Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  Which leads to another point that the critics have made. It is a kind of satellite argument to the misogyny I am charged with: that the women I write are “angry.”

  Considering the things that have been done and are being done to women in our society, shouldn’t women be angry? Shouldn’t men who care about women be just as angry? Of course Trina is angry in Jade that the man she loves betrayed her. Of course Nomi is angry about the way she is treated in Vegas and the way she has been treated in the past. Her anger explodes in a rage directed at the man who raped her best friend. But he is only a symbol of the Vegas world and, indirectly, of the male world. The violence she does to him is cathartic and freeing and justified.

  Writing angry women, writing a woman who carries a switchblade, does not mean that you find women threatening. It means that you share their anger, that you think there is a need for a woman moving in a certain part of the world to carry a switchblade. It means you don’t see them as victims but as people who will defend themselves and fight for themselves.

  Without movies showing women who refuse to be victimized, who confront and fight the forces trying to victimize them, we will be left with movies about women that are touchy-feely, Hallmark Moments filled with speeches about sisterhood and close-ups of hands holding.

  That may be what the critics want, that may be the view of a roseate, politically correct, nonconfrontational, Prozac-driven generation. But as many women will tell you, that’s not the real world. Pretending that it is the real world in the hope of creating role models doesn’t have to do with writing or with drama. It has to do with public relations and politics.

  Things are not rosy and feel-good out there and if we find reality as it is … in Vegas and in the privacy of the bedroom … hurtful, sleazy, and ugly, then we should work to change the reality instead of pretending it’s not out there.

  The critics can blast away at the messenger all they want, but sticking our heads in the sand will never make the world a better place.

  Responding to the criticism of Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven said: “I don’t think that the religious moralists or right-wing feminists are heartless or cynical, but I think that they are similarly misguided in their attacks on sex in movies. Fundamentally, they both argue that a woman showing her tits is being degraded, is being exploited, is being humiliated, and that the act of showing her tits contributes to the downfall of civilization.

  “I don’t think that’s true. What that woman is doing is demonstrating our strong human instinct for procreation. Most heterosexual or bisexual men like to see tits and ass because those sights stimulate our sexual drives, our natural desire to fuck and create babies. Most women like to show off their bodies in skirts that reveal their legs or blouses that emphasize their breasts because they like to use their sexual power—they know that dressing this way will attract men who will ultimately give them babies. (Of course this is not a conscious process.) That’s the simple biology lesson of it all. We need to accept that we are just animals who are running around doing one thing rather effectively, which is to procreate.”

  Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven told the media, was influenced by Flashdance, the movie I co-wrote in 1983.

  What Paul didn’t know is that before I wrote the Flashdance script, the director, Adrian Lyne, asked me to watch a Dutch movie he had just seen called Spetters, about a group of kids who dream about being motorcycle racers.

  I saw Spetters and liked it and I’m sure it influenced the script of Flashdance, which then influenced the script of Showgirls.

  Spetters was directed by Paul Verhoeven.

  It was fair to say then that Paul Verhoeven was the original original inspiration for Showgirls.

  Heh heh heh.

  In a review of Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut, Nancy Pate of the Orlando Sentinel wrote: “I can’t help but think that because Moore is a woman who writes highly polished prose, people are calling In the Cut ‘daring’ and ‘provocative.’ Whereas, if Joe Eszterhas, say, were the author, those adjectives would be ‘sick’ and ‘exploitative.’”

  The Los Angeles Business Journal did a front-page story asking industry people what they thought would happen to my career:

  An anonymous executive: “He’s a member of the club. He’s a tacky and repulsive man, but if he writes a good script we’d love to have a chance at it.”

  Steve Cesinger, an entertainment specialist at a Los Angeles–based investment bank: “Nobody knows if a movie is going to be a hit until it’s released. When you have a name writer attached to a film, it’s like an insurance policy. It eliminates one of the biggest risk factors. You don’t want an untested, no-name writer.”

  Gene Corman, producer of F.I.S.T.: “He’s the golden lion. He believes in the work ethic and Ernest Hemingway. Keep the sentences short, the characters strong, and the story readily identifiable.”

  Jerry Bruckheimer, producer: “Joe is a conceptual guy who understands big entertainment. As an ex-journalist, he understands deadlines and stories that are very dramatic and easily understood. We all go through peaks and valleys. He is an enormous talent.”

  Frank Price, producer: “Joe is a tremendously talented writer who has great originality. He takes chances. Remember, Babe Ruth was the home run king who also had the strikeout record.”

  Anonymous producer: “The secret is out. The bloom is off the rose. He keeps repeating himself.”

  Anonymous screenwriter: “At the root of the Eszterhas phenomenon is titillation. There is a sense of danger about him, violence. For a lot of movie executives, who have no life experience, he’s exciting, exotic. They get a sense of danger by being in business with him.”

  Bob Berney, producer: “Everybody wants to shoot down the top guy. He is a wild guy who has led a flamboyant life. He likes to get into trouble. He can be his own worst enemy.”

  Jeff Berg didn’t renew Guy’s contract at ICM, putting Guy out of the agency business.

  Had I not fired him, I’m sure Jeff would have picked up Guy’s contract.

  I never would have fired Guy, though, had I not risked my career for him when I fired Michael Ovitz as my agent.

  In that sense, Guy was yet another casualty of the Ovitz fallout … in addition to Irwin Winkler and Barry Hirsch.

  My friend Don Simpson died. I smoked a couple of joints and did a double-bubble dose of Cristal in his honor.

  I wasn’t as close to Don as some, I didn’t hang out with him as much as some others, but I loved the guy. I knew I could call him at four o’clock in the morning for help of any kind and he’d be there for me; I think he knew I’d be there for him if he called, too.

  Don wasn’t really a producer; he was a rock and roll star. He was a fat, smart little kid from Alaska who, like Bill Clinton, a fat smart little kid from Arkansas … and so many others of us … grew up wanting to be a rock and roll star.

  Don Simpson started in the music business, then took his outlaw rock and roll ethic into film—that’s probably what he was best at with all of his movies. He selected the music himself; the music was perfect for and perfectly drove each movie. On a personal level, he remade himself: the fat little kid was gone; he even redid the planes and contours of his face.

  Sex, drugs, rock and roll: Don did as many drugs as Elvis and died Elvis’s death: collapsing to the floor from the toilet while reading a book … wearing the reading glasses he (and Elvis) never wore in public … Elvis’s book was about the Shroud of Turin, Don’s was about wannabe rock and roller Oliver Stone.

  I have two poignant memories of him though the two are really one. It is a scene I’m sure Don played out hundreds of times; I just happened to be witness to it in two places, years apart.

  In both, we are with slutty women we have met only hours ago—once in New York, once in Vegas—and both times Don is pouring his heart out to the bimbos he has just met, telling them about his strict Baptist upbringing and his strict parents.

  The bimbos are listening, their smiles glazed, their l
ips puffed, their eyes even welling with icy tears. They are thinking about the part this big-shot producer will give them if they play their cards right.

  Don is thinking, as he mumbles soulfully about his upbringing, about the body parts the bimbos will give him in exchange for the heartbreaking stories he is telling them.

  What he doesn’t know, though—or won’t admit to himself—is that he doesn’t have to tell his Dickensian stories … he doesn’t have to betray his parents to these bimbos … he doesn’t even have to talk to them at all … they’ll give him their body parts just to get the parts he can cast them in.

  So Don treats them not like bimbos but as young ladies … pretending he needs to seduce them … pretending he has to break their hearts with his stories.

  The bimbos pretend that they have hearts and Don can pretend to kiss them as he grabs hold of their proffered body parts.

  Relations between Sherry Lansing and me were—understandably so—somewhat strained until she called me one day and asked me for a favor.

  “This woman is doing a photo book on famous directors,” Sherry said, “and Billy needs a writer to do a short essay on him praising his work. He’s too embarrassed to ask you himself, but do you think, honey, as a favor to me, you can write some nice things about Billy for the book?”

  I wrote the essay for her.

  Right back at me!

  I told you I was a Hollywood animal, didn’t I?

  I was sitting at a table with a group of people at an old-time Hollywood kind of place with leather booths and twinkling little lights near the Burbank Studios.

  I glanced around and saw Guy sitting with his back to me on the other side of the room. He was reading a script.

  I went over to him and we hugged and he asked me to sit down. We hadn’t spoken in a long time. He looked tired.

  He was trying to make a production deal with a studio, he told me, but wasn’t having any success. The house in Beverly Hills was gone; he was living in an apartment on Wilshire.

  He asked about Naomi and the boys and I told him to come over and see us sometime. He nodded.

  I asked him for his phone number and as he gave it to me he said, “You won’t call me.”

  I said of course I would call him.

  “We had a helluva run, didn’t we?” Guy said and we hugged again and he walked out with his script under his arm.

  I didn’t call him.

  In Marin County, Gerry Eszterhas had me back in court, trying to get an equal share of all my future earnings (the premise being that she had inspired me as a writer, so my output was really due to her).

  She presented her expert witnesses: screenwriting professors, mostly from UCLA, who took Gerri’s money (mine really) and parroted her point of view on the stand:

  That the idea is what’s important, not the screenplay. That I was being paid these astronomical amounts of money not because my scripts were good, but because the ideas were.

  I hated these smug academics, failed screenwriters or failed television writers who then turned to teaching kids what they themselves didn’t know and couldn’t do. There they were, pontificating—and being paid to try to damage someone who had succeeded at what they had failed at.

  The only part of it I enjoyed was my lawyer’s reiterated question to each one: “What screenplays or teleplays have you written?”

  They responded by haltingly listing unproduced scripts or low-level TV productions from thirty years back or collaborations without credit on someone else’s screenplay.

  I smiled during these moments as their faces turned red or as they set their dewlapped jaws.

  I laughed out loud once as a “professor” shamefacedly mentioned his paltry credits and then reached for his glass of water with a trembly hand.

  We flew back to L.A. together—Naomi, my lawyer, Gerri’s lawyer, and me. Gerri’s lawyer was across the aisle from us.

  I couldn’t stop myself, of course, and started talking loudly about odd plane crashes where only one side of the plane … the one Gerri’s lawyer was on … suffered fatalities.

  At LAX, I was standing outside, smoking a cigarette, waiting for Naomi, when Gerri’s lawyer passed me.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said and smiled.

  I smiled, too. And said, “Fuck you!”

  The lawyer actually looked hurt … like he didn’t understand why I’d say something like that to him.

  As Christmas approached, a mutual friend called to tell me that Guy wasn’t in very good shape, not even coming over to his house for the Sunday football games.

  He was going to ask Guy over for Christmas but had decided to go out of town instead and wondered if I could invite Guy over to my house.

  I hadn’t seen Guy in a while but called and invited him. He seemed choked up and accepted the invitation.

  When he was an hour late on Christmas Day, I called him but got no answer. We waited another hour but the kids were hungry and the turkey was already overdone, so we ate without him.

  He never showed up.

  In its overview of the 1995 year in film, the New York Times’s big headline read “FROM AUSTEN TO ESZTERHAS.”

  Janet Maslin castigated “nasty, irresponsibly super-violent, sleaze-filled exploitation films (here’s the moment to mention Joe Eszterhas) that Bob Dole had no trouble making a campaign issue out of.”

  A screenwriter of my acquaintance who hangs out at the Rose Café in Venice made a list of three hundred hit movies. He put each movie on an index card, mixed the cards together, and put the cards into a hat.

  He pulled the individual cards out of a hat and matched them into twos indiscriminately. These are some of the combinations he came up with: Rocky and The Turning Point; Cliffhanger and Clueless; Top Gun and Ace Ventura; Network and The Fight Club; Midnight Cowboy and As Good as It Gets; The Sixth Sense and Flashdance; The Usual Suspects and Star Wars; Jerry Maguire and Deliverance; The Towering Inferno and Dressed to Kill; The Godfather and The Blair Witch Project; Pulp Fiction and All About Eve.

  He pondered his combinations for several days at the Rose Café and picked three: Jerry Maguire and Deliverance (a young agent with a wife and child finds himself on vacation in the Carolinas, where he has to defend his family from a backwoods madman), The Towering Inferno and Dressed to Kill (a homicidal maniac sets a fire in a high-rise, trapping the victims he picks off one by one), Pulp Fiction and All About Eve (a blue-collar girl who is a street hood schemes to become the star of her high school play).

  He pitched all three to different studios and sold all of them for a total of $1.7 million. All three went into studio development but none of the three has so far been made.

  My father kept calling us at three and four o’clock in the morning.

  My heart almost stopped every time the phone rang at that time for fear that something had happened to Steve or Suzi.

  He claimed to have forgotten the time difference each time.

  I said, “Pop, there are babies in this house. You wake them up and you scare the hell out of me.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry, but this is very important” … and would then tell me some absurdity involving his nurses. They were stealing his cans of Coke or nibbling at his dried Hungarian sausage or purposely giving him the wrong medication.

  The middle-of-the-night phone calls kept happening—but he would hang up when I picked up. I knew it was him because we had caller ID.

  I called him back each time he hung up on me and he denied that he’d called.

  “Pop,” I said, “I know it was you. I have this thing on the phone that tells me.”

  “It must be malfunctioning,” he said.

  “Please stop calling me at these times,” I said.

  “It wasn’t me,” he said.

  We finally got an answering service. My father was checkmated now. The service picked up at three and four in the morning. We weren’t bothered.

  He even conned the service once or twice into putting him through, tel
ling them that it was an emergency and that we had just called him.

  I had to leave instructions with the service: Even if my father said it was an emergency, they couldn’t put him through. At least one operator, I knew, considered me heartless.

  Then he started calling eight or ten times a day and leaving messages with the service. Sometimes I’d call him back two or three days after the first call—and there’d be thirty messages from him in total.

  He was angry when I finally called him.

  “Why don’t you call me back? You’re my son!”

  “I do call you back, Pop, but sometimes I get busy.”

  “Too busy to call your own father back?”

  “All right,” I said, “sometimes I’m not busy. Sometimes I just don’t feel like calling you back. What is it? Why did you call me, Pop? What do you want?”

  He said, “I wanted to hear the sound of my son’s voice.”

  I said, “Well I don’t want to hear the sound of your voice right now.”

  “Then you won’t hear it,” he said, and hung up.

  The screenwriters sip their cappuccinos at the Rose Café in Venice, their brows knit, their laptops overheating, as they wait for their muses to unearth box office gold.

  They are there in the mornings but never after dark, when the kids from the projects two blocks away come by with their Uzis and perform Sam Peckinpah drive-bys.

  But in the mornings, when the gangstas are still asleep, the screenwriters create and kibitz and dish and crank themselves high with dreams and caffeine. Sometimes they even ask each other to read and criticize a scene and engage in lengthy dialogue about the relative merits of dialogue and spine.

  But oh, if they’d only stick around until the gangstas came by or if they’d only see the blood in Venice’s streets, oh the stories these screenwriters would be able to tell! Though they also know they’d be stories they wouldn’t be able to sell.

  Endings don’t end happily in Venice after dark.

  Young, hip, no dummies, by mid-afternoon the screenwriters get the hell out of there.

  I wrote a script called Male Pattern Baldness about a man in Cleveland who literally winds up going to war against the forces of political correctness.