Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  We had heard that Paul was now living in a hotel with Elizabeth Berkley, but we’d never met her. We know his wife, Martine, quite well, so we were curious.

  It was all arranged for Thursday at Paramount and I asked Joe what I should wear. He said, “Why don’t you wear your new pearl necklace?” So I did. I chose a tiny jumper with a white blouse underneath and the pearls. It was a little snug because at three months of my second pregnancy, I’m starting to show, but it passed.

  When we got to the set I immediately noticed as we entered that everyone was in jeans. I said, “I’m really overdressed.” Joe said, “You look beautiful.” Then I overhear a guy say as I walk by, “Who’s the prom queen?”

  It gets worse. We enter and the set is a Vegas strip joint. I’ve never been to Vegas, never been on a set, and never been to a strip joint. It was hot, smoky, and loud. We were there with Guy and Sam Fischer, Joe’s lawyer.

  As I look to my left, up on a stage, Elizabeth Berkley is stark naked with three other women. They are humping a pole with their legs spread and their tongues out. Elizabeth licks the pole. She is supposed to kick her G-string panties off her ankle, but they keep getting caught on her heel. So they keep doing it again and again.

  Over the throbbing music Paul yells, “Joe, I saved this scene for you!”

  Guy is cool, Joe is amused, and Sam is overheating.

  Gina Gershon comes over and starts to say how much she admires Joe and how she knows he must have modeled Cristal after Aphrodite or some such theory. I’m not really listening, but at least she’s dressed.

  Then Paul yells cut. All the women grab a robe, except Elizabeth. She skips down the stairs and comes jiggling over to us. She is so hot and so close to us I can smell her. Heat is emanating from her. She has on shiny body glitter and high heels. And that’s all.

  She says, “Hi Nomi! I’m Nomi!”

  I say, “Well, it was a childhood nickname of mine but the similarities end there.” She tilts her head and laughs.

  When you talk to someone in a crowded room who is naked (as I discovered) you try to keep contact with their eyes. The weird thing is that her eyes are two different colors. One is green and one is brown. So even that is uncomfortable.

  She shakes hands with Guy and Sam and Joe and then starts gushing about how this character is her and how Joe is like a god on the set.

  Suddenly I feel extremely nauseous. Either morning sickness, the smoke, or the conversation.

  Anyway, I think, “I can’t just bolt out of here. They’ll think the prom queen can’t handle it.” So I take deep breaths.

  Then Paul comes up behind Elizabeth and puts both arms around her waist and his hands on her belly. And he smiles.

  “At last you meet Nomi,” he says to Joe. I’m looking for an exit. Joe, who knows me so well, leans down and says, “I’d like to go outside for a cigarette; join me.”

  When we get out there I can feel the wind cooling the sweat on my upper lip. He looks at me and says, “Jesus Christ,” but that’s as far as he gets, because out comes “Nomi” and she’s making a beeline for us.

  She’s now wearing a G-string and holding a top about the size of a wet-wipe. She’s talking and appearing to be trying to untangle her top so she can put it on, but she’s bouncing up and down with her efforts.

  She says as she’s fumbling, “How did you like it?” And Joe says, “Boy that was something …”

  Then he says, “You know, Paul looks really happy …” sort of fishing to see how she feels about Paul.

  And she says, “Yeah, well, did you know that I sing? I heard you have a script with a singer in it …” Joe looks at me blankly.

  I say, “Foreplay.”

  He says, “Oh, yeah.”

  She goes on about how she would love to read it. She finally gets her top on and hooks her fingers into the armholes. It’s a loose tank top. As she talks, she swings her hands back and forth in front of her so that her breasts pop in and out of the armholes.

  I’m watching. Nipples. No nipples. Nipples. No nipples. I’m still feeling queasy.

  Suddenly, Sam Fischer bolts out the door and races up to us. “I’m going to get water! You guys want any?” I say yes, Joe passes.

  Seconds later Sam comes racing back with two Dixie cups splashing on his coat sleeves. As I watch him, I’m thinking, “He’s coming undone …”

  In the meantime, Elizabeth has brushed my hair back from my shoulder, Joe’s hair back from his shoulder, and is saying how she’d love to get together. Mercifully, she is called back to the set to have her nipple rouge touched up for the next scene.

  Joe says, “Let’s go,” and we head to the limo.

  On the way there Paul comes out and he says, “Joe!” He looks like a maniac. His hair is hanging in damp hunks around his face and he’s laughing. We all laugh.

  Then Joe says, “So do you think we’re going to get an R rating?”

  And Paul says, “Considering what I’ve shot so far? No.”

  And Joe says, “Tomorrow is the last day of shooting.”

  And Paul says with a smile, “I know.” When Joe and I finally get into the car we sit there for about thirty seconds in silence.

  Then Joe says, “He cast a blow-up fuck doll as Nomi Malone.”

  But, as I understood it, Charlie Evans had seen her first and had recommended her enthusiastically.

  Billy Friedkin, the director of Jade, who had said he wouldn’t “change a comma” of my script … sent me a memorandum full of changes he wanted to make.

  I sent him a letter dated “Halloween, 1994”:

  Dear Billy,

  The reason I was in support of you directing Jade is that you said, repeatedly and publicly, that you “would not change a comma of the script.” Considering your memo of the 25th of October, it is clear that you lied to me.

  The lie rankles, of course, not only on a creative level, but on a personal one. Considering the fact that the last time you had a hit movie was in the early seventies, you never would have gotten a chance to direct a script that was viewed as the hottest in town without my support. Considering the fact that Sherry is the head of the studio involved made the situation even more complicated. You needed my public support to avoid any charges of favoritism. You needed it and you got it. We even had a discussion outside Alice’s in Malibu one day about how, thanks to my quotes in the L.A. Times, we had put the issue to rest.

  As you know, I have listened to your ideas at great length and have incorporated some of them in my latest draft. I also, as you know, did an earlier draft for Sherry, gratis, as a favor, in our misguided effort to land Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts for the parts. I have done my best to work with both you and Sherry.

  But your latest suggestions, outlined in your memo of the 25th of October, are so misguided we’re not talking about changing commas anymore. We’re talking about destroying the material, burning its fabric, vitiating its power. You’re taking an original piece of work and turning it into clichéd, watered-down television. You’re taking a very commercial piece and making it boring.

  Since I view my scripts as my children, I will not do anything to hurt my children. Nor will I stand idly by while someone does one of my children harm. Unlike most screenwriters, I am willing to go to the wall in defense of my children, no matter what that means.

  To address your points individually:

  1. You say—“I feel it serves no purpose to suggest that Trina is a hooker.”

  The very basis of this piece, even in outline form, was exactly that this successful nationally respected clinical psychologist has a whole other life as a high-priced hooker. It is a startling notion dramatically and, I believe, commercially. It is also a daring, very un-television-like notion.

  Your suggestion that she not be a hooker but be in search of “wild sex because she’s not getting it from Matt” is the oldest cliché, one even that television has worn out. Men and women who cheat always cheat because they’re having sexual problems with
their mates—what is unique about that? What is dramatic? Are you seriously suggesting that we can get an audience’s attention in the nineties by trying to feed them this old warm spit? They’ve seen it. They know it. There is nothing startling about it. Why in the world would they want to see a movie with this as its underlying theme—as opposed to a movie about a very successful, intelligent, classy woman who hooks on the side?

  Your suggestion also diminishes Trina as a character and implies a sexism I want to avoid. Trina has a whole other life as a hooker because she likes it and because she has the balls to do it. She is very nineties. Her life knows no boundaries and she can carry it off. Now you want her to have sex with a bunch of guys because “Matt doesn’t give her enough wild sex”? Come on—it’s not sexual frustration that’s fueling my Trina—it’s an unlimited horizon. And it’s anger at Matt for cheating on her.

  2. You suggest that we “try and see a bit more of the public life of Matt and Trina.”

  This is a tightly knit murder mystery. You can show their public life by showing the existing scenes powerfully—the black-and-white ball, Trina making her speech at the convention, the Belvedere house and all its trappings. Introducing scenes that underline the fabric of the piece in a tight murder mystery will destroy the piece’s pace and thrust.

  I remind you that we’ve already added one unnecessary chase scene—the more unnecessary, irrelevant scenes you add, the more you affect the tightly wound spring.

  3. You suggest that Matt only kill Medford and that the governor’s men kill the others.

  The fact that Matt kills all of them is a central tenet of the piece. What is shocking … and must be shocking … to us at the end is that this moneyed, educated, sophisticated criminal attorney is capable of killing a lot of people as part of a deadly game aimed at his wife.

  By suggesting that the governor’s men do all the killings except one, you destroy one of the most psychologically intriguing parts of the script. You also indulge in clichés left over from the sixties. I am so tired of movies where elected officials or government people are depicted as the bad guys. It is the kind of knee-jerk, simplistic liberalism that I loathe. We are in the nineties!

  4. You suggest that we clarify the Porsche situation—who is driving which Porsche at which killing.

  This movie is a mystery that I want people to think about. Yes, the business with the cars is complicated, but logical. Audiences can handle complicated plots—as Basic Instinct shows. I want them to leave the theaters and figure things out afterward. It makes them think and talk and argue about the movie. Your suggestion that we clarify this “so that the idea of whose Porsche did what to whom doesn’t have to be talked about so much” is dead wrong. Don’t you get it? We want them to talk about it. We want to give them a movie that has some ambiguity and gray.

  5. You suggest that David “make two or three stops” after we know that his brakes have been cut.

  Upon reflection, even though I made the change, I think showing the cutting of the brakes is wrong. It creates greater suspense not knowing whether anything was done to the brakes or whether David is getting paranoid about everything. We should never know if anything was done to the brakes—we should let the audience make up its own mind … and argue about it.

  But to suggest that he make two or three stops afterward, after the brakes have been cut, is ludicrous. It’s just bad television—a cheap device that I am convinced today’s audiences are too smart for. This is and has to be a tight murder mystery—to glop cheap television stuff into it diminishes the piece’s visceral power.

  6. You suggest that David not kill Hargrove himself at the end but that the others kill him in a “grassy knoll” scenario.

  The point is … and it is a central point that you clearly don’t understand … that David gets so sucked into all this personally that at the end he kills a man with his own hands … a man who, we realize at the end of the picture, was innocent. Thematically, it is the final indication that David’s hands have become not only dirty, but bloody.

  “Grassy Knoll Scenario”? This is not a political thriller. This is a psycho-sexual murder mystery. You are taking a visceral, tightly wound piece and turning it into some kind of half-assed political conspiracy movie left over from the sixties.

  I also want to address your last paragraph. “Were I to just shoot the first draft without bringing my own sensibilities to it,” you write, “the resulting effort could turn out flat.” What I want you to bring to it, Billy, is your explosive visual power. I have enormous respect for your sense of visual, explosive theater. I have little respect for your abilities as a writer. You didn’t hire on to write this piece, you hired on to direct it. Stick to your turf, I have no intention of invading yours.

  By trying to rewrite it, instead of directing it, you are your own worst enemy. You are taking a script that would be a hit movie and turning it into a failed movie. Why? Why do that to yourself? You need a hit movie and you’ve got one in your hands.

  I signed the letter “Trick or treat.”

  I added this P.S.: “Paul Verhoeven shot the first draft, the white pages, of Basic Instinct. He brought his own explosive visual power to it. The movie grossed over $400 million.”

  After the executives read the finished script of One Night Stand, New Line was knocked out. The script was 90 percent dialogue, guaranteeing that it could be made for a small budget. Mike DeLuca, the head of production at New Line, told me that people at the company liked it so much that they were going around the office reciting lines of dialogue.

  But Adrian Lyne, after reading the script, said he didn’t want to direct it. He was going to do a remake of Lolita instead. New Line was enraged and threatened to sue him but Adrian wouldn’t budge.

  The Today show wanted to do the second part of its series about the making of One Night Stand and New Line and I were dodging them. They had paid me $4 million for a script the director didn’t want to shoot—we didn’t think that would sound very good to moviegoers.

  · · ·

  Gerri gave Guy an expensive, gold ID bracelet for his birthday.

  He showed it to me, obviously pleased with the gift.

  “You accepted it?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  I said, “She didn’t earn the money she bought it with; I did.”

  He said, “I’ll send it back to her if you want.”

  I said, “She paid for it out of the $32,500 a month alimony the court said I have to pay her.”

  He looked fondly at the bracelet on his arm and said, “Okay, I’ll send it back to her.”

  I could tell how much he liked it, so I said, “It’s okay, don’t worry about it. Pretend I gave it to you.”

  I was upset, though. I was fighting for my financial life and my friend and agent was accepting gold trinkets from what I considered my ex-wife’s pirated stash.

  Naomi and I were sitting at the bar in the Dume Room, our neighborhood beer joint, sipping our Negras and looking at Jan-Michael Vincent’s framed photograph behind the bar. He was a young man in the picture, the embodiment of the golden boy Californian, blond, tanned, flashing perfect teeth, a bimbo on each arm.

  It was taken a long time ago when I was a beginning screenwriter and when it looked for a while like Jan-Michael Vincent was going to be a big movie star. But then there was an automobile accident: he broke his neck.

  I saw a picture of him in court recently: bloated, his face a roadmap of pain, his eyes unfocused and vacant.

  But he was still up on the wall behind the bar at the Dume Room, grinning at us, full of life, the golden boy catching a wave, grabbing a piece, dreaming the dreams he was so certain would never die.

  I was in a war with Columbia over my adaptation of Howard Blum’s Gangland and appealed not to Mark Canton, the studio head, whom Newsweek once labeled “moronic,” but to his boss, Mickey Schulhof, the head of Sony Corporation of America.

  Dear Mr. Schulhof,

 
I don’t like to begin a letter by listing my credentials, but in this case I feel that I must. I have written eleven movies—my twelfth, Showgirls, directed by Paul Verhoeven, is filming now. My thirteenth, Jade, directed by William Friedkin and starring David Caruso and Linda Fiorentino, begins filming in January.

  My movies have grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office—among them are Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Flashdance, Sliver, Music Box, and Betrayed.

  In terms of my ability and willingness to be a part of a collaborative process, I have worked with three directors—Paul Verhoeven, Costa-Gavras, and Richard Marquand—twice. As I probably don’t have to tell you, it is not likely that a director of their stature will work with the same writer twice … if that writer is not willing to be a part of a collaborative process.

  In 1993, I began working on Gangland for Columbia Pictures. We had agreed from the beginning, as my quote in Daily Variety upon the announcement of the project shows, that Gangland would be “an epic, larger than life story” about John Gotti.

  Mark Canton urged me to write a script with ambiguity and grays—so that at the end of the picture, audiences would feel ambivalent about the relative values of Gotti and the FBI. Since I have at other times in my work dealt with ambiguities and processes of corruption, I not only agreed with Mark’s suggestion but felt it was one of the reasons I was picked for the project.

  Jon Peters, the producer, urged me to view it as an American epic. Indeed, it was the way I viewed it. I felt that if we were to do yet another Mafia story, the only way to do it fresh was to do it as a kind of raw, in-your-face street epic.

  I coordinated a massive research project so that we would have other background sources besides Howard Blum’s powerful book. I worked closely with Howard at my home, picking his brain, trying to tap into the wealth of knowledge he possesses about Gotti and the FBI.

  In June of 1994, I turned in my script to the studio. It was more than 170 pages long. I felt it to be a blistering, powerful, emotionally moving epic whose underlying theme was a corruption of the spirit on both sides—the FBI side and the mob side.