In 1991, after I wrote Basic Instinct, I was the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood and Marcia was in New York, a producer trying to find hot scripts and put films together.
I asked if she wanted to produce my latest script with Irwin Winkler, one of the town’s hottest producers. She was happy and grateful, but, unfortunately, we never got the movie I had written made.
My agent at the time said, “If you really want to say thank you to her for the help she was to you and pay her back, maybe next time you should give her a script that’s not about the president of the United States having sex with a cow.”
This industry is much more inbred than the music business.
Producer Don Simpson died of a heart attack while straining on the toilet. He was reading a book about Oliver Stone. (Elvis also died of a heart attack while straining on the toilet. He was reading a book about Jesus Christ.)
If you write a hit movie, don’t write the sequel.
Your vision didn’t include a sequel: your vision was for one story, which they are now asking you to stretch to two.
Remember that piece of rope can only stretch so far without snapping.
When MGM asked me to write the sequel to Basic Instinct, it was easy for me to pass: I’d get millions from a sequel whether I wrote it or not, according to my contract for Basic Instinct.
I had other incentives to pass, too. The studio executive in charge of the project, Lindsay Doran, told me she thought the original was “sexist” and “misogynistic” and said, “We have to figure out a way not to make the sequel like that.”
I didn’t remind her that the original had made nearly 500 million worldwide at the box office.
I didn’t tell her that a French newsmagazine picked the release of Basic as the worldwide event of 1992—not in entertainment, but in world news.
I didn’t tell her that, thanks to her attitude, I thought my characters Nick Curran and Catherine Tramell were in the hands of a politically correct ideologue. But I knew that any sequel they might make would be a disaster.
I’m glad I didn’t write the sequel to Basic Instinct.
Written by Henry Bean and Leora Barish, it turned out to be the disaster of the year, getting reviews that made my reviews for Showgirls look terrific in comparison.
Typical was David Thomson’s review in The Independent on Sunday (London): “Everyone now marks Sharon Stone down as the chump who enabled them to do the remake … And Sharon Stone, for the first time in her life, has been publicly disgraced. Now it is hard to see where she can go—except to the kind of roles Joan Collins played when television had soap operas.”
Its opening weekend box office was 2 million—unfathomably abysmal—the numbers were similar all around the world.
Thanks to Henry Bean and Leora Barish, I finally got some damn good reviews for the original.
The trades wrote: “Part of this disaster is the fault of the abysmal script (I can’t believe I’m saying this, but: Joe Eszterhas, we need you!).
The Toronto Star: “Missing in action in the sequel are Michael Douglas, director Paul Verhoeven, and writer Joe Eszterhas, who are sorely missed, as is any semblance of a coherent plot.”
The Guardian (London): “The original Basic Instinct had style, of a barking mad sort; Eszterhas’s screenplay had its own beady-eyed narrative drive.”
The Denver Post: “With Basic Instinct, Eszterhas, the one-time writer for Rolling Stone, became screenwriter as rock star.”
The New York Daily News: “Written as a fever dream by Hollywood bad boy Joe Eszterhas, the original introduced into the pantheon of femme fatales a wealthy thirty-year-old widow with degrees in literature and psychology.”
The Independent (London): “Mounted on the different testosterone drives of Joe Eszterhas, Paul Verhoeven, and Michael Douglas (major league hard-ons)—Basic Instinct was a trash masterpiece, deliriously inventive, hatefully incorrect, and exhiliratingly sure of its bad taste.”
The Weekly Standard: “Only once, really, did a genuinely filthy mainstream Hollywood picture strike it big, and that was the original Basic Instinct—a brilliantly made thriller in which a bisexual woman goes around San Francisco killing men with an ice pick. At one moment, Basic Instinct is the ultimate male fantasy about a completely uninhibited woman, while at the next it’s the ultimate male nightmare about a woman so cold she would kill you as soon as look at you. It’s lascivious and puritanical in equal measure, a movie that says sex will probably kill you and, what’s more, you’ll deserve it. But man, what a way to go. Basic Instinct became a sensation because it rides its mixed messages all the way to a daringly unrealized conclusion that leaves us in perpetual doubt as to who the real killer is. That playful trickery is entirely absent from the endless and lethargic sequel.”
The Village Voice: “The original Basic Instinct was both a manifestation and a critique of sex panic, an effortless distillation of a late ’80s/early ’90s zeitgeist: the end of second-wave feminism, the peaking of AIDS anxieties, the dawn of the Clinton years. Stale and corny, Basic Instinct 2 isn’t even accidentally relevant.”
On the other hand, some critics still want me dead.
Even though I had nothing to do with the sequel, the Arkansas Times wrote in its review of Basic 2: “It’s the kind of movie that makes me wish Joe Eszterhas’s mother had left a few more dry cleaning bags around when he was a kid.”
Thanks to the sequel, I’m a director.
The Sunday Independent of Johannesburg, South Africa: “We all remember that famous scene—the flash—with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. It was trashy film, but Joe Eszterhas directed it with the flair born of knowing delight in trashiness.”
If it’s a bad movie and it fails—well, what the hell—blame it on George W. Bush.
Paul Verhoeven, who turned down a lot of money to direct Basic’s sequel, said this about the sequel’s failure: “Anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States.”
Did you know they paid me homage in Basic Instinct 2?
That’s what a critic said, discussing a scene in the film where someone is reading a Hungarian-language primer.
I don’t think that the critic knew that one of the movie’s producers was Hungarian, as was the cinematographer. And the producer’s girlfriend had a small part.
So the Hungarian homage may have been addressed to all the Hungarians making the film, an homage made by Hungarians to Hungarians, dancing merrily off the sinking ship.
I did not pleasure myself … , I swear I didn’t. …
Reviewing Basic Instinct 2 in The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz wrote: “The only person who’ll enjoy this travesty is the exiled Eszterhas, who’ll no doubt be pleasuring himself as his pagan goddess thuds to earth.”
Yeah, okay, but she’s still got chutzpah.
After the failure of the sequel, Sharon Stone announced that she would direct either another sequel or a Basic Instinct television series.
A producer friend told me, “What happened to the sequel says nobody even wants to see her pussy anymore, let alone her movies.”
Beware of quisling screenwriters.
Notice how often critics and film journalists write that such and such a screenwriter worked on a film, doing an uncredited polish or rewrite.
The critics and journalists are leaked this information by the director or the studio. The screenwriters they plug are either the director’s friends or the studio’s lackeys.
The reason the names of these screenwriters are leaked to the press is to take credit away from those writers who really wrote the script and who may have gotten into defiant creative disagreements with the director or the studio.
Don’t take a screenwriting course in Cleveland, Ohio, either.
Bob Noll teaches screenwriting at both John Carroll University and the Cleveland Play House. His credits? Producer and co-director of the local weekly children’s show Hickory Hideout on Cleveland’s Channel 3.
He was also a child actor and
worked in local theater.
His advice about how to write a good script?
“Step one: Put a character in a tree. Step two: Shake the tree and let loose ravenous animals to prowl beneath it. Step three: Get the character out of the tree—survival optional.”
Sometimes everything goes wrong on your movie.
Director Phillip Noyce, on Sliver: “On Sliver I just became so tired I couldn’t get off the floor. I had to have doctors constantly injecting me with vitamins. I was trying to give up smoking at the time and I don’t think I was all that stable myself, as I had been inhaling up to six packs a day previously. … I was terribly addicted and had decided to give up before Sliver. This probably wasn’t a good idea for my equilibrium. But every day of pressure on the Sliver set caused bad nicotine-induced panic attacks, so the chaos of the whole thing was not something I could blame on others. The film had become a Hollywood nightmare—with a producer [Robert Evans] who, from the beginning, had dreamt of his movie being directed by someone else, a writer [Joe Eszterhas] who had abandoned a best-selling novel to pen his own version of the story, an actress [Sharon Stone] who I couldn’t communicate with and who loathed her co-star and producer, and a cinematographer [Vilmos Zsigmond] who was creating beautiful images at a snail’s pace, on a set that made more noise than the actors when they spoke their lines. At night I dreamt of turning up at a schoolboy rugby match and then running onto the field only to discover I’d left my football boots at home. I’d wake with a deep sense of dread. Facing another day at the factory that filmmaking had become.”
Never mind all that, the real reason Sliver failed.
Two of the key elements (screenwriter and cinematographer) were Hungarian.
Time is your best ally.
When Betrayed was released in 1988, the critics said it was “an unrealistic apocalyptic vision.”
Just a few years later, neo-Nazi Timothy McVeigh, the spittin’ image of the Tom Berenger character in Betrayed, blew up the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City.
When Showgirls was released in 1995, critics said it “maligned and libeled” Las Vegas, “a place of family values.”
Just a few years later, Vegas casinos were playing topless stage shows and casino buses were taking tourists to lap-dance bars.
If you get lucky, you’ll find partners.
I hooked up with three directors twice: with Richard Marquand on Jagged Edge and Hearts of Fire; with Costa-Gavras on Betrayed and Music Box; with Paul Verhoeven on Showgirls and Basic Instinct.
I hooked up with the producer Irwin Winkler (Rocky, Raging Bull) four times: on Betrayed, Music Box, Basic Instinct (he was replaced by Alan Marshall), and Sacred Cows (unproduced).
ALL HAIL
Harlan Ellison!
The screenwriter/author claimed that the script of The Terminator was a rip-off of both a novelette and a TV script that he had written. He sued and won.
After he won, he bought a full-page ad in the trades, which said, “The film acknowledges the works of Harlan Ellison.”
Use Frank as your role model.
I was appearing as myself in An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, and Arthur Hiller, the director, did two takes and wanted to do more.
I said no, that two were enough, then got up and walked off the set.
Arthur gaped, but what could he do? I wasn’t going back to do any more takes.
I learned that from Sinatra. Frank did two takes—no matter who the director was—and no more.
Can you be a person of integrity as a screenwriter?
Screenwriter/novelist Raymond Chandler: “All progress in the art of the screenplay depends on a very few people who are in a position to fight for excellence. Hollywood loves them for it and is only too anxious to reward them by making them something else than writers. Hollywood’s attitude to writers is necessarily conditioned by the mass of its writers, not by the few who have what it calls integrity. It loves the word, having so little of the quality.”
Keep everything close to your vest.
Producer David Merrick once got a phone call telling him his building would be blown up in two minutes. He told no one else, ran out of his office, yelled, “Take any messages!” to his assistant, then scurried to the elevator and out of the building.
Hit ’em back.
When MPAA president Jack Valenti told people that I was “desperately ill and needed immediate medical attention,” I reminded people that Jack Valenti was the White House aide who briefed Lyndon Johnson in the West Wing bathroom each morning and handed him the toilet paper under the stall before he got his gig at the MPAA.
If they kick the living shit out of you, smile and say, “Is that the best you’ve got?”
I won the Hollywood Women’s Press Association’s Sour Apple Award—following in the footsteps of Norman Mailer and Howard Stern … for acting boorishly and believing my own publicity.
When I received the award at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, I said this:
“Mel Gibson said that if I came here to accept this award, I should wear a bulletproof vest. I’ve brought my wife with me instead. I pity any potential assassin who may be lurking here. Naomi keeps a riding crop next to our bed, you know.
“I know that this award is given for believing your own publicity and I thought what I’d do here today is share some of my recent publicity with you. I’m doing it, of course, so that you will have no lingering doubt in your minds that you have given this award to the right person.
“The Portland Oregonian said about me: ‘He is an imbecilic ape of a screenwriter.’
“Time magazine said, ‘His movie is ludicrous, he can’t write.’
“The Boston Globe said, ‘He types, he doesn’t write, and if the stories about his manual typewriter are accurate, he can’t type very well, either.’
“A small-town paper in Florida said, ‘He is the overwriter—overweight and overpaid.’
“The Miami Herald said, ‘It’s hard to believe this is the same man who wrote Music Box and Betrayed. With age, his brains seem to have lowered gravitationally to another part of his anatomy.’
“Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to thank you. I am proud of you for giving this award to a screenwriter instead of Jim Carrey, the actor who was my main competing candidate. This is a landmark day for screenwriters! Good Lord, I have defeated the biggest movie star in the world!
“Eat your heart out, Jim. The apple is mine!”
You’ll need some K-Y jelly.
Producer Robert Evans: “You’ve gotta scare the piss out of ’em to close a deal. You’ve gotta make ’em feel that if they don’t do the deal, you’ve got somebody waiting in the wings who will. Fear is the K-Y jelly that gets the fucking done. Without that jelly, the deals don’t close.”
Mark Twain, Homer, and Shakespeare were in the same boat you’re in.
Novelist/screenwriter Raymond Chandler: “No writer in any age ever got a blank check. He always had to accept some conditions imposed from without, respect certain taboos, try to please certain people. It might have been the church, or a rich patron, or a generally accepted standard of elegance, or the commercial wisdom of a publisher or an editor, or perhaps even a set of political theories. If he did not accept them, he revolted against them. In either case they conditioned his writing. No writer ever wrote exactly what he wanted to write, because there was never anything inside himself, anything purely individual that he did want to write. It’s all reaction of one sort or another.”
Thank God for television.
Mike Medavoy: “The audience certainly recognizes a second-rate product when it sees it. It ought to: it grew up watching second-rate stuff on television.”
Don’t become a complete cynic.
Have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch,” wrote Raymond Chandler. “The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as he is to himself. He should be scrupulously honest about his work, but he should not expect scrupulous honesty in return. He won’t get it.”
; Some people might begrudge you your success.
When he heard that Time magazine was thinking of putting producer Robert Evans on its cover, studio chief Frank Yablans said to Evans, “If you’re on the cover of Time without me, I will make each hour of each day of each week that you’re here so miserable you’ll be sorry you’re alive.”
Help those who’ve helped you.
Two young guys wrote a script that was butchered by the director and the studio. The producer stuck up for the writers but couldn’t protect them from the director and the studio.
The script that was butchered was called Assassins, starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas. The screenwriters were Larry and Andy Wachowski. The producer was Joel Silver.
Because Joel Silver stuck up for them, Larry and Andy gave him their next script. It was called The Matrix.
P.S. Assassins was a disaster.
This can metaphorically happen to you.
At first I was shocked,” Marilyn Monroe said. “I hadn’t been around enough to know what was going on. He had a suit on, so I didn’t think he could hurt me. When I started thinking about a new dress I wanted and couldn’t afford, well … I was pretty drunk, too, so I said okay. I still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He asked me to take off my clothes. I thought that was a pretty good deal for fifteen dollars.”
PERK OF SUCCESS: YOU, TOO, CAN GET THE BEST TABLE AT SPAGO
I do, sometimes on only an hour’s notice. And Wolfgang always comes over to my table and often he even sits down. Hallelujah!
We even had dinner together while vacationing in Hawaii. He even gave me career advice: “Don’t ever turn your back on Michael Ovitz! He never forgets.”
Wolfgang is a good guy. He has the same respect for screenwriters that he has for directors and movie stars—as long as they’ve all had some hit movies.
Leni Riefenstahl smiled in her grave.
The Writers Guild gave its Best Original Screenplay award to the liberal propagandist Michael Moore for his script of Bowling for Columbine, a documentary.
In other words, Moore didn’t write it; he interviewed people and edited what they said into a political polemic.
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 11
