Hollywood Animal by Joe Eszterhas

movie. Some liked it; others disliked it … but almost all of them were fascinated by and on some sexual level
drawn to
the man who wrote it.
    If I was a cheating husband before I wrote
Basic
, I became a kind of sexual stuntman after it was released in the theaters.
    It all led, finally, to what Evans considered his ultimate compliment: “I saw the movie and thought, ‘Damnit, this cocksucker knows more about pussy than I do.’”
    (I don’t.
No one
will ever know as much as Evans.)
    My advice to screenwriters: Be careful what you write. Because what you write … can come back and
rewrite you!
    It’s possible that in that post
-Basic
period, I was trying to live up to the definition of the Hungarian word
Eszterhás:
“a vagabond who sleeps on a different roof each night.”
    XIV
    I couldn’t deny that I was a “rogue elephant” of a screenwriter (the
Los Angeles Times
). I not only didn’t respect most directors but didn’t respect most screenwriters, either.
    Which screenwriters were worthy of respect? William Goldman maybe? The Bill Goldman who wrote
Butch and Sundance
, sure, but that was a long time ago and now Bill Goldman was advising young screenwriters to take notes during a meeting with a producer and pretend to like the producer’s ideas—even if they were imbecilic—just to get the job. That sounded a whole lot to me like the madam telling the girls how to turn tricks at her bordello, so I told the London
Times
that Bill Goldman was “a hooker from Connecticut.” (And Bill, a proud New Yorker, called the
Times
angrily after the piece appeared and said, “Did Joe really say I was from
Connecticut
?”)
    Or, how about Ron Bass, who rewrote Barry Morrow’s
Rain Man
and earned a secondhand ricocheting Oscar? Ron was one of my first attorneys, working for one of the most powerful showbiz law firms in town. (It didn’t hurt to still be on the firm’s stationery when Ron was seeking screenwriting jobs; one way of looking at it was that studios could curry favor with the law firm hoping to get a break during the next Cruise negotiation by hiring one of its lawyers to write a script.)
    Ron was a good lawyer when he had represented me, doing whatever I asked, and he had the same lawyerly attitude working with a director on a script. “My function is to
service
directors,” Ron told the press, “to help them realize
their
vision.
    “I’ve got to make the director’s vision my own in some way,” Ron said. “I’ve got to find the thing in the director’s vision that I’m not just willing to help him with, but that really excites me, so that I can get inspired along his line of thinking. … The director was so generous to listen to me. … Once I’m commissioned I have a vision that squares with my studio executive’s and my director’s—whomever I’m working with—and then I’m relaxed. I’m on this job. … The director is the author of the film. … I wasn’t smart enough to get it right away but Steven Spielberg was extremely patient with me. He talked with me until I started to realize this was not only something to get behind but was really a much better way than I’d be doing. … These are like the nicest guys, these directors. They’re not only great directors, they’re also really great people to work with.”
    As I reread all of Ron’s words, I realized that these were really not
lawyerly
terms: “
Servicing … the director’s vision … the director was so generous to listen to me … the director is the author of the film … Steven Spielberg was extremely patient with me … these are like the nicest guys, these directors
.”
    No, to me these were words neither lawyerly nor writerly, these words were theatrical moans.
    Were screenwriters like Tom Schulman (
Dead Poets Society
) or Michael Blake (
Dances with Wolves
) or Michael Tolkin (
The Player
) worthy of respect? Sure, but they wrote one great script but didn’t have lengthy careers.
    What about Robert Towne