Ego, cash and fate

In the year 2000, I was 56 years old, a Hollywood screenwriter, the author of 15 movies. Some of them (“Basic Instinct,” “Jagged Edge,” “Flashdance”) were some of the biggest box-office hits of our time. Some (“Showgirls,” “Jade,” “Sliver”) were some of the biggest critical disasters in recent memory. Some were pretty good: “Music Box,” “F.I.S.T.,” “Telling Lies in America,” “Betrayed.” Some were movies that I loved but few others did: “An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn,” “Big Shots.” Some were movies that I hated: “Nowhere to Run,” “Hearts of Fire.”

My movies had grossed more than $1 billion at the box office. I had made millions and millions of dollars writing them. I had sold one script for $3 million, another for $3.7 million, another for $4.7 million. I was the only screenwriter in the history of Hollywood who had groupies. I got 2,000 fan letters a week.

I was overwhelmed by the money I was making writing screenplays. We were so poor when I was a kid that we mostly ate canned soup for dinner, with occasional fried baloney galas. The clothes my father, my mother and I wore were from the Salvation Army, the Volunteers of America, or from the St. Vincent DePaul Society.

My shoes were usually so loose that my socks kept slipping down and I had to keep bending down to pull them up. I wore a winter overcoat that was four sizes too big -- another kid could have fit under it with me.

In the refugee camps in Austria, we ate pine needle soup for a month and one day my father went through his pockets for crumbs, found some, and gave them to me. I ate them.

... And when a movie of mine failed or I couldn’t sell a script, I had a ready response:

“The hell with it,” I said. “It ain’t the refugee camps.”

The first screenplay deal

Before everything was finalized, Marcia Nasatir at United Artists asked that I meet with Mike Medavoy, the head of the studio. He was pleasant and friendly. His back wall was filled with photographs of himself with actors, politicians and public figures.

“It sounds fine to me,” Mike said. “But how do I know you can write a screenplay?”

“His book is really cinematic,” Marcia said to him. “You’d see this is no problem if you read it.”

“Yeah, but it’s a book,” Mike said. “I’m talking about a screenplay. How do I know he can write a screenplay?”

I said nothing. My Adam’s apple was probably bobbing, butterflies were making their way through my esophagus toward my open mouth.

“Mike, I’m telling you,” Marcia said.

“We’re not making a book deal with him, we’re making a deal for a screenplay.”

“Oh,” I suddenly blurted. “That’s no problem. I took a couple of film courses in college. I wrote a couple scripts.”

He looked at me a long moment, a twinkle in his eye. “Fine,” he finally said, “no problem then. Let’s do it.”

Twenty years later, Mike Medavoy said to me, “I knew it [wasn’t true], but that wasn’t the question I was really asking you. The question I was asking you was if you really wanted to do this and the lie told me that you did.”

Heart and soul

The worst best-intentioned advice I ever got about screenwriting came from Richard Gilman, the distinguished literary critic, at a party in New York almost 30 years ago.

“Whatever you do,” Dick Gilman said to the beginning screenwriter, “don’t put your heart into your scripts. You’ll get it broken.”

For almost 30 years now (and 30 scripts and 15 produced movies), I’ve put my heart into my scripts ... and my heart is unbroken.

My advice to beginning screenwriters is this:

Put every ounce of heart and soul and guts and passion that you possess into every sentence of every screenplay.

And laugh.

Breaking up with Ovitz

I cleared my throat.

“Well, I guess you know why I’m here,” I said.

He looked at me a moment and said, “Barry told me.”

I explained to him about Guy and went on at length about the great loyalty I felt to him, about how, even during his corporate years, Guy had kept looking out for me.

Michael listened impassively, nodding. Then he said, “What about your loyalty to me?”

He had a thin and strained smile on his face.

I tried to tell him that I did feel a great loyalty to him and to CAA. That, indeed, there was no other possible reason, no other possible person, that would cause me to leave.

“You mean all the deals we made for you don’t count?” he said. “The three-picture deal, then the six-picture deal, the ‘Big Shots’ sale, all the casting we’ve done for your movies.”

He mentioned Debra Winger and Tom Berenger in “Betrayed” and Jessica Lange in “Music Box,” all CAA clients.

“We’ve made you the highest-paid screenwriter in the world. That doesn’t count?”

“Of course it counts,” I said.

“But not enough.” We were looking right at each other, that strained smile still on his face.

“No,” I said.

For a moment his smile disappeared as we looked at each other evenly.

Then his face broke into a broad grin. He leaned forward over the desk, leaning closer to me.

“You know what, Joe?” he said quietly. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re not leaving this agency. If you do, my foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. What did he say? Foot soldiers? Blow my brains out? His grin was frozen now, his eyes right on mine, his voice soft, friendly, avuncular. I could hear my own heart beating like an echo chamber in my ears.

Casting ‘Flashdance’

Michael EISNER, who in his heart of hearts is a Mike Todd-like showman, organized one of the most unusual test screenings in the history of Paramount Pictures. He gathered together 200 of the most macho men on the lot, Teamsters and gaffers and grips, and sat them down in a screening room.

He got up onstage to tell them what was about to happen. That they would see an audition reel from three young actresses auditioning for the lead in the movie called “Flashdance.”

“I want to know one thing from you guys after you’ve seen it,” he said. “I want to know which of these three young women you’d most want to [sleep with].”

They cheered and threw fists into the air and after they saw the reels they voted overwhelmingly for Jennifer Beals. She was cast in the part.

Life bleeds into art

A movie I wrote, “Music Box,” is about a Hungarian immigrant named Mihaly Laszlo who comes to America from the refugee camps and raises his children to be successful Americans. His daughter, Ann Talbot, becomes a criminal attorney in Chicago.

One day, out of the blue, the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations announces it is prosecuting her father for war crimes allegedly committed in Hungary many years ago. Ann Talbot defends him.

Thanks to her efforts, her father is cleared of the charges. It is only then that she discovers he is guilty. Her father, the man she has loved most in her life, is a war criminal, a moral monster.

I was proud of the film on a very personal level. I, who was Hungarian born, had showed the world what the Hungarians themselves

When the war was decided and over, when there was no more ammunition, Hungarians had taken those Jews not already sent to Auschwitz down to the Danube and strangled them with their bare hands. I took great pride in exposing the full magnitude of this horror to the world.

The movie got some terrific reviews and did very little business. “Joe Eszterhas,” the respected critic Michael Sragow wrote, “has written the ultimate feminist screenplay.” Elie Wiesel praised it. My father, 83 years old, saw the movie in Cleveland and said, “I’ve never been prouder of you than I am at this moment.”

About a year later, in November 1990, while I was in L.A., my wife called me early one morning to tell me my father was desperately trying to reach me. “He sounds panicked,” she said.

I called my father in Cleveland and he was so upset he could hardly speak.

He had just received, by registered mail, a letter from the Department of Justice.

He read it to me over the phone. It informed him that he was the target of a war crimes investigation by the Office of Special Investigations. The letter announced dates for hearings to be held at the federal building in Cleveland.

I sat down as he read the letter. I was dumbstruck. I remembered the scene ... the scene I had written ... in ‘Music Box’ where Armin Mueller-Stahl tells Jessie [Jessica Lange] about a letter just like this one, and Armin says, “It must be a different Mihaly Laszlo.”

“What can this be about?” I asked my father.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

I told him I’d be in Cleveland the next day and called my old friend Gerry Messerman, one of the city’s top criminal lawyers.

Gerry was equally dumbstruck.

When I saw him in Cleveland the next day, Gerry looked grave. “This is a full OSI investigation,” he said. “They’ve been working on it for years. It has mainly to do with a book your father wrote in Hungary.”

“What book?”

He looked at his notes and spelled it. N-E-M-Z-E-T P-O-L-I-T-I-K-A.

He saw the startled look in my eyes. It was the book -- “National Policy” -- which my father said he could never find, the only book of his that he could never find in America, the book that I had promised as a child that I would find for him when I grew up.

“There’s other stuff, too,” Gerry Messerman said. “He allegedly worked in the Propaganda Ministry during the war. He was allegedly in charge of anti-Semitic propaganda and he allegedly wrote anti-Semitic articles in newspapers.”

It felt like the ground was shifting under me. My father had always told me he worked as an assistant to the prime minister; he had never mentioned the Propaganda Ministry or anti-Semitic propaganda. I remembered the times as a child when I had seen him arguing with the Franciscans or other Hungarians who had said ugly things about Jews.

I believed in the Office of Special Investigations. I had just written a movie heroizing the office and its agents. I believed that prosecuting war criminals 50 years after the fact was a just and honorable endeavor.

Now the very people whom I’d heroized in a movie seen around the world, the very people who, I believed, were heroic doing what they were doing ... were investigating my father!

The Justice Department had gone to the trouble and expense of translating “Nemzet Politika” in its entirety. It didn’t take us long to find it, a section headed “The Question of the Jews.”

My heart sank. It read like the Hungarian version of “Mein Kampf.” Jews were “parasites” that “the body politic had to rid itself of.” There were sentences like: “The iron fist of the law must be applied to this parasitic race.”

They asked my father a question and he either denied something or said he couldn’t remember. Then they provided documented evidence of what they were alleging.

I learned that ... my father had indeed worked in the Propaganda Ministry ... had written hundreds of vicious anti-Semitic editorials

I sat there looking at the evidence, listening, my head down. A book burning! How could a writer be involved in a book burning?

Almost as an aside at the end of that first day, I learned that my mother -- my shy, pious, religious mother! -- had been a registered member of Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party, Hungarian Nazis openly dedicated to the extermination of Jews.

There was no doubt about any of it now. Even my mother had joined the only party in Hungary openly espousing the extermination of Jews.

“We’ve only got one card to play,” Gerry said. “You.”

“It’s like ‘Music Box’ again,” I said. “I’m his alibi. I get him off the hook.”

At the end of the hearings, in an off-the-record session with the OSI, Gerry spoke to Neal Sher and Eli Rosenbaum and Judith Schulmann and pointed out how the publicity attendant to my father’s deportation or trial would hurt me both personally and in Hollywood.

I had written three movies about racism and anti-Semitism: “Betrayed,” “Music Box” and “Big Shots” ... and one of the projects I wanted to do in the future, Gerry Messerman said, was about Father Charles Coughlin and the anti-Semitic isolationist forces rampant in America in the ‘30s and early ‘40s.

The OSI decided to “continue the investigation” and my father was neither deported nor placed on trial.

My advice to writers: Be careful what you write.... What you write can break your own heart.

Adapted from “Hollywood Animal” by Joe Eszterhas Copyright Copyright 2004 by Joe Eszterhas Published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.