Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  “I’ll withdraw with you,” he said.

  I knew that if Irwin withdrew, he wouldn’t be paid because the movie wasn’t yet in production. I would be paid because my payment was for having already written the script. I told him he didn’t have to do that.

  “The only reason I’m involved in this is because of you,” Irwin said. “I don’t want to work with Verhoeven. God knows what this movie is going to look like when he is done. If I withdraw with you, you’re not going to look as bad. No one’s ever accused me of being hard to work with. If I pull out, too, it’ll signal that you’re right to a lot of people.”

  I knew he was withdrawing to help me. I thanked him and called Guy to tell him Irwin was withdrawing as well.

  Guy said, “What if I can convince Carolco to take their three mil back and give us the project back?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “That’d be great!”

  “Hold on,” Guy said. “Understand that if we get the script back, and try to sell it again, we might not get as much as the first time. It’ll look to some people like something’s wrong, like it’s got the clap.”

  “Do it,” I said.

  But Carolco refused to give the project back to me and the next morning’s Variety had another banner headline: “ESZTERHAS, WINKLER WITHDRAW FROM BASIC.”

  I issued a statement:

  Due to philosophical and personal differences with the director Paul Verhoeven, I have decided to withdraw from Basic Instinct.

  At a meeting with Verhoeven and Michael Douglas on August 8, it became clear to me that Verhoeven’s intention is to make Basic as a sexually explicit thriller.

  In a current issue of Premiere magazine, he discusses his willingness to show an erect penis on-screen.

  My intention when I wrote the script was that it be a psychological mystery with the love scenes done subtly. Every love scene in my script begins with the words: “It is dark; we can’t see clearly.” On a personal level, I discovered Verhoeven’s attitude toward the collaborative process was, as he very loudly explained it to me, “I am the director, ja? I am right and you are wrong, ja?”

  The wires picked it up because of the record script sale and the story blasted its way into the daily papers.

  Guy told me Mario Kassar was so angry he was threatening to sue me for “publicly injuring” the project he’d paid $3 million for.

  I went back to Marin and heard that Paul was working with Gary Goldman, a screenwriter friend of his, on the rewrite.

  Meanwhile, Carolco was trying to cast the part of Catherine Tramell and was having problems. Lena Olin called Mario Kassar after a meeting with Verhoeven and said she liked the script but couldn’t work with Paul. Most actresses, afraid of the nudity and Paul’s decision to make the movie sexually explicit, were turning it down. Kelly McGillis and Mariel Hemingway wanted to do it but had done screen tests that weren’t very good.

  And then there was Sharon Stone. She was a B movie starlet who had worked with Paul on Total Recall. A former model, she’d scratched and clawed for more than a decade trying to get star parts in movies. None of it had worked.

  Her agents described her this way: “If she can get into the room, she’ll close the deal.” A producer told me, “She knocked on my door at midnight at the Deauville Film Festival. I wouldn’t let her in.”

  Sharon Stone was in love with the script, in love with the part, and campaigning to get it. She did a screen test that Verhoeven and everyone at Carolco loved. But they were reluctant to cast her.

  A few months after Irwin and I pulled out of Basic, Andy Vajna, the head of the production company Cinergi, called to tell me of a lunch he’d had with Verhoeven. Paul told him he wanted to send me the final Basic Instinct shooting script.

  “What does he want me to do?” I asked Andy. “Have a stroke while reading it?”

  “He says he didn’t change your script,” Andy said.

  I said, “I bet he says that to all the girls.”

  I got the final shooting script from Verhoeven and as I was reading it, I thought Verhoeven had mistakenly sent me the wrong draft. But there it was—on the front page, “Final Shooting Script.”

  Because not a word had been changed.

  It was my first draft, word for word, scene for scene, even with the exact ending that Michael Douglas had so disliked.

  I called Verhoeven and asked, “Is this some kind of joke you sent me?”

  He very affably said that it was no joke—it really was the final shooting script. He said that he and Gary Goldman had done two or three drafts that hadn’t worked and at the end of that process, he’d realized that my original script was “genius.”

  Paul said he had then convinced Michael Douglas and now even Michael “loved” the script.

  I was so bewildered I didn’t know what to say.

  “How do you feel about coming back in?” Paul asked.

  Well, I said, still dazed, I guessed I felt fine about that.

  I asked about bringing Irwin back in as well and Paul said that it was unfortunately too late for that, he had brought in his own producer, Alan Marshall, a line producer with a take-no-nonsense reputation.

  I went down to L.A. a few days later and Paul, Guy, Michael Douglas, and I had a very public prime-table dinner at Morton’s.

  Paul said how pleased he was that Carolco had finally decided to cast Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell.

  “She is Catherine Tramell,” Paul said.

  Since Catherine Tramell was an ice-pick-wielding, manipulative, omnisexual, sociopathic killer, I asked Paul what exactly he meant by that.

  “Sharon is evil,” he said.

  “You mean as Catherine Tramell.”

  “No, as Sharon.” Paul laughed. “She is perfect.”

  The next day Paul and I met with Daily Variety and Paul publicly welcomed me back to the project. He said he had made a “mistake.” He hadn’t understood “the basement, the foundation” of my script. I was impressed. The same man who had yelled “I am the director, ja?” at me was now publicly saying he’d made a mistake. I didn’t know of many directors who’d make such an admission privately, let alone publicly.

  This was some kind of screenwriter’s dream I was living here: first $3 million for a script, then a public admission from the director that he had screwed up.

  Sure enough, there it was on the front page of Daily Variety the next day: “VERHOEVEN ADMITS TO MAKING ‘BASIC’ MISTAKE.”

  A few days before the shoot began in San Francisco, I went to an actors’ read-through at a Fisherman’s Wharf hotel.

  Michael was there, looking trim and tan after a few weeks in the sun in Mexico … “I’m gonna go down to Mexico and get beautiful,” he had told me at Morton’s … George Dzundza … I’d seen Willie Nelson in the Dzundza part when I wrote it … the willowy and dark Jeanne Tripplehorn … was it possible there were already sparks between Michael and Tripplehorn?

  And Sharon Stone.

  She was wearing a sweat suit and didn’t strike me as being a sex goddess. She had a cuddly, little-girlish quality about her and an open freshness.

  “Who am I?” she asked me, wearing Catherine Tramell’s shoes.

  “You’re charming and warm,” I said. “And you’ve got a great smile. And you’re manipulative and cold and enjoy hurting and killing people. You are evil.”

  She held my eyes and she said, “Yes!” and we laughed. I liked her.

  She flashed me that wonderful smile and she said, “You’re so sly.”

  “Why?”

  “Catherine’s last name. Tramell. I researched it. I know what it means.”

  I smiled at how proud she seemed of herself.

  “What does it mean?”

  “You know what it means,” she said.

  We were smiling at each other.

  “Will somebody end the suspense, please?” Michael Douglas said.

  “A tramell is a funeral shroud in Scottish mythology,” Sharon said. “Isn’t t
hat brilliant?”

  “That’s very good,” Paul said to me.

  Michael said, “I’m impressed.”

  “Actually,” I said to Sharon, “I didn’t know that. I like to name my characters after baseball players. Alan Trammell of the Tigers is one of my favorites.”

  “Oh don’t you try pulling that stuff with me!” Sharon said, suddenly an irate little girl, and we all laughed.

  · · ·

  As the shoot approached, there were stories in the papers that San Francisco’s large and politically powerful gay community was going to mount a major protest against the movie. The trouble had begun with a Liz Smith column that described the script as being about “ice-pick-wielding lesbians.”

  Though I’d lived in the Bay Area for nearly twenty years and though I’d made many gay friends, I wasn’t concerned about the protests.

  To begin with, I didn’t consider Catherine Tramell to be a lesbian. She was clearly bisexual in the script, which to me meant that she was both heterosexual and homosexual. To say that this was an ugly negative portrayal of a homosexual was, I felt, silly.

  The real point to me, as I saw her character, was that she was psychotically omnisexual. She used her sex and her brains for manipulation.

  It was the manipulation and the seduction that she really enjoyed, not the sex.

  A group of prominent gay community leaders approached Paul and asked him to have a meeting with them to discuss the script. Paul turned them down.

  Angry at being flatly rebuffed, they called me. I knew some of them … I particularly admired one of them, San Francisco supervisor Harry Britt … and said I had no problem sitting down with them.

  I called Paul at his hotel on the wharf and told him I thought we should sit down for a meeting with the gay leaders.

  “I am not sitting down with anybody!” he said. “This is censorship. I will not allow a political action committee to stop my creative expression!”

  I said, “You don’t have to agree with them. What’s wrong with an exchange of ideas?”

  “They are blackmailing me to attend this meeting by threatening their protests. I will not be blackmailed and I will not attend!”

  He sounded like he was back in his “I am the director, ja?” mode.

  “Well fine,” I said. “If you don’t want to sit down with them, then I will.”

  “You are a traitor!” he yelled. “You are betraying me!”

  Mario Kassar called Guy moments later, screaming, threatening to sue me again.

  “Well, I’m sitting in the bunker again,” Guy said to me. “I’m thinking about taking the next plane to Paraguay.”

  The San Francisco papers carried the story prominently. There would be a meeting with gay protesters. The screenwriter would be there, but the director wouldn’t.

  Paul called me screaming. “What are you doing to me? Now I have to go!”

  I was getting tired of it.

  “You don’t have to go,” I said. “You do what you have to do. I’m going.”

  “I will look like an asshole if I don’t go,” Paul said. “You are making me look like an asshole, ja?”

  I said, “You are an asshole if you don’t go.”

  “What?” Paul Verhoeven sputtered. “What? I am not an asshole!”

  “Fine,” I said, “then I’ll see you there.”

  I got to the meeting, held in a conference room at a San Francisco hotel, a couple minutes late.

  Paul and his producer, Alan Marshall, a big, bearded New Zealander, were sitting at one end of a very long table with a Carolco PR man and two local PR guys, both gay, both clearly here to mollify the gay community.

  Sitting very far away, at the other end of the table, were about a dozen people … Harry Britt among them … men and women, mostly very young, a couple of them wearing cool Queer Nation T-shirts.

  I introduced myself and picked an empty chair among the protesters, sitting with them … facing Paul.

  The Carolco PR man began to spiel about making a corporate contribution to a local AIDS fund and I laughed to myself. It was a simple-minded, insulting gesture, a bribe offer, really, and Harry Britt nicely backhanded it by saying he wasn’t there to discuss AIDS, he was there to discuss Basic Instinct.

  “There is nothing to talk about except this,” Paul said. “I am not a racist! I am not a homophobe! I will make the movie I want to make! You will not tell me what to make! I will not accept censorship!”

  It was the worst way to begin, exacerbated, I saw, by his style and his accent. The style was blazing hot and, to my ears, the accent awfully Germanic.

  I knew Paul Verhoeven hated the Nazis, I knew he had even been the victim of Nazi bombings as a child, but he acted and sounded like the stereotypical screen Nazi.

  “Paul,” I said, “I don’t think anybody here wants to censor you. I don’t think anybody in this room believes in censorship, but I, at least, as the screenwriter, want to hear how people here feel about the script. There can be no harm in listening.”

  Alan Marshall was glaring at me.

  Paul, I could tell, didn’t even want to look at me.

  The people in the room had gotten the script somehow and started to talk about it. They viewed Catherine Tramell as a lesbian and felt her depiction to be negative.

  Since she was, the script implied, having sex with a woman friend (Roxy) who was a convicted murderer, they saw two lesbian killers in my script.

  They thought the reference to Catherine and Roxy by the George Dzundza character as “dykes” was offensive.

  They believed Michael’s sexual scene with Tripplehorn to be “date rape” and felt that showing date rape on-screen would lead to real-life imitation of it.

  I argued that neither Catherine nor Roxy were lesbians but bisexuals—part straight and part gay—so it wasn’t fair to view them simplistically as gay.

  But as far as the group in the room was concerned, bisexual was gay.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If someone is bisexual, he or she is not just homosexual—he or she is also heterosexual.”

  “If they’re bisexual, they’re gay,” someone said.

  “By whose definition?” I asked.

  “By ours.”

  “I don’t agree with the definition,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” someone said. “If you were gay, you’d know what you were talking about.”

  “What does that mean?” I said. “Does that mean only gay writers can write about gay characters?”

  “Yes,” someone said.

  I said, “Aw, come on. That means Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee can’t write about heterosexual characters. That means they shouldn’t have written their plays.”

  No one said anything to that.

  Paul said to the group, “Do you mean that gay people on the screen can’t be bad people? Gay people on the screen have to be saints? Are there no bad people in real life who are gay?”

  “Why do they always have to be bad people on-screen?” Harry Britt said. “Why haven’t there been any movies where the good guy just happens to be gay? Why haven’t we seen any action heroes ever—who just happen to be gay?”

  Harry went into a very moving description of his childhood in Port Arthur, Texas. “The only gay role model I had growing up,” he said, “was Liberace. Why aren’t there ever any gay role models in the movies?”

  “You’ve got two lesbians in this movie,” somebody said to me, “they’re both killers.”

  “Even if you view Catherine and Roxy as both lesbians,” I said, “and I disagree with you … that’s not true. By your definition, you have the police psychiatrist, the Tripplehorn character—by your definition, she’s lesbian, too, and she’s a victim, not a killer.”

  Somebody said, “If we’re not killers in movies, then we’re victims. Why does it have to be that way?”

  Somebody else said, “What do you mean the Tripplehorn character isn’t a killer? She’s revealed as the killer at t
he end of the movie!”

  I said, “No, she’s not, Catherine’s the killer,” and I suddenly realized that Basic was such a tangled mystery that some people here didn’t know who the real killer was.

  As I watched the young people in this group, I was moved by their passion and their conviction. I had always identified with blacks and Jews and gay people … the words “nigger” and “kike” and “faggot” weren’t far from the “greenhorn” and “hunkie” and “queer” that I’d heard as a child and as an adolescent.

  “Why do we have to have these ‘dyke’ references in the dialogue?” somebody asked me.

  I explained that the words came out of the mouth of a veteran, hard-boiled old-school cop and that, realistically, George Dzundza’s character would use that word.

  “But why do we have to hear it on a screen?” someone else said. “We hear it so often in real life.”

  I thought about those words that had hurt me so much as a kid and I suddenly said, “Maybe you’re right.”

  Paul said to me, “What do mean she’s right? It’s part of your character’s language. You just said so.”

  “He doesn’t absolutely have to use the word ‘dyke’ for us to understand his character,” I said.

  There was silence in the room.

  Paul and I were looking at each other.

  His look said: Traitor, how can you be doing this to me?

  Harry Britt looked at me and said, simply, “Thank you.”

  “Let me look through the script,” I said. “Maybe I can find some changes that don’t affect the plot or the characterization.”

  “No,” Paul said, his voice rising. “We will make no changes! I am the director! I am shooting the movie I want to shoot and I want no changes!”

  “This isn’t your baby,” I said to him. “It’s mine. If I want to make changes to my script, I can.”

  “You can make all the changes you want,” Paul said, “but I am not putting them into the movie.”

  Then he turned to the group and he said, “I will not make a movie you will find offensive. I will not make a movie the public finds offensive to you. Your date-rape scene, for example—it will be obvious to everyone that scene will be consensual sex, not date rape.”

  “How do we know that?” someone asked.