It was a dark, satiric comedy and my gut told me it had potential to be a hit movie.
I called Arnold Rifkin and told him I had written a new spec and how excited I was about it and he said, “Send it over right away.”
Then he said, “Hold on a minute,” and put me on hold.
He came back and he said, “I’ve checked my calendar. I’ll read it on”—and he gave me a date.
The date he gave me was two weeks away.
I didn’t think I’d heard him right.
“That’s the earliest date I’ve got to read anything,” he said.
I wanted to say: It takes about an hour to read a script—you don’t have an hour in your day for two weeks?
I wanted to say: Do you move your lips when you read, Arnold?
I didn’t say those things and Arnold Rifkin said, “Gotta go. Congratulations. Send it over. I look forward to reading it.”
I thought: Way, way forward.
Two weeks forward!
· · ·
I sat in my den and thought:
I was the highest-paid screenwriter in town. I’d been paid astronomical, record prices for my scripts. Every spec script I wrote turned into an event. The last one, Blaze of Glory, wound up on the front page of the Calendar section of the L.A. Times for … not selling.
Half the producers in town would have made trips to Malibu to read the script if I had let them.
And yet my own agent wouldn’t read it for two weeks.
Because he was too busy.
Too busy for two weeks to read something for an hour.
I was hurt.
He loved having me in his life, huh?
Would he have been too busy to see Bruce Willis’s dailies?
Too busy for two weeks to see Bruce Willis’s dailies?
I fired Arnold Rifkin.
Not in person. (I was too busy.)
Not by phone. (I was too busy.)
By fax.
Right back at ya!
My fax to Arnold Rifkin said:
Dear Arnold,
It has, unfortunately, become painfully clear to me that due to your other responsibilities and obligations I am not receiving the kind of representation I deserve. I have, as a result, decided to leave the William Morris Agency. I wish you the best, both personally and professionally.
Sincerely,
Joe
I didn’t know then what I would learn with the passage of time: Firing Arnold Rifkin was a mistake, too. Certainly not a grave mistake like firing Guy McElwaine, but big enough that over the years I came to regret it.
Arnold wasn’t my brother, but he was a goodhearted friend. He got too busy sometimes, that’s all … and it took him too long to read a script.
I needed an agent and I thought about my old friend Bob Bookman. Bookie was one of the few people in town who read. He loved Proust and Flaubert and spent as much time as he could out of town … preferably in France.
The only problem was that Bookie’s agency was CAA and it was still headed by Michael Ovitz.
It had been nearly ten years since our bust-up but I remembered Wolfgang Puck’s advice—“Ovitz never forgets”—and was wary.
I had lunch with Bookie at my house and asked him to sniff out how Ovitz would feel if Bookie represented me.
Bookie called back quickly and said Ovitz had no problem with it.
I said I’d do it only if we sent out a joint press release which I’d co-write.
Bookie called back and said Ovitz agreed.
We went back and forth on the press release. Everything was fine until I added this sentence. “Ovitz said, ‘I have always admired Eszterhas’s talent.’”
When Michael Ovitz read that sentence, Bob Bookman said Ovitz felt “a surge of animosity” and the deal was off.
I went back to Jeff Berg and Jim Wiatt at ICM. I had been back and forth with those two so often through the years that Jeff had even written me a letter once (after I fired him) telling me he looked forward to the next time I hired him.
“Changing agents,” Sean Penn said, “is like changing deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Jeff and Jimmy came out to Malibu on a Friday afternoon and read Male Pattern Baldness. They thought it was very commercial and thought we could sell it to someone for as much as $4 million.
They went back to the office to devise a game plan. They said they’d get back to me by the end of the day Monday.
After they left, I picked up the phone and called the director I thought would be ideal for this script.
Betty Thomas had done comedy much of her life, had directed The Brady Bunch Movie, and was working on Doctor Dolittle. More important, she was every studio’s directorial flavor of the month.
I told her what I’d written and she wanted to read it right away. I said I’d get the script to her house in the Valley the next day—Saturday.
She read it Saturday and committed to direct it.
Since she owed Paramount a movie, she got the script to Sherry Lansing on Sunday.
Monday morning Sherry called Jeff Berg and bought Male Pattern Baldness for $4 million—two now and two upon commencement of principal photography.
The script was sold and green-lighted with a director attached before Berg and Wiatt even had a chance to call me with their sales plan.
ICM took 10 percent—for what I guessed was a ten-minute phone call.
Movieline magazine picked “the 100 dumbest things the folks in Hollywood have done lately:
“#40—Elizabeth Berkley remarked about Showgirls: ‘I’m really proud of this performance and this movie.’
“#41—Joe Eszterhas named the unprincipled nude dancer in Showgirls ‘Nomi’ after his own wife, Naomi.
“#42—Joe Eszterhas claimed that he thinks Showgirls star Gina Gershon is ‘The Anna Magnani of the ’90s.’
“#43—Joe Eszterhas stated in his trade ad defending Showgirls—‘It is my operating principle as a writer that society will never change if we stick our heads in the sand and pretend that abuses to women, blacks, Jews and gay people aren’t happening every day.’
“#44—Joe Eszterhas claimed that Showgirls was ‘a deeply religious message on a very personal level.’
“#49—David Caruso said, ‘You’ll see. Jade will be rediscovered by audiences in the future. In fact, I will make a prediction that this film will have a resurgence.’”
Discussing Showgirls’s failure during an interview, Paul Verhoeven said, “There was a perception problem. It was hyped as the kind of sexy, pornographic movie that would go through the boundaries. That was wrong. Audiences went looking for thrills and emerged unaroused and that made them hate the film. Beyond that, there were problems with the script.”
In other words—Fuck me!—it was my fault.
Finally … about Showgirls.
Naomi was right.
“Dark and depressing” was what she had said when she read it in its first draft on Maui.
Most of the critics expressed some variation of that same theme after seeing the movie.
My father had been calling and leaving messages for two days but I hadn’t yet called him back. Steve was visiting us and I’d been hanging out with him.
On this particular afternoon, I was writing and Steve was off doing something in Melrose.
Our gate bell rang.
I picked up and a voice said, “Is this Mr. Eszterhas?”
I said yes.
He said, “This is Deputy Miller of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. I have an emergency message to give you.”
I felt the chills go down my back. My heart started to beat like a jackhammer.
He said, “I have to give it to you personally.”
At that moment, I knew that Steve was dead—that he’d had an accident on the way to Melrose.
I said, “I’ll be right out.”
I knew I was going to have a heart attack before I walked by the swimming pool and the guesthouse and the garage and got to th
e gate. My heart now felt like it was going to burst out of my chest. I was shaking.
I opened the gate and saw the uniformed cop standing there next to his Sheriff’s Department cruiser. He looked grim.
And exactly then I saw Steve’s car driving down the street toward the house.
Steve was alive.
But what about Suzi?
The cop said, “Are you all right?”
“No,” I said, “what’s your emergency message? Is it my daughter?”
The cop said, “Your daughter?”
I said, “She’s in school in Boulder.”
The cop said, “No, sir. Your father called us from Ohio. He said he’s been calling your house for days and not getting an answer. He was worried something was wrong. He asked us to come out to the house to make sure everything was okay here. That’s why I had to see you in person.”
I said, “Everything’s fine. My father’s ninety-three years old. He’s got Alzheimer’s disease.”
The cop said, “I’m sorry, sir. My uncle’s got Alzheimer’s, too. I know what it’s like. We won’t be bothering you again.”
He got back into his car and Steve said, “Is everything okay, Pops?”
I said, “Grandpa called the cops.”
Steve said, “I heard what you said. Why didn’t you tell me Grandpa’s got Alzheimer’s.”
I started to laugh as we walked back to the house. I said, “He doesn’t, Mano.”
I thought about Gerry Messerman’s contention that my father was the most manipulative man he’d ever met.
My father had managed, at the age of ninety-three, with a broken English accent, to con the L.A. Sheriff’s Department into thinking we’d been robbed or home-invaded or murdered and to send a deputy to our house.
I was convinced it was his revenge for me not calling him back … and for hiring the answering service that he had to deal with each time he called us.
My father was saying—You may have the money to wall yourself off from me … but you still aren’t beyond my reach.
I called him and read him the riot act. I told him that Steve was visiting and that he had almost given me a heart attack with his call to the cops. I told him I had told the cops he had Alzheimer’s so they wouldn’t listen to him if he called them again. And I told him that if he kept harassing me with his phone calls, I’d make sure the nurses took his phone away from him.
My father said he was terribly sorry and swore that it would never, ever happen again.
Then he said, “What you said about the Alzheimer’s, that was pretty fast thinking,” and laughed.
Still angry, I called a Hungarian man who was my father’s closest friend in Cleveland and told him what my father had done … but he knew all about it already … even knew that I told the cop my father had Alzheimer’s.
He had just gotten off the phone with my father.
“Your father said, ‘Oh, I really got Joe mad this time.’ Your father laughed so hard I was worried about his heart.”
I said, “He thought it was funny?”
He said, “Not what happened, but how angry you were.”
Naomi’s dad, who’d smoked cigarettes all of his life, was sick with lung failure. I bought him a hospital chair and a big screen TV. We went back to visit him in Mansfield and I trimmed his hair and beard and nails and toenails.
He wasn’t eating or drinking much, but we smoked a couple of cigarettes together and told a couple of dirty jokes. We buried him at the cemetery in Mansfield, about a month later.
I loved Barney Baka, a man who had built houses with his own hands, an ornery old Polack who was known as “Ebeneezer” to his children and grandchildren. Maybe because we were both ethnics who shared a lifelong love of the Cleveland Indians—but it was as though we recognized each other when we met. Sometimes, sitting in cars next to each other, I even held the old man’s hand.
His funeral was held on a glorious spring day. Butterflies were everywhere; squirrels scampered in the trees. As we prayed over Barney’s casket and I looked at Naomi and her brothers and sister, the family that I, an only child, had never had, I thought:
You did good, Ebeneezer, raising these decent, good kids, even though you did it in your crotchety, old-timer way.
And I thought to myself:
Would I be able to raise my boys to be good and decent people in Malibu, on the bluff where Sean Penn and Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez had grown up? Above the beach where the honking of sound trucks and star trailers mixed in with the crashing surf and the seals’ cries?
· · ·
Cleveland mayor Michael White and I held a joint press conference to announce the filming of Male Pattern Baldness.
Mayor White said: “Cleveland’s stardom as an urban success story in the nineties has been followed by local, national, and international news media. We’ve shed our rust-belt image to reveal a new American city that will be revealed to the world on Hollywood’s silver screen. I’d like to first commend Joe Eszterhas for returning to his hometown to make this spectacular announcement and secondly to thank him for the economic impact this movie will garner for Cleveland and its citizens.”
I said: “Cleveland is the only real hometown I’ve ever had—and I’m glad that I can give something back to the people and the town that treated me with great feeling and affection when I was growing up here.”
The press release mentioned that Betty Thomas, who’d direct the film, “was born in Willoughby, Ohio, attended South High School, and began her career as a student teacher in the Willoughby area.”
I was even presented with the flag of the city of Cleveland.
In Marin County Court my lawyer, Patricia Glaser, made a brilliant case against Gerri’s position, hammering away at the unfairness of putting a man into creative servitude for the rest of his life—and then tried what she described as “a very long shot.”
Without calling any expert witnesses, without a detailed presentation of our side and our case—she asked the judge to dismiss their case. To throw it out of court. Because an idea, according to the law, is not property.
A month later, the judge did exactly that.
The story ran across the top of the front page of the Marin Independent Journal.
Gerri, Suzi said, was “humiliated.”
I was free … if you could call payments of $32,500 a month and giving up millions of dollars, two houses, and four cars … freedom.
Richard Dreyfuss came to our house for lunch, carrying an Evian bottle that had a piece of elastic tape on its side that said “RICHARD DREYFUSS.”
He left it behind and our housekeeper, starstruck, asked if she could have it.
She kept it next to her bed in the guest bedroom and, about six months later, when Naomi’s older brother Bep visited from Ohio, he stayed in the guest bedroom, got thirsty in the middle of the night, and slugged the water from the bottle next to the bed.
Our housekeeper let out a shriek when Bep left and she realized her Richard Dreyfuss water was gone.
She grieved for days.
I offered to call Richard to ask him to send over another bottle of his Evian water, but the housekeeper said it wouldn’t be the same thing as the bottle she’d had.
We called Bep and told him he’d guzzled Richard Dreyfuss’s six-month-old water and all Bep said was “Yuck!”
Naomi and I were never apart. We had lunch and dinner together every day—Naomi cooked or I grilled and we listened to Billie Holiday and Renzo Arbore and his orchestra a lot. We were also having one baby after another. On September 27, 1997, our third son, John Law Eszterhas, was born.
Sometimes we left the kids with their nanny and drove over to Palm Springs or down to Laguna … and put more babies in the oven.
The only nights we were ever apart were when Naomi was readying to ease another baby out of the oven.
We were so close that our only separations were caused by our lovemaking.
My father sent me a document headlined
“STATEMENT” and witnessed and also signed by his housekeeper.
Written in Hungarian, it said, “My book Nemzet Politika (National Policy) is anti-Semitic. Its assumptions, conclusions, and observations are faulty and wrong. I find it necessary therefore to withdraw and deny the faulty and wrong assumptions, conclusions, and observations in my book.
“Historical events after the publication of this book proved my anti-Semitic assumptions, conclusions, and observations to be shameful.
“I forbid any future publication of a new edition of this book.”
My father called to tell me that Father Miklos Dengl, the Franciscan priest who fired him from the Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday, visited him.
“He’s dying of heart disease,” my father said. “He asked me to forgive him for firing him. He said he knows now that what he did was cruel and unjust.”
“Did you forgive him?”
“I threw him out of the house,” my father said.
I said, “What did he do?”
“Cried,” my father said, “the same way I cry sometimes because you won’t forgive me.”
He laughed.
I didn’t think it was funny.
I said, “Maybe I’ve forgiven you.”
My father said, “Don’t tell me any of your Hollywood lies.”
I thought that was funny so I laughed.
My father laughed with me.
For a brief moment, we shared our laugh.
When Michael Ovitz left CAA and became an executive at Disney, I wrote him a public note in Los Angeles Magazine:
Dear Michael,
Kevin’s gone, Sly’s gone, Barbra’s gone, even Seagal’s gone. The new CAA president, Richard Lovett, has allowed some folks to take a picture of his ass. Sweet Jesus, Michael, all these years after our Incident at Rashomon, they have asked me—Me!—what I’d do if I ran CAA. It’s as screwy as asking Bob Dole what he’d do if he ran the country!
This is what I would do, Michael. I would do anything to convince you to come back. I would buy the CAA building and give it to you. I would buy the Peninsula Hotel across the street and give it to you. I would buy Wilson’s House of Leather and give it to you. Hell, I’d go down Wilshire and buy the ICM building and give it to you. I’d buy Roy Lichtenstein and give him to you.
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