The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (25 page)

LESSON 6

Don’t Take Your Clothes Off!

If you really want to learn about the industry
…

H
ide in a bathroom stall in the men’s room of The Grille in Beverly Hills any weekday lunch hour, overhearing conversations. At the end of that time, you will have learned everything you need to know about Hollywood.

Don’t obsess about getting rich
.

P
addy Chayefsky: “You make a lot of money and you never get rich.”

Research all celebrity auctions you may be involved in
.

A
man paid thousands of dollars at a celebrity auction to have lunch with me. He wanted to be a screenwriter and used the lunch to get screenwriting tips.

His name was Jerry George. He was an editor of the
National Enquirer
. I used the lunch to get celebrity tips. I asked him more questions than he asked me.

It’s possible I learned more from Jerry George in that lunch than he learned from me. And it didn’t cost me anything

Don’t ever write a script for a movie-star couple who are allegedly in love
.

I
t will fail.

Consider:
Shanghai Surprise
with Sean Penn and Madonna;
The Getaway
with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger;
Husbands and Wives
with Woody Allen and Mia Farrow;
Mortal Thoughts
with Bruce Willis and Demi Moore;
Proof of Life
with Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan;
Made in America
with Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson;
Eyes Wide Shut
and
Far and Away
with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman;
Bounce
with Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow;
Gigli
with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.

You, too, can live the screenwriter’s life
.

H
unter S. Thompson described his “workdays” in Hollywood as “Violence, joy, and constant Mexican music.”

P
ERK OF SUCCESS: YOU, TOO, CAN GET MAXFIELD’S ON MELROSE TO SEND YOU A $ 150,000 SELECTION OF GOLD AND DIAMOND CROSSES

If, that is, they know you’ve sold a lot of scripts for a lot of money. Then they’ll send you their selection of crosses—wherever you are in the world—by FedEx by ten o’clock the next morning, and trust you to send the unbought crosses back to them
.

Help those who’ve helped you
.

M
arcia Nasatir was a studio executive at United Artists when she discovered me, in 1974. She had read a book that I had written, which had been nominated for the National Book Award.

As the years went by, my career as a screenwriter prospered, while Marcia had turned to the shaky world of independent production.

In 1991, after I wrote
Basic Instinct,
I was the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood and Marcia was in New York, a producer trying to find hot scripts and put films together.

I asked if she wanted to produce my latest script with Irwin Winkler, one of the town’s hottest producers. She was happy and grateful, but, unfortunately, we never got the movie I had written made.

My agent at the time said, “If you really want to say thank you to her for the help she was to you and pay her back, maybe next time you should give her a script that’s not about the president of the United States having sex with a cow.”

This industry is much more inbred than the music business
.

P
roducer Don Simpson died of a heart attack while straining on the toilet. He was reading a book about Oliver Stone. (Elvis also died of a heart attack while straining on the toilet. He was reading a book about Jesus Christ.)

If you write a hit movie, don’t write the sequel
.

Y
our vision didn’t include a sequel: your vision was for one story, which they are now asking you to stretch to two.

Remember that piece of rope can only stretch so far without snapping.

When MGM asked me to write the sequel to
Basic Instinct,
it was easy for me to pass: I’d get millions from a sequel whether I wrote it or not, according to my contract for
Basic Instinct
.

I had other incentives to pass, too. The studio executive in charge of the project, Lindsay Doran, told me she thought the original was “sexist” and “misogynistic” and said, “We have to figure out a way not to make the sequel like that.”

I didn’t remind her that the original had made nearly
500 million worldwide at the box office.

I didn’t tell her that a French newsmagazine picked the release of
Basic
as
the
worldwide event of 1992—not in entertainment, but in world news.

I didn’t tell her that, thanks to her attitude, I thought my characters Nick Curran and Catherine Tramell were in the hands of a
politically correct ideologue
. But I knew that any sequel they might make would be a disaster.

I’m glad I didn’t write the sequel to
Basic Instinct.

W
ritten by Henry Bean and Leora Barish, it turned out to be the disaster of the year, getting reviews that made my reviews for
Showgirls
look terrific in comparison.

Typical was David Thomson’s review in
The Independent on Sunday
(London): “Everyone now marks Sharon Stone down as the chump who enabled them to do the remake … And Sharon Stone, for the first time in her life, has been publicly disgraced. Now it is hard to see where she can go—except to the kind of roles Joan Collins played when television had soap operas.”

Its opening weekend box office was
2 million—unfathomably abysmal—the numbers were similar all around the world.

Thanks to Henry Bean and Leora Barish, I finally got some damn good reviews for the original
.

T
he trades wrote: “Part of this disaster is the fault of the abysmal script (I can’t believe I’m saying this, but: Joe Eszterhas, we need you!).

The Toronto Star
: “Missing in action in the sequel are Michael Douglas, director Paul Verhoeven, and writer Joe Eszterhas, who are sorely missed, as is any semblance of a coherent plot.”

The Guardian
(London): “The original
Basic Instinct
had style, of a barking mad sort; Eszterhas’s screenplay had its own beady-eyed narrative drive.”

The Denver Post
: “With
Basic Instinct,
Eszterhas, the one-time writer for
Rolling Stone,
became screenwriter as rock star.”

The New York
Daily News
: “Written as a fever dream by Hollywood bad boy Joe Eszterhas, the original introduced into the pantheon of femme fatales a wealthy thirty-year-old widow with degrees in literature and psychology.”

The Independent
(London): “Mounted on the different testosterone drives of Joe Eszterhas, Paul Verhoeven, and Michael Douglas (major league hard-ons)—
Basic Instinct
was a trash masterpiece, deliriously inventive, hatefully incorrect, and exhiliratingly sure of its bad taste.”

The Weekly Standard
: “Only once, really, did a genuinely filthy mainstream Hollywood picture strike it big, and that was the original
Basic Instinct
—a brilliantly made thriller in which a bisexual woman goes around San Francisco killing men with an ice pick. At one moment,
Basic Instinct
is the ultimate male fantasy about a completely uninhibited woman, while at the next it’s the ultimate male nightmare about a woman so cold she would kill you as soon as look at you. It’s lascivious and puritanical in equal measure, a movie that says sex will probably kill you and, what’s more, you’ll deserve it. But man, what a way to go.
Basic Instinct
became a sensation because it rides its mixed messages all the way to a daringly unrealized conclusion that leaves us in perpetual doubt as to who the real killer is. That playful trickery is entirely absent from the endless and lethargic sequel.”

The Village Voice
: “The original
Basic Instinct
was both a manifestation and a critique of sex panic, an effortless distillation of a late ’80s/early ’90s zeitgeist: the end of second-wave feminism, the peaking of AIDS anxieties, the dawn of the Clinton years. Stale and corny,
Basic Instinct 2
isn’t even accidentally relevant.”

On the other hand, some critics still want me dead
.

E
ven though I had nothing to do with the sequel, the
Arkansas Times
wrote in its review of
Basic 2:
“It’s the kind of movie that makes me wish Joe Eszterhas’s mother had left a few more dry cleaning bags around when he was a kid.”

Thanks to the sequel, I’m a director
.

T
he Sunday Independent
of Johannesburg, South Africa: “We all remember that famous scene—the flash—with Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct
. It was trashy film, but Joe Eszterhas directed it with the flair born of knowing delight in trashiness.”

If it’s a bad movie and it fails—well, what the hell—blame it on George W. Bush
.

P
aul Verhoeven, who turned down a lot of money to direct
Basic
’s sequel, said this about the sequel’s failure: “Anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States.”

Did you know they paid me homage in
Basic Instinct 2?

T
hat’s what a critic said, discussing a scene in the film where someone is reading a Hungarian-language primer.

I don’t think that the critic knew that one of the movie’s producers was Hungarian, as was the cinematographer. And the producer’s girlfriend had a small part.

So the Hungarian homage may have been addressed to
all
the Hungarians making the film, an homage made by Hungarians to Hungarians, dancing merrily off the sinking ship.

I did not pleasure myself … , I swear I didn’t
. …

R
eviewing
Basic Instinct 2
in
The Weekly Standard,
John Podhoretz wrote: “The only person who’ll enjoy this travesty is the exiled Eszterhas, who’ll no doubt be pleasuring himself as his pagan goddess thuds to earth.”

Yeah, okay, but she’s still got chutzpah
.