Hollywood War Stories

It's all about passion

If you audition for a role as an actor, test your comedy routine, pitch an idea, sing or play your song,  its all about how much energy, perhaps humor, and certainly passion you put into that effort.

A good example was Noomi Rapace, a Swedish actress, who wanted to play the part of Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,the first film in a trilogy made from one of the best selling novels in history. Being naturally voluptuous (which she was in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), she didn’t have a prayer to land the role of an anorectic, ninety-nine-pound bi-sexual punk. She lost fifty pounds, died her hair ink black and styled it in a faux hawk, got tattoos and piercings, and forced the producers to give her a shot.

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Claire Townsend, labeled one of the top seven “baby moguls” in the L.A. Times, was a Vice President of Production at Twentieth Century Fox.  She was singularly responsible for Fox making Quest for Fire. I was amazed. I asked her, “How the hell did you sell a screenplay with no dialogue? Monkeys grunting through an entire movie?!” Her answer: “It was the passion of the filmmaker (Jean-Jacques Annaud.) He got up on my coffee table and acted out the entire script.”

Claire started as a reader for a hundred bucks a week for a major producer. He treated her like a slave. Although fearful of him, she wanted to write a tell-all book about Hollywood swine. Little did she know that she would soon contract breast cancer and die. Through it all, Claire taught me a huge lesson: It’s all about passion. Crashing the Gates.  Breaking the Waves. Making something out of nothing. Surviving.  Rest in peace dear Claire.

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My writing partner, Dick Chudnow, and I completed a screenplay called 1775, which attributes the Revolutionary War to a circulation battle between the British establishment newspaper, edited by Thomas Pepys, and the fledgling Revolutionary American rag, edited by Thomas Paine. It was a a comedic vision of history.

 We met with two vice presidents of United Artists, Willie Hunt and John Tarnoff, who had both  liked our movie KGOD/aks PRAY TV and were comedy fans.  We felt we were in a receptive room.  We had them laughing their tails off and felt we nailed it. Willie, relaxing after a final laugh, looked at Tarnoff, then back at us. She said, “That is the funniest pitch I’ve ever heard,” then continued, “We’ll never make that movie. No one at this studio would understand it; it’s a period piece, which is expensive; and, although all the characters are hysterical, this studio was built by movie stars. This is a youth movie, with an ensemble cast, and they’ll just never get it.”

We know we gave it our all because we believed in it so passionately. It just wasn’t the right place to pitch.  

There’s passion fruit, the passion of love (which you may or may not confuse with the sex part), and, according to Mel Gibson, the passion of the Christ. Use any or all of them plus props, trendy clothes and tap shoes if you can tap dance, and, above all, your soul. Because, along with that pitch, that audition, that song, that stand-up routine, or the video you show, its all about the passion you display that, more often than not, becomes infectious to those listening to you.