Paul Rudnick, the openly gay writer who penned the script of Addams Family Values, lives in John Barrymore's Greenwich flat. He's one of the funniest gay men we've got, as he demonstrates in a conversation that ranges from whether he's glad he took his name off Sister Act to homophobia in Hollywood.
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Four years at Yale University followed by a stint on Manhattan's off-Broadway theater circuit left Paul Rudnick bereft of at least one skill that every neophyte screenwriter requires: the ability to read upside down.
"Few highly placed executives will have read your book or play or even your screenplay," says Rudnick, who recently scripted Addams Family Values and doctored its predecessor. "They will have read two paragraphs of coverage that were written by some underling, who has also written a list of points to be discussed at the meeting. These are usually typed up on little blue pads, and the executive will have them laid out on his desk as if he is playing solitaire. If you learn to read upside down, you know the comments that will be coming to you during the next 10 minutes--because nothing he says will have anything to do with what he thinks of your work."
After a beat of hesitation, Rudnick adds, "Hollywood is beyond satire. Some of the people there make $800,000 per year, but you would not trust them to fold a shopping bag."
One of the film industry's few openly gay screenwriters, Paul Rudnick whips off biting observations with the consistency and efficiency of curves being fired from one of those machines that send baseballs sizzling into batting cages. But he does it with a screechy, knuckleball of a vocal pattern which seems somehow out of place here, in his decidedly baronial Greenwich Village apartment. Once inhabited by John Barrymore, it is now crammed to the skylight with baroque furnishings that might have been purchased at the Prince of Liechtenstein's liquidation sale. It's the sort of heirloomed environment that would be best complemented by a tenant who turns out in a dramatic smoking jacket and exudes an air of contrived bloodlines.
But that's not Rudnick. Dressed in blue jeans and a red sport shirt, the man of this manor carries an Ivy League undergrad's air of brainy impishness. Sitting across from me, he stretches out on a well-worn, oxblood colored chesterfield chair and props his feet on a matching settee. Rudnick leads with the kind of Roman nose that gives one a truly memorable look, and his wide eyes follow me as I slowly take in the elegantly cluttered digs: regal busts, sofas covered in old velvet, a scale model of a castle that had been built as a humidor but is now used for storing magazines.
Smiling, Rudnick acknowledges that owners of antique shops greet him as if he were a messiah. "Most stores will have one piece that I like--huge and carved and ugly--that nobody else would want," he explains, as I admire double-headed eagles embossed on the backs of chairs. "So, when I come in and buy it they are very happy to see it go." After acknowledging that a prominently displayed, Germanic-looking coat of arms is decidedly not a family heirloom--"My coat of arms would be two Twinkies and a Bic pen"--Rudnick sums up the look of his apartment: "The place is like Gomez Addams's bachelor pad."
I tell the screenwriter that it sounds like an unabashed bid to plug his new movie, then comply by asking how Addams Family Values will differ from its predecessor. "That film," I say of The Addams Family, "sort of worked around a plot, didn't it?"
"You might say that," he acknowledges, gamely. "In fact, it's wildly plotless, almost a model of plotlessness. The Addams Family was mostly about disguising the fact that there was no plot. Addams Family Values has an enormous amount of plot. And it's all my work. No other writer touched it, which is extremely rare." He hesitates for comic effect, then adds, "It's the Hope diamond of film writing."
Like the Addamses, Rudnick leads what seems to be a blithely eccentric existence that lacks any visible degree of self-consciousness or stomach-bleeding stress. And for a screenwriter, whose work usually gets tampered with by people less talented than himself, that's saying something. Rudnick tells me that it simply comes down to keeping Hollywood "in perspective." Sitting here with a view that encompasses both church steps and crack dealers near Washington Square Park, banging away on a Liquid Paper-spattered Selectric--Rudnick maintains that operating a computer, like driving, is beyond him--he has devised a wordsmith's balance. He writes plays for pauper's wages (I Hate Hamlet, which was set in this very Barrymore apartment, enjoyed a respectable run on Broadway two years ago, and his latest play Jeffrey currently ranks as an off-Broadway hit), but wins princely sums for his scripts.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rudnick has never written a word on spec for Hollywood--"The East is the spec coast," he says, "while the West Coast is the bank"--and maintains sight of the fact that studios can operate with the corporate ruthlessness of conglomerates dismantling unprofitable steel companies.
"You have to be very careful about the emotional investment that you put into a screenplay," cautions Rudnick. "Hollywood will not only break your heart, it will also transplant it into a baboon. So if you go in, allowing your life and your imagination to hinge on a studio film project, you will be destroyed. I try to do the best work that I can, but I don't allow that kind of work to define me or be a personal source of happiness. If I did, it would kill me."
"I take it that you're alluding to Sister Act," I venture, recalling the Whoopi Goldberg smash that Rudnick had originally scripted and subsequently removed his name from.
"Hey!" Rudnick replies with an air of put-on perkiness, "let's get into movie business torment."
Warming to the subject, but saving Sister Act for now, he opens with a tale of his still-unproduced script The Gossip Columnist, a screwball comedy about a down-and-out sportswriter who finds himself penning a Liz Smith-style column (naturally, with the assistance of a suddenly broke socialite/love interest).
"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.