Hollywood Animal (3 page)

A couple years later, Mick Jagger came around again. He was interested this time in acting, not producing … playing Alan Smithee, the title character in
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
.

His assistant called the producer of our film.

She said Mick had read the script and wanted to talk about it—not with me … but with the director, Arthur Hiller.

The producer, who was a Jagger fan, told the assistant Mick shouldn’t meet with Arthur Hiller, who was in his seventies and hardly knew who Mick was.

Mick, the producer said, should meet with Joe Eszterhas, who was a Mick Jagger
freak
and who had all the juice on this movie.

The assistant spoke to Mick and called the producer back. Mick didn’t want to meet with Joe Eszterhas, Mick said. Mick didn’t have meetings with
screenwriters
, Mick had meetings with
directors
.

Besides, the assistant said, Mick had some script ideas. Maybe Arthur Hiller would hear them and decide to bring in a
new
screenwriter.

The producer told me what Mick Jagger’s assistant had said and I asked Arthur Hiller if he wanted to meet with Mick.

“Not especially,” Arthur Hiller said and tried to talk me into letting his friend Michael York play the part.

In my insufferable way, I told the producer … to tell Mick’s assistant … to tell Mick, Jumpin’ Jack Flash himself … to go fuck himself.

I was such a big-shot screenwriter that, in a little Mississippi town near Memphis, I accomplished something Tom Cruise and Danny DeVito couldn’t do. I called my boyhood idol Jerry Lee Lewis, introduced myself, told him I was in town, and he said sure, come on over.

I heard later that Cruise and DeVito had made similar calls but Jerry Lee didn’t like Cruise’s work and he thought DeVito was “a pygmy,” so he wouldn’t see them.

When I got to his ranch, Jerry Lee came out from behind the steel door of the bedroom he spent most of his time in, wearing a white terry cloth robe and panda slippers. He had an unlighted Dunhill pipe in his mouth.

We looked like two aging geezers who’d seen too many miles of bumpy, potholed road. Two aging geezers who’d used too many unhealthy substances to cushion the bumps.

“
Basic Instinct
—that’s one of my favorite movies,” Jerry Lee Lewis said.

Then he said, “You know that shot where she sticks her whatchamacallit into the camera? Did they have to shoot that for a long time?”

“How does it feel,” an assistant to a director said to me in those post-
Showgirls
days, “to be the most reviled man in America?”

I smiled and said,
insufferably
, “You mean I’m worse even than O.J.?”

She turned archly away and said nothing.

It didn’t help that in the week after he was found not guilty and got out of jail, O. J. Simpson went to see two movies:
Showgirls
and
Jade
.

VI

I had very personal reasons for being insufferable.

Screenwriters historically have been treated like discarded hookers in Hollywood: not invited to the premieres of their own movies, cheated out of residual payments, blackballed for their political beliefs.

Many had been treated like hookers because they hooked—working, as the lawyer-turned-successful-screenwriter Ron Bass said, “to serve the director’s vision.”

I
wasn’t
there to “serve the director’s vision.” As far as I was concerned, the vision was mine and the director was there to serve
it:
to translate
my
vision to the screen.

Film critics and film writers insisted that the director was the auteur of the film, even if the director didn’t write the film … that a film was “by” Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, not by Melissa Mathison and Paul Schrader. I knew that most film critics and film writers were failed screenwriters who sometimes even forced the screenplays they were clutching on the directors they interviewed … so I questioned film critics’ motives: here they were, earning their paltry wages, living in their garrets, while screenwriters like me were earning fortunes and living on Maui and in Malibu.

I learned that I shouldn’t expect praise from people who either turned green or livid at the mention of my name.

At a graduate school film seminar, Costa-Gavras was asked why one of the characters in
Music Box
behaved a certain way.

“Ask Joe,” Costa-Gavras said. “He wrote him that way.”

Then another grad student … and another … and another asked the same question.

“I realized they didn’t understand,” Costa-Gavras told me. “No matter how many times I said that I shot
your
script and put
your
story and
your
characters on-screen, they had been turned into film school robots who considered
me
the auteur.”

I wrote a movie in which two characters were little kids. I named them Steve and Suzi, the names of my first two kids.

Steve and Suzi were happy their names would be on the big screen. We went to the premiere of the movie together and we all sat waiting excitedly for their big moment.

And when it came, “Steve” and “Suzi” weren’t in the movie.

“David” and “Jessica” were.

Steve and Suzi were heartbroken and so was I.

In the lobby after the premiere, the director introduced Steve and Suzi to his two beautiful kids … David and Jessica.

We all shook hands and the director said we should get Steve and Suzi together with David and Jessica, who were about the same age.

We all said that was a terrific idea!

But somehow or other Steve and Suzi and David and Jessica and the director and I never saw each other again.

Fueled by my anger, I not only pushed my agents into achieving a series of screenwriting breakthroughs, but also made sure the breakthroughs were publicized.

I made record amounts of money on several script sales and kept breaking my own records.

I was the first screenwriter in history to get first dollar gross points (a percentage of every dollar brought in at the box office)—
Tom Cruise points
—from his movie.

My travel budget for each of my scripts included first-class tickets for me, my wife, and my children … it also included a limo standing by wherever we traveled … two bedroom suites at hotels like the Dorchester in London, the Dolder Grand in Zurich, the King David in Jerusalem, the Ritz in Paris … Concorde tickets for all of us to Europe and back.

As opposed to other screenwriters, I held on to the book and theatrical rights to my scripts.

I had to be given the same access to the media as the director and the producer—if they did a publicity junket, I had to be there with them at all the junket’s stops.

When I traveled to publicize a movie, my own publicist had to travel with me. All interview requests had to be handled by my own publicity person, not by the studio’s.

“
From Joe Eszterhas
” was the bold black line which appeared on the publicity poster (what we call the “one sheet”) on my last movie,
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
.

It was the first time in history a screenwriter had been granted this line by the studio.

“
From Joe Eszterhas
” also had to appear boldly on all merchandise connected to the movie: T-shirts, bumper stickers, coasters, matches.

An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
… crashed and burned both critically and commercially.

But I have hundreds of T-shirts … thousands of bumper stickers … scores of coasters … boxes full of matches that say … in case I forget … “
From Joe Eszterhas
”!

Liz Smith wrote, “
Showgirls
is the reportedly sensational film about strippers that will carry the dreaded NC-17 rating when it is released. Controversy enough? Don’t be silly. The
real
hot topic over
Showgirls
has nothing to do with breasts and buttocks. It is the placement of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’s name on-screen that has everybody atingle.

“Eszterhas will see his name appear right
before
that of director Paul Verhoeven. And
after
that of Alan Marshall and Charles Evans—they are the producers of
Showgirls
.

“In the movie industry this is causing a riot. The idea that writers should receive such powerful billing in film credits has producers all over Hollywood acting crazier than ever.

“Writers, on the other hand, are smiling like Cheshire cats that swallowed the whole canary.”

Having said all those insufferable things about directors, I have to admit, too, that I am one of the few screenwriters who have worked with the same director twice.

Not only that, but I’ve worked
twice
with
three different
directors: Costa-Gavras (
Betrayed
and
Music Box
); Paul Verhoeven (
Basic Instinct, Showgirls
); Richard Marquand (
Jagged Edge, Hearts of Fire
).

That means not
all
directors are lying, self-focused, pretentious, homicidal
filmmakers
.

That also means I am not
completely
insufferable.

I was overwhelmed by the money I was making writing screenplays. We were so poor when I was a kid that we mostly ate canned soup for dinner, with occasional fried baloney galas. The clothes my father, my mother, and I wore were from the Salvation Army, the Volunteers of America, or from the St. Vincent DePaul Society.

My shoes were usually so loose that my socks kept slipping down and I had to keep bending down to pull them up. I wore a winter overcoat that was four sizes too big—another kid could have fit under it with me.

In the refugee camps in Austria, we ate pine needle soup for a month and one day my father went through his pockets for crumbs, found some, and gave them to me. I ate them.

VII

Like most Hollywood stars, I even had blond highlights streaked into my hair. My ex-wife took one look at me and said, “Now you look just like Naomi!”

I told her I didn’t really think that was fair to Naomi.

Gerri harrumphed.

My first wife, Gerri Javor, and I were married twenty-four years. We had two beautiful children. We grew apart. We divorced.

Gerri and Naomi had a lot in common. They both grew up in small-town Ohio in rusty steel towns: Naomi in Mansfield, Gerri in Lorain. They were both journalism majors at Ohio State University in Columbus. They both worked for the school newspaper,
The Lantern
, and both took photographs of Woody Hayes–coached football teams. They were both Catholics who had gone to Catholic schools. They were both of Central European ethnic origin: Gerri was part Hungarian, part Slovak.

Perhaps most remarkably, twenty years apart, they had both been grabbed at Ohio State by a hooded would-be rapist who knocked them into the snow and then was frightened off by their screams.

After college, they both went on to work for Ohio newspapers: Naomi for the
Columbus Dispatch
, Gerri for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
.

My father met Gerri Javor before I did. I was still at Ohio University when she was the nationalities editor of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
and wrote an article about Hungarians’ mistreatment of Slovaks after World War I.

My father, a Hungarian writer and nationalist and the president of the Committee for Hungarian Liberation, took great umbrage at Gerri Javor’s article and organized a petition drive to get her fired. He asked me to translate the petition from Hungarian to English.

The
Plain Dealer
didn’t fire Gerri Javor, but it forced her to have a meeting with my father.

“She’s a very attractive young woman,” he told me afterward. “You should try to meet her sometime.”

I laughed and said, “If
you
like her, Pop, I wouldn’t.”

Two years later, when I met her at the
Plain Dealer
, the first thing Gerri Javor said to me was, “You’re that man’s son, aren’t you?”

I liked her.

My father had lived in Cleveland all these thirty years that I had been in California. He was ninety-two years old and needed around-the-clock nursing. He’d had a heart valve replacement when he was eighty-five and had then suffered a series of strokes.

He couldn’t hear very well now and he was on a catheter and most of his teeth were gone … but he was happy that he was still in his own house in Cleveland
Heights,
thanks to my ability to foot all of his bills, and not in an old-age home.

I loved my father but came to the awful, heartbreaking realization in 1990 that I loathed him as much as I loved him, a realization that made our relationship cruelly difficult and painful.

István Eszterhás was a Hungarian novelist and journalist, until 1990 the greatest friend I’d ever had. He was my inspiration and support. He believed in me and cared about me. He loved me.

I knew that without his presence in my life, I would have accomplished very little.

But I tried to stop loving my father in 1990.

I didn’t speak to him for a year and a half. I didn’t allow him to visit the grandchildren he loved, Steve and Suzi.

All my life my father told me he had a recurring dream.

I was a little boy and we were walking through a labyrinthine train station. He was holding my hand and he somehow let it go and, suddenly … he had lost me.

He was sobbing, running up and down, yelling my name, trying to talk to people who didn’t speak his language.

No one understood what he was trying to say … and I was gone, lost somewhere in this foreign world.

Gerri Javor and I courted while we were both police reporters at the
Plain Dealer
. Part of our courtship was covering stories together.

At a wedding on a Saturday afternoon on the East Side of Cleveland, the former boyfriend of the bride shot the groom and took the bride hostage at an apartment complex only a couple of blocks away from my father’s house in Cleveland Heights.

Gerri and I were both covering the story for the
Plain Dealer
as the apartment complex turned into the scene of a media siege. Print and network reporters were there from as far away as Chicago and New York.