Gonzo Screenwriter

By Jeffrey Ressner

The chaotic life of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas could serve as a high-concept sequel to The Player, last year's scathing parody of movie industry manners. Fade in: A Hungarian emigre becomes a hotshot newspaper reporter in the 1960s, reinvents himself as a gonzo journalist and gets the call from Hollywood to write scripts. He clashes with studio heads and Hollywood power brokers, even the awesome Michael Ovitz, but he survives and thrives. As he turns out a succession of sexy, if not particularly smart, screenplays such as Flashdance, Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct, his fee rises to a record-breaking $3 million per script, making him the town's hottest writer.

His career hits a new, if bumpy, peak with the erotic thriller Sliver. Shooting is shadowed by rumors of tension between co-stars Sharon Stone and William Baldwin. Then the steamy, voyeur-happy sex in the film threatens to + saddle it with a box-office-stifling NC-17 rating, and dozens of trims are made in the final cut to get an R rating. With extensive retooling going on, the buzz is downright dismal, and Paramount even declines to hold advance reviewers' screenings. In the midst of all this, he leaves his wife of 24 years and takes up with the wife of the co-producer, after the co-producer runs off with actress Stone.

Where Eszterhas, 48, is concerned, it has always been hard to tell which is stranger, truth or fiction -- or even which is which. But anyone who has questioned his version, or his scripts, has soon learned that Eszterhas is a scrappy, macho type who stands by his words. "I've always believed in fighting for my work," he says, decked out in his usual patched jeans, cowboy boots and decidedly nondesigner shirt. "I've taken great pride in being a writer, and I demanded a certain kind of treatment. When I haven't been treated that way, I've either fought back very hard or I've walked." Says producer Don Simpson, who worked with him on Flashdance: "He's a literate mountain man in warrior mufti. He intimidates the dumb and the weak."

Eszterhas has been able to get away with being a defiant rebel because he delivers high-voltage scripts. He's become best known for his sharp, pulp- fiction sense and his ability to build dramatic confrontations out of blunt dialogue. He can also hammer out reams of pages within hours. On Flashdance, Simpson recalls, "he gave us a draft in two weeks, then did 11 more. He's a workhorse."

Eszterhas' imaginative flair was too much of a good thing during his early years as a newsman at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where one of his stories cost the paper $60,000 in damages for what, on appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed were "calculated falsehoods." By the time the decision came down, however, Eszterhas had come into his own as a star writer for Rolling Stone, specializing in tough stories about bikers and narcs while adopting the freaky style of fellow staffer Hunter S. Thompson. Former colleague Grover Lewis recalls that Eszterhas first showed up wearing "a 9-to-5 haircut and polyester suits" but soon sported buckskins and long hair and "would stab a hunting knife into the conference table to emphasize his story ideas." Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner sensed Eszterhas' tremendous "gift for narrative and story" and wasn't surprised when he started selling his work to the movies, beginning with the union story F.I.S.T.

/ Eszterhas quickly displayed his penchant for squaring off against Hollywood heavyweights. He withstood the demands of F.I.S.T. star Sylvester Stallone for a share of screenplay credit. Several years later he butted heads with studio executives over the ending of the courtroom drama Jagged Edge. His greatest confrontation came in 1989, when he decided to leave the Creative Artists Agency for rival ICM and, according to Eszterhas, CAA honcho Michael Ovitz threatened to have his "foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day . . . blow your brains out."

Although Ovitz denied making such statements, correspondence between the two men detailing their respective versions of the episode was faxed all over Hollywood, boosting Eszterhas to the almost mythic stature he relishes to this day. "Every time I'm in a limo and it passes the CAA building," says Eszterhas, "there is this right hand that sneaks out of the back window with this middle finger uplifted. I've done that religiously, and I get a great kick out of it."

Within months of the Ovitz imbroglio, Eszterhas made headlines again when Basic Instinct drew protests from gay and lesbian groups for its depiction of a bisexual, icepick-wielding wild woman. The movie nevertheless grossed more than $350 million worldwide, and since then Eszterhas has sold various ideas that could end up making him more than $10 million over the next two years, among them a $3.4 million script about mobster John Gotti. In addition, he has written a TV commercial for Chanel No. 5 that was directed by Roman Polanski, and he is mulling over a possible move into theater.

And, of course, controversy continues to swirl around him, most recently concerning his tumultuous personal life. With his wife Geri and their two teenagers still based at the family home in Northern California, Eszterhas typically has shuttled from hotel room to interview to fax machine, firing off bulletins about his romance with Naomi Macdonald and about William Macdonald's with Stone. Last week the two new odd couples found themselves at a somewhat intense 10-foot distance of each other during Sliver's post-premiere party in Los Angeles.

"There is a certain rhythm to my life," Eszterhas muses. "I'll fight for what I believe in, I'll fight for my writing. But I'll tell you, I certainly yearn for a peaceful, harmonious time." Don't bet your icepick on it, Joe.

With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles