book reports
The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!
Joe Eszterhas
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
Joe Eszterhas has gone from indispensable to disposable. Famous for a handful of screenplays (Jagged Edge, Flashdance, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls), he hasn’t had a hit since 1993 (Sliver, which made its money overseas). Why not? His memoir Hollywood Animal (2004) already told us the answer: screenwriters, even powerhouses like him, get no respect. The best anecdotes are handily summarized by Bryan Curtis of Slate.
Today Eszterhas lives with his wife and four sons in Bainbridge Township, Ohio, but in his newest effort, The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood, he continues to present himself as the beast of Bel Air.
Once more, Animal comes across as monstrously dangerous to the phonies of Tinseltown. He worked as a bartender. He drank and smoked way too much. He got into a famous altercation with Michael Ovitz—famous largely because Animal has never stopped talking about it. He “dallied,” as he puts it, with Sharon Stone, “the star I created.” (His account here is more delicate than that in Hollywood Animal: “I’m glad I nailed her.”) He also made a lot of money.
Eszterhas tells us that (a) in Hollywood the screenwriter is the key creative source; and (b) the screenwriter is treated really, really badly. On the first, rather shaky, point, see my blog entry.
As for the mistreatment of screenwriters, the book delights in badmouthing Hollywood luminaries, and Animal embellishes everything with accounts of his own misadventures. There are some incompatibilities, though: anybody who gets paid $4 million for a four-page outline won’t convinced many people that he’s been screwed by the system.
Don’t expect a probing self-portrait. If every man is the hero of his own life, Animal is the superhero of his. You don’t get where he is unless you are an extraordinary person, refusing to compromise your artistic integrity. It takes a lot of courage to make sure no meddlesome director or producer sullies the script of Sliver or Showgirls, let alone Burn Hollywood Burn: An Allen Smithee Film.
The Devil’s Guide purportedly offers counsel to the aspiring screenwriter. But this is no step-by-step guide. The book is broken into twelve chapters, consisting in turn of nineteen lessons, which are then splintered into free-association sound-bites. (The memoirs in Hollywood Animal are organized, if that’s the word, the same way.) We get advice, anecdote, invective, constant insults directed at Robert McKee, and quotes clipped from unacknowledged sources. It’s a scrapbook of factoids, or pseudo-factoids, linked by wisecracks. Walter Benjamin once imagined creating a book of nothing but quotations, and Animal comes close.
I put in this reference to attract cybernauts who have Googled “Joe Eszterhas Walter Benjamin.”
Scattered through are a few writing tips, such as:
Don’t keep messing with the first scene.
Don’t burden your lead character with too much backstory.
Take your time revealing your main character.
As usual with such advice, though, you could imagine writers succeeding by doing just the opposite.
Other career management tips sound reasonable, especially if you assume that everyone around you is Machiavellian. Animal makes a good case that everyone is.
Always lie about how many drafts you’ve done. (That is, claim more than you wrote.)
Take notes for yourself after a pitch meeting. . . .Then mail these notes to your lawyer, keeping, of course, a copy for yourself.
Much of the book is funny, or at least the people whom Animal quotes are:
Jaws producer David Brown: “The only orgasm that Lew Wasserman [the longtime Universal chieftain] ever had in his life was when he saw the opening numbers for Jaws.”
The wife of a studio exec said to me: “Jack was so wound up, we really needed a relaxing evening. We went to a séance for Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn.”
But sometimes Joe’s own claims are pretty preposterous.
Dr. Zhivago was hammered by the critics when it was released. It is now considered perhaps the greatest movie of all time by many writers, directors…and critics.
Who are these critics? Where have they been hiding all these years, and why did they confide only in Animal?
Eszterhas’s days of stomping the Hollywood weasels seem to be over. His most recent credit is a 2006 Hungarian movie about water polo under the Communist regime. It’s been garnering good notices. Way to go, Joe! 
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