Keeping Up with the Addamses

"It was constantly on the verge of being made, casting was constantly being announced and postponed. Ultimately, though, I could not remain emotionally involved in that project unless I wanted to spend all of my time weeping," says Rudnick. "Finally, I got a call from the studio. They said, 'Paul, we've got great news for you. Guess who's going to star in The Gossip Columnist? Andrew Dice Clay!'" Rudnick's artificially excited smile flips into a downwardly pointed crescent moon of a frown. "That was before Andrew Dice Clay's fall, but my response was, 'Really? Wasn't Joseph Goebbels available?'" Rudnick now laughs and shakes his head with amazement. "There's a real dichotomy between Hollywood perception and reality. I mean, having Andrew Dice Clay star in a movie of mine was not a dream come true for me."

Segueing, Rudnick leans forward to explain that Sister Act began as a slightly subversive Bette Midler vehicle before becoming a watered-down hit for Whoopi Goldberg. "I am a huge Bette Midler fan," Rudnick continues, "so it was a thrill to try writing something for her, and the original idea that I came up with had a lot of real bawdy comic elements to it. I wanted to celebrate Bette Midler's innate joy and life form. I like the idea of Bette as the antidote to the Catholic church. But I now realize that it was very naive on my part to expect a studio to make a film that undermines the Catholic church."

Though Rudnick expresses some sadness, not to be mistaken for regret, over having removed his name from what would have been his first produced screen credit--"Sister Act was a heartbreaking situation that resulted in enormous amounts of money for everyone except me"--he saves his real agitation for a discussion of the ways in which Hollywood perceives gays. To begin with, one might extrapolate, the entire industry is housed in a giant closet.

"Gay execs and straight execs are equally dishy," says Rudnick. "Hollywood is one of those places where everyone seems gay after a point. I mean, wait a minute: You 're in show biz? Ninety percent of your life is gossip and fantasy? You will seem like a certain type of gay person. Any movie star or director who fancies himself as a dock worker is deluded. You put any movie executive down on some inner-city street and he'll get beaten up just as quickly as a chorus boy."

While Rudnick acknowledges that working in the arts suits him with the comfort of a miniskirt on RuPaul--"It's gay heaven. You can't get any more tolerant than that unless you decide to become a florist or upholsterer"--he does find himself disturbed by the quiet homophobia that exists in the film industry's development wings. "Homophobia in Hollywood is mostly expressed in the reality that you shouldn't even bother to suggest gay material," Rudnick tells me. "It just won't wash. They will be sympathetic, they will be entertained, but there is a bottom line. Making Love, a bad 10-year-old gay film, made no money, so it is held as proof that gay subject matter doesn't work."

Rudnick then goes on to point out a far sadder truth about Hollywood and its gay constituency. "The scary thing [is that it] comes from a certain amount of self-loathing," he maintains. "It goes back to when these Eastern European Jews founded the film industry, yet found it necessary to present perfect, wholesome, Waspy versions of American life. It had nothing to do with their own experiences, but they were terrified, and justifiably so, of being trashed or ridiculed in some way. Likewise, with gay film executives, there is often this fear that the world hates them, that the world will find out something about them. As a result, they behave more homophobically than straight people. They will acknowledge that the rest of the world hates us, and that if we let out our little secrets, we will be discovered and dismissed."

Never one to let a pall linger for long, Rudnick presses his hands together and brightly suggests that we embark upon a tour of his domicile. "Back when I was considering whether or not to take this apartment, an older lady friend of mine described it to me," he recounts, rising from his chair. "I had no idea that she'd ever been here before, but it turns out that she'd had an affair with [John] Barrymore's son-in-law, who was still married to Diana Barrymore at the time, in this apartment."

Juicy pedigrees aside, Rudnick could have fallen for this fourth floor walk-up merely for its size and unique accouter-ments--a huge skylight, windows made of blue stained glass, gothic-looking curves that were added to the walls, and a little cubbyhole behind an imposing wooden door. Rudnick ceremonially opens it and remarks, "This had been designed to hold a statue of the Madonna. But I figure that if a Jewish boy has a statue of the Madonna in his house, he just goes right to hell."

Save for a little coffin in the kitchen, which was made to commemorate the completion of the first Addams Family movie, plus a couple of issues of Variety and a stack of scripts on his desk, Rudnick's home bears no evidence of his profession. I wonder if this is some form of designer denial, a way that he keeps from reminding himself of the artistic difficulties that New York-based novelists/journalists/playwrights turned screenwriters bitch about just as surely as they skirt beggars at their ATMs.

Rudnick shakes his head in the negative and insists that the last thing he wants is to be perceived as a whiny screenwriter. He leads the way into his bedroom--where the bed frame is constructed from an old coat rack and a wooden moose overlooks the room with frozen aplomb--and he explains that a screenwriter's initiation is hardly a seduction of the innocent.

"Everything awful that's said about Hollywood is true, 10 times over," he flatly admits. "It is run by morons, writers are treated like garbage, and when films get rewritten by teams of hacks--many of whom are more into watching movies than they are into writing them--it becomes very clear why movies are so bad. However, if you are going to get involved in that industry, don't be surprised; either lower your standard of living so that you no longer require massive amounts of money for work you know will be destroyed, or don't complain."

Rudnick sighs with the resignation of one who knows, then adds, "The attraction of money and glamour and status can be alluring, but there are an awful lot of signposts going in. In fact, there are so many warnings that my only argument with outraged screenwriters is, What did you expect?"

Exiting the bedroom, cursorily checking out a walk-in closet of a kitchen--"I never cook," Rudnick allows, "though this is a great place for storing sweaters"--and leading the way up a winding staircase that opens onto the roof, Rudnick explains that he did not bring me up here to show off the deck's loose panels nor inspect his rooftop guest room, which is now filled with his out-of-season clothing. Instead he wants me to see a wooden ship's steering wheel that is in decrepit condition.

"That wheel is from one of the first silent films of Moby Dick," Rudnick says. "Barrymore brought it up here." He looks around, takes in a splendid view of the World Trade Center, then adds, "When Barrymore lived here there was a little pond and garden on the roof. He lived here mostly as an escape."

Back downstairs, talk turns to romance. Rudnick is currently dating a doctor, though the notion of them living together makes him visibly uncomfortable. "As a writer I need an enormous amount of time alone," says Rudnick. "Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly."

No doubt anticipating a return to the solitude afforded by his ornate cocoon, Rudnick searches out a cinematic coda for his craft. Coming up blank, he settles for the quasi-scientific: "It makes me feel like I should be studied by Oliver Sacks or something."

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Michael Kaplan wrote about Cafe Tabac for the October Movieline.

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