The Bluto of screenwriters

Joe ESZTERHAS writes in short, punchy paragraphs. Like this one.

He wants us to know, at the outset, that the movies he wrote -- among them “Flashdance,” “Jagged Edge” and “Basic Instinct” -- altogether grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide.

He wants us to know that he was paid $4.7 million for a script and that other sales approached that figure.

He wants us to know that, by and large, they were done his way -- without the studio or the director imposing a lot of changes on his work.

He wants us to know that he doesn’t give a blankety-blank what the critics and other moralists thought about these movies. He liked them. The public liked them -- until, well, er, “Showgirls” happened.

He wants us to know that along the way he had a one-night stand with Sharon Stone. It was OK, but he’s had better.

All right, enough with these short sentences and paragraphs. They’re not my style. I am, by nature, a critic, which means that I like dependent clauses and nervous nuances. Nor am I as envious of big-bucks Hollywood careers as he thinks I (and my ilk) must be. But that aside, and with the further caveat that he is more interested in his divorce and remarriage than his readers can possibly be, I have to say that I liked his memoir, “Hollywood Animal,” a lot more than I thought I would. It is, I think, an often brutally truthful book and one that, judging by early reviews, some readers will go out of their way to misunderstand. It is an occasion to visit renewed contempt on his less-than-elegant movies and their less-than-elegant writer. No one, so far, is coming to grips with the hyperbolic, compelling book that is before them.

Eszterhas came to Hollywood from about as far away as you can come. He was born in Hungary and spent some early years in a displaced persons camp, eating pine needle soup. His father, a novelist and cultural bureaucrat, got a job writing for and editing a right-wing Catholic emigre newspaper in Cleveland, where his only son grew up a juvenile delinquent. (He almost killed a kid with a baseball bat for no reason he can explain.) His mother was a schizophrenic. Quite late in life, Eszterhas learned that his father, seemingly a tolerant and humorous man, was a rabid anti-Semite during Hungary’s fascist years. He found this out when the government moved to deport him, after he’d already written his most serious film, “Music Box,” about a woman who discovers similar secrets about her own father: This is an irony that justifiably haunts Eszterhas.

His account of growing up and of eventually coming to grips with his past is interwoven with the more darkly glamorous tale of his Hollywood success. It is absolutely first-rate -- painfully, poignantly heartfelt -- and vividly explanatory of his bumpy, bumptious latter-day ride. What he took away from Cleveland was a sort of radical innocence, a grim belief that all friendships and alliances were bound to be temporary, that in the end the only person he could rely on was himself.

I cannot tell you how many agents he fired over the course of his career -- beginning with his famous dismissal of Michael Ovitz -- or how many directors and producers he fell out with. All I can say is that he recounts these betrayals with scary frankness. I know and like some of the people he trashes, and I would like to hear their sides of these stories. But never mind; Eszterhas has told his side honestly -- if not necessarily tastefully.

I don’t know why we should particularly care about that latter quality. The assertion of power is rarely a tasteful business anywhere, and there’s something to be said for the childlike nakedness with which it is wielded in the movie business. You can always see the knife coming. At the same time, you know that all enmities are temporary; a few months later you’re going to be doing dinner, and probably a deal, with the same Armani-clad louse who’s currently sliding the shiv between your ribs.

Anyway, he’s not saying anything nastier than Peter Biskind says in “Down and Dirty Pictures,” and Eszterhas is a much less dogged, much more entertaining, writer. What emerges most potently from Eszterhas’ many tales of sex, lies and feature films is his knothead refusal to play the writer’s customary victim’s role in the Hollywood biome. He wanted to be -- was for a time -- the Lion King. Not for him the cautious step-deal, whereby money is doled out to the hapless writer a little at a time -- treatment, first draft, second draft, polishes -- while he desperately attempts to accommodate the studio’s notes, in the process delivering not a few free rewrites. No, our Joe wrote a lot of his scripts “on spec” and sold these fully finished products on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

I don’t think he necessarily wanted to revolutionize the business, but he did think one screenwriter, namely himself, ought to act like a real writer, like a novelist or a playwright, willing to forego the steadier income (and compromises) guaranteed by the Writers Guild’s standard contract in order to retain more control. That, very often, he made more money this way and became a macho star, envied and eventually reviled, was an incidental, if for him delightful, fringe benefit.

He was aided, for a while, in this enterprise by the fact that he had a seemingly direct connection to the American psyche, unmediated by high-toned aspiration. He wrote the kind of movies a hairy-chested autodidact (for whom English was a second language) wanted to see -- sexy, violent, visceral. And who cared what haute Hollywood secretly, or the wuss reviewers publicly, thought about them? He was in tune with his own, and our -- how to put this? -- basic instincts.

Of course, it couldn’t last. Popular tastes subtly shift and their former master loses touch with them without quite noticing. And, of course, life takes its distracting toll, especially if said master is a self-confessed alcoholic and gives his enemies the opportunity to take the high moral ground, as he did with “Showgirls” -- what with its excessive nudity, its apparent female exploitation and degradation and (its real sin) being a flop at the box office. Upon mature reconsideration, one sees that Eszterhas’ heroine was a projection of himself -- prettier, of course, but a tough-talking moralist taking on a vulgar subculture and trying to maintain her honor within it. It was, for all its flash and trash, basically a Douglas Sirk movie with pasties. And a work as bound to be as willfully misunderstood as “Hollywood Animal” is going to be.

Our author is now out of show biz. He’s moved back to the Cleveland area and nearly died of throat cancer, but he’s given up the booze and cigarettes, has become an anti-smoking crusader and -- yes -- found God. But his pretty wife loves him, the kids are growing up clean and pure. The Eszterhases have a flag in the frontyard, and they’ve developed a taste for Happy Meals. It’s the perfect Hollywood ending -- a little too neat, a little too inspiring -- maybe, come to think of it, a little suspicious. But who would begrudge it to Eszterhas? He’s always given the public what it wants, even when it doesn’t know, or refuses to admit, precisely what that might be. That he has done so with a high, happy, combative heart strike me as a highly readable virtue, not a mortal sin. And who cares if, in recounting his adventures he has left some blood on the floor. This is Hollywood; its mostly ketchup anyway.