Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  I just lay there for a moment. Contemplating the repercussions. After years of being in the PR business myself, the words “damage control” have taken on a whole new meaning since I’ve been married to Joe.

  “Oh God, Joe,” I said. “Why?”

  He smiled down at me and said simply, “Because I can …”

  When we went back in he immediately used his idea in his first interview. There was a sudden scurrying in the next room. The PR guy came hustling in and said nervously in my ear, “You know, the MGM people are spastic. Joe has to stop saying the stuff about the IDs immediately.”

  I said, “If you tell him to stop because MGM is panicked, he’ll just do it more.”

  He said, “Well, I have to say something …”

  I said, “Fine, you tell him. But right now he’s doing it about every third interview. If you provoke him, it could get worse.”

  He whispered to Joe and Joe whispered back. Red-faced, the PR guy left.

  From that moment on, Joe used the ID line in every interview.

  At the press junket, Gina Gershon explained to reporters what Showgirls was about: “This movie really represents the Aphrodite-Psyche myth dead-on. Aphrodite is the goddess of love and beauty, and she hears about some mortal chick who all of a sudden people are treating like a goddess, and this does not sit well with her. So she sends her lover/son Cupid down to destroy Psyche. Now, Cupid would kind of be Kyle MacLachlan’s character, and Nomi is Psyche, and I’m Aphrodite. And instead of killing Psyche, Cupid recognizes her beauty and potential and falls for her.”

  United Artists announced it had no problem with the film’s NC-17 rating. NC-17 for “Nudity, exotic sexuality throughout, graphic language and sexual violence.” “We’re accepting the rating because we believe the rating is proper,” studio head Frank Mancuso said.

  Verhoeven said: “It’s really exciting to be able to release the movie in the United States as I shot it. I think the American people are strong enough.”

  Michael Medved, host of the PBS series Sneak Previews, said: “The NC-17 is the kiss of death.”

  “I created her character,” Paul Verhoeven said in an interview about Nomi Malone, played by Elizabeth Berkley, “with elements from two or three people. I was even thinking about my mother. She could suddenly explode in an outrageous situation that was based on nothing. I am not a big fan of Freud, I have always rejected him because he’s right, he knew too well about me. Let’s reduce it to that, it’s all about my mother.”

  He created the character based on his mother … from the script which I wrote based on Naomi, the love of my life.

  Naomi’s journal:

  We went to the Jade focus group screening last night. It was at a theater in the Valley. All the things they had discussed, all the changes that were supposed to happen, the ending that was going to be changed back to the original one Joe wrote, weren’t there.

  It was the same movie we saw at Paramount. The same stupid ending. I could tell Joe was inflamed. The answers coming from the test audience were dismal. It was a nightmare.

  When it was over, we walked out and I could tell this wasn’t one of those times where Joe was going to think it over. He wasn’t going to go home and then write a note or call the next day.

  He walked up to Jonathan Dolgen, the head of Paramount, and said something I didn’t hear, but judging from Dolgen’s face, it was memorable.

  Then he turned to Sherry and said, “Your husband ruined it. He ruined the fucking movie.”

  He grabbed my hand and I was nearly running to keep up with him. We got in the limo and he said, “Go.”

  As we drove away I heard Sherry Lansing yelling, “Joe! Wait! Please!”

  I looked back and she was running. Running after the limo in her high heels and Armani suit. I felt sorry for her.

  Naomi’s journal:

  He’s here. Nicholas Pompeo Eszterhas.

  As Joe held him, he was so quiet and inquisitive. Not frightened at all by the bright lights and the noise. He looked all around and kept sticking his tongue out, as though he didn’t quite know what to do with it. “A Mick Jagger tongue,” Joe said.

  They took him to the nursery and took me to my room.

  Joe held my hand. Above him, the TV set was on. Joe was telling teenagers to “use your fake IDs” to see Showgirls.

  CHAPTER 29

  Everybody’s Pissed Off

  DICK

  He’s a demagogue. A grandstander. He’s a loose cannon. A wild hair. He’ll do anything!

  FEIGHAN

  One fucking lunatic—that’s all that it takes—one twisted wacko and the whole world goes gaga!

  City Hall, unproduced

  SHOWGIRLS WAS RELEASED by MGM on September 22, 1995, and was met with eviscerating reviews. While its box office numbers for the first weekend were good enough to put it into the number two position, it plummeted headfirst in its second weekend of release.

  Jade was released by Paramount three weeks later, on October 13. Its reviews were equally deadly and commercially it was dead when it opened.

  The abysmal failure of the two movies together, three weeks apart, was an unparalleled disaster in the history of Hollywood. Imagine two Heaven’s Gates or two Oliver Stone or Alfred Hitchcock movies failing cataclysmically three weeks apart.

  The reviews were blistering and often personal. Sometimes it seemed that the money I was making was getting reviewed as much as the two movies.

  Typical of the Showgirls reviews:

  “Showgirls is your basic sleazathon du jour. Slicked up with glossy visuals and a driving beat, it will, if nothing else, bring people together. It’ll bring women’s rights advocates to their feet in anger, and bring the conservative right to its knees in gratitude for new ammunition against Hollywood Babylon … a big silicone implant … Trashdance.”—Boston Globe

  “Eszterhas is the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood history. … What seems to turn Eszterhas on are women with knives (a switchblade appears in the first sixty seconds), lesbianism, sex for cash and violence. … His insights into human nature come from pulp fiction, and a fear of women palpitates in all his best work (they’ll kill you—but if you’re lucky they’ll have sex with you first, and maybe put on a lesbian show).”—Roger Ebert

  “Showgirls manages to make nudity exquisitely boring.”—Los Angeles Times

  “Showgirls author Joe Eszterhas is the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, which is only appropriate since he knows the most clichés.”—Charleston Gazette (West Virginia)

  “A prurient no-brainer, the work of the overpaid hack Joe Eszterhas.”—Manville News (New Jersey)

  “An abominable movie.”—Washington Times

  “As a screenwriter, Eszterhas is colossally inept.”—The Pantagraph (Bloomington, Illinois)

  “Verhoeven literally strips his women naked for long stretches and exploits them in a way that makes every other contemporary film that has demeaned and humiliated women look positively constructive and healthy.”—Sacramento Bee

  “Showgirls is a porno flick that is being shown in mainstream theaters. … If Showgirls is a financial success, Hollywood will make similar films. Do you want it to stop? … Show more opposition to people like Joe Eszterhas, who ought to keep his porno flicks in the bad neighborhoods.”—syndicated columnist Cal Thomas

  And a sampling of the Jade reviews:

  “Please, what have we done to deserve another Joe Eszterhas movie? Okay, we acquitted O.J.”—Baltimore Sun

  “With a salary of $2 to $4 million per script, Eszterhas is a very wealthy case of arrested development … sleaze-monger Eszterhas reverts to his Jagged Edge mode of mock-clever plot twists.”—Seattle Times

  “It is a little frightening to think that Joe Eszterhas, the highest-paid screenwriter in history, and one of the sickest, may be sitting in front of his computer at this very moment coughing up something I will one day be obliged to look at in a theater.”—Newsday

  “If
there were any justice in the world, Jade, scripted by the infamous Joe Eszterhas, would be remembered as the laughable sleazy bomb it is. Instead, it was overshadowed by Eszterhas’s even more egregious Showgirls.”—The News & Advance (Lynchburg, Virginia)

  “I can’t wait for Joe Eszterhas to write a comedy about a leper colony that becomes a nudist camp for serial killers. He’s on the way there, although his latest, Jade, gnaws its rather bloody bones in a cave somewhat higher up the valley from Showgirls.”—San Diego Union Tribune

  “Jade is the thriller for which screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was paid $2.5 million. Eszterhas’s most likely comment on the matter: “S-s-s-s-s-uckers!”—Tampa Tribune

  “Just another lame, confusing, noisy template in the Joe Eszterhas formula.”—Monroe Enquirer-Journal (North Carolina)

  “William Friedkin does the best he can with what appears to be screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’s atonement for Showgirls—the men are the crude, duplicitous sexual predators here.”—St. Petersburg Times (Florida)

  “We feel we know Joe’s tastes by now: he likes chicks, chicks who dig chicks, chicks who turn tricks, and chicks with ice picks.”—London Daily Telegraph

  “Round up the posse. Load the shotguns. We’re going after Joe Eszterhas,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Ray Mark Rinaldi wrote.

  “The fact that this writer was paid a reported $2.5 million for his Jade screenplay is downright criminal, and if Hollywood won’t take him out, it’s time for good movie-going citizens to take things into their own hands.”

  Posses? Loaded shotguns?

  Take me out?

  Citizens taking things into their own hands?

  All because of a screenplay that I wrote?

  Some people were mighty pissed off at me.

  In Philadelphia, Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey went to the shrinks to try to explain Showgirls … and me.

  “What kind of male screenwriter creates women who are only sexual?” Rickey asked.

  James M. Pedigo, chief psychiatrist at Philadelphia’s Joseph Jay Peters Institute, “which deals with sexual offenders and their victims,” answered Rickey’s question this way: “A man with ideas that sex is not something that brings people closer together but is a powerful tool to be used by women, probably grew up in a house where he saw that and where he did not see parental tenderness, where Mother might have let Father know if he didn’t take out the trash, there wouldn’t be sex tonight.”

  I tried to imagine my Catholic, painfully shy, old-world mother telling my father that if he didn’t take the garbage out, she wouldn’t …

  To get that opinion of me, critic Carrie Rickey had gone to a shrink who dealt “with sexual offenders and their victims”?

  I was a sexual offender now? Because of something I had written?

  Dolores Barclay, the arts editor of the Associated Press, began her review this way: “Early on in Jade, there’s a scene in which an assistant district attorney finds a cuff link at a murder scene. He immediately recognizes it and suppresses it as evidence—a move that’s totally out of character and pretty dumb.”

  When I read the review I got nauseous.

  Because I agreed with Dolores Barclay.

  It was one of the scenes that was not in my script, that Billy Friedkin had inserted.

  It was one of the scenes that made me throw up when I saw the rough cut.

  As more reviews savaged the screenplay of Jade, Billy Friedkin called to offer me support.

  He had destroyed my script … he had butchered the movie … he had mostly avoided the critical beating I was taking … and here he was offering to support me through the battering … he had caused.

  “Don’t lose heart, Joe,” Billy said. “Think about Gustav Mahler. He was a genius, a creative maestro, and he never got one good review in his life.”

  Bill Macdonald showed up at Jade’s premiere, held in the Paramount lot. He had a date with him neither Naomi nor I knew.

  A few feet from us at times, he kept his eyes down and never looked up. When his producer credit appeared on-screen, one person in the theater applauded.

  He and his date left before the lights came up at the end of the movie.

  No longer my agent but still my friend, Guy McElwaine called me.

  “There’s one thing you’ve got to remember,” Guy said to me. “You’re a star. There’s never been a screenwriter who was a star. You’re a big, burly guy who knows how to play to the cameras and the public. You didn’t have to end your letter to Ovitz the way you did, with that Fuck you, Mike stuff, but you knew how it’d play in public. And you didn’t have to kiss Naomi for all the photographers at the Sliver premiere, but you knew that if you did, you would upstage Sharon and Bill. You can’t sit in a restaurant or stand in a theater line without getting asked for an autograph. Imagine how some pissant little failed screenwriter who’s doing reviews for some newspaper or magazine must hate you! Why you and not him or her? If I were one of those assholes I’d hate you, too.

  “We live in a town,” Guy McElwaine said to me, “where you don’t root for your friends to fail. You root for your friends to die.”

  I wrote the Los Angeles Times this letter—a response to the barrage of criticism:

  In his review of Jade, critic Kenneth Turan wrote: “And despite the writer’s recent protestations that his women are strong masters of their own fate, he once again hasn’t been able to come up with female protagonists who aren’t victims or hookers or, more likely, both.”

  Every critic, of course, is entitled to his or her own opinion, although the opinions about my last two movies, Showgirls and Jade, have been … um, personal. Most critics have begun their reviews by analyzing my income as though deputized by the IRS. Then they go on to loftier things. A sampling:

  “He is a troll-like man who wants to be Ernest Hemingway” … “He is an ape of a screenwriter” … “He is the Overwriter—overpaid and overweight” … According to Liz Smith, an upcoming episode of Roseanne will have a character say: “Every Joe Eszterhas film is his revenge against some girl who ignored him in high school. Having seen him, I’m sure he has a thousand more in him.” And Roger Ebert, who wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, wagged his finger at me on television and said, “He is afraid of women!”

  Well … golly …

  I do have long hair, although I’ve always considered Ernest Hemingway an insensitive boor who destroyed the lives of the people who loved him. I have always been fond of apes, especially silverback gorillas. Maybe I am overweight, but I’m trying to swim more. Some girls did ignore me in high school (and college), but others didn’t. I have seen myself in the mirror, and I don’t consider what I see pretty. And as far as being afraid of women—sure, some powerful women, like some powerful men, have scared the bejesus out of me—but it seems to me that if you are only afraid of men and not women—that is misogynistic.

  There is, however, a thematic echo (besides the dollar amounts) to some of the criticism that I feel compelled to address: it is Turan’s point that I write women who are either hookers or victims or both and that, parenthetically, my writing is misogynistic.

  The central tenet of Jade is that a wife whose husband cheats on her decides to cheat on him. She doesn’t want to fall in love with anyone, so she cheats with a series of men, once with each man.

  The central tenet of Showgirls is that a young woman turns her back on stardom rather than be spiritually destroyed by the corruption of the male-dominated world that she is in. She turns her back on the money, the glamour, the ambition—and goes back out on the road. Alone.

  In both movies, the women, Trina and Nomi, take action as a result of what men have done to them: Trina’s husband betrays her; Nomi’s male-oriented Vegas world betrays her. They refuse to be victimized and, strong women, they do what they have to do to control their destinies.

  It is a theme I’ve explored in other movies: In Jagged Edge, Glenn Close kills the man who manipulates her. In Betrayed, Debra Winger
kills the man who wants to corrupt his own children. In Music Box, Jessica Lange turns in the father she loves to save the child she loves. In each case, it’s a woman who refuses to be victimized by a man who is using her. Indeed, the critic Michael Sragow called my script for Music Box the “ultimate feminist screenplay.” Jessica Lange was nominated for an Academy Award.

  I find it ironic that while one critic calls something I’ve written “the ultimate feminist screenplay,” other critics accuse me of misogyny, of writing of “hookers and victims.” The fact that I’ve had some of the best actresses of my generation—Close, Winger, and Lange—playing my characters (when they were submitted almost every other script in Hollywood) is viewed by the critics as not relevant. The fact that Flashdance was the inspiration for a generation of young women to pursue their own dreams and ambitions is also irrelevant.

  As far as writing women who are hookers is concerned, the point in Showgirls is exactly that while Nomi has hooked in the past to survive, she will not sell her soul and become part of the Vegas machinery. She has preserved a part of herself that is inviolate and pure no matter what she’s been through. When Cristal tells her that she is a whore, she not only denies it but the action she takes at the end of the movie denies it. In Jade, Trina doesn’t simply hook, she gets even with a man who betrayed her—in the exact same way that he betrayed her—with a series of one-night stands.

  What I fear happening, as a writer in the nineties, is this: if you depict women who are being abused and manipulated, you are accused of being an accomplice to that manipulation and abuse. Never mind the societal reality—never mind that in Vegas, for example, women auditioning to be dancers are put through exactly the kind of nightmare the movie shows. The audition scene in the movie was based, literally, down to some of the dialogue, on research. Never mind the societal reality that there are women in the world who, discovering that their husbands have betrayed them, decide to cheat themselves, to get even.