Back to Basics reviews Joe Eszterhas’s autobiography, Hollywood Animal:
Jozsef Eszterhas was born in Hungary in 1944. His father, István, was a writer, heavy and short, with a pronounced limp. (“My father had surgery eleven times on his hip without anesthetic.”) Little Jozsi’s mother, Mária, was a tavern keeper’s daughter, “her dark hair highlighted by slanted, deeply brown Eurasian eyes.” At moments like this, you realize why Eszterhas was fated to become a screenwriter. He is a helpless fabulist. Even when he tells the truth, it sounds made up. As American planes attack Nazi-held Hungary at the end of the war, two of their targets are, naturally, the Eszterhas home (“a direct hit”), and the Steir car that is being driven by Jozsi’s father toward the Austrian border: “They machine-gunned us, but my father roared the Steir over a ditch and into the trees.” One thing we know about dads: only in movies do they roar their automobiles. The rest of the time, they drive.