On the fringes of the downtown area, lap dance clubs, many still run by the mob, welcomed tour groups of men bused there by the hotels. The lap dancers were, for the most part, stunning, statuesque Playmate-types who picked up as much as $1,000 in tips each night.
A lap dancer took you into a dark back room, took all her clothes off, and danced on your lap stark naked, often bringing you to climax.
She was allowed to touch you but if you touched her—and didn’t tip her—security would bounce you out. If you touched her and tipped her enough, everybody looked the other way.
The showgirls, meanwhile, who’d often been used as hotel-comp hookers in the past, didn’t do that (or as much of that) as before. Their world was a catty and competitive place where women worried about their understudies, and put ice on their nipples and coke in their noses before they went onstage.
As we did the interviews, I resolved to make this script as real as possible, even though much of it was grim, especially the part that had to do with sexual violence.
Over and over again, we heard stories of rape. A young dancer brutally raped by a high roller who then bought her a $10,000 diamond ring to shut her up … a lap dancer gang-raped by a group of male strippers in Hawaii … a showgirl on vacation with her boyfriend in Mexico raped by police responding to her calls that the boyfriend was having a heart attack. (The boyfriend died and, after the rape, police forced her to drive his body back across the border.)
Back in L.A., Paul said he agreed there was a powerful, original, but very dark story here.
“Are you going to commit to direct it?” I wanted to know.
“Not until I read your script.”
It was the same ring-around-the-rosie as before.
“I’m not going to write it for free and take the chance of not selling it if you decide not to direct it.”
“Then,” Paul announced, “I say to you goodbye.”
We were stuck. He wouldn’t commit to direct it and I wouldn’t write it for free with him already involved. When Robert Evans heard about the stalemate, he howled.
“Eszterhas and Verhoeven together again after Basic Instinct? Lap dancers, music, tits and ass and pussy? You tell me who’s not going to want to see that movie!”
Evans told his independently wealthy brother, Charles, about it and Charlie, in his late sixties, asked me how much it would take for me to write the script. I told him to call my lawyers.
My lawyers set the terms. Charlie would have to give me a $2 million advance. After I wrote it, if we sold the project to a studio, Charlie would get his $2 million back—and a $1 million profit. He would also be a producer of the movie.
If I wrote the script and couldn’t sell it, Charlie would be out the $2 million. Charlie knew that if Paul committed to direct it, we could sell it anywhere. He asked to meet with Paul.
“Tell me the truth,” Charlie said to Verhoeven. “What are the chances you’re going to direct this?”
“I don’t know, ja?” Paul smiled. “It depends on the script. If it’s brilliant, yes. If it’s shit, no.”
“I’d like to have a better idea of what you’re going to do before I lay out two million dollars.”
“Very understandable,” Paul said.
“So how about it?” Charlie said.
“Oh, I can’t tell you that until I know if it’s shit.”
“But Joe won’t write the script until he gets paid,” Charlie said.
“That’s right.” I smiled.
“But is that fair?” Charlie said to Paul. “That I just write him a check for two million dollars under these conditions?”
“Certainly not,” Paul said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t do it.”
Charlie sighed.
“Also,” Paul said, “you have to understand, you can be a producer but you won’t be a producer.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t do anything. You will have your name on the movie but that is all. I have my own producer, Alan Marshall, and Ben Myron will be a producer.”
“But I don’t want to do anything,” Charlie said.
“Then why do you want to be a producer?”
“I want my own trailer on the set,” Charlie said.
“A trailer, fine. You can have a trailer.”
“I want to meet the girls in the movie.”
“That’s okay, too,” Paul said.
After the meeting, Charlie drew me aside and asked me what my hunch was. Would Verhoeven direct the script if Charlie paid me $2 million to write it?
“Yeah,” I said, “I think he’s into this. I think he will if the script’s good.”
“You think the script will be good?”
“Well, Basic Instinct was pretty good, wasn’t it?”
“This is a musical not a mystery,” Charlie said.
“That’s true. But Flashdance was pretty good, wasn’t it?”
“You rewrote that. That wasn’t your original,” Charlie said. “I did my homework on you.”
“That’s true, too, Charlie.”
“I wish I could be sure you’ll write a good script. I wish I could be sure he’ll commit to direct it.”
“That’d make it easier for you, Charlie, wouldn’t it?”
Charlie said, “Yes it would.”
He decided to take the chance.
The morning after he wired my lawyers the money—$2 million up front—Charlie Evans woke up and had himself taken to the hospital.
He was having heart palpitations.
Verhoeven just laughed.
“Who wins?” he said. “Joe wins.”
I had a $2 million advance to write the script called Showgirls, but it would have to wait. There was something else I had to write first …
A few months after Basic’s release, I was at dinner in Robert Evans’s fabled house around the corner from the Beverly Hills Hotel. The dinner was our first in-depth discussion of the script I would write, Sliver, and Bob, now in his mid-sixties, his skin sun-tooled to nearly black leather, had asked two bimbos to join us, a fortyish mother and her young daughter.
Halfway through the dinner I said, “This is the way it’s going to work, Bob. I write the script the way I want to write it. You have no input. You give me no ideas. When I’m done, I give you the script and you get it made.”
When the dinner ended, he drew me aside and asked, “You want mom or the kid?”
I wanted neither.
I didn’t want to be compromised by Evans, as so many in Hollywood had been through the years. He had a shoeboxful of Polaroids he had shown me … explicit, Hustler-like shots of women who were now married to famous and powerful men.
“Pussy hair, my boy,” Evans said to me, “is stronger than universal cable.”
He was famous for greeting new screenwriters with a special present. There would be a knock at the screenwriter’s hotel door and the screenwriter would open it to find one of Bob’s stunning bimbos standing there.
One poor schmuck with an Underwood (Jack Warner’s phrase) even fell in love with one of these young women, a romance that ended when he discovered that part of his new love’s job was to report the details of his sexual performance to Evans. That kind of personal knowledge, to Bob, meant power and deals and movies made, and … input into a screenplay.
I was doing Sliver, an adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel, as a favor to Guy, who was urging me to do it as a favor to Evans. Bob’s career, which had reached the pinnacle of Hollywood success during his years as the head of Paramount and his fabled marriage to Ali MacGraw, was pretty much over.
He and his brother, Charlie, had been busted for cocaine; Bob had even been implicated but ultimately cleared on a murder charge. He had spent, by his own admission, “years in the fetal position,” unable to get up in the morning. His office was filled with framed, yellowing headlines and photographs which his staff called “The Hall of Shame.”
But there was a disarming candor about Evans. In a town of pretentious phonies, Evans
almost bragged about how broke he was. And he was a flatterer.
“The only reason Sliver is going to get made,” he said, “is because of you.”
It was only partially true.
Yes, I was the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood and my presence meant a lot to the project and to Bob, but studios didn’t green-light movies because of the screenwriter’s name.
Evans had been desperate to get me to do this project.
“This movie,” Evans said of Sliver, “is all about pussy.”
I didn’t think Ira Levin’s well-crafted novel was about that … but what Evans said didn’t surprise me. Evans thought everything was about that. And from his point of view, from inside this grand house full of mirrors and candles and vivacious, uninhibited young women frolicking in the pool and the guesthouse and Bob’s mink-rugged bedroom … maybe it was all about that … although Bob claimed, “I haven’t been able to get it up since 1978.”
The house, I thought, smelled of scented candles, mildew, and come (one reason maybe for all the scented candles).
Evans’s charm kept me interested. The day we had our first meeting with the studio, Bob insisted we have lunch at his house first. It was a feast of freshly flown-in caviar and lobster and bottles of Dom Pérignon, with the butler and the maid in hovering attendance, and I thought there was something deeply touching about this man, broke and supported by his brother, making such a grand event out of a meeting with a studio.
Evans was so happy to be back in business! So happy to be having a meeting with the studio about a film that looked like it might actually be made!
A block-long limo took us to the meeting. Evans was dressed in his monogrammed slipper shoes and as he went through the doors of the administration building at Paramount … I stopped him and wiped some white powder off his black cardigan sweater.
“Jesus, Bob,” I said.
After Basic Instinct was released, I started spending time with the biggest star in the world.
Sharon Stone was funny and bright and I thought I saw occasional flashes of Catherine Tramell: a world-weary cynicism sometimes clouded her eyes.
“She is Catherine Tramell,” I remembered Verhoeven saying, “she is evil,” but I didn’t believe him.
Sharon and I had fun together; we made each other laugh.
“You created me,” Sharon teased me and sent me notes signed “Catherine.”
I bought her two hundred roses when she was nominated for a Golden Globe and a gold wildlife bracelet made in Hawaii.
One memorable night I picked her up at her tiny house off Mulholland overlooking the Valley. Sharon brought out a bottle of frosty Cristal, we put James Brown on, and then she brought out some grass that she said was Thai. We shared a joint and it blew the tops of our heads off.
We were crawling around her living room rug, around the dollhouse she loved so much, slugging from another bottle of Cristal. We were ripped out of our skulls but we thought we should have something to eat and somehow made it down to Citrus, the industry’s flavor of the month, after what seemed the longest ride.
“Holy Christ,” I kept saying.
“I know, I know,” Sharon giggled, almost trilling the words.
Citrus was jammed full of the usual industry faces and we must have been an odd sight sitting in our booth, our eyes rolling around in our heads.
Sharon blinked at the other diners and said, “Who are these fucking people?”
I looked around and identified certain producers and agents, all trying not to stare at the spectacle we were creating. Sharon smiled at them and good-naturedly said, “Fuck ’em.” She had some white sauce running down her chin and I wiped it off with my napkin.
“That felt nice,” she said and smiled.
Another bottle of Cristal later we were ready to leave and I asked the maître d’ to ask our driver to pull the limo as close to the door as he could so we could fall into the car and not have to walk. The maître d’ gave us a signal a couple minutes later and we wobbled and lurched across the restaurant as the other diners, frozen, stared.
We fell into the car and Sharon, somewhat revitalized, said we had to hear some more James Brown. Now. Right now.
The driver took us to Virgin Records on Sunset, pulled up as close to the door as he could, and we wobbled and lurched inside. James Brown CDs were upstairs.
I wasn’t sure I could navigate the steps but Sharon went zigzagging up. A few minutes later, she reappeared on the top step, holding a stack of CDs. She threw her arms wide and yelled, “I’m coming down!”
I heard laughter from some of the people in the store and then some of them started to applaud. Sharon came zigzagging back down the stairs, her arms wide, and threw herself three steps up into my arms. Now I heard more applause.
We somehow paid for the CDs and were trying to leave the store when the security guards came over. We were trying to leave, they explained, through the front store window. They graciously led us to the door, where our driver was waiting for us and helped us into the car.
In the limo, we put James Brown on, Sharon pulled out another joint. There was a moment when I put my hand on her thigh—she was wearing chocolate-brown suede pants—and she said, “I knew you’d put your hand there, that’s why I wore these.”
We had a brief and insane argument.
“My ass hangs halfway to my knees,” she said.
“You’ve got a beautiful ass,” I told her.
She said, “I’m pushing forty. This should have happened to me twenty years ago. I crawled a hill of broken glass. Why didn’t you write this script twenty years ago? Why?”
We had another bottle of Cristal back in her house and crawled around the dollhouse some more. Then I went back to my hotel. The phone rang as I was walking in the door to my suite.
It was Sharon. She sounded hysterical. “My burglar alarm went off,” she said. “I woke up in the living room. I grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen. I started to look around, then I got scared and ran down the street and the security people picked me up.”
I could visualize the scene: Sharon Stone, the biggest star in the world, the ice pick queen, running down her little suburban street with a butcher knife in hand.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“They brought me back home. The burglar alarm was off. The security people said it had never gone off.”
“Do you want me to go over there? I’ll be right there.”
“No,” she said. “I’m okay now. I think I’m okay now.”
I said, “You just freaked on the dope.”
“This happened to me on Ecstasy once,” Sharon said. “I had to go to the hospital. I thought I was having a heart attack.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to go over there?”
“No,” she said. “It’s okay.” She paused and in a little girl’s voice she said, “We had fun, didn’t we?”
“Yeah.” I laughed. “We sure did.”
At my recommendation, she hired Guy McElwaine as her agent and, thanks in no small part to Guy, she agreed to do Sliver.
She had reservations about doing another movie with erotic content, but she thought I was her good luck charm.
I had, after all, as she kept saying, “created” her. And we had fun spending time together.
Guy told me he was devastated. His marriage had broken up. It was his eighth or ninth marriage. I’m not sure. He was married at least twice to the same woman.
Guy is the world’s last romantic. Each time he marries, he is in love. He thinks it’ll last forever each time.
When he told me that this marriage had broken up, I told him that I was sending him to Hawaii for two weeks—all expenses paid—at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel resort on the Big Island.
An hour after I told him, his secretary called me to ask if my offer was for Guy alone or for Guy and “a friend.”
“Don’t tell me Guy and his wife are getting back together again,” I said. “That’s terrific.”
<
br /> His secretary said, sadly, that they weren’t … but that Guy had a friend—formerly married to an actor and a rock star—and if it was okay with me, he wanted to take her to the Mauna Kea “to cheer him up.”
I said that was fine with me: let the cheering up begin!
· · ·
When Robert Evans heard that Sharon was doing Sliver, he was overjoyed. He was suddenly a big shot again, producing a movie starring the world’s newest screen sensation. But when Evans found out the condition with which Sharon was doing the movie, I thought he was going to go into cardiac arrest.
Sharon’s condition was simple, flat, and nonnegotiable: Evans could not go to the set of his own movie when Sharon Stone was filming.
She did not want to be around Robert Evans. Sharon did not want to cast her eyes on Robert Evans. And, since the biggest stars in the world always get what they want, Paramount had happily agreed to Sharon’s condition.
The problem was a girl in a dog collar. According to Sharon, a friend of hers from her modeling days wound up as one of Bob’s house bimbos. According to Sharon, Bob supposedly kept the young woman naked and in a dog collar for weeks at a time. Sharon said that her friend needed psychiatric care for months after leaving the Evans house.
According to Evans, Sharon’s story was whole-cloth fiction. He was enraged. “You talk to any girl who’s ever been in this house,” Bob said. “There are no dog collars here. This isn’t that kind of a house.”
I felt he had a point. The girls that I had met in Bob’s house all seemed very fond of him, treating him like a classic Hollywood “daddy.”
“She can’t kick me off my own set!” Evans raged. “Who the fuck does she think she is? A dog collar? The name is Evans! Robert Evans! Not the Marquis de Sade!”
Sharon, however, was adamant and unyielding and, as the shoot began, Evans was not allowed to go within one hundred yards of his own set.
Our director was Phillip Noyce, a big, shambling Aussie whose first big hit was Dead Calm and who had directed the recent hit Patriot Games.
Sharon, perhaps sensing that she intimidated the physically gawky Noyce on a sexual level … Phillip seemed to gaze at Sharon a lot … didn’t like him. She called him “the Creep” and “the Bozo.”
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