His Instincts Are Basic

By Lev Grossman

It's O.K. to be curious about Joe Eszterhas' memoir, Hollywood Animal (Knopf; 736 pages). Really. It's perfectly natural. After all, Eszterhas is the most (or maybe the only) famous screenwriter in the business, best known for hitting commercial gold in 1983 with Flashdance and again in 1992 with Basic Instinct. He also has several notorious craters to his credit, including Jade and Showgirls. But a word of advice: given its ample girth and its very low signal-to-noise ratio, you might want to approach Hollywood Animal with this handy guide.

The first chapter? Skip it. Here's a sample: After producer Robert Evans read the screenplay for Sliver, he sent Eszterhas a note telling him how great it was. The note was delivered by a woman wearing only a mink coat. And she carried the note in a place that was not, strictly speaking, a pocket. Oh, and Eszterhas also tells us that he slept with Sharon Stone, and that it wasn't that great. Classy. The trouble with this kind of thing is that it's tasteless without even being fun.

Moving on. Hollywood Animal alternates chapters about Eszterhas' life in Hollywood with an account of his traumatic childhood. Eszterhas, 59, was born in Hungary during World War II. His first memory is of a little boy who drowned in a cesspool in a refugee camp. When Eszterhas was 5, his parents brought him to the U.S., where he grew up dirt poor and delinquent in the Hungarian section of Cleveland. His father edited a Hungarian-language newspaper, while at home his mother went slowly mad--she believed the electrical outlets were shooting rays at her. All this is affectingly told in rich, dry-eyed detail, leavened with the occasional Vonnegutesque sardonicism.

But it's probably not why you're here. You're probably here for the other chapters, the ones about Eszterhas' feuding with a loutish Sylvester Stallone on the set of F.I.S.T., and auditioning dewy showgirls for Flashdance with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and arguing over the size of Glenn Close's posterior on the set of Jagged Edge. You're no doubt also curious about Eszterhas' alleged death threat from Michael Ovitz, and Marlon Brando's feces collection, and Elizabeth Berkley's exhibitionism on the set of Showgirls. There's a large amount of celebrity dirt in Hollywood Animal, and much of it is rich, loamy, high-quality dirt. Go ahead. It's O.K. to roll around in it.

Just don't try to dig too deep. There may be a pretty jazzy 400-page book lurking somewhere inside Hollywood Animal, but Eszterhas vastly overestimates the reader's interest in the breakup of his first marriage, and in his various health problems, and in the superfine details of his wheelings and dealings and squealings with studio executives. Even worse, there's a fundamental lack of self-insight here. Eszterhas wants to spin himself as a Hollywood outsider, a self-righteous desperado who took the town for all it was worth and then rode off into the sunset (he moved back to Ohio in 2001), but at the same time he is unbearably eager to drop names and show us what a hotshot insider he is, or at least was. So treat Hollywood Animal like an industry party: arrive late, skim quickly through it for the boldface names, and bail out long before the show's over. -By Lev Grossman