Hollywood Animal Read Online Free

granted this line by the studio.
    “
From Joe Eszterhas
” also had to appear boldly on all merchandise connected to the movie: T-shirts, bumper stickers, coasters, matches.
    An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
… crashed and burned both critically and commercially.
    But I have hundreds of T-shirts … thousands of bumper stickers … scores of coasters … boxes full of matches that say … in case I forget … “
From Joe Eszterhas
”!
    Liz Smith wrote, “
Showgirls
is the reportedly sensational film about strippers that will carry the dreaded NC-17 rating when it is released. Controversy enough? Don’t be silly. The
real
hot topic over
Showgirls
has nothing to do with breasts and buttocks. It is the placement of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’s name on-screen that has everybody atingle.
    “Eszterhas will see his name appear right
before
that of director Paul Verhoeven. And
after
that of Alan Marshall and Charles Evans—they are the producers of
Showgirls
.
    “In the movie industry this is causing a riot. The idea that writers should receive such powerful billing in film credits has producers all over Hollywood acting crazier than ever.
    “Writers, on the other hand, are smiling like Cheshire cats that swallowed the whole canary.”
    Having said all those insufferable things about directors, I have to admit, too, that I am one of the few screenwriters who have worked with the same director twice.
    Not only that, but I’ve worked
twice
with
three different
directors: Costa-Gavras (
Betrayed
and
Music Box
); Paul Verhoeven (
Basic Instinct, Showgirls
); Richard Marquand (
Jagged Edge, Hearts of Fire
).
    That means not
all
directors are lying, self-focused, pretentious, homicidal
filmmakers
.
    That also means I am not
completely
insufferable.
    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.
    VII
    Like most Hollywood stars, I even had blond highlights streaked into my hair. My ex-wife took one look at me and said, “Now you look just like Naomi!”
    I told her I didn’t really think that was fair to Naomi.
    Gerri harrumphed.
    My first wife, Gerri Javor, and I were married twenty-four years. We had two beautiful children. We grew apart. We divorced.
    Gerri and Naomi had a lot in common. They both grew up in small-town Ohio in rusty steel towns: Naomi in Mansfield, Gerri in Lorain. They were both journalism majors at Ohio State University in Columbus. They both worked for the school newspaper,
The Lantern
, and both took photographs of Woody Hayes–coached football teams. They were both Catholics who had gone to Catholic schools. They were both of Central European ethnic origin: Gerri was part Hungarian, part Slovak.
    Perhaps most remarkably, twenty years apart, they had both been grabbed at Ohio State by a hooded would-be rapist who knocked them into the snow and then was frightened off by their screams.
    After college, they both went on to work for Ohio newspapers: Naomi for the
Columbus Dispatch
, Gerri for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
.
    My father met Gerri Javor before I did. I was still at Ohio University when she was the nationalities editor of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
and wrote an article about Hungarians’ mistreatment of Slovaks after World War I.
    My father, a Hungarian writer and nationalist and the president of the Committee for Hungarian Liberation,