Hollywood Animal (52 page)

Gerri’s brother, Bob, developed schizophrenia in his early twenties. “Voices” took over his life. “God” began speaking to him, telling him, among other things, to build a cuckoo clock with the figures of the apostles.

Among the “other things” was the notion that I was “killing God and America” with the movies I was writing and that I was “fornicating with harlots.”

When I wrote
Big Shots
, a movie about a white and a black kid learning to be friends, “God” whispered to my brother-in-law that I was Satan and that Steve and Suzi were “Satan’s spawn.” This was because “God” told Bob that “the color black represented evil.”

His condition worsened and Bob entered a psychiatric hospital in Ohio.

Just before
Basic Instinct
’s release, I got a phone call from the doctors at the psychiatric hospital. They told me to flee my house in Tiburon with my wife and kids. My brother-in-law had broken out of the hospital, stolen his mother’s car, grabbed two rifles from the attic, and was headed west to kill me.

He had seen some television ads for
Basic
. “God” told Bob he didn’t like the ads for
Basic
. “God” talked to Bob about “harlots and Satan.”

It wasn’t easy to flee my house. My eighty-two-year-old father was in an upstairs room with round-the-clock nursing recuperating from a heart valve replacement. My kids were in high school. I had other scripts to write.

Instead of fleeing, I hired an army of private detectives and security agents. Armed guards stood in front of our house. Camouflaged agents with high-scope rifles prowled the fields in back. They started wearing bulletproof vests after the private eyes discovered that my brother-in-law had won an expert marksman award while at a private military school in his teens.

There were guns and shotguns hidden in different parts of our house in Tiburon—under pillows and couches, atop cupboards.

We waited and cowered. Nothing happened. There was no trace of my brother-in-law, although police agencies had been notified across the country.

Suzi, I saw, was petrified and I realized I couldn’t do this to my kids any longer. We decided to flee to a hotel in Hawaii, leaving the security army behind to guard my father, the nurses, and the house. The high school my kids attended distributed mug shots of my brother-in-law to all the teachers.

Three weeks later, while we were in Hawaii, my brother-in-law called a relative in Ohio. He was in Mexico City. He was broke. He needed money.

I sent two of the security agents—off-duty federal marshals—to Mexico City. They found my brother-in-law at his fleabag hotel and “observed” him. He spent much of his time in the hotel lobby, ranting and raving about God and Satan and
Big Shots
and
Basic Instinct
and me.

My security agents had a legal problem. They couldn’t just kidnap him and take Bob back to his Ohio psychiatrists. They had to get my brother-in-law across the border legally somehow.

I called Robert Evans. I knew that Evans had ties to the Bush White House, especially to press secretary Marlin Fitzwater. I told him about my brother-in-law problem. He went to Fitzwater, who got the ambassador to Mexico involved. FBI agents and Mexican federales hooked up with my security agents in Mexico City.

My brother-in-law was arrested for vagrancy and taken to jail. He was left there for three days. After three days, my security agents went to see him. They gave him a choice. He could either rot in that Mexican jail or he could accompany them back to his psychiatric hospital in Ohio. Bob didn’t much like that Mexican jail. He agreed to accompany my security agents.

The security agents handcuffed him and sat on the plane with him to Ohio. The plane stopped in Houston, although, thanks to Fitzwater, they didn’t even have to get off and go through Customs.

As the others were getting off the plane in Houston, Bob started raving at the black people passing him, black people who were “the color of evil.” He ranted and raved about
Basic Instinct
. He asked the other passengers if they’d seen
Basic
. He told them they’d go to hell if they did.

When the plane landed in Cleveland, my security agents whisked my brother-in-law to a limo I’d hired standing by the plane. The limo drove him to his psychiatric hospital. When they got there, my brother-in-law, still handcuffed, head-butted one of the security guards and made a run for it. When they dragged him inside, he was yelling, “Joe is Satan. Joe Eszterhas is Satan.”

My private detectives found his car abandoned at the side of the road in Connecticut. They found the two rifles, recently oiled and loaded, in a locker at
the
Greyhound station in Houston, where Bob had left them on the way into Mexico.

Seven months after I sold
Basic
, I wrote another spec script—this one called
Original Sin
, a thriller about lovers who’d met in a past life.

I sent the script to Guy and Jeff Berg, who said they were going to stage another auction.

My first question to them was: “What about Ovitz?”

Jeff said, “We’ll watch him.”

Guy said, “We surely will.”

I had once again asked Irwin Winkler to produce it and he had once again agreed.

“Does Irwin have the script?” Berg asked.

“Of course he does,” I said. “How could he read it otherwise?”

“That means Ron Meyer’s got it, which means Ovitz has it.”

I said, “Irwin wouldn’t do that to me.”

Berg said, “Okay,” and hung up.

Two days before the scheduled auction date, Andrea King of the
Hollywood Reporter
wrote a front-page story about
Original Sin
being auctioned. The story lavishly praised the script and said it was so commercial that it would go for an even higher price than
Basic Instinct
.

It was obvious from her story that Andrea King had a copy of the script.

Berg was thermonuclear.

“You know what this story does?” he yelled. “It scares everybody away. It says they don’t have a chance to get this because the price is going to be so high.
That
means we won’t be able to bid people against each other to get the price up. She sandbagged us. She purposely wrote this and praised it to the heavens to kill the sale. How did she get the script? Tell me that.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “you’ve got the only copy.”

“Our copy’s in the safe, we haven’t even Xeroxed it yet.”

“I don’t know how she got it.”

“I do,” Berg said. “Winkler.”

He pointed out that Andrea King covered CAA for the
Reporter
.

I called Irwin and asked him if he’d shown the script to anyone. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “Absolutely not.”

The day we went out to auction with
Original Sin
, Jeff’s fears were proven right. The studios claimed to like the script but said they were afraid to bid on it considering what they’d read it was going to sell for in the
Reporter
.

We discovered they were hesitant for another reason, too: the Thousand-Pound Gorilla was working the phones. Himself.

“Ovitz is calling everybody,” Jeff said. “He’s not talking about you. He never mentions you. He’s putting it in terms of the industry. He’s talking about the escalating price spiral, especially for screenwriters. He’s saying that for the health of the industry, screenwriters’ prices have to be kept down. He’s saying it would be a bad precedent if we sold this for even more money than we got for
Basic.”

Jeff laughed. “He’s got nothing personally against you. He just wants to be the studios’ pal and give them good advice.”

I said, “What can we do?”

Jeff said, “We can sell this sonofabitch script.”

ICM went to war with CAA over
Original Sin
. (“Jeff and I must have made eight hundred calls,” Guy told me later.) For two weeks … as the battle went on … the script stayed unsold.

During that time, a young assistant at ICM told her boss that she had seen a Xerox copy of
Original Sin
at her boyfriend’s house five days before we took it to auction.

In other words, while the script I’d sent to ICM was still in their safe.

I called her from Marin and asked who her boyfriend was. He was, she said, one of Ron Meyer’s assistants at CAA. I asked if she could possibly retrieve her boyfriend’s copy.

I think one of the saddest moments of my life was when I opened the brown envelope she sent me. It was a Xerox copy of my
typescript
of the script done on my manual typewriter … the typescript copy of
Original Sin
I’d sent only to Irwin Winkler … the script I’d sent to ICM had already been typed on a computer by my typist.

What froze me to my bones at that moment was that I knew that at least one thing Michael Ovitz threatened had come true:
my relationships with Barry Hirsch … and now my dear friend Irwin Winkler … were over
.

I called Irwin, shattered and angry, and said, “How could you have done this to me?”

“What?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“You gave the script to Ronnie Meyer.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I told you. I didn’t give it to anybody.”

“You’re lying to me, Irwin,” I said. “I trusted you.”

“We’re friends,” he said. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

A part of me believed Irwin even as I knew I would end my relationship with him. I knew it was possible that one of Irwin’s secretaries or one of his assistants had gotten my script to CAA without Irwin’s knowledge.

I didn’t feel I had the freedom, though, to dwell on that possibility. I was caught up in …
overwhelmed by …
my war with Ovitz and his asshole foot soldiers.
I
was made uncomfortable by the very fact of Irwin’s undeniable closeness to Ovitz, Meyer, and CAA.

It’s possible that I ended my relationship with Irwin for that reason alone … that my bloodlust for the battle made the breakup a self-fulfilled prophecy.

At the end of the two weeks, we sold
Original Sin
to Andy Vajna and Cinergi for $1.25 million. ICM had won its war with CAA.

Vajna, my fellow Hungarian, facing intense pressure from Ovitz not to buy the script, agreed to buy it only after ICM promised to help him with casting on other projects.

“Ovitz never mentioned you,” Vajna told me later, “he was arguing for the future financial health of the industry.”

About a year later, over dinner in Hawaii, Wolfgang Puck, a very decent man and an immigrant, like me, from Europe, turned to me and said, “Michael never forgets, Joe. Remember that. I know him. I’ve done business with him. Watch your back.”

I watched my back for many years as Michael Ovitz kept denying over and over again the things I alleged he had said to me at our meeting in the fall of 1989.

Then, in an authorized biography published in 1997 called
Ovitz
, written by Robert Slater, I was astounded to read the following paragraphs:

The question that was on the minds of everyone connected to the Eszterhas Affair, and that certainly was uppermost in the author’s mind as he talked with Ovitz, was this: Had he or had he not made the notorious threat to march his foot soldiers down Wilshire Boulevard and blow the screenwriter’s brains out?

The question was posed: What in fact had he said to Eszterhas in that regard?

Then came Ovitz’s startling response:

“Eszterhas and I were joking with each other when I said: ‘You don’t want our foot soldiers going up the street gunning for you, do you?’”

Until that moment, Ovitz had denied ever making any foot soldiers’ remarks of any kind. Was this the first time he had admitted to making the infamous remark?

“Yes,” said Ovitz, “it was.”

We had been joking!

That was funny!

· · ·

Two years after I sold
Original Sin
, I got a script from Andy Vajna, the head of Cinergi, with a note that said, “Read immediately!”

I started reading it and recognized it as
Original Sin
with a different title and by a writer I’d never heard of.

Someone had Xeroxed my script and put a new cover and title on it.

I called Vajna and he told me the story:

The script in front of me had been sold to Hearst Television the previous week for $250,000.

Cinergi’s lawyers had discovered that the “author” worked in Chicago as a mailman and lived with his aged mother. He had taken a screenwriting course at a local community college where
Original Sin
had been part of the course and where copies of my script had been distributed to the class.

The mailman Xeroxed my script, changed the title, put his name on it, and sent it to a Chicago agent who sent it to a Hollywood agent who sold it to Hearst Television.

Cinergi’s lawyers were now threatening the mailman with the tortures of hell.

You couldn’t expect to sell
every
script you didn’t write, of course. Cinergi’s lawyers determined that the mailman had tried to sell another of my scripts, too—
Sacred Cows
—but this time had failed in his efforts.