Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  Had I not called it “a deeply religious message,” I probably wouldn’t have issued a press release telling teenagers to bring their fake IDs to see it.

  Had I not told teenagers to bring their fake IDs, I would have avoided making a colossal asshole of myself.

  A hit movie! Showgirls! A hit movie!

  You have no idea how happy that would have made me!

  Because I had done something else tragically foolish, too.

  I had named the lead character of Showgirls “Nomi” … Nomi … Naomi’s childhood nickname … Nomi … the name I loved and was always going to call her in our most intimate moments.

  Until the movie came out and disastered and turned my true love’s childhood nickname into a national joke.

  No more “Nomi”!

  Now I never call the love of my life “Nomi” anymore!

  For the record … what I was thinking by saying Showgirls has “a deeply religious message” was this:

  At the end of the movie, Nomi Malone turns her back on stardom and leaves Vegas because of the amorality she has seen and experienced there.

  She has become a star as the result of participating in that amorality … but rejects her stardom … and that amoral world … and gets back on the road, hitchhiking out of town … with her own billboard looming above her.

  Whatever I was trying to do, I admit now that it was a dumb-ass thing to do.

  For the record … what I was thinking by telling teenagers to bring their fake IDs to get into the theaters to see Showgirls was this:

  There was nothing in the movie to harm them because I didn’t believe that either four-letter words or naked body parts would do any harm to teenagers.

  Since only those teenagers who look close to eighteen have fake IDs, I certainly wasn’t calling for ten- or fourteen-year-olds to see it.

  The movie, in my mind, for reasons I’ve explained above, has a moral message … it would be good for teenagers’ values to see Nomi Malone rejecting stardom and money because of the amorality which was its cost.

  It’s impossible to show the rejection of an amoral world without showing the amoralities which make someone reject it.

  Whatever I was thinking … I admit now that telling teenagers to bring their fake IDs to see Showgirls was a dumb-ass thing to say.

  V

  In the year 2000, I was fifty-six years old, a Hollywood screenwriter, the author of fifteen movies. Some of them (Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Flashdance) were some of the biggest box office hits of our time. Some (Showgirls, Jade, Sliver) were some of the biggest critical disasters in recent memory. Some were pretty good: Music Box, F.I.S.T., Telling Lies in America, Betrayed. Some were movies that I loved but few others did: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Big Shots. Some were movies that I hated: Nowhere to Run, Hearts of Fire.

  My movies had grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office. I had made millions and millions of dollars writing them. I had sold one script for $3 million, another for $3.7 million, another for $4.7 million.

  I was the only screenwriter in the history of Hollywood who had groupies.

  I was one of the few screenwriters in the history of Hollywood who were paid more for writing their scripts than some directors were for directing them.

  The New York Times headlined: “Big Bucks and Blondes—Joe Eszterhas Lives the American Dream.”

  ABC News called me “a living legend.” And Time magazine asked this question: “If Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Eszterhas?”

  I was “the Che Guevara of screenwriters” (Variety) and “the Andrew Dice Clay of screenwriters” (the New York Times).

  Details magazine said, “He is a sexually transmitted disease.”

  Another New York Times article said, “In his own way, Mr. Eszterhas is as much an object of fantasy as Sharon Stone.”

  In a story about the rock group U2, the Los Angeles Times wrote: “Remember when people thought Bono just wanted to be God? Now he wants to be Joe Eszterhas.”

  I got two thousand fan letters a week.

  The best fan letter I’d ever gotten came to me when I was a writer at Rolling Stone magazine in the seventies.

  A young woman wrote: “Do you want to come to Mars with me and play?”

  It was addressed to “Ms. Esther Has.”

  When I knew I was falling in love with Naomi, twenty years later, I asked Naomi the same question: “Do you want to come to Mars with me and play?”

  Fan letters and autographs and limos and groupies … I was in hog screenwriter heaven … I was insufferable!

  How insufferable was I?

  Well, I called one of my directors “a doddering old fuck.”

  How insufferable was I?

  At a meeting with a group of studio executives, I said, “You guys better get your hands off my dick and stop diddling me.”

  I was wearing an International Brotherhood of Teamsters jacket as I said that. Underneath the jacket was a black T-shirt with the words: “My inner child is a mean little fuck.”

  How insufferable was I?

  On my last movie, I wasn’t content with screen credits for screenwriting and executive-producing. I insisted that the first credit to be shown on-screen say: “Joe Eszterhas presents.”

  How insufferable was I?

  My hair was halfway down my back. I wore frayed jeans patched with red bandanas and a black hooded jacket with the words “Fuck You” at the top.

  How insufferable was I?

  I said to Robert Evans, “I’m not going to roll over and let him fuck me just because he’s the director and happens to be married to the head of the studio! You’ve rolled over so many times that it doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

  How insufferable was I?

  When I said that to him, Evans was (and still is) a dear friend of mine.

  I was such a big-shot screenwriter that, in San Rafael, California, as I was being wheeled into an ambulance after an artery in my nose burst …

  I saw a man on the street with his son pointing to me.

  “Look,” the man said, “there! That’s Joe Eszterhas!”

  His son said, “Where?”

  The man said, “There! Bleeding.”

  I was such a big-shot screenwriter that I could even keep Mick Jagger waiting.

  Mick was calling from Bali, trying to talk me into letting him get an early look at a script I had written about Otis Redding called Blaze of Glory.

  I told him that I really couldn’t do that … it wouldn’t be fair to the other producers, etc., etc. … enjoying every moment of it as Mick started to charm and nearly beg to have a shot to produce it.

  Here he was, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, the ultimate rock star of my generation, begging just to be able to read my words.

  So I finally said okay—he was, after all, Mick Jagger, the man every guy of my generation wanted to be. Naomi and I faxed every page of the script over to him in Bali and …

  He didn’t even call me back to tell me he didn’t like it.

  An assistant called three days later, to say that Mick had passed.

  Oh, well, it was worth what had been my opening line to him: “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.”

  A couple years later, Mick Jagger came around again. He was interested this time in acting, not producing … playing Alan Smithee, the title character in An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn.

  His assistant called the producer of our film.

  She said Mick had read the script and wanted to talk about it—not with me … but with the director, Arthur Hiller.

  The producer, who was a Jagger fan, told the assistant Mick shouldn’t meet with Arthur Hiller, who was in his seventies and hardly knew who Mick was.

  Mick, the producer said, should meet with Joe Eszterhas, who was a Mick Jagger freak and who had all the juice on this movie.

  The assistant spoke to Mick and called the producer back. Mick didn’t want to meet wit
h Joe Eszterhas, Mick said. Mick didn’t have meetings with screenwriters, Mick had meetings with directors.

  Besides, the assistant said, Mick had some script ideas. Maybe Arthur Hiller would hear them and decide to bring in a new screenwriter.

  The producer told me what Mick Jagger’s assistant had said and I asked Arthur Hiller if he wanted to meet with Mick.

  “Not especially,” Arthur Hiller said and tried to talk me into letting his friend Michael York play the part.

  In my insufferable way, I told the producer … to tell Mick’s assistant … to tell Mick, Jumpin’ Jack Flash himself … to go fuck himself.

  I was such a big-shot screenwriter that, in a little Mississippi town near Memphis, I accomplished something Tom Cruise and Danny DeVito couldn’t do. I called my boyhood idol Jerry Lee Lewis, introduced myself, told him I was in town, and he said sure, come on over.

  I heard later that Cruise and DeVito had made similar calls but Jerry Lee didn’t like Cruise’s work and he thought DeVito was “a pygmy,” so he wouldn’t see them.

  When I got to his ranch, Jerry Lee came out from behind the steel door of the bedroom he spent most of his time in, wearing a white terry cloth robe and panda slippers. He had an unlighted Dunhill pipe in his mouth.

  We looked like two aging geezers who’d seen too many miles of bumpy, potholed road. Two aging geezers who’d used too many unhealthy substances to cushion the bumps.

  “Basic Instinct—that’s one of my favorite movies,” Jerry Lee Lewis said.

  Then he said, “You know that shot where she sticks her whatchamacallit into the camera? Did they have to shoot that for a long time?”

  “How does it feel,” an assistant to a director said to me in those post-Showgirls days, “to be the most reviled man in America?”

  I smiled and said, insufferably, “You mean I’m worse even than O.J.?”

  She turned archly away and said nothing.

  It didn’t help that in the week after he was found not guilty and got out of jail, O. J. Simpson went to see two movies: Showgirls and Jade.

  VI

  I had very personal reasons for being insufferable.

  Screenwriters historically have been treated like discarded hookers in Hollywood: not invited to the premieres of their own movies, cheated out of residual payments, blackballed for their political beliefs.

  Many had been treated like hookers because they hooked—working, as the lawyer-turned-successful-screenwriter Ron Bass said, “to serve the director’s vision.”

  I wasn’t there to “serve the director’s vision.” As far as I was concerned, the vision was mine and the director was there to serve it: to translate my vision to the screen.

  Film critics and film writers insisted that the director was the auteur of the film, even if the director didn’t write the film … that a film was “by” Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, not by Melissa Mathison and Paul Schrader. I knew that most film critics and film writers were failed screenwriters who sometimes even forced the screenplays they were clutching on the directors they interviewed … so I questioned film critics’ motives: here they were, earning their paltry wages, living in their garrets, while screenwriters like me were earning fortunes and living on Maui and in Malibu.

  I learned that I shouldn’t expect praise from people who either turned green or livid at the mention of my name.

  At a graduate school film seminar, Costa-Gavras was asked why one of the characters in Music Box behaved a certain way.

  “Ask Joe,” Costa-Gavras said. “He wrote him that way.”

  Then another grad student … and another … and another asked the same question.

  “I realized they didn’t understand,” Costa-Gavras told me. “No matter how many times I said that I shot your script and put your story and your characters on-screen, they had been turned into film school robots who considered me the auteur.”

  I wrote a movie in which two characters were little kids. I named them Steve and Suzi, the names of my first two kids.

  Steve and Suzi were happy their names would be on the big screen. We went to the premiere of the movie together and we all sat waiting excitedly for their big moment.

  And when it came, “Steve” and “Suzi” weren’t in the movie.

  “David” and “Jessica” were.

  Steve and Suzi were heartbroken and so was I.

  In the lobby after the premiere, the director introduced Steve and Suzi to his two beautiful kids … David and Jessica.

  We all shook hands and the director said we should get Steve and Suzi together with David and Jessica, who were about the same age.

  We all said that was a terrific idea!

  But somehow or other Steve and Suzi and David and Jessica and the director and I never saw each other again.

  Fueled by my anger, I not only pushed my agents into achieving a series of screenwriting breakthroughs, but also made sure the breakthroughs were publicized.

  I made record amounts of money on several script sales and kept breaking my own records.

  I was the first screenwriter in history to get first dollar gross points (a percentage of every dollar brought in at the box office)—Tom Cruise points—from his movie.

  My travel budget for each of my scripts included first-class tickets for me, my wife, and my children … it also included a limo standing by wherever we traveled … two bedroom suites at hotels like the Dorchester in London, the Dolder Grand in Zurich, the King David in Jerusalem, the Ritz in Paris … Concorde tickets for all of us to Europe and back.

  As opposed to other screenwriters, I held on to the book and theatrical rights to my scripts.

  I had to be given the same access to the media as the director and the producer—if they did a publicity junket, I had to be there with them at all the junket’s stops.

  When I traveled to publicize a movie, my own publicist had to travel with me. All interview requests had to be handled by my own publicity person, not by the studio’s.

  “From Joe Eszterhas” was the bold black line which appeared on the publicity poster (what we call the “one sheet”) on my last movie, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn.

  It was the first time in history a screenwriter had been granted this line by the studio.

  “From Joe Eszterhas” also had to appear boldly on all merchandise connected to the movie: T-shirts, bumper stickers, coasters, matches.

  An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn … crashed and burned both critically and commercially.

  But I have hundreds of T-shirts … thousands of bumper stickers … scores of coasters … boxes full of matches that say … in case I forget … “From Joe Eszterhas”!

  Liz Smith wrote, “Showgirls is the reportedly sensational film about strippers that will carry the dreaded NC-17 rating when it is released. Controversy enough? Don’t be silly. The real hot topic over Showgirls has nothing to do with breasts and buttocks. It is the placement of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’s name on-screen that has everybody atingle.

  “Eszterhas will see his name appear right before that of director Paul Verhoeven. And after that of Alan Marshall and Charles Evans—they are the producers of Showgirls.

  “In the movie industry this is causing a riot. The idea that writers should receive such powerful billing in film credits has producers all over Hollywood acting crazier than ever.

  “Writers, on the other hand, are smiling like Cheshire cats that swallowed the whole canary.”

  Having said all those insufferable things about directors, I have to admit, too, that I am one of the few screenwriters who have worked with the same director twice.

  Not only that, but I’ve worked twice with three different directors: Costa-Gavras (Betrayed and Music Box); Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Showgirls); Richard Marquand (Jagged Edge, Hearts of Fire).

  That means not all directors are lying, self-focused, pretentious, homicidal filmmakers.

  That also means I am not completely insufferable.


  I was overwhelmed by the money I was making writing screenplays. We were so poor when I was a kid that we mostly ate canned soup for dinner, with occasional fried baloney galas. The clothes my father, my mother, and I wore were from the Salvation Army, the Volunteers of America, or from the St. Vincent DePaul Society.

  My shoes were usually so loose that my socks kept slipping down and I had to keep bending down to pull them up. I wore a winter overcoat that was four sizes too big—another kid could have fit under it with me.

  In the refugee camps in Austria, we ate pine needle soup for a month and one day my father went through his pockets for crumbs, found some, and gave them to me. I ate them.

  VII

  Like most Hollywood stars, I even had blond highlights streaked into my hair. My ex-wife took one look at me and said, “Now you look just like Naomi!”

  I told her I didn’t really think that was fair to Naomi.

  Gerri harrumphed.

  My first wife, Gerri Javor, and I were married twenty-four years. We had two beautiful children. We grew apart. We divorced.

  Gerri and Naomi had a lot in common. They both grew up in small-town Ohio in rusty steel towns: Naomi in Mansfield, Gerri in Lorain. They were both journalism majors at Ohio State University in Columbus. They both worked for the school newspaper, The Lantern, and both took photographs of Woody Hayes–coached football teams. They were both Catholics who had gone to Catholic schools. They were both of Central European ethnic origin: Gerri was part Hungarian, part Slovak.

  Perhaps most remarkably, twenty years apart, they had both been grabbed at Ohio State by a hooded would-be rapist who knocked them into the snow and then was frightened off by their screams.

  After college, they both went on to work for Ohio newspapers: Naomi for the Columbus Dispatch, Gerri for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

  My father met Gerri Javor before I did. I was still at Ohio University when she was the nationalities editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and wrote an article about Hungarians’ mistreatment of Slovaks after World War I.

  My father, a Hungarian writer and nationalist and the president of the Committee for Hungarian Liberation, took great umbrage at Gerri Javor’s article and organized a petition drive to get her fired. He asked me to translate the petition from Hungarian to English.