It’s a Basic Instinct

“S he arches her back . . . her hips grind . . . her breasts are high . . . .”

I don’t know how many times a young person has tugged at my sleeve and asked how someone goes about writing a $3-million movie script.

They’ve been tugging at me for most of my career because I seem available and because I love answering questions, even if I’m wrong.

In the beginning, they asked how to write a news story, how to put together a column and how to sell a piece to Boys’ Life for $150.

Now it’s the $3-million script.

I could answer the earlier questions because I am familiar with those forms of writing. You just set your margins, turn on the air conditioner and start pounding away.

The idea, an editor once said to me, is to write something so riveting that a reader will say “wow” when he finishes it.

We don’t say wow too much anymore, but the contemporary equivalent will do just as well.

Up until now, however, I had no idea how one put together a movie script worth $3 million.

I say up until now because I have just come into possession of the script by Joe Eszterhas that sold last month for, right, $3 million.

To begin with, it’s printed on paper, uses traditional punctuation marks and is about cops, sex, dope and murder.

That italicized first paragraph is from scene one. Wow.

You remember Joe Eszterhas. He wrote the film “Jagged Edge,” but you don’t remember him for that.

You remember him because he accused super-agent Mike Ovitz of saying he would never work in this town again if he left Ovitz’s agency, which is CAA, to join ICM.

As it turned out, Eszterhas doesn’t work in this town anyhow. He lives and works near San Francisco. What he does is sell in this town.

The accusation against Ovitz was contained in a letter leaked to the media, which had several days of good fun with it. We are easily amused in L.A.

Ovitz denied having threatened anyone, the Writers Guild said he’d better not and Eszterhas went back to his word processor.

That was last fall.

Meanwhile, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union embraced capitalism, England rioted over new taxes, earthquakes shattered Iran and Eszterhas wrote a new script.

It is called “Basic Instinct” and was snapped up by Carolco Pictures for the aforementioned $3 million.

The film is described as a steamy thriller, which indeed it is.

Take that first scene. This sets it up:

“A man and a woman make love on a brass bed. There are mirrors on the walls and ceiling. On a side table, atop a small mirror, lines of cocaine. A tape deck PLAYS the Stones: ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’

“Atop him . . . she straddles his chest . . . she leans down, kisses him. . . .”

She does a lot of other things he really enjoys, and then she kills him. Another wow.

Unlike a lot of your $1-million movies, “Basic Instinct” gets right to it.

Nothing captures the attention like sex and murder in close proximity, unless it is sex, murder and rock and roll.

We have that too.

The dead man is ex-rock star Johnny Boz, but since he is ice-picked in scene one, he isn’t important.

The important characters are a wry, tough San Francisco cop named Nick and a rich, beautiful, horny novelist named Catherine.

At one point, Catherine admits to having had sex with Johnny Boz for the single purpose of researching a book.

A cop named Gus says, “That’s pretty cold, ain’t it, lady?”

She replies: “I’m a writer. I use people for what I write. You write what you know. Let the world beware.”

Makes sense to me.

Well, no, it ain’t classic dialogue, but I ask you, who got the 3 million clams, Wil Shakespeare or Joe Eszterhas?

“Basic Instinct” is essentially a love story. You know that right away because of stage descriptions like, “They are holding each other’s eyes” and “They don’t take their eyes off each other” and “Their eyes are digging into each other.”

Also, they talk dirty to each other, which is another indication they may someday be very close. Exactly how close comes later. Through moans of ecstasy, we can hear Eszterhas whisper, “Sequel. . . .”

You get the idea. To write a $3-million script, start with sex and murder, add tough cops and willing women, and end with sex and murder.

Now quit tugging at my sleeve, kid, so I can get to work writing my own $3-million movie.

It’s about a newspaper columnist who is taking a week off to lie under a tree with a glass of wine and watch the clouds drift by.

His eyes are closed and he’s smiling. Wow.