Way back when it was politically and socially correct (before the sultan of Brunei bought the place), I used to stay at the gorgeous Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Not that it really matters, but back in the day, so did Michelle and Barack Obama.
I was heading into the restaurant at the Bel-Air late one night just when producers David Brown and Joe Wizan were leaving. They greeted me warmly. Years before, David and Joe had optioned my book The Midnight Club and sworn they were going to get it made.
That didn’t happen, although it got close, with Sylvester Stallone set to play the lead. But I liked Joe and David. Joe, who had once run 20th Century Fox, grinned and asked, “What are you working on now? Or are you resting on your laurel?”
“I’m still waiting for that first laurel, Joe, but I do have a new book I like.”
“Do tell,” said David Brown.
I told Joe and David about a smart, charismatic African-American detective named Alex Cross. I had just finished the second Cross novel, Kiss the Girls, and I spun the plot right there on the restaurant steps. The classic Hollywood elevator pitch, without the elevator, delivered in under two minutes.
Joe and David said, almost in one voice, “You’ve got to send it to us. Send it tomorrow. We’ll read it before end of day.”
I knew that probably meant some recent Stanford or USC grad would read Kiss the Girls sometime that month, but I sent Joe and David the book. I didn’t expect anything would come of it. It’s not unusual in Hollywood to get gushy enthusiasm for material before it gets read, and if it’s a novel, that typically means never.
But two days later, not only had David and Joe read Kiss the Girls, they’d bought it.
Next came the real miracle. Paramount got involved and it looked like the movie was actually going to be made. Morgan Freeman had agreed to play Alex Cross. We had a hot young director named Gary Fleder.
Now, I had been on set for a lot of commercials, but I’d never been on a big Hollywood studio’s movie set before. We were shooting in North Carolina. Everybody was super-polite to me. But I soon found out that on the movie set, the novelist rates somewhere below the caterer. They know why the caterer is there.
Ashley Judd was one of the leads in Kiss the Girls. She had left the University of Kentucky to start a career in films and she was smart and funny. A lot of Kiss the Girls was shot in the thick, buggy woods, and Ashley started calling it Kiss the Squirrels.
On the first day of shooting, Paramount still hadn’t cast one of the two villains. I was used to running buttoned-up commercial shoots at J. Walter Thompson, and I found the situation on Kiss the Girls, frankly, unbelievable. There were scenes with the villain later that week—and they hadn’t even cast the part.
That night I had dinner with David and Joe. They could see that I was agitated. David was an avuncular, college-professor type and very experienced in the film world. He’d run Paramount at one point. He proceeded to tell me that on a movie set, “The director is the pilot. Once you start shooting, you have to let the pilot fly the plane.”
I listened politely and nodded like I was ten years old, but I knew it was just more Hollywood bullshit. And David Brown, whom I respected, could shovel shit with the best of them.
I also knew that Paramount had sent a casting selection for the villain to the director, Gary Fleder. They wanted to hire Cary Elwes for the part. I thought Elwes was a fine choice.
At nine that night, Fleder still hadn’t even looked at the tape. Suddenly, Joe and David got up from the dinner table. They left me drinking my coffee and rushed off to the shoot to make the director look at the damn casting tape.
I sat at the table by myself, thinking, So much for letting the director fly the plane.