A short life of the author
Joe Eszterhas (born József Antal Eszterhas, 23 November 1944) is a Hungarian-born American screenwriter, journalist, and memoirist who was, for a period in the late 1980s and 1990s, the most powerful and highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood — a man who commanded $3–4 million per script and who, through sheer force of personality and commercial success, achieved a level of celebrity and influence that screenwriters almost never attain. His screenplays — including Flashdance (1983), Jagged Edge (1985), Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995), and Jade (1995) — range from brilliantly commercial to spectacularly terrible, often within the same film. His books, particularly the memoir Hollywood Animal (2004), are vastly more interesting than most of his screenplays.
Life
Eszterhas was born in Hungary and fled with his family during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, arriving in the United States as a refugee. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in poverty. He attended Ohio University and became a journalist, working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and then Rolling Stone, where he was a star reporter and feature writer. His journalism — particularly his coverage of the Kent State shootings and the Vietnam War — was visceral, confrontational, and politically engaged.
He transitioned to screenwriting in the late 1970s, and his combination of journalistic instinct, narrative skill, and willingness to write explicit, provocative material made him extraordinarily successful in Hollywood. He was at the peak of his power from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, when he was setting price records for screenplay sales and wielding more creative influence than most screenwriters ever achieve.
Hollywood Animal (2004)
Eszterhas’s memoir is a massive, sprawling, wildly entertaining book that covers his childhood in Hungary, his immigration to America, his journalism career, and his years in Hollywood with a candour and energy that are genuinely unusual in the genre. He writes about the film industry with the insider knowledge of a man who was at the centre of it and the critical distance of a man who was always, fundamentally, an outsider — a Hungarian refugee from Cleveland who never entirely belonged to the world he conquered.
The book is frank about sex, money, power, alcohol, and the mechanics of how Hollywood actually works — who gets paid, who gets credit, who gets destroyed. It is also, unexpectedly, a serious memoir of immigration and class: Eszterhas writes about his father’s experiences in Hungary, about the trauma of displacement, and about the particular hunger for success that drives first-generation Americans with a depth that the rest of the book’s flamboyance can obscure.
American Rhapsody (2000)
Eszterhas’s political book — written in the aftermath of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal — is a gonzo-journalistic exploration of American politics, celebrity, and sexual hypocrisy. The book mixes reporting, commentary, and autobiographical confession in a style that owes something to Hunter S. Thompson and something to Eszterhas’s own instinct for provocation.
The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood (2006)
A collection of advice, anecdotes, and aphorisms about the screenwriting profession — part craft manual, part war story, part cautionary tale. The book is more useful than most books about screenwriting because Eszterhas has actually been at the top of the profession and is willing to be honest about what that involved.
Later Life
In 2001, Eszterhas was diagnosed with throat cancer — the result of decades of heavy smoking — and lost most of his larynx. The experience transformed him: he quit drinking and smoking, became a practicing Catholic, and wrote Crossbearer (2008), a memoir of religious conversion that is sincere and surprisingly moving. The trajectory from Basic Instinct to Catholic devotional writing is one of the more unexpected arcs in American literary life.
Collecting Eszterhas
Hollywood Animal (2004, Knopf) in first edition brings $15–$40. American Rhapsody (2000, Knopf) brings $10–$25. Eszterhas’s screenplays — particularly shooting scripts of Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge — are collected by film memorabilia specialists.