Magic Man was as dead as Burt Reynolds’s career … as Wolfgang Puck’s Eureka … as Cathedral Latin High School, razed and the site of a parking lot … as dead as my marriage to Gerri … as dead as John Candy.
· · ·
Naomi asked to read all the scripts I’d written.
Her favorite was Magic Man.
“It’s sweet,” she said. “It’s moving. It doesn’t have any violence. Even the sex is gently done.”
She had a suggestion.
“I’d like to see more of the boy’s father,” she said. “He’s too much in the background for me.”
I rewrote the script, focusing on Karchy’s father, who was somewhat—but only somewhat—patterned after my father.
Naomi loved the rewrite: “I think you can get four really strong actors into this now,” she said. “For Karchy, Billy Magic, Diney, and now the dad.”
She also loved the new title I came up with for the script: Telling Lies in America.
I changed the title not because I didn’t like Magic Man but to make it appear that this was a brand-new script.
It had been around for so long that there had been a change of generations at the top studio levels.
Many of today’s executives wouldn’t remember a script called Magic Man but if they went to their computers, they’d find it, along with readers’ reports, which would or wouldn’t be friendly.
By changing the title, I made sure that no studio readers’ reports would be uncovered.
At about the same time, Fran Kuzui, the director of Tokyo Pop, whom I hadn’t seen in all this time, was having lunch with a friend: a young director named Guy Ferland.
Guy told her he was working on a coming-of-age piece that he hoped to get financed and direct. Fran told him about the best coming-of-age piece she’d ever read: Magic Man.
Guy was incredulous. The author of Basic Instinct and Sliver and Showgirls had done a coming-of-age piece that Fran thought was the best she’d ever read?
“I’ll send it to you, read it,” Fran said.
Guy read it and called her. “This is the piece I want to direct,” Guy said.
Fran said, “I’ll call Joe.”
Guy Ferland and I met and I told him about the new draft I’d done called Telling Lies in America. He read it and was very excited. I was, too. I liked Guy’s sensitive approach to the piece.
He agreed with Naomi: he thought it possible that we could get four topnotch actors.
Financing wouldn’t be easy, but Guy thought he could do the movie on a bare-bones budget and shoot it on location in Cleveland.
Fran Kuzui (my angel) and her husband had a production company of their own and Fran thought they could provide some of the financing.
Guy Ferland took the script to some friends of his at a new company called Banner Entertainment and they agreed to provide the bulk of the financing—if we would all agree to take very little money for our efforts.
I agreed to take $100,000 for the script.
I insisted, however, that since my rewrite was Naomi’s idea, Naomi be made executive producer (at no fee, but with her own director’s chair).
Casting came together quickly.
Brad Renfro, only fourteen years old but already an actor of enormous talent and potential, agreed to play Karchy Jonas.
Kevin Bacon, a superb actor who had somehow never been nominated for an Oscar, agreed to play Billy Magic.
Calista Flockhart was Guy Ferland’s discovery. A relative unknown when Guy cast her as Diney, she was on the cover of magazines only a few years later as Ally McBeal.
Maximilian Schell agreed to play Karchy Jonas’s father after a conversation with me. I had enormous respect for Max—both as an actor and as a human being. His courageous anti-Nazi stands in Europe had made him a hero to many Europeans.
“Where are you right now, Max?” I asked him over the phone.
“I am at a little farmhouse in Austria,” he said. “I can see the Hungarian border from where I am. Where are you?”
“I am on the island of Maui,” I said. “I can see a rainbow over the sea from where I am.”
“But you are Hungarian,” Max said. “You should be here looking at your border and I should be there sitting in the sun and looking at the rainbow.”
I laughed and Max said, “Ach! There is never justice in the world!”
“Yes,” I said. “On occasion there is!”
Max thought that was funny.
Max wanted $100,000 to do the movie.
The Banner executives explained to his agents that we were doing this on an extremely low budget … and that Max’s part was the fourth lead. On a low-budget film, $100,000 for the fourth lead is astronomical excess.
Max’s agents said they’d speak to him and when they called back they said Max was firm about the money. His part may have been the fourth lead, his agents said, but Max would have to come to Cleveland, Ohio.
That, his agents added, was a long way from Austria. It was also not exactly New York or L.A. or London or Rome or Paris.
The price of having to go to Cleveland, Ohio, was $100,000.
His agents also said Max had instructed them to ask this question:
How much was Joe Eszterhas being paid?
We had another actor begging us to play the part, but Guy Ferland felt it sounded too much like “stunt casting.”
Charles Bronson was in his seventies now but he related to the story thanks to his own immigrant roots.
It made me smile, though.
A choice between Maximilian Schell and Charles Bronson. How many parts were there which attracted both of those men?
I said to the Banner executives: Okay, give Max my $100,000.
I was now being paid nothing to effect my revenge on my high school enemies at Cathedral Latin.
But I was happy to pay the anti-Nazi crusader Maximilian Schell $100,000 of my own money … to effect a very personal revenge on my anti-Semitic father … whom Max would play in the movie.
Kevin was doing the movie almost for free. He loved the part.
“Billy Magic is a very sexual character,” he said. “Sex and music are the essence of what’s flowing through his veins.”
He and Brad Renfro had worked together in Sleepers, where Kevin played a prison guard who raped Brad. Now he was playing a role model who was corrupting him.
Brad was the oldest fourteen-year-old I had ever met. He played a mean blues guitar and liked beer. The bartenders at the hotel where he was staying obliged him and he spent some nights playing his guitar on the small bar’s stage.
Girls surrounded him, driven to the hotel by their mothers, who waited in the car while Brad busied himself entertaining them.
At fourteen, he was already a chain-smoker. He fell in love with the Vietnam souvenir lighter that I carried. It said, “Vietnam—66-67 Phu Rieng.” Underneath that, it said, “Water. Never touch the stuff. Fish fuck in it, you know.”
I gave Brad the lighter and he was overjoyed.
I had others at home that said: “Ours is not to do or die, ours is to smoke and stay high.”
And: “Being in the army is like a rubber. It gives you a feeling of security while you’re getting fucked.”
And: “There is no gravity. The world sucks.”
· · ·
I gave a small speaking part to my brother-in-law Joe Baka, a steelworker from Mansfield, Ohio, who had never had any acting experience and who did it as a hoot.
Bep thinned down, got into character, and was so good that agents began trying to sign him up. After the movie’s release, while on a flight to visit us in Malibu, the stewardess recognized him.
Tempted to become an actor, Joe Baka, no dummy, hurried back to his steel plant in Ohio.
I was standing in the parking lot of the Num Num Potato Chip factory, where I had played ball as a kid, being interviewed by an NBC camera crew.
I told them about playing ball right here in the Num Num Potato Chip factory parking lot and as I was s
peaking, an old lady came over and handed me something. It was a free dinner coupon for two at … Nick’s Diner, where my father had yelled “Frankfoorter! Frankfoorter!” at the top of his lungs and where my mother had fled alone after the Hungarian ball.
After the interview was over Naomi and I walked down to Nick’s Diner to have a cup of coffee at the counter.
I felt tears in my eyes but forced myself to stop them and forced myself to smile.
The NBC cameras were outside, shooting us at the counter through the window.
Dick Jacobs, the owner of my revered Cleveland Indians, asked some of us from the movie to his private loge at Jacobs Field. I had long admired Jacobs, a grand old man in his seventies who had done more to revitalize Cleveland than maybe anyone else.
Brad Renfro was there, sneaking sips of beer that he thought no one noticed and dragging on a cigarette in the no-smoking seats.
“This is really amazing; what you’ve done with this ballpark,” Brad said to Dick Jacobs. “It’s beautiful.”
“Aw,” Dick Jacobs smiled, “don’t flatter me.”
“I’m not fucking flattering you,” Brad Renfro said. “I wouldn’t fucking flatter you. I’m serious.”
Dick Jacobs’s face turned red and his hands started to tremble. “You have very bad manners, young man,” he said and walked away.
Naomi walked after him. “Dick, please,” she said. “He’s a kid. He didn’t mean anything. He’s only fourteen years old.”
“At this rate,” Dick Jacobs said, “he won’t see twenty.”
· · ·
I wanted Maximilian Schell to be happy. When he arrived from Europe (with his daughter and her nanny), I took him to one of Cleveland’s best restaurants, Johnny’s Downtown. Max was tired and he had a cold and all he wanted was a bowl of vichyssoise.
Johnny’s didn’t have vichyssoise.
Maximilian Schell didn’t want anything else.
I had a few words with the maître d’, who sent someone scurrying to a nearby supermarket, and Maximilian Schell had a bowl of vichyssoise in front of him within ten minutes.
“I think this may be the best vichyssoise I’ve ever had,” Maximilian Schell said. “Who would have thought I’d have the best vichyssoise of my life in Cleveland?”
When Max Schell found out that the character he was playing was based on my father, he asked if he could visit him.
I drove him out to my father’s house and Max asked him if he could take some articles of my father’s clothing to wear in the film and “get into character.”
I knew that Max usually kept all the clothes he wore in films and wore them in real life. I told my father that and my father gave up his beret and one of his Hungarian peasant hats.
I knew that Maximilian Schell had devoted his life, at great personal cost, to fighting the Nazis and I wondered how he would feel if he knew that the beret and peasant hat he wore had once been worn by … an alleged war criminal.
And I thought: who could have imagined, back there on Lorain Avenue, that one day Maximilian Schell, the world-famous actor, would someday be wearing my father’s beret?
Thinking back to those early days on Lorain Avenue from now on, I wondered: Would I see Maximilian Schell in that beret instead of my father?
During his visit to my father’s house, Max asked if he had any tapes so Max could study my father’s accent.
My father said there was a tape of a Hungarian television interview in his bookcase. Naomi went to get it and popped it into the VCR while Max kept talking to my father.
When I saw what came up on the screen, I motioned quickly to Naomi to turn it off.
It was a tape of a Hungarian movie from the forties filled with Nazi anti-Semitic harangues about the Zsidos.
“Wrong tape,” I said to Max, who, busy talking to my father, hadn’t seen it.
· · ·
The movie was finished and we were looking for a distributor to put it into theaters.
Our best shot was Miramax. The head of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, and his wife came to see a rough cut in Beverly Hills on a Saturday afternoon. Harvey was restless during the screening and wandered around getting himself something to drink. But his wife was crying as she watched it.
“It’s a terrific picture,” Harvey said afterward. “But I gotta think about it.”
“I loved it,” his wife said. “I was moved.”
Harvey Weinstein wrote me a note saying that he’d liked Telling Lies very much but that after great deliberation and against his wife’s advice, he had decided not to distribute it.
I wrote him this note:
“I take no shit from nobody,” Karchy Jonas says in Telling Lies. I’ve lived my life that way and the first time I saw you, many years ago, taking the room over at the Ivy, I recognized a kindred spirit.
This movie might find a distributor, but it will not find a home. You are its home.
I ask you this … and it’s something I have learned in only the past three years: listen, please, to your wife, as I listen to mine. It was Naomi who made the suggestions about Telling Lies that made me rewrite it. Women, I’ve learned, are smarter than we are. And I think, incidentally, women will love this movie—if they get a real chance to see it. Which brings me back to you. You would give people that “real chance.”
I have the feeling that your involvement with this is the difference between a hit movie and a barely remembered one.
Maybe it’s because I sense that you and I, in different ways, from different backgrounds, are both Karchy Jonas.
At any rate, I ask you to reconsider your decision.
Harvey thought about it some more and stuck to his decision: Miramax would not distribute Telling Lies in America.
While we were looking for a distributor, I called Joe Roth and asked him to see the movie. He was once going to direct it; now he was one of the studio heads at Disney.
Joe saw it and called me back quickly.
“It didn’t do much for me,” he said. “I wouldn’t have done it that way.”
We still didn’t have a distributor, but we were getting rave reviews. Even I was getting rave reviews!
“Here’s a surprise,” wrote David Ansen in Newsweek. “Joe Eszterhas, the writer who inflicted Showgirls and Basic Instinct upon the world, redeems himself with this autobiographical tale.”
“I loved this movie,” said Roger Ebert. “This is one of the very best performances Kevin Bacon has ever given. The movie is so wonderful in terms of the relationship between the broken-down disc jockey and this young kid. And the disc jockey himself, what a rich character! This is really one of Eszterhas’s best pieces of writing.”
“Little that Joe Eszterhas has done for the screen would deem him likely to write something like Telling Lies in America. … There’s a sweetness and an integrity here that seem completely out of character for this writer,” wrote Marshall Fine for the Gannett Newspapers.
“The movie proves that Mr. Eszterhas still possesses sharp dramatic instincts,” wrote the New York Times.
The Nation wrote, “Add this to the list of cinema’s small but lasting pleasures: the sight of young Brad Renfro, in the role of the Hungarian immigrant Karchy Jonas, learning to pronounce ‘the’ in Telling Lies in America. … Yes, there’s a movie now in the theaters in which a character faces a moral crisis. … But the most remarkable aspect of Telling Lies in America is unquestionably the identity of its screenwriter—the man responsible for the scripts of Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Until now, he has hardly made himself known as a framer of moral dilemmas, his characters’ thoughts having tended, shall we say, toward the pudential. … Eszterhas once had a reason to write: every part of the world around him was scary and beautiful.”
Not that Telling Lies won all the critics over. Carrie Rickey of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who trotted out the shrinks to analyze my parents’ sex life after Showgirls, called Telling Lies “as cynical as its villain (Billy Magic) … as contemptuous and contempt
ible a piece of work as has ever been made.”
Jay Carr of the Boston Globe was touting Kevin Bacon for an Oscar …
Telling Lies was picked to be shown at the prestigious New York Film Festival …
But the movie never found a distributor.
Banner Entertainment valiantly tried to release it itself, but Telling Lies failed commercially.
Everyone involved with the movie looked forward to attending the New York Film Festival. The movie’s inclusion was truly an honor (the only American film selected besides Robert Duvall’s The Apostle) and the media coverage would be celebratory and huge. But two weeks before the festival screening, Naomi gave birth to John Law Eszterhas in Santa Monica. She developed a staph infection.
If Naomi couldn’t go to New York, I decided, I wouldn’t go either. The rewrite which made the movie work had been her idea.
The night of the festival screening in New York, I grilled hot dogs and burgers in Malibu.
Telling Lies opened the Cleveland Film Festival as well and, after the showing, I was signing autographs and having my picture taken when a man my age stopped me and said, “Joe, you probably don’t remember me, but would you mind if I have a picture taken with you?”
I recognized him immediately. He was one of the kids at Cathedral Latin who had been ugly to me.
“I remember you, Marty,” I said.
“You do?” he said with a sheepish half smile.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t take pictures with others,” and turned away … to a man named George Gund, who is one of Cleveland’s wealthiest and most famous men … and who was standing there asking if I would have a picture taken with him.
I put my arm around George Gund and smiled as he put an arm around me … as Marty from Cathedral Latin stood there staring at the two of us.
Weeks after Telling Lies in America was selected by the New York Film Festival, I got a letter from its director asking me for money.
I didn’t know if this was the way film festivals worked: first they flatter you; then they ask you for money.
The letter explained that they wanted to use my money so that André De Toth, my fellow Hungarian, could attend a festival tribute in his honor.
Bandi Toth was in his nineties now and couldn’t afford the travel fare. He had directed Ramrod and Tanganyika, movies which the critics said were “noted for their casual attitude toward violence and treachery”—things which had been said about my own movies as well.
Hollywood Animal Page 77
