“Because I tell you,” Paul said.
“How do we know that’s true?”
“Trust me,” Paul said.
Harry Britt said, “That’s just not good enough.”
It was all over the television news in San Francisco that night—Eszterhas was willing to make changes, but Verhoeven wasn’t.
I saw myself interviewed, saying, “They made some points I agreed with.”
The next day the papers played Paul as the bad guy and said I’d become a hero to the gay community.
Mario Kassar called Guy and said, “That’s it! I’m suing him!”
“If you sue him,” Guy said, “you’re going to have every gay militant between California and Paris on the set of your movie.”
“Fuck him!” Mario Kassar screamed. “I’m going to put a contract out on him!”
“What did you say?” Guy McElwaine screamed so loudly that the secretaries down the hall heard him.
“Oh for God’s sake, Guy,” Mario said. “You know I’m not going to do anything like that. But why is he doing this to me? I paid him three million dollars to do this to me?”
The New York Times did a story about the San Francisco protests of Basic Instinct which pointed out that this was probably the first time a screenwriter was battling to change his own words … against a director who wanted to use the screenwriter’s words unchanged. The New York Times also pointed out that this was the same screenwriter who’d walked off the project because this same director wanted to change his words.
I sent Paul a series of changes which, I felt, violated neither the story nor the characters.
Paul once again said publicly that he would make no changes.
A columnist who applauded Paul’s position said this was the first known case of a director maintaining the integrity of a script against the efforts of a screenwriter who wanted to destroy what he’d written.
The protests began as the movie started shooting. The protesters carried signs and yelled loudly and blew whistles but were, I thought, harmless. Alan Marshall didn’t think so, however, and started making “citizen’s arrests” of kids in Queer Nation T-shirts and carrying them to nearby police vans.
I couldn’t believe that the producer of a Hollywood movie was actually carrying out “citizen’s arrests” on the streets of San Francisco and attacked Alan for using “Nazi tactics.” I referred publicly to a book in which Bill Cosby, who’d worked with Marshall, called him a “racist.”
My criticism of Alan Marshall caused a trash fest in the press. Michael Douglas, an icon of liberal politics who had become the main target of the protesters, called me a bunch of names in a national magazine, the nicest of which was “opportunist.”
Paul was quoted as saying that since I lived in the Bay Area, I was physically afraid of the wrath of the gay community. (When Basic Instinct was released, I heard Paul sandbagged parts of his Pacific Palisades home, afraid of being physically harmed by Queer Nation kamikaze squads.)
Paul kept filming. He suffered a nosebleed one day which required hospitalization and my spies said Michael Douglas had punched him, although Paul denied it. (Not that unusual in Hollywood: Sly Stallone broke several of director Ted Kotcheff’s ribs on First Blood.)
Stone and Michael were at each other’s throats.
I remembered Michael’s complaint that “she one-ups me every time” … when I heard that, in a scene near the end of the movie, he refused to move toward Sharon, but insisted Stone move toward him. Stone refused to do it and Paul was forced to shoot it both ways.
At the end of the shoot, still trying to mend fences, Michael attended a gala San Francisco AIDS benefit, sat on the dais, and announced a big-buck donation.
I was invited to no screenings and was left off the invitation list for the premiere. Gay groups announced massive protests in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles for opening night. T-shirts were made that said “Catherine Did It” and kids with Queer Nation T-shirts and loudspeakers walked up and down San Francisco streets saying “Don’t See It—Catherine Did It!” hoping to ruin the mystery and the box office.
I saw the movie on opening night in my local Marin County theater with Gerri and Steve and Suzi. I stood in line, paid money to see my own movie, bought everybody popcorn, and sat down. A bank of TV lights waited outside for my reaction.
When it was over, I walked outside and stepped to the cameras and said, “I loved it. Paul Verhoeven has directed a brilliant movie. My hat’s off to him. He was right when he said there wouldn’t be anything injurious in this movie to gay people.”
The public agreed with me. The movie opened huge—$15 million in 1992—against sometimes fulminating reviews. The protests ended after two days.
While protesters were right about harmful Hollywood depictions of gay people, many of them soon realized they’d picked the wrong movie as their target. They should have gone after Bird on a Wire with Mel Gibson instead of Basic Instinct.
I did notice, though, as I watched the movie, that Paul had removed all the references to “dykes” in the dialogue just as I’d suggested.
As we walked out of that Corte Madera Theatre, Steve, my fifteen-year-old son, seemed orgasmic.
“Dad! Dad!” Steve said. “How did you come up with that scene where she crosses her legs?”
It was the scene which my friend Robert Evans would refer to as “the hundred-million-dollar pussy-hair shot.”
I realized I was at a cathartic moment with my son. Why oh why had I told my kids I’d never lie to them?
“I didn’t,” I said.
He said, “What?”
I said, “It wasn’t in the script. It was Paul’s idea. In the previous scene in the script, as Sharon was getting dressed, Michael saw that she wasn’t wearing underwear. But to have that flash of hair in the interrogation scene, that was Paul’s idea.”
Steve seemed shocked.
The most controversial, most talked about scene in the movie, wasn’t even his father’s idea.
I sent Paul Verhoeven a case of champagne congratulating him and told the L.A. Times that “Paul was right and I was wrong” about the points the protesters had argued. Basic Instinct, I said, was in no way a homophobic movie.
Now some of the leaders of the gay community were calling me a “traitor” and accusing me of “using and betraying” them.
I noticed that in the interviews that he did, Michael Douglas seemed somehow befuddled about the movie’s success. He kept talking about “redemption” and how this movie had no “redemptive value.”
I noticed, too, that a lot of people who had seen the movie were coming to me and asking whodunit? They’d enjoyed the movie but weren’t sure who the killer was.
It reminded me of Jagged Edge, where Siskel and Ebert had set off a national guessing game by saying they weren’t sure that it was Jeff Bridges who was wearing the ski mask in the final scene of the movie.
· · ·
A woman in Toledo, Ohio, who saw Basic killed her husband by sticking an ice pick into his heart.
She had seen the movie.
The media was all over me.
I told them he probably died a faster and less painful death than if she had used a butcher knife or a gun.
Basic Instinct, the script I’d written in three weeks, went on to gross more than $400 million around the world. It was the number one box office hit of the year in both the United States and around the world. A French news magazine picked it as the event of the year. Not the movie event of the year. The news event of the year. The magazine said that a hundred years from now, 1992 would be remembered as the year Basic Instinct was released.
Ah, the French! In France, Mickey Rourke is a superstar.
Thanks to Basic Instinct, Gerri, Steve and Suzi, and I were undergoing a very personal crisis in Tiburon.
Gerri’s brother, Bob, developed schizophrenia in his early twenties. “Voices” took over his life. “God” began speaking to him, telling him, among other
things, to build a cuckoo clock with the figures of the apostles.
Among the “other things” was the notion that I was “killing God and America” with the movies I was writing and that I was “fornicating with harlots.”
When I wrote Big Shots, a movie about a white and a black kid learning to be friends, “God” whispered to my brother-in-law that I was Satan and that Steve and Suzi were “Satan’s spawn.” This was because “God” told Bob that “the color black represented evil.”
His condition worsened and Bob entered a psychiatric hospital in Ohio.
Just before Basic Instinct’s release, I got a phone call from the doctors at the psychiatric hospital. They told me to flee my house in Tiburon with my wife and kids. My brother-in-law had broken out of the hospital, stolen his mother’s car, grabbed two rifles from the attic, and was headed west to kill me.
He had seen some television ads for Basic. “God” told Bob he didn’t like the ads for Basic. “God” talked to Bob about “harlots and Satan.”
It wasn’t easy to flee my house. My eighty-two-year-old father was in an upstairs room with round-the-clock nursing recuperating from a heart valve replacement. My kids were in high school. I had other scripts to write.
Instead of fleeing, I hired an army of private detectives and security agents. Armed guards stood in front of our house. Camouflaged agents with high-scope rifles prowled the fields in back. They started wearing bulletproof vests after the private eyes discovered that my brother-in-law had won an expert marksman award while at a private military school in his teens.
There were guns and shotguns hidden in different parts of our house in Tiburon—under pillows and couches, atop cupboards.
We waited and cowered. Nothing happened. There was no trace of my brother-in-law, although police agencies had been notified across the country.
Suzi, I saw, was petrified and I realized I couldn’t do this to my kids any longer. We decided to flee to a hotel in Hawaii, leaving the security army behind to guard my father, the nurses, and the house. The high school my kids attended distributed mug shots of my brother-in-law to all the teachers.
Three weeks later, while we were in Hawaii, my brother-in-law called a relative in Ohio. He was in Mexico City. He was broke. He needed money.
I sent two of the security agents—off-duty federal marshals—to Mexico City. They found my brother-in-law at his fleabag hotel and “observed” him. He spent much of his time in the hotel lobby, ranting and raving about God and Satan and Big Shots and Basic Instinct and me.
My security agents had a legal problem. They couldn’t just kidnap him and take Bob back to his Ohio psychiatrists. They had to get my brother-in-law across the border legally somehow.
I called Robert Evans. I knew that Evans had ties to the Bush White House, especially to press secretary Marlin Fitzwater. I told him about my brother-in-law problem. He went to Fitzwater, who got the ambassador to Mexico involved. FBI agents and Mexican federales hooked up with my security agents in Mexico City.
My brother-in-law was arrested for vagrancy and taken to jail. He was left there for three days. After three days, my security agents went to see him. They gave him a choice. He could either rot in that Mexican jail or he could accompany them back to his psychiatric hospital in Ohio. Bob didn’t much like that Mexican jail. He agreed to accompany my security agents.
The security agents handcuffed him and sat on the plane with him to Ohio. The plane stopped in Houston, although, thanks to Fitzwater, they didn’t even have to get off and go through Customs.
As the others were getting off the plane in Houston, Bob started raving at the black people passing him, black people who were “the color of evil.” He ranted and raved about Basic Instinct. He asked the other passengers if they’d seen Basic. He told them they’d go to hell if they did.
When the plane landed in Cleveland, my security agents whisked my brother-in-law to a limo I’d hired standing by the plane. The limo drove him to his psychiatric hospital. When they got there, my brother-in-law, still handcuffed, head-butted one of the security guards and made a run for it. When they dragged him inside, he was yelling, “Joe is Satan. Joe Eszterhas is Satan.”
My private detectives found his car abandoned at the side of the road in Connecticut. They found the two rifles, recently oiled and loaded, in a locker at the Greyhound station in Houston, where Bob had left them on the way into Mexico.
Seven months after I sold Basic, I wrote another spec script—this one called Original Sin, a thriller about lovers who’d met in a past life.
I sent the script to Guy and Jeff Berg, who said they were going to stage another auction.
My first question to them was: “What about Ovitz?”
Jeff said, “We’ll watch him.”
Guy said, “We surely will.”
I had once again asked Irwin Winkler to produce it and he had once again agreed.
“Does Irwin have the script?” Berg asked.
“Of course he does,” I said. “How could he read it otherwise?”
“That means Ron Meyer’s got it, which means Ovitz has it.”
I said, “Irwin wouldn’t do that to me.”
Berg said, “Okay,” and hung up.
Two days before the scheduled auction date, Andrea King of the Hollywood Reporter wrote a front-page story about Original Sin being auctioned. The story lavishly praised the script and said it was so commercial that it would go for an even higher price than Basic Instinct.
It was obvious from her story that Andrea King had a copy of the script.
Berg was thermonuclear.
“You know what this story does?” he yelled. “It scares everybody away. It says they don’t have a chance to get this because the price is going to be so high. That means we won’t be able to bid people against each other to get the price up. She sandbagged us. She purposely wrote this and praised it to the heavens to kill the sale. How did she get the script? Tell me that.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “you’ve got the only copy.”
“Our copy’s in the safe, we haven’t even Xeroxed it yet.”
“I don’t know how she got it.”
“I do,” Berg said. “Winkler.”
He pointed out that Andrea King covered CAA for the Reporter.
I called Irwin and asked him if he’d shown the script to anyone. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “Absolutely not.”
The day we went out to auction with Original Sin, Jeff’s fears were proven right. The studios claimed to like the script but said they were afraid to bid on it considering what they’d read it was going to sell for in the Reporter.
We discovered they were hesitant for another reason, too: the Thousand-Pound Gorilla was working the phones. Himself.
“Ovitz is calling everybody,” Jeff said. “He’s not talking about you. He never mentions you. He’s putting it in terms of the industry. He’s talking about the escalating price spiral, especially for screenwriters. He’s saying that for the health of the industry, screenwriters’ prices have to be kept down. He’s saying it would be a bad precedent if we sold this for even more money than we got for Basic.”
Jeff laughed. “He’s got nothing personally against you. He just wants to be the studios’ pal and give them good advice.”
I said, “What can we do?”
Jeff said, “We can sell this sonofabitch script.”
ICM went to war with CAA over Original Sin. (“Jeff and I must have made eight hundred calls,” Guy told me later.) For two weeks … as the battle went on … the script stayed unsold.
During that time, a young assistant at ICM told her boss that she had seen a Xerox copy of Original Sin at her boyfriend’s house five days before we took it to auction.
In other words, while the script I’d sent to ICM was still in their safe.
I called her from Marin and asked who her boyfriend was. He was, she said, one of Ron Meyer’s assistants at CAA. I asked if she could possibly retrieve her bo
yfriend’s copy.
I think one of the saddest moments of my life was when I opened the brown envelope she sent me. It was a Xerox copy of my typescript of the script done on my manual typewriter … the typescript copy of Original Sin I’d sent only to Irwin Winkler … the script I’d sent to ICM had already been typed on a computer by my typist.
What froze me to my bones at that moment was that I knew that at least one thing Michael Ovitz threatened had come true: my relationships with Barry Hirsch … and now my dear friend Irwin Winkler … were over.
I called Irwin, shattered and angry, and said, “How could you have done this to me?”
“What?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“You gave the script to Ronnie Meyer.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I told you. I didn’t give it to anybody.”
“You’re lying to me, Irwin,” I said. “I trusted you.”
“We’re friends,” he said. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”
A part of me believed Irwin even as I knew I would end my relationship with him. I knew it was possible that one of Irwin’s secretaries or one of his assistants had gotten my script to CAA without Irwin’s knowledge.
I didn’t feel I had the freedom, though, to dwell on that possibility. I was caught up in … overwhelmed by … my war with Ovitz and his asshole foot soldiers. I was made uncomfortable by the very fact of Irwin’s undeniable closeness to Ovitz, Meyer, and CAA.
It’s possible that I ended my relationship with Irwin for that reason alone … that my bloodlust for the battle made the breakup a self-fulfilled prophecy.
At the end of the two weeks, we sold Original Sin to Andy Vajna and Cinergi for $1.25 million. ICM had won its war with CAA.
Vajna, my fellow Hungarian, facing intense pressure from Ovitz not to buy the script, agreed to buy it only after ICM promised to help him with casting on other projects.
“Ovitz never mentioned you,” Vajna told me later, “he was arguing for the future financial health of the industry.”
About a year later, over dinner in Hawaii, Wolfgang Puck, a very decent man and an immigrant, like me, from Europe, turned to me and said, “Michael never forgets, Joe. Remember that. I know him. I’ve done business with him. Watch your back.”
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