From News Hound to Hollywood Animal

Friday, February 27th, 2004

In From News Hound to Hollywood Animal, Ellen E. Heltzel interviews screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, best known Basic Instinct and Flashdance. Before becoming a screenwriter though, Eszterhas started as a journalist:

In my first job, at the Dayton Journal-Herald, mostly I drove around listening to the police radio. One night I heard there’d been a shooting in a suburban neighborhood. I got there before the police did, and I heard someone crying in the house, so I walked in. I moved toward where I heard the crying, and in the first room I saw blood and tissue all over the wall, and a dead body on the floor. I kept going, and there was another body, and more blood and tissue. And then, in the next room, I found an old lady with white hair, and the surreal thing was that she was crying and talking in Hungarian, which is my native tongue. Her son-in-law had shot her daughter and himself. In terms of everything I covered, this really moved me. But I never used it in a movie.

Creepy:

I’d recently come out from Cleveland, and he and I went to some party, where Hunter [Thompson] took out this gigantic needle and proceeded to shoot himself in the navel. I said, “—–, what was that?” He said, “Ether. Would you like some?” I declined.

Eszterhas has described screenwriters as the “discarded whores” of the business:

They cheat and steal from all screenwriters, including me. [...] When I sold “Basic Instinct” for $3 million — mind you, the director still got $8 million and the star got $15 million — immediately after that, Jeff Katzenberg wrote a very famous memo saying we can’t keep paying these prices to screenwriters, because if we do, it’s going to affect the amount we have to pay directors and actors.

I’ve heard other screenwriters make this point before:

My problem with film critics is that they never read the screenplays. They see the movie, and if they don’t like the movie, they tee off on the screenwriter — even if the screenwriter’s work has been mutilated by other people the director brought in to “fix” whatever he thinks is wrong.

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