Joe Eszterhas: The Hollywood Interview

Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.



JOE ESZTERHAS
IS TELLING NO LIES IN AMERICA
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the October 1997 issue of Venice Magazine.

Joe Eszterhas has been one of Hollywood's top screenwriters for the past fifteen years. The author of such diverse works as Jagged Edge, Music Box, Basic Instinct, Flashdance and Showgirls, Eszterhas is a man of many voices and many lives, his having begun in Hungary in 1944, born in a tiny town near the Austrian border. Eszterhas spent his first six years in German and Austrian refugee camps, emigrating to the U.S. in 1950, settling with his family in Cleveland, Ohio. There, Eszterhas attended Catholic schools and developed an interest in writing. After graduation from Ohio University where he majored in journalism and English, Eszterhas first made a name for himself as a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and later Rolling Stone, writing what many consider to be the definitive coverage of the aftermath of the Kent State shootings in May of 1970. Eszterhas followed this with a book on the shootings called 13 Seconds, written with Michael D. Roberts. In 1974 Eszterhas wrote Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse, which won a nomination for the National Book Award and gained the attention of a Hollywood producer, who thought the young scribe should try his hand at screenwriting. Eszterhas' first script F.I.S.T., a fictionalized story about a Jimmy Hoffa-type labor leader played by Sylvester Stallone, was produced in 1977. He hasn't stopped working since.

Eszterhas' latest film, his 17th produced, is Telling Lies in America, a semi-autobiographical story about a Hungarian immigrant teenager named Karchy Jonas (Brad Renfro) growing up in Cleveland in the early 1960's. Karchy is an outcast as a scholarship student in his preppy high school, seeking solace in the seemingly glamorous world of rock & roll. When a slick local disc jockey (Kevin Bacon) agrees to take Karchy under his wing, Karchy embarks on a voyage of self-discovery that takes him from being a wide-eyed boy, to a much wiser young man. Directed by Guy Ferland and produced by Banner Entertainment the film also stars Calista Flockhart and Maximilian Schell.Telling Lies is a bittersweet memoir, full of truth, nostalgia and laughter that stings in your throat. It is by far Eszterhas' most personal, and finest work to date.

Among Eszterhas' upcoming projects are the satirical comedy An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Reliable Sources, Evil Empire, and Blaze of Glory, a biopic about the life of singer Otis Redding.

Eszterhas and his wife Naomi, who are expecting their third child soon, sat down recently in their magnificent Malibu home to discuss Joe's remarkable life, past, present and future.

When did you develop an interest in writing and storytelling?
JOE ESZTERHAS: My dad's a writer in the Hungarian language and he's written about 30 Hungarian novels. I grew up on the near-West side of Cleveland, which is a tough, sort of polyglot neighborhood with everyone having their individual turf. Until I was 13 or so, I didn't even read. It was the classic thing of the immigrant kid who comes to the new world, feels his parents are out of touch with the new world and goes in exactly the other direction. So I was really into baseball and rock & roll. There was a lot of bad stuff happening in the neighborhood. It was a time when people had zip guns and knives...and I got into a lot of juvenile trouble. When I was 13, I got into some serious trouble because I hit a kid in the back of the head with a baseball bat who'd been taunting me for a lot of years and was older, calling me names like D.P. (displaced person), Greenhorn...this kept going on for a while. I fought him a couple times, but always lost since he was about four years older than me. Then one time at a baseball game when he was up to bat, I just went up behind him and hit him the back of the head. I went to Juvenile. Went through the whole process. And I realized then that if I kept living the way I had been living, there was no future. And I started to read, read voraciously. Read anything at all. There was this paperback bookstore in my neighborhood, and I'd go down there. The guy liked me and he'd give me the books and I'd bring them back, like a library. And I read anything and everything: Tennessee Williams one day, A.J. Cronin the next day, Steinbeck, Forrester. I fell in love with reading. That's where it really began. I took notes on the books I had read, made lists for myself. I remember one year I went through 300 some books. What happened then is that I stayed off the street. I was petrified about what had happened to the kid that I'd hit. He was in the hospital for something like ten days and there was a period when no one was sure if he was going to survive. The only thing left with neighborhood that I really did was play basketball, which I usually did by myself because I didn't want to mix with the same kids I was with before, because it was all trouble. I just turned to reading completely. After two or three years of that, I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful to tell a story. So I wrote some stories for myself and fell in love with writing. I decided early on to do journalism as a way of making a living in the hopes of eventually writing fiction. It was the old Hemingway school where his theory was that every writer should spend five years doing journalism and not a minute more because those five years would be extremely educational, but if you stayed a minute longer, you'd get totally jaded and lose all of your sensitivity.

What was your beat during your newspaper days?
I was a street reporter. The intent was always that I'd use the experience for some day writing fiction. The political beat or the city hall beat were beauracratized beats, where you weren't really responding to experiences. As a street reporter, I covered whatever happened. From car wrecks, plane crashes, shootings, riots...I was always interested in the human aspects of those things. Then I was a feature writer and wound up getting a Jimmy Breslin-style column. Journalism, in my case, was an amazing training ground, first because I didn't know American society since I was an immigrant and in an ethnic sort of background for much of the time. And two, I was intensely shy as a kid and it was very difficult for me to talk to people. Journalism throws you into all levels of American society and forces you to interact with people.

How did you go from The Plain Dealer to Rolling Stone?
In 1971 I was fired from The Plain Dealer for writing a piece in The Evergreen Review on the My-Lai massacre. It became a huge national case that was about if you are employed by a publication, can you criticize that publication in a different venue if you're still paid by them. I had written as a free-lancer before I was fired in Cleveland, a couple of pieces for Rolling Stone. One of the pieces was on a biker gang shoot-out in Cleveland. After I did this piece, Hunter Thompson wrote me a note that said "Goddammit, now I know there's someone else out there that knows about bikers besides me." (laughs). Hunter, unbeknownst to me, went to (Rolling Stone publisher) Jann (Wenner) and said "I think this guy's a really terrific writer." So it was like a gift from God. Two days after I got fired in Cleveland, I get the call from Rolling Stone saying we'd like you to come out to San Francisco to do a piece on narcotics agents. Can you get a leave? I said "Yeah, no problem pal. I've just been canned!" (laughs) So I went out to San Francisco and met everybody, liked everybody. You have to remember that at the time, this publication was just raising its head from being absolutely underground. I went to Rolling Stone at a time when the closet was filled with shoeboxes full of cash from people sending cash for subscriptions, and we didn't know what the hell to do with it. Finally it got full one day, Jann called the Brink's truck one day and they came in and took it all away! (laughs) It was the very early stages of Rolling Stone. It was the fun stage. It was the kind of period where if you wrote a piece about narcotics agents who were abusive, and many were, and it was about busting kids with a little weed instead of going after the big smack dealers because that was too complicated and they may have been getting paid off. So they'd bust kids for having a little weed, get big headlines and look like heroes, which is total bullshit, right? So I wrote some pieces that brought that out. And when they came out, we had some of the biggest dope dealers in San Francisco coming by the office saying "Hey man, that was a really great story," and bringing us huge bags of dope! The office was filled with huge garbage bags full of marijuana! That's when I was with Rolling Stone. (laughs) We all felt that we were doing something different in journalism that was challenging to the establishment and the journalistic structure. There was hardly any advertising, no holds barred writing. You could have a piece that ran 40,000 words and if it was too long, they'd bump an ad to run the whole story! Imagine that today!

Let's talk about Kent State and your pieces on the killings of the four students by National Guardsmen in May of 1970.
The thing about Kent that I'm really proud of is that I wrote a book on it called 13 Seconds that came out at the same time as a book James Michner wrote on Kent State. The Michner book was a complete whitewash. His book's thesis was that the confrontation between student demonstrators and National Guardsmen had been caused by outside agitators and political radicals and that they were the people at fault. The truth about Kent State was that it was the culmination of months of red-hot rhetoric not only by Richard Nixon, but by James A. Rhodes, the Governor of Ohio, who kept attacking the protesters as "bums" and "lowlifes." The rhetoric had a prevailing psychological affect on everyone in the state, including the guardsmen. So you take a bunch of kids who are 18-21, put them in Kent with gas masks and helmets and guns, and they've been conditioned by this horrendous rhetoric, and suddenly they're there with protesters yelling at them, throwing stones but nothing else. And in the deepest part of themselves, they had bought the fact that these people were radicals, outside agitators, Communists, all that, and they lost it. They opened fire. That they lost it is understandable because they were kids. What got them to the point where it was easier for them to lose it, in my mind, which the Michner book ignored purposely because Michner was, in my mind, a Republican apologist, was that they had been conditioned by the rhetoric from Nixon and James A. Rhodes. I remember doing an hour on the Today show in 1971 with Michner and Izzy Stone, when it was done live. I was just a kid, 27 years old. I'm really proud that I wrote this book because otherwise I think Michner would've gotten away with his incredible whitewash...I covered it as a journalist. I wasn't there the moment of the shootings but I had covered the previous weeks protests and I was there an hour after the shootings, so I knew the build up. It is one of the great tragedies of our time, in my mind.

Tell me about the genesis of Telling Lies in America.
I wrote it around 1984. Everyone passed on it initially. Then through the years, many people started responding to it. Fran Kuzui, who is one of the producers...sometime in the late 80's, got a hold of the script, tried to get the financing for it and just couldn't do it. John Candy at one time wanted to do it, which would have been very interesting...then, ironically what happened is that I forgot about the piece because I don't like to re-read my stuff. Then after I met my wife Naomi, she wanted to read everything I'd written and went on this gigantic hunt.

NAOMI ESZTERHAS: I searched everywhere! Joe didn't have copies of a lot of his old scripts, so I went to studios, agencies, places like Script City...then I read Telling Lies and I told Joe that I couldn't believe it hadn't been made. It's such a wonderful story, so moving.

JOE: What Naomi did that was really cool was get obsessed with the piece in a very lovely, gingerly way...but then what happened was that she kept re-reading it and one day came in and said to me, very lovingly and gingerly, I've got an idea here that the relationship between Karchy (the protagonist) and his dad really isn't explored enough...so I took the script and re-wrote it from page one. So there were a lot of different little things changed. So Fran Kuzui had kept telling people how much she loved this. She and Guy Ferland were friends, she was kind of a mentor to him...Guy read it and said he'd love to direct it. So Guy and I talked. I looked at his film The Babysitter, which I thought had a lot of terrific things in it...then I gave Guy the re-write and felt that he really understood the piece from the inside. So he, Fran and Ben Myron took it to Banner, which was just started out and they agreed to do it for $4 mil, in 20 days for shooting! It's amazing.

I find it interesting that, even at your level, you still have a hard time getting your projects set up.
Oh, constantly! Constantly! I did a piece on Otis Redding two years ago called Blaze of Glory, another spec piece. People warned me, told me it was a tough sell, that nobody knew who the fuck he was. To me, the strength of the story, in addition to the great music, was the relationship between Otis and Phil Walden, who was his manager and his friend. On a whole other level it's about a black man who realizes his blackness and becomes in charge of himself and his company and of his destiny, even though he's begun with a white man who was his friend, which makes it very difficult...so we took the script out, everybody loved it, but nobody wanted to do it! (laughs)

How did you become interested in Otis Redding?
I was the last guy to interview him before he died. I was a young reporter in Cleveland and there was a place called Leo's Casino, which was the only place in Cleveland where people like Otis and Aretha Franklin and Lee Dorsey played. I was always in love with R & B, and that's where it was. And Otis was really sweet to me. We talked for about an hour. The next afternoon I was in the city room when a guy brought the wire up to me. Otis had flown out of Cleveland that afternoon and crashed in that lake in Wisconsin. So I had met the man. I felt this amazing warmth. I listened to his music all the time as the years went by, and I really felt something, so I decided to do it. About six months after we sent it out, Jon Avnet, the director, read it and liked it and we did sell it to Universal, then Jon decided he was going to do something else and the piece was just sort of up in the air. Only in the last couple months has something started to come together again because Iain Softley (Backbeat) wants to do it as his next movie. So it looks like it might finally happen now with Miramax. So to answer your question, is it difficult getting things set up? Oh yeah.

I hear there's a great story about you, Jimi Hendrix and a Hungarian restaurant.
(laughs) Hendrix comes into Cleveland in '69 and at that point is this totally feared, sexual, hot, stunning black person who's got all these young, white women around him. He's playing the Public Auditorium in town and the cops are very nervous. It was the same time that they busted Jim Morrison in Miami (for indecent exposure). So I go back and interview him for The Plain Dealer. What struck me about him was that he was one of the gentlest human beings I'd ever met. He had this wonderful gentleness and warmth that just sort of enveloped you. I talked with him for about an hour. He was there with Chas Chandler and Noel Redding. Jimi says he's hungry and what's good in Cleveland. I suggested this Hungarian restaurant...he sort of looks at these two other guys and says "Okay, cool. Let's go." So I take him to this little Hungarian restaurant on Buckeye road in Cleveland, filled with people in their 60's in black suits, women in babushkas and shit (laughs) and here we come as this fucking limo stops! Jimi gets out, things are dangling, hair is exploding. Here come the other two guys, bopping out! The owner knew me, comes running up "What the fuck are you doing?! Who are these guys?!" And we sit down and have this wonderful, big dinner and he loved it! Then what was funny, after dinner Jimi says "Man, I gotta buy a car. I want a blue Corvette." So Chas makes a couple calls. An hour later we're at a Corvette dealer in Shaker Heights. Jimi picks it right off the floor, hires some guy to drive it down. We go back to the concert and Jimi's in a great mood. We've been smoking dope all afternoon. Jimi does "Purple Haze," then the house lights suddenly go up. There's been a bomb threat! Everybody gets cleared out. I'm not certain to this day whether that was a real bomb threat, or whether the cops were just trying to fuck with him.

The first film of yours that had a big effect on my generation was Flashdance.
I was hired on Flashdance to rewrite the original script by Tom Hedley. A couple stories I remember about that. The lead role was down to three girls: Jenny Beals, Demi Moore, and this New York model named Leslie Wing. They were all terrific. Michael Eisner at the time was the head of Paramount and he had a hard time making up his mind as well. So Michael gathered the toughest, grungiest Teamsters and macho guys on the lot, put 200 of them in a screening room. Michael got up, said "Guys, I'm going to show you three screen tests. The only thing I want to know when they're done is, which one of these women would you really want?" Jenny Beals won hands down! (laughs) The other story is that (director) Adrian Lyne's cut was 40 minutes longer than the theatrical version. Paramount literally took the film away from Adrian and chopped it down to what it now is. If you can imagine taking 40 minutes out of a picture! Adrian's cut was much closer to Fame with that kind of character development than the movie that you saw. Paramount had so little faith in the picture that they sold off 34% of their own rights to the picture to a private investor group, thinking this movie was going to bomb. Those private investors were really lucky! (laughs) The movie wound up doing something like $380 million worldwide.

A lot of your films have dealt with the theme of betrayal: Jagged Edge, Music Box, Betrayed, Basic Instinct. Where does the need to keep exploring this theme come from?
First of all you have to realize that I've written a lot of other scripts in between those, some of which got produced and some which didn't--all with very different themes and of different genres. It's tricky for a screenwriter. A novelist writes what he writes and it's published. If you look at his body of work, you can see everything he's written and his progression. The screenwriter doesn't have the choice of publishing it. The studio either makes it, or not. That's why if you look at four things in a row that a screenwriter has had produced, they might all be of a similar nature or theme, and the assumption is that this is the only theme the writer writes about, when the reality most likely is, these are the sorts of films that the studio is out to make. In terms of the theme itself, it's one I would articulate as 'we don't know the people we love.' And there's part of them we will never know. And I think films like Betrayed, Music Box, Basic Instinct, certainly played off of that theme. I've always been fascinated by the hidden parts of us. I think a close relationship with someone, man or woman, is a lifelong quest to find that hidden part. And unfortunately in most relationships I don't think people do find that hidden part. They don't share it.

Let's go back to Telling Lies. Is it autobiographical?
I've called it figuratively autobiographical. What I mean is, it's always tough to tell how much is and how much isn't because it's a sort of swirl of imagination...parts of it certainly are. The kid certainly reminds me very much of how I was at that age. The insecurity, the false bravado, the desperation to do something and to be somebody when there ain't but a piece of fuckin' evidence that you can be something or be somebody. And underneath all that a terrific fragility of the spirit. I certainly felt all that...there was a lot of prejudice and ugliness in my school, too. I was one of the six poor kids who stayed together at one table all four years while everyone else just sort of pissed on them. And this was not just among the students. The brothers fostered it also. I remember brothers saying "Oh look, Joe's got a new pair of pants today," in front of the whole class, you know? I remember my father, who was making hardly any money, being brought into the school by the principal who told him he was one of the few fathers who hasn't contributed to some fund, and why was this. My father tried to explain that he was very poor and the priest said to him, "Yes your son's here on scholarship, but that doesn't mean you have to behave like a bum with us."

Don't you think that most artists have a hard time fitting in from an early age? You're thinking and feeling things that most of your peers simply don't think and feel.
Yeah, I think if you're off the beaten path in any way it's always tough. I've been off the beaten path my whole life. You can say it's "artistry" although I admit it's a word that scares the living fuck out of me, "artist."

Why?
Well, I always say I do the best that I can at what I do, which is writing and if other people want to use that word, fine. But I have great trouble with it in terms of self-definition simply out of humility, I think. It's one hell of a word to live up to. Maybe it's my background, having grown up blue collar with a lot of people who work with their hands.

It sounds like you had some tough times in high school. Did you ever go back to any class reunions?
No, I haven't. It was too painful. We've been getting these things 'Please come back and be our speaker,' that kind of stuff. When we showed Telling Lies for the first time at the Cleveland film festival last March, this guy came up to me after it was over and said "Joe, it's Marty...Do you remember me?" And he'd just seen the film. I said "Yeah, I remember you." He was one of the guys who'd given me a hard time. He paused and said "I'm sorry." (Pause) It was very telling. A terrific moment.