Screenwriters as a group rail against the injustices of Hollywood and complain that they have no power. Oscar-winner Ron Bass, the screenwriter of such films as Rain Man, The Joy Luck Club, Waiting to Exhale, My Best Friend's Wedding, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, the new What Dreams May Come and the upcoming Snow Falling on Cedars, complains very little and wields his own powers of persuasion.
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Everyone in Hollywood knows the old joke about the starlet so dumb she slept with the writer. A powerful screenwriter is a perfect oxymoron. Even writers with the most exalted reputations suffer regular humiliations. Paddy Chayefsky won three Academy Awards and was one of the only writers ever to get his name above the title, but all he could do in the wake of damage he believed director Ken Russell had done to his script of Altered States was take his name off the finished film. To protect their work, many writers choose to direct, but that's no surefire guarantee of artistic freedom, either. And besides, some writers don't have the temperament or desire to direct. There's simply no obvious way for a screenwriter to work in Hollywood without at least courting burnout levels of frustration.
Ron Bass stands as a rare exception in the world of impotent screenwriters because he not only avoids beating his head against a wall on a regular basis, he actually has a discernible degree of power. He makes big bucks, wins awards (an Oscar for Rain Man) and has a healthy percentage of box-office hits (like last summer's My Best Friend's Wedding). He's one of the most prolific screenwriters in the business--he's had 14 feature-film scripts credited to him in the last decade or so--and his exclusive writing-producing deal with Sony gives him more clout than ever to oversee a diverse slate of projects. Remarkably enough, Bass has achieved his success not by penning the type of action movie blockbusters that usually put writers in demand, but by concentrating instead on women's pictures, like The Joy Luck Club, and character-driven dramas, like Rain Man. In the last half of this year alone Bass will have four movies in release: How Stella Got Her Groove Back, based on Terry McMillan's novel (he also wrote Waiting to Exhale); What Dreams May Come, a big-budget supernatural romance starring Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra and Cuba Gooding jr.; Stepmom, a tearjerker starring Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon for which he did the final (uncredited) rewrite and served as executive producer; and Snow Falling on Cedars, which is adapted from David Guterson's best-selling novel about a murder trial that hinges on small-town prejudice against Japanese Americans in the years after World War II and stars Ethan Hawke as a reporter who's loved a Japanese-American woman since they were children together.
Young scribes eager to emulate Bass's extraordinary success and productivity will be hard-pressed to follow his example. Though he wrote his first novel when he was a teenager, writing seemed like an impractical career to him so he studied law and he spent 17 years as a high-priced entertainment attorney before he dared to call it quits. Apart from the perspective on Hollywood it afforded him, his legal background gave him skills that have proved useful to this day. "Every day I would walk into my office at 8:00, "Bass recalls," and there would be 50 files neatly set up on the desk and three or four phone lights already flashing. I would have to go from one negotiation to the next by punching those buttons. I'd have to remember everything about a case, as well as the psychology of the person I was negotiating against and what it would take to get them to do what I wanted them to do. Then 30 seconds later, I'd be involved in another negotiation. That ability to have selective focus has been very helpful in enabling me to work on more projects simultaneously than most writers think they can handle."
Indeed, the most distinguishing factor in Bass's screenwriting career is the way he's organized himself into something of a mini-corporation that remains in motion despite difficulties or delays in individual projects, and keeps Bass out of the all-morning-at-the-deli life that shoptalking screenwriters all over town indulge in. He has a staff of seven people who help to research, rewrite and produce his movies. As Variety editor Peter Bart wrote, "While others stumble along, trying to piece together a career, Bass behaves like a crazed fox in Hollywood's henhouse. He writes seven scripts a year and, more important, gets a remarkable percentage made."
In addition to time management and organization skills, Bass's legal background taught him to be a master politician adept at measuring and massaging the giant egos that populate the film business. Filmmakers on every level pay lip service to the notion that movies are a collaborative art, but Bass actually operates on that basis. Certainly, he is strong-willed in pursuing his vision of a story, but by nature and practice he's receptive to suggestions from others. He believes in the value of collaboration, and he points to My Best Friend's Wedding for examples of when he was right to defer to the director and when he was right to go with his own instincts.
"It said in my contract on My Best Friend's Wedding that nobody could rewrite me. Nonetheless, P. J. Hogan, the director, and I worked it out together. When we were doing the crab-house scene, he said to me, 'I want everyone to break into song here.' I said, 'How long is this going to go on?' And he said, 'I think the longer it goes, the funnier it gets.' I said, 'This isn't a sketch movie. This is a movie where you have to be invested in the characters. If you have this surreal moment, won't that take audiences out of the movie?' I was very skeptical, but he was convinced it would work. We went to the first preview, and he was 100 percent right. I never would have had the guts to go for that."
Bass proved to be right about the ending of the movie, though. Executives at TriStar argued that an ending in which the heroine winds up dancing with her gay friend at her ex-lover's wedding would be depressing. "They felt that if America's sweetheart, Julia Roberts, was not going to end up at the altar," Bass explains, "at least we had to know the sun was shining. I said, 'Hey, it's Julia Roberts, do we really think she's not going to get a guy for the rest of her life?' Well, I got out-voted. I wrote a new ending where another guy comes up and asks her to dance. The idea was never that he was going to be her boyfriend; it was just to show that she could dance with a guy again. When we tested the movie, we didn't even have to wait for the cards. Everybody walked up to me and said, 'OK, you're right.' They could see nobody cared about this guy who had never been seen before. So we went back to my original ending."
In the case of Snow Falling on Cedars, Bass and director Scott Hicks (Shine) disagreed about the amount of dialogue in the film, and Hicks prevailed. "I found the novel to be extremely eloquent," Bass says, "and Scott's contribution to the script was paring down the language and relying more heavily on the visuals. He took all the voice-over out of the movie. A lot of people don't like voice-over, but I think when it's used correctly, to reveal the inner heart and feelings of the character, it's very helpful." Despite their disagreements, Hicks and Bass are working together on another film. In fact, most of the directors who have collaborated with Bass choose to work with him again.
It was Hicks's decision to cast Ethan Hawke in the leading role. "I hadn't seen all of Ethan's movies," Bass admits. "But Scott was enormously enthusiastic about him, and from what I can tell, he has the right qualities for the role of Ishmael. Ethan has a dark, moody side as well as a more accessible side, and that fits this character. Ishmael is not the normal movie hero. He's not an out-there kind of guy. He's embittered. He's lost his arm in the war, has been rejected by the woman he loved, has been in the shadow of his father. He's lived a life of disappointment and frustration. Ethan conveys that bitterness; he gives you the sense of someone who has a deep interior life."
Of course, not all of Bass's efforts at team playing have worked out to his satisfaction. Some of his work has mutated into forms radically different from his original conception. He developed Dangerous Minds for Michelle Pfeiffer, but they disagreed over the tone of the film, and Pfeiffer brought in Elaine May to rewrite Bass's script. He ended up with sole screenwriting credit on the movie, but it bears little resemblance to the movie he envisioned.
"Almost all the dialogue in the film that was finally released was Elaine's," Bass says. "And the sensibilities of that film were different from the way I would have done it. The film was enormously successful, so they may have been right to fire me. My version might have been a big flop. But the storytelling choices, the character choices, the mode of interaction between teachers and students, all were considerably different from the decisions I would have made. I was very disappointed because I loved the [original] piece." Bass's fate on Dangerous Minds, which he describes as "part of the writer's lot in life," points up the pragmatic value of the "corporate" approach he's taken to screenwriting. "If you're only writing one script, and you have nothing else on the horizon, I don't know how you'd survive being fired. But the next day, I can say, 'OK, now I get to go back to this other project.' You have more of a chance to keep an emotionally stable course."
Bass's skill at collaboration can be illustrated by the fact that he once worked with two very strong, very different directors on the same film and got along successfully with each of them. The film was Rain Man. The first director was Steven Spielberg (who eventually left the project) and the second was Barry Levinson (who ended up directing the movie). According to Bass, one illustrative difference in their approach to material is that Spielberg envisioned an ending where Tom Cruise jumps onto the train platform to join his brother, Dustin Hoffman, just as the train is about to leave. Levinson considered that too sentimental and insisted on removing the final clinch. Bass, ever the diplomat, sees merit in each director's approach: "If Steven's film had been made and Levinson's film had been made, the films would have looked very different, and they both would have been wonderful. The film that Steven and I were doing was more about going with the big emotions. It was more operatic. Barry's stuff is more in a minor key; it's indirect, it's off the nose, and totally wonderful in a different way."
One might think that Bass's track record and obvious willingness to be flexible when necessary would protect him from reckless meddling, but like every other writer in Hollywood, he runs up against the maddening capriciousness of studio executives. "The biggest problem with the studio development process," Bass says, "is that with all good intent, there's this irreducible adversary element to it. How can executives justify their position if they say, 'Ron's script is brilliant, don't touch a word'? If that's their only comment, why do they have their Mercedes in their parking space?" But once they've justified their existence by suggesting changes, they have an investment in seeing them made. "It's one thing to give input. But I'm not a first-year writer. They paid me a fortune because they believe I really know how to do this. When we disagree, why don't they take my opinion? It never fails to amaze me the number of executives who feel that they are better writers than the writer."
If studios are the least rewarding partners in collaboration, actors are, Bass feels, the most overlooked opportunity. Bass himself has developed a close rapport with several actors, and he believes that writers should make a concerted effort to develop more projects in conjunction with stars. "I've always felt closer to actors than to anybody else, including directors," he says. "I love to find actors that I want to work with again and again. Some people just say your words better. I've always felt that way about Julia Roberts. Whenever I hear Julia reading dialogue I've written, it's as if she made it up herself. Meg Ryan is another actor I could write for all day. She just says my stuff the way I hear it in my mind."
Bass wrote When a Man Loves a Woman for Ryan, and he has written Sleeping With the Enemy, My Best Friend's Wedding and Stepmom for Roberts, as well as a couple of projects that have not yet been made. Several years ago he actually wrote a project that Roberts and Susan Sarandon hope to make together, but it is still stuck in development hell. Then he worked with them again on Stepmom. "They had been looking for a long time to find a film that they could do together," Bass says. In Stepmom, Sarandon plays a dying woman who must entrust her children to her ex-husband's young girlfriend, played by Roberts. Bass worked closely with the two actresses to incorporate changes they wanted made. "Those are the fun things in the job," Bass says of their collaboration. "We worked in a very shorthand way. It was not like meeting with studio executives. There was none of that diplomacy. Everybody talked very plainly. It was down-and-dirty. Susan and Julia would say, 'Here's what it needs.' And we plunged right in." Bass was struck by the difference in the style of the two actresses. "Both of them are articulate," he says, "but Susan generally is the one who takes the lead. Julia will sit back and listen, then will step in and make her point directly and succinctly. She's more surgical, whereas Susan is more expansive. Yet they're very tight with each other. They communicate with their eyes, almost like sisters."
Contrary to some people's belief, Bass did not write My Best Friend's Wedding in order to rescue Roberts from some of the dreary dramas (like Mary Reilly and Michael Collins) that she had been making. He wrote the script on spec, one of the only times he has ever done that. "I'd never written an all-out comedy before," he explains, "and I didn't want someone at a studio telling me how to do it. Comedy is so subjective. So I wrote it on spec, and it sold. I tried not to think of a specific actress while I was writing it, but I probably did have Julia in mind even more than I realized. So much of it just kept sliding toward the stuff that she does so well--that Lucy Ricardo nutsiness, and the way she can be frantic and staccato and waspish, and then just break your heart in the next instant."
When Bass completed the script for My Best Friend's Wedding, his agent planned to send it to the top companies around town and auction it to the highest bidder. But Bass was about to take a trip to Hong Kong with filmmaker Luis Mandoki (the director of When a Man Loves a Woman) and an executive from United Artists to research a project, and he wanted the auction to begin after his return. Right before his departure, the script was leaked to a few people, and it then ended up being sent to all the major players in Hollywood just as Bass was boarding the plane for Hong Kong. While they were on the plane, Bass gave the script to the executive from United Artists.
"He read it and loved it and wanted to make an offer on it," Bass recalls. "He wanted to call the head of the studio right then and there. But the phones weren't working on the plane. So he said, 'Tell me how much money would be the offer you couldn't refuse.' I didn't want to do it, but he kept pressing me, so finally I named a very high number. He said, 'Great. As soon as we land, we're going to take the limo to the Peninsula hotel and go right to the phone before we even go to our rooms, and we're going to call the studio and buy it for your price.' I said, 'This is the easiest deal I ever made.' We landed in Hong Kong and went to the Peninsula hotel, and the clerk said, 'Mr. Bass, you have a fax.' It was from my lawyer, saying, 'Congratulations, the script has been sold to TriStar, and Julia Roberts is starring in it.' I have no idea how she got it so quickly. It all happened in the 17 hours that I was on that plane. It actually sold for the price this guy from United Artists would have paid."
That Bass's strongest affinity for an actor is with Roberts, a woman, and that many of his most successful projects have been stories about women, probably stems from the unusual childhood he lived. From the age of three to 11, he suffered from an illness that was never identified but that left him bedridden with high fevers much of the time. He only attended school part-time during those years, which forced him into a universe quite unlike that inhabited by most boys his age. He read a tremendous amount and became fascinated by the psychological insights he found in classic novels. His childhood isolation led him to feel a strong connection to women.
"As I was growing up," he explains, "I found that I could talk about emotional and psychological matters with women very naturally and comfortably, and they liked finding guys who were interested in that stuff. To this day most of my best friends are women. Most of the people in my company are women. Although there are exceptions, I find it generally true that women are more interesting people in life and more interesting in drama. Men are more result-oriented, and therefore they don't want to be in touch with their inner life because that's going to slow them down. They don't want to feel guilty or vulnerable or afraid or embarrassed. They don't want to feel the range of emotions that threaten self-esteem. Women--and I mean women from cocktail waitresses to heads of government--are process-oriented, not result-oriented. They want to know what they're feeling, even if it totally screws them up. That means they go through the kinds of journeys and the kinds of change that make for great drama."
Bass's interest in adapting Richard Matheson's novel What Dreams May Come is in keeping with this view of drama. The novel was first optioned in the '70s, but studios, which don't generally share Bass's view, kept getting cold feet about the subject matter. "It's an extremely romantic piece, and thank God Hollywood has discovered the young female audience that will go to romantic movies over and over again," says Bass. "It's a love story that all takes place in the afterlife. Robin Williams dies right at the beginning of the movie, and the rest of it is set in heaven and hell. A love story that goes beyond death is extremely interesting to me. Whether life and love literally continue beyond death, none of us really know. But at the very least, the story works as a metaphor; it expresses the truth that love is more powerful and more important than death. Our mortality isn't the thing that defines us."
Bass recognizes he's been somewhat typecast as a writer of intimate character dramas, if not women's films, and would like to correct the notion. "I want to write in every genre," he says. "I haven't had a chance to do a gothic horror film yet, but I'd love to. I have written science fiction and action films that haven't been made. I'm dying to write a big tentpole special effects movie. I don't think there's any reason why having terrific characterization and an interesting personal story has to minimize or get in the way of fabulous special effects."
Whatever Bass's ambitions may be in the high-decibel action area, his next film, scheduled to start shooting this fall, is another women's movie, Passion of Mind. It will star Demi Moore as a woman who lives two alternate existences--one as a contented mother and homebody, the other as a hard-driving executive. "Ultimately she has to integrate the two sides of her personality," Bass explains. A great many actresses had been interested in the project, which Bass originally wrote in the late '80s. It was director Alain Berliner (_Ma Vie en Rose_) who finally settled on Moore, a choice Bass applauds.
"We needed an actress who could play both sides of the character," Bass says. "A lot of actresses we knew could play one side, but we hadn't seen them play the other side. Demi has played tough, self-obsessed, driven women, like the character she played in Disclosure. And she has also played loving, family-oriented, more artistic women, as she did in Ghost. I don't feel she's always been appreciated for her range. Also, I was gratified that she was willing to take this part for far less than her usual fee. It's a very low-budget movie, and a lot of big stars talk about wanting to do smaller independent movies, but at the end of the day, they or their agents will hold out for the $15 million fee in the big-studio picture."
Though Bass's productivity and relative satisfaction with his profession seem to derive from his willingness to be a team player, he is successful because he's an unmistakably skilled craftsman with a strong sense of structure and a gift for licking seemingly insurmountable problems of adaptation. Bass disdains the formulaic approach to screenwriting. "When I was a freshman at Stanford University," he recalls, "I took a course in the American novel from Wallace Stegner. He would talk about being in Paris with T.S. Eliot and Fitzgerald. I went up to him after class one day and said, 'Dr. Stegner, I want to be a writer. Which of the writing courses at this university should I take?' He said, 'Never take a writing course. I would never teach one and never take one. The moment you put someone else in the position of authority over you, you are accepting that there is a right and wrong way to do something. If it's going to come through you, it's got to come through you. Read everything you can read, steal everything you can steal. Be a sponge. But don't let someone tell you how to do it.' I've lectured at writing classes, and I've repeated that advice. When some screenwriting manual tells you, on page 62, the heroine's got to have a defeat, I laugh out loud."
On-the-job "stealing" and "sponging" are what Bass is happy to engage in. He's currently working with Steven Spielberg on adapting Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha, and has enthusiastically borrowed a writing strategy from his collaborator. "One technique Steven uses that I've never used before," Bass reveals, "is to color-code the story outline emotionally. If our lead character's principal emotion in a scene is happiness, we're going to write it in yellow. If it's envy, we'll write in green. If it's passion, it'll be red. If it's anger, it'll be purple. Steven feels that gives you an emotional landscape, and if you see too many scenes in a row that are the same color, you realize you may not want five consecutive scenes that are all about anger. Steven is a great guy to always learn something new from."
Ron Bass has perfected a savvy strategy that combines cleareyed thinking with just the right degree of deference. "I've been criticized two or three times by Joe Eszterhas," Bass says, "over something I said in an article in the Writers Guild journal several years ago. I said that ultimately, at the end of the day, the director's vision has to be served, and the writer has to help the director work toward it. I still stand by that. If you want final decision-making authority, you have to direct. I don't want to direct for a whole lot of reasons. I love working on 10 or 15 stories in a year instead of just one. I want to travel with my wife and go to my kids' plays. If you look at power as I think Eszterhas looks at power, as who's going to win in a head-to-head confrontation, I don't think the writer has that kind of clout in our business. If you look at power in a different way, as the capacity to persuade, the capacity to have the strength of your ideas heard and accepted, I think the writer can have a lot of power. This is a business that has to work by collaboration; it can't work by confrontation. I would say 90 percent of the time I feel very comfortable with the extent to which my opinion has been heard and respected. I haven't won every battle and I don't expect to."
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Stephen Farber wrote about action movies for the August '98 issue of Movieline.