went

from there. And then my wife and I went to California to seek fame and fortune and spent about a year there, couldn't get anything to happen, went back to our home in Cape Cod and then my wife got a television series, so he went back to California. And oh, meanwhile, also I worked. I worked as an assistant on a movie for American International, and I was just a kind

of general go for a shot in New Mexico. And at that time I got to know a lot of people on the film, and so I still didn't know I wanted to break into the screenwriting business, but I

had no idea how to do it. But then one day I was going to go play tennis at a public art but there was too long a wait, so I said, I'm just going to go over and talk to my friend Norman at AIP and we sat down and we were talking, and he said, Bill, listen, you know they were known for low budget pictures, and you know, under people like Roger Corman, they started you know, you know, the story Scorsese and Nicholson and a lot of other He said, Bill. You know, he knew I was a writer,

and he said, have you gotten the ideas? And so out of the top of my head, I said sure, and I gave him a one liner, which was Hatfields and the McCoy's as a rival stock car racing families, and he said, I can sell that. So that was my first job, was out of the blue. They offered me minimum and I took it and I had a lot of fun writing it, and looking back, it was not, I don't think a very good script. There wasn't enough

action and enough wasn't exploitative enough. But the reason it didn't get made, as a matter of fact, when I had the script and Jim Nicholson, he and Sam Arkoff owned the company and Lee had a disagreement about whether to do this picture or not, and Jim Nicholson was the champion of my script. But I remember meeting in their office and saying, listen, I've got a good friend who was looking for his first directing job, and I know he's going to be big in this town, and

you ought to consider him. His name is Steven Spielberg, and he had one credit, which was a two TV movies, one called Duel, which was they got great ratings, and Stephen and my wife Joan and I were good friends, and he said, oh, yeah, no, I'd like to do that. So I told him the basic story and we went out to Riverside and watched the races, and I had

a whole bunch of it. Used to Super eight films, They used to put them in a little little boxes like this, and so I run along about four of these Super eight boxes and gave them to Steven and he shot the race and I wish I had those. I wish I talked with him to say, you know, I wish I'd saved those. He said, probably they really would have been bad, he said, because we didn't have

a very good angle on the race. But anyway, needless to say, because of a dispute with Nicholson, the movie never got made, but it got me publicity, got me an agent, and then I went on from there and again I had a script that I'd written about. It's called Siege originally, and I sold it to CBS with the help of a good friend who was an agent. An interesting story and it's not a complaining one, because it all turned out great for me. Was that they

offered me. The studio offered me less than minimum for the script, and then they finally agreed to it. And then the producer on the script and there was that go project at this point said well we can't afford to do. And this was the guy who was very, very wealthy, one of the heirs of the Max Sycture fortune. He said, well then, Gus, you know I was being paid fifteen thousand dollars. He said, unless you take ten

thousand dollars, we can't do the show. I knew it was much more important to get a credit, and he said, but don't worry, he said, you know, when the profits the movie come in, you'll get your extra five thousand, so I knew it was born. I got a credit. The movie came on the air, not only had great ratings, but I got specifically mentioned as the writer. And after

that my career took off. You know, I wrote a lot of television movies, and I wrote a bunch of spec scripts and then without going through the years, because this was nineteen seventy three, I think, and literally just after the my movie aired and everybody was looking for me to be a writer, and I had an agent call me up the right six months writer strike happened, so couldn't do anything, and I thought, well, you know,

this is a business. It's ups and downs. So you know, my wife and I had just agreed to buy a house on Mulholland, so we spent the six months. She taught her acting class and I worked on renovating the house, and the strike was over. It seemed to just take forever, and you know, like what happens in a strike, a lot of my other fellow writer friends couldn't write, so we would do things like go bowling or talk about

the business. But once the strike was over, I got all kinds of offers to write TV shows, TV long form, and so you know, I did that for a few

years and had a lot of fun doing it. I got to be known as a writer because I also turned down a lot of things because ethical reasons, Like they wanted me to write the script about Charles Manson and I read his self aggrandizing biography and realized, there's no way making a movie about this isn't going to make him important in some way because he's the protagonist. So I said, no, forget it, I'm not going to

do it. Movie never got made. But anyway, I was in the screenwriting loop and I was the go to writer for long form, and I turned a lot of things down, either because I didn't feel I could do a good job, but it was nice to be in a position. And it was also nice to be where I would, you know, sit at my desk writing and the checks would come in the mail because this is way before a direct deposit, and I stick them in the drawer. I didn't even have time to put them

in the bank. You know, it was fun and I really enjoyed the writing. But after a while I realized that writing for television, either if you were writing a prestige show, it wasn't really what I wanted to do. I wanted to write screenplays. So that's kind of the height of my being offered things. I said to my agents, Listen, I always want to write scripts and then spec scripts, and they said, okay, we'll support you, which meant a big cut in commission for them, but they supported me.

I guess. The second or third script I wrote was optioned by twentieth Century Fox, but again that they signed me a producer, and it got caught in the mill that the East Coast wanted to do it, the West Coast didn't, and so it didn't get made. But I'm you know, it was still a good script. And so that's pretty much what I kept doing. And then two

years later, Steven Spielberg we were good friends. We hung out together, and we saw him through the staggering success of Jaws and also him going into and into fame, and he used to have a we had a boat in the marina which we spent weekends on and Steven would come down and we'd hang out, and I remember him telling us that they wanted him to do the sequel to Jaws, and he knew instinctively it was the wrong thing.

what's the most commercial thing I can write. I was a big fan of the Clint Eastwood movies, the Dirty Harry movies, so I thought, huh, dirty Harriet, and I'll write I accept on making I'll make her a woman, a liberal, and I said it in the Houston Police Force. And I went in and tried to sell it to Fox and a couple of others and they were interested. You know, I pitched it, so I said, well, okay, So I wrote the script and then I knew I needed a better agent for selling a script. So this

is way before the big spec script craze happened. And I found an Asian named Melinda Jason, who was really just what you want. I mean, she was classic, you know, pushy, over the top, but I knew she could sell the script. So she did the classic thing, which has sent the script out on a Friday and saying, you know, you've got a chance here. We want to see bids on

Monday morning. And I was back and we were back in our place in Vail, Colorado, which is where I was mostly living, and I remember sitting there and Melinda called me up and said, well, Bill, we got some bites. And the one who came up with the most money, which was really life changing money at that point, was twentieth Century Fox, and they said, we'll give you a certain amount of money, you know, several hundred thousand dollars for an option on the script, but if we buy

it outright, will give you more money. I said, I wrote this script to sell it, and so I sold it outright, and that was really thrilling moment because it bruty did change our life. And I forever thanked Spielberg for saying you ought to do that, Bill. And of course, then the story because that script, which my title was Extreme Measures, we eventually became Fatal Beauty after the long But if we you know, talking about the whole process of Fatal Beauty, my main thing is is that script

accomplished exactly what I did wanted. It raised my profile enormously and I got offers to, you know, to write all kinds of movies do rewrites, were lots of money, but that wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to write Beverly Hills Cop too. And when the business was changing, and when writers like Shane Black and Steve Desosa came in, I knew they could write this stuff much better than I could. That wasn't my metier

writing you know, an action action comedy script. And of course when Lethal Weapon came out and Beverly Hills Cop, you know, action comedy scripts with a lot of real action but also comedy, especially the kind of ironic approach of Shane Black's. I said, well, I'm glad I turned it down because those guys are better than I would be. It's not my thing, and I'm they're writing I really admire. But it got me to where I got a lot

of rewrite jobs and writing jobs. But the experience of working on Fatal Beauty, as I said, I don't know what information you want, but my overwhelming feeling about it, no matter the fact that script that was made into

Fatal Beauty was nothing like my original script. I remember sitting in the screening room with my wife at Fox, and they were they expecting this, you know, because it was supposed to start somebody like Christine Lottie, not somebody like Whoopi Goldberg, who I would admire a lot as an actor and as a person, but totally wrong casting. But they said, you know, they shot the movie and they said, well, by contract, we have to write high are you to write the sequel? And we know this

is going to be a big movie. So I watched the movie Fatal Beauty in a screening room at Fox, and I turned to Joe and said, I don't know. They think it's going to be a hit. I think this is a terrible movie. And but I don't pretend to know. There are movies that were hits that I didn't understand, and movies that bomb that I thought were wonderful. It's like all of us. So but I said, sure,

I'll write the sequel. And then of course the movie came out and the movie to John Goldwin was the producer working for Fox, and she said, well, the movie didn't open, and it didn't, I mean, it had a terrible opening, and he said, well, you know, we're just going to pay you off because there's not going to be any sequel. And I said, Marie, I'm so surprised.

they hired some other writers to do it. But when I saw the movie, I realized one, you know, a completely different plot, essentially different characters. And the movie bombed. And I regretted the fact that my name was going to be all over it. But the fact was it, really I did accomplish what I wanted. One they had They paid me a really good sum because before the movie opened they had to buy contract or great a price for the for the sequel, and so between the

original price and the sequel and the reruns. I you know, I shared credit with with other people, but of course I did, because they really wrote the script that shows up on the screen, you know. I know years later people would say to me, oh, I really liked that line in Fatal Beauty and I saw your name was on it, and I said, no, that goes to the

rewrite rye. That wasn't one of my lines. It was frustrating, but it's also not an unusual tale for a professional screenwriter, and it reaccomplished exactly what I wanted, so I have mostly I would have loved if the original script had been shot. And as matter of fact, a couple of people hired me, some readly at the same studio that

eventually made it. They said, Bill, and they'd hired me to do a rewrite on a movie or something, and theson Bill, I read the original script one of the extreme measures, and he said, why didn't I make it? That's a great script, And I said, I agree, but I'm not an executive. I don't know why. But the fact is, my original script got me a lot of other work, so to me, it accomplished exactly what I wanted. And even though the work that I was mostly offered.

At that point, writing scripts or rewriting was not stuff I wanted to do. I know I'd done a good job, and because the script sold and a lot of people read the script, and a lot of fellow writers looked at it and said they couldn't understand they paid you all this money for that, And I said, well, but I analyzed what the business was. They needed humor, it needed to be frank and just skirting the edge of

what was possible at the time. But also especially the women executives loved it because Harriet, I believed, which was her name, was a very strong, independent woman. I didn't take shit from anybody and was excellent at her job. But as I said, it's exactly the opposite of Clint Eastwoods dirty Harry, and I like that character. I you know, it was just an old fashioned Western kind of thing, you know. So that that was pretty much the story

of it. I don't know how much detail I can give you, because once I didn't agree with to work with Melius, they hired They hired actually a couple of good writers to work on the script, but they wanted to go a completely different direction, and having subsequently and

previously been hired to rewrite other people's scripts. I was aware sometimes the scripts were really terrible scripts but a writer had a good idea, But other times they were the prescribed scripts I was rewriting were really pretty good.

big Spece script craziness, where the money? I mean, my friend Tom Shulman got a package for his agency CAA where he got a million dollars for a script that it was a package for CIA. The movie didn't go anywhere, wound up being called This was Sean Connery, and I can't remember who the woman wind up starring in it, but of course I can't remember the name of it.

want to do that. I did that, and I said, also, there are guys and women who can do it much better than I can, because that's not my I was known for character driven stories and good characters and good dialogue, and that's not really needed or even though I feel that Shane Black and Desusa and some others I've done a really good job and write terrific dialogue, and it's then it's been proven by you know, things they've written later on. But it was it was a great time

for me. But I also I didn't like having my scripts just not done the way I wanted them. So I had some lucky breaks. But you know, I had people who wanted to buy scripts, but I said, but I said, well, I don't want to hear to turn this into this, and they said, well, that's pretty much what we want to do. Just independently based on a spicscript I'd written that never got done. But Dustin Hoffman hired me to write a script, and I worked with the Richard Gear on a script, and I ultimately those

movies didn't get made. But also then when you work with a big star, there's a lot of other things going on, you know there. And when I got to know Robert Redford pretty well, you know there, some of them are incredibly talented, like Dusty Hoffman or Richard Gear. I really like Richard Gear as a terrific person. But things that happened, you know, he and also he said, you know, my profile isn't high enough. I just can't

get this movie going on my own. It was before just before Officer and a Gentleman and between Officer and Gentleman and Pretty Woman. So once Pretty Woman came out, you know, he was he was back on the a list that I have absolutely no complaints, And I don't want to be in a process of gossiping negatively about anybody who works on a script. Has so many factors

come into play, so many people have different agendas. You know, sure I would have liked it if my script that turned out to be Fatal Beauty was the original script. I'm convinced it would have been a very successful movie and maybe even a franchise. But you never know. I mean, the movie business is very strange business, and the kind

of magic you know. I mean, I know guys like Alan Ball who come into town with a script and the you know, Steven Spielberg's ambulance buys it, shoots it American Beauty almost like he wrote it, and he goes on to have a terrific career. That's not usually what happens. And you know, I got to know people like he said. I was at a writing meeting at Columbia and the secretary says, you know, my copy machine maker just sold a script for two million dollars. And I said, really,

And I knew what the script was. It was under siege by one it was you know, it was it was die Hard on the boat, of course, but he'd come up with a clever And I said, no, you don't understand. This guy is a screenwriter who's working as a copy machine repairer. He's been working for years trying

to get things going. But to them, what they saw was it was like when I went to the secretary to pick up the check for selling Extreme Measures, which became Fatal Beauty, and the secretary looked at him, says, you got How long did it take you to write this? I said three and a half weeks and they said, you got that many thousand dollars a day. I said, no, I've been doing this now for fifteen years. You know,

that's the nature of this business. And I know a lot of writers, really good writers, who never catch a break. It was like when when we had the number one hit record in the world. People said, Wow, you guys are lucky, they said, and you already know what to do. You really understand the business. I said, no, lucky is what we were. We were in the right place at the right time, with the right song. It's a fairly simple song. You could dance to it, you could sing it,

and it was an incredibly lucky break. That's why there's a sign over my wife and I's bedroom door that's says gratitude, because I feel incredibly fortunate, especially because I wasn't willing to take every job that came along, and I feel fortunate I had the luxury I didn't because I vowed when we came to California. I was not going to get involved in a lifestyle that I had to work to support. So we never got a huge, fancy house. We never wound up, although we did go

to Chasen's a lot just because we liked it. Well, we never wound up, you know, spend lots of money and things. We didn't give huge, large parties. And I'm so glad because maybe because I had a degree in economics, I realized that this may go on for a while, it may not. Both with the with the hit record and both of the screenwriting success and I've both were incredibly lucky breaks at the right place at the right time,

And I'm forever grateful for that. And that's why I only have good things to say about the whole experience, which turned out to be fatal beauty, because you know, I would grouse to my wife sometimes though I wish they'd made the original movie, and anytime somebody unearthed the original script, they would say things like, well, why wasn't this made? And of course, you know, you have to really be deep into the screenwriting game to understand what

can happen to scripts. And you don't have to talk to too many writers. Most of them successful ones. It's like still Owne said once that anybody who's trying to make it in this business is covered with scar tissue, because when I used to teach, I would say, you know, if you're not getting a lot of no's in this business, you're not working hard enough, because it's not with rare exceptions.

stump men who playing touch football. And then one day a friend of Rock Hudson said to him, listen, they're looking for a guy who looks like you to fill out the cast of a new tub television seria of Barbara Stanley called Big Valley. So he went up and read for it. No acting experience at all, never acted in high school, but he was a good looking guy. Engaging, and he got the part, and he was never out of work for the next twenty plus years. You know,

had three or four series. You know, you know how unusual a story that is compared to all these talented actors. The same thing I think of all the incredibly talented musicians and songwriters who never make it. You know, they can run rings around me in terms of music, certainly in terms of guitar playing, but they weren't in the

right place at the right time. So that's why. And the whole Fatal Beauty experience provided exactly what I wanted to which it gave us my wife and I financial freedom and to do the things that I want, did not have to do things I didn't want.

she is, we just see her. And she says to one of the recruits, you know, the hall, tall, handsome guy. So first she says, listen, you know, hold the gun on me and threaten me. And so the guy holds the gun and she said, act real mean, like you're going to shoot me. She just talks to him a little bit, and suddenly she know, she closes the distance and grabs the gun with her finger on the trigger, him firing it. But he manages to pull a trigger,

but the gun is pointing at the ceiling. When the cameras up to the ceiling, it shows a whole bunch of holes in the ceiling. Obviously she's done this many times. And now, of course it's well known you don't get too close, but in those days, something that if every policeman knows, but it wasn't something that was in the film language at the time, and so you know, Harry, we follow Harriet. She goes from there and somebody calls her on her pager. This is before cell phones working,

and said, listen, Harriet, we got a situation. And she said, okay, I'll be right there. So she said. He said somebody is holding people hostage in an elevator. She said, okay, I'll be there, so she comes. He walks in, that says, a tall high rise building in a shopping mall. And she walks into the building, looks around and somebody says, oh, here comes Derry. Harriet. Get out the body bags. And that's another fellow policeman. And they don't know what to do,

and she says, okay, give me a minute. She walks into the sundry store and says to the guy, I want a really large, ugly purse and a real silly floppy hat. So she puts it on, walks back and says, so where's the where's the elevator? And they said he's holding people there. So she goes to the elevator, presses the button, and the elevator down and there's this guy holding the people with a gun on them, and she gets in pretending to be this so fluttery, really confused woman.

She says, oh, I'm so sorry, and I'll wait for another elevator, and the gunman says, no, you get on, lady. So she gets on with her purse and her silly floppy hat, and the elevator rises up, and it's one of those things with the glass elevator. It's open and you can see the whole of the shopping mall, kind of like the Century City mall. And as the elevator's rising, the guy gets more and more frightened and more and

more menacing. And we'd seen Harriet put the gun in the purse, her gun in the purse, this horrible floppy purse, and the guy more and more menacing, and he looks like he's going to go for somebody. So she shoots through the purse and blows the guy right out the window, which wouldn't happen, but and he fallsid to the floor, and so she turns around, gets rid of the hat

and then leaves. You know, later she had met a guy in the sundry store who really came on to her, and you know, she really liked the looks of the guy. Without going through too much detail. She winds up in a hotel in a hotel room with him a little later in the day, and of course he hasn't seen the news or anything, and you know, they're about they're in bed in in the hotel room, about to get

it on when the on the television comes Harriet. They're saying, well, you know, he really saved the day, and she says they bleep it out. She says, I just trying to keep the ship ship rising below chin level. And she just goes, oh my god. And of course the guy she's about to get into bed with, you know, nothing's going to happen. So she picks up her clothes and leaves and the guy I sort of stares open mouth.

But that's how they introduce into the character. And the next day it turns out she's kind of has a you know, a dirty Harry approach to She doesn't like to work with inexperienced partners and she likes to go along alone. But the Houston police chief said, listen, Harry, I we didn't need you to take care of this guy. He's kind of a special hire, so I want you

to partner with him. And so she says, okay, so she meets the guy and is a young black guy, nervous, and so they're walking, you know, to the shape up and she says, listen, let's get this straight right away. You don't call me gash hunt pussy, he said, And I won't call you nigger, dinger, darkie. All right, and he goes all right, But that sets the tone. In other words, she very frank, I'm not concerned about what we now call political correctness. But she gets the job done.

And so the story of the movie is about very clever murder that's going on serial because it turns out it's two twins and what's called a foaliadeu or working together, and they're inseparable, and so, you know, she and her partner track it down, and there's a whole lot of things that go on. But what's so the script is

the combination of the action and the humor. They're sent out of town to check on a lead, and she goes to this small town in Texas where there's the typical you know Virgil Timbs Virgil, I forget that, I mean not a Virgil's the Rod Steiger character and Chable Knight and anyway, you know, Harriet comes in and he doesn't want to give much and he said, listen, he said, you know, around these parts of the country, we feel about women in our police force like we feel like

shit in our apple pie. And Harriet says, well, I won't ask if you're any recipes and leaves. But the people who are reading that spec script, they like that kind of language because it was pushing the boundaries of what you could do. And they like the character because she has a great sense of humor. But also the

position se'es in is realistic. You know, she has a lot of admirers, but a lot of envious policemen on the on the force, but because she gets the job done, and you know, there's a lot of excitement, a lot of them. There's a big shootout at the end and very dramatic and where Harriet gets the part and her partner get the the purpse car. They're in are in

a classic location. They're in a big warehouse and she manages to hook the purpse car on a on a huge chain and it winds up being hoisted above the air with the with the purp playing. You know, it was a very visual I knew what it was. I didn't pretend that it was some kind of amazing piece of writing. It was meant to be an action comedy with a female protagonist. And you know, a lot of the actresses of the day heard about it and wanted

to play it. But once they they put John Mealyus on his rewriting, and then another writer, and then and then they started changing the script and they changed it into a very ordinary drug story. And of course then none of the actresses who wanted to play the original character wanted to play it, but Whoopy Goldbert was looking to do something different. And I remember this was before

I saw what they'd done with the script. I remember seeing on the Tonight Show talking about how much fun she was having playing a cop and you know, using a big gun. And they had some pretty good They had Reuben Blades, and they had Sam Elliott. They had a pretty good supporting cast. I thought the movie was was nonsense. It still could have been nonsense in to beg a big hit. You know, nobody knows anything to

code Bill Goldman, which is really true. But Tamir, it was just a miracle that I accomplished what I wanted to do, and I learned very quickly the movie did good for me. I didn't want no point in trashing writers who were hired to work on it, no point in, you know, when people would see the movie and see my name and say, oh, you know, I enjoyed that

was fun, I would say thank you. I wouldn't say, oh, you should have seen my script, you know, because that then they deflates the people who are complimenting you, because actually, if it's a civilian, a regular person, they're really excited, Oh, your name's on a movie. And Opie Goldberg was in it. And of course, once the movie came out on TV and you know, ran, of course nobody remembered that it

was a flop, except, of course, twentieth Century Fox. But over the years, I'm sure they've made their money back because it plays an awful lot, and you know, they sold it with a basket of movies, and I still get, you know, an occasional twenty thirty forty dollars residual. But I realized it's you know, that was nineteen eighty four or five. It was made, you know, forty years later. You know, I just dealt with the fact that it did what I wanted and that I would never show

it to anybody as an example of my work. Oh, you ought to see this movie. I mean, a lot of my contemporaries, their scripts were made into really good movies. It'd be proud to show it. Some of my television movies turned out pretty good, some not so much. But I said, I basically feel about my career very fortunate. And there's a lot of very talented writers who never really wound up getting a break, And especially now and now when everybody has two businesses, theres and show business

and everybody, you know, there's endless you know. I had a lot of students I sometimes taught at festivals or or movies that I taught for seven years the University of North Carolina, teaching screenwriting and playwriting. And you know, the kids have in most cases delightfully unrealistic views of, you know, how they're going to make it in Hollywood. And a couple of times I got some of my students' intern jobs. But then they found out how much

work it is if you start at the bottom. And they thought they were going to go out there and they'd have a script and you know, people would fall all over them, and they said, well, I'm you know, I'm being a gopher for. And I said, who are you being a gopher for? And I said, well, I'm working for Scott Free And I said, these guys are a major production company. Just look around and get to know people. There's lots of opportunities. They didn't want to

do that. I was really surprised, and I was aware of it when I was trying to sell anything my first couple of years, you know, went on endless interviews to try and sell, you know, show for them originally and shows like Benicheck or The Original Mission Impossible. And I did write a couple of things for television, but I really didn't like it because the formula was so rigid,

there was limited what you could do. And the TV movies, some of them which came out really well, I just got tired of the restrictions in the in the act format because in those days, this is way before you could write a series or a movie for you know, HBO or Apple or any of the others. I would be fun to written in those times. And also I dispect scripts that I had that everybody said were absolutely

great never get made. But there are a lot of writers, some of them extraordinarily successful could never get their pet script made. But again I just had no complaints, And I don't really have a lot of gossip because I wasn't around the production of Fatal Beauty, and I just know from you know, people at Fox who hired me to do other projects were around the project and saw it going what they thought was in the wrong direction.

they become huge hits and other either outrageous comedies. I remember I was they wanted to hire me if somebody had written a script that eventually became something about Mary and they said, you know this is this is not a good script.

right people. And that's the coda line from one of the Dirty Harry movies. The man's got to know his limitations. And I knew what my strengths were and what my weaknesses were, because what I never wanted to do was take a thing just for the money, knowing I couldn't really do a good job with it. You know, the things that I took, either rewrites or originals that they bought, I knew by my standards I could do a good job.

Sometimes they came out well, sometimes they didn't like I was hired to do a major rewrite on a ge movie Theater, which was a prestigious CBS to our movie, and the woman who read the original script way missed the mark and they were right about it. So I did a you know, major rewrite on it. And interestingly enough, the movie won a Peabody Award. I didn't get any credit at all. When the arbitration or the thing came through, I didn't bother putting in. I said, well, you know,

it wasn't my idea. And I don't know how much I did or I don't know what the criteria was. But what happened was when the my name didn't show up on the script, and a woman named Judith somebody or other, you know, she got the credit, she got all the residuals and and but the New York Times was really i'd have to say, outraged, because they ferreted out the real story of what I did with the script.

I think they talked to the producer and they wrote an article which was unheard of, saying Bill Swano, you know,

should have had credit on this. And then when it won an award, the producers of the movie insisted that I get on an award also because I'd done they thought i'd done, which I thought was an incredibly decent thing and really surprised me because but I never you know, I remember sometimes writers called me up if I worked on their script or they worked on mine, and they'd say listen, I need to get mostly close to the credit for this, because I did an awful lot of work,

and I said, it's not my decision to make. If he wanted, I'll just let it go to arbitration. Sometimes I lost, sometimes I didn't, but I I didn't know. You know, there were writers I knew who would handle

the arbitrations, but I did. This wasn't something I wanted to do, and I didn't want to get knowledgeable enough to do it, so I would just let it go, and sometimes it went my way, like it certainly went my way in the ge theater was called Miles to Go, starting Marty Balsen and interestingly enough, McKenzie Phillips, a John

Phillips's daughter. You know, I knew John Phillips really well because he and Scott mackenzie, both of them went on for considerable fame, had a folk trio and used to hang around us in the village trying to figure out how we played what we played, so I knew him. And of course when I knew him, John Phillips was this absolutely straight laced guy wearing a suit and singing preppy songs. So when I saw him and the mom was in the Poppas, which I thought was great. I

loved their music. I thought they were a fabulous group, but unfortunately they were you know, at the dysfunctional hell hole in terms of lifestyle. But it was kind of you know, like I the way the paths crossing the business. This is off the topic, but you know, I was in graduate school studying economics, and I used to go to a little cafe in the place they called Dinky Town in Minneapolis, which is where a university students hung out.

Then there was this kid wearing a red beanie, singing and playing songs, and he and I would trade sets, and he was a surly young kid. He didn't particularly like me. I was doing a lot of American blues and blassic and he was doing traditional songs but also some songs he'd written. And of course that guy was

Bobby Zimmerman, soon to be known as Bob Dylan. So when we both showed up in the village a few years later trying to be singers, and he was suddenly Bob Dylan, not from Hibbing, Minnesota, but from calub New Mexico. And you know, having claimed gone to visit Woody Guthrie and I was pretty contemptuous, and I really didn't like his first year songs. But then all of a sudden, he wrote a couple of songs and I went, wait a minute. I mean, I like this guy, but he's

a fucking genius. This guy really is great. So I've been in a huge appreciation of his music, not of him. And he tried to pretend he didn't know me when we first showed up in New York. Right, I was gonna bust his chops because I knew who he was, but I never said anything.

just pro bono for friends. But also I'm aware that the business has changed incredibly amount and the things that I like to teach about the fundamentals of storytelling and the fundamental bricks of constructing a good story are still valid, and they're valid for a lot of other things. I remember when I was teaching in North Carolina, I had the students who came to my class, but they wanted to be lawyers. But they're learning how to organize a story,

which if you're going to be a trial lawyer. And I thought, well, that's the terrific idea. And you know, I also taught playwriting and I had some really talented people who I'm really pleased with because a lot of the teachers who are teaching these talented people wanted to mold them into what they thought what a good writer should be. And I would just say, you know, this is your and they want to do projects that their other teachers would say, that's wild.

but is trying to be themselves is really rare. And her teachers had told her. I encouraged her to write a play which was very scattered and a lot of different stories, and they said, well, don't write that play, you know, And it turns out, out of thousands of entries, it won the college wide play contest and she got a full production. And you know, she was just she was just different.

was fun. They treat you well and you don't have to work too hard and you get to see a lot of interesting movies. But now ever since the pandemic, traveling is really onerous. That's pretty much my story. Do you have any other questions or did I answer what you.

three four five days of rehearsals. It wasn't funny. It wasn't like, you know, it wasn't Eddie Murphy and you know, and Beverly Hills cop her personality came through, but it wasn't formed yet. I mean not as the movie personality wasn't formed yet. That if she played the script, that would have been a rich for so that she so she made the script come to her, if that makes sense.

If it came in. There were there were moments when it was then when it was funny, but it also you know, got it got edgy too, you know, there's a little bit of race baiting in there. I had a terrific experience with her forty five years forty years ago, forty years ago on Fatal Beauty. It's just that it's just the whoopee has become such a public personality. I don't want to say the wrong thing. But then she

was she was an actress. She was coming off Color Purple and the and the series two or three Burglar what have two or three comedies that she'd done, you know what I mean. I thought she was extremely talented.

I think she was miscast in Fatal Beauty. I made the mistake of being convinced by Laddie Ellen ladd Junior to use her to replace Believe it or not, Share Fatal Beauty had started out to be of the genre that they then called guns and garter belts, and it was meant to have a serious to have share player, a serious badass, you know, along with being very sexy, and then you know, and then having some kind of a relationship with Sam Elliott and Shaer bailed a lot

smarter than me. The arguably and Cher went and did moonlighting. So I started to back out and I had a house to deal with. MGM. Lottie just really twisted my arm and kept insisting that she would make it funny Whoopy and you know, and I kept saying, but it's not a funny script. It's it's a shoot him up with a female lead and a little bit of sex throw And then I mean, but there's no there's no funny lines in here. The conception is not funny. Anyway, Lottie said she'd do it, and I don't know why,

but I agreed. I thought I Whoopy was a terrific talent. And you know, there there were there were a few bumps along the way. Once she bailed because she she went to a prize fight in Vegas during the night shoot and left me hanging. She wasn't a professional yet in the sense of, you know, being a trained actor. She was a personality, and she wasn't funny on her on her own. She wasn't funny in the sense that she was verbally going to come up with her own

funny lines. You know, I think that if I'd had other actors with her, maybe I could have tried for some improvisation.

And then you know, in some ways she's smarter than all of us because she took you know, she jumped off She was brilliant a ghost, and she jumped off of that into into being a public personality and a talk show and it has become something totally different and Fatal Beauty because it doesn't fit the political stream of the how do you say the temper of the day. Back then, they didn't they didn't want to hard a hardcore black killer cop female. They wanted you know, they

wanted the color purple. But anyway, so it got, it got. It got bad reviews, and it didn't do well. But it played like crazy when we when we previewed it, it blew out, it blew out the numbers on all black audiences, and it did very well with white audiences. Male. Because who she is, I think in Fatal Beauty doesn't it was what the atmosphere of the time throughout the country. Political media, major media. They didn't want to see Whoopee

the way she was in Fatal Beauty. They wanted to see her in a way which I guess promoted a racial healing. I don't know, so it it sort of became forgotten Fatal Beauty, and I happened to think it's an extremely well made movie, and I think she did a terrific job, and Sam did a great job, and you know, I have only good things to say about people. Except the schedule was deadly because oh it went for day to night and there was damn there was damn

little day. So I mean it was you know, It's just it was, you know, a week after week of long nighters. God damn near killed me. I ended up walking away from him with walking pneumonia. The film basically has disappear from my over where I was. I was very hot off of Fright Night, so you know, and you know, and I was already established as a writer in Hollywood, and I went from that into a little

film called Child's Play. I was firing on all four cylinders, but I needed I needed the material there, you know, and I got it because I wrote Child's Play.

before Child's Play. I mean I knew. I took it off the one of the episodes that Dan Curtis did for Trilogy of Terror, which the TV movie in nineteen sixty eight.

I got nineteen seventy nine. But so I wrote that script and designed all of that with the doll because of what I'd seen with Dan Curtis and the Prey and the zuomidaland then what I saw on the Shining, And if I got it worked visually, it worked, you know. I mean that Dolphon turned into something terrifying. That's what

I was doing. David Kirschner was looking for ways to merchandise everything Chuck ate, and you know, I mean in the combination of a movie the scared living hell out of you with a merchandising campaign that reached into every imaginable place you know, age And I mean, so Chuck is going to bury us all. Chuck is gonna be going long after we're both gone. You know. It's just so just amazing. And no I did not see it. I did beyond what I did, beyond the first movie to stand alone, you know.

plywood thinging for the put up. So I don't think he was thinking about a romantic comedy when he was doing Fatal Beauty, but he was on it before I was. Yeah, And then they toned it down. They toned it down for me, but then they took Whoopy and put her into that, and I don't I don't think I was as sophisticated then as I like to think I am now. Maybe if it had Norman Tanamar or comedy director. But I don't see how it. I never saw any way to turn that. There was there was no funny bone

at its core was with Fatal Beauty. And so what you have is yet you should you should have a bit of Millius's vision, and you know, and the polishing by Dean rised her and then the personality the Whoopy paid put into it. But she played it, you know she did, and I thought she sold the violence pretty well. And I hope more people discover the film. But of all my films, it's it's it's probably the along with the TEMP, is the least mentioned. So there you go.

The ending got screwed up. I don't want to get into it. But that was Bob who was that? That was Stanley Jaffey. They'd had he'd had success changing the ending on Fatal Attraction, was it? And then so we went crazy changing changed the end, not not the films, but the ending, and then changed the ending on John millis Is World War two film Navy, I think. And then then that I got I got hit on the TEMP. And then he also went after Sliver, so he got four or five films in a row. The endings got

mauled by by Stanley Jeffy. I don't know if anything were successful beyond Fatal Attraction, but I don't know in terms of changing the ending adding that much more. But what he did is he softened it in uh in the TEMP. Well, thank you so much, this is great talking with you, we too, thank you very much.

to these films. But after this we get the Telephone, which is I want to say, based on a play, and it feels completely different. This is the last time we really get Whoop as a action hero for I think forever. You could make an argument that her character from Sister Act is a little bit of an action hero. There's a little bit of crossover with some of the stuff as far as her with her early character and then her nun character.

to back, like such charismatic, brilliant performances. But WHOOPI ones like, it's funny.

I don't know how much it crossed over into Ireland and the UK with her, but beyond the film piece, but just been in the culture for like over forty years when you think about it, and there always just seem to be something on with her. And then still she's got the view like the talk show panel stuff. So I've got a lot of respect for her and her opinions on things, and her willingness to be out there and to take chances too. I think that's a great thing.

and it's a really fantastic book. It's so touching. But she's just a great storyteller as well. Do you forget that she wrote all of her plays and her one woman shows and stuff, So she's a great writer as well.

the push behind them. There was nobody marketing them. They just appeared one day and you eat a sort of but you didn't.

though as you get into the nineties. But there just seemed to be a whole maybe like twenty years where these kind of films you get several of them a year, kind of standard fair. You know, usually every action star had at least one of them. There was, you know, like we talked about with her Eddie Murphy, it was like it was a way to try and get comedians

up to the next echelon or something. I just find them an interesting document of an era, you know, really beyond they're just pure entertainment value, but meaning what do they represent in terms of the time. And one of the things that I wrote in my notes for this movie was shoot Out at the Mall totally Eighties.

is Mora Isles. And that's the the id and the super ego type of thing, which I guess plays also into the whole thing of the Kroll versus the Brad Duraff character, where it's like Kroll is so super cool and super calm and just very matter of fact with Whoopee as Resoli, and then Dorf is just completely whacked out through the whole thing that Milius draft. Again going back to that, the three guys in that one they wear what was it like, a Hitler mask, a wolf mask,

and a porky pig mask. Through the opening heist that happens, and it's fucking crazy, blood, blood, wolf and step.

a remake. And it's actually like the fifth remake or fifth adaptation of a story from I want to say, like the nineteen thirties, written by I want to say, an Italian author, and they made so many different versions. It's basically somebody anybody who sets up a fake person. It's very Captain Tuttle, right. It's like I set up this fake person and they're the one who's really in charge,

and I'm just following orders. And but I'm the smart person, and I'm just giving the fake person all the good ideas, and the good ideas come from them, and they're somebody of much higher status, or in Whoopee's case, it's an old white guy. So she's, oh, mister so and so is an available right now. But she's giving all of this stuff and basically creating an empire with this fake person. And of course at the end it's we have to see this person that this is necessary that we do this.

And she's great. But like I said, Day and West, throughout that movie you find out, oh, she's actually the power behind the throne at this other company and she comes over with and works with Whoope, and you're just like, oh, she's These two women could take on the entire fucking world.

I probably won't be able to talk with him. But THEO was very open and you'll hear that interview when we talk about v I Warshowski much later in the year in November. Is that noir is neo noir. We're doing a lot of neo noirs this year.