Hollywood Animal (46 page)

I thought it would be fun to flip the dynamic: to do a movie about a man being manipulated by a woman who is brilliant, omnisexual, and evil. I wanted to touch on thrill killing and homicidal impulse, concepts I found especially frightening.

The piece wrote itself. I improvised all the way through. I made no notes for myself, no outline. I simply put the things down which the characters said to me.

I immersed myself in the Rolling Stones. For some reason I didn’t really understand, their music was at the core of the piece.

Three weeks from the time I started thinking about it, I finished the piece. I called the script
Love Hurts
.

The morning that I sent it to Guy, I changed the title to
Basic Instinct
.

Both Guy and Jeff Berg were knocked out.

“Now
this
is what I mean by commercial,” Guy said, harking back to the advice he’d given me when I was thinking about leaving Ovitz … that the best way to overcome Ovitz was to write a script that everyone felt would make money.

I sent the script to Irwin Winkler, vacationing at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes, and asked him to produce it. “It’s not the kind of thing I usually produce,” he said, “but it’s a helluva script. Sure, I’ll produce it.”

What Guy and Jeff had in mind was to do a “full, broad-based auction” … to send it to every production entity in town with any kind of money
and
to try to get them to bid against each other.

My first question to Guy and to Jeff when they told me their plan was, “What about Ovitz?”

“Fuck Ovitz,” Guy said. “Remember what I told you?
This town runs on greed
. This is a $200 million hit movie.”

“Ovitz can’t hurt us on this one,” Berg said. “He won’t dare to try to stop this. If he does, the media will be all over him in a nanosecond thanks to your letter. A year from now, when we go out with another script,
that’s
when we have to watch him.”

“You know what?” Guy said. “In a funny way, Ovitz just might work
for
us. A lot of people don’t like him or resent CAA’s power. Maybe they’ll want to send him a message by bidding on this.”

The bidding began at ten o’clock in the morning.

By noon, we had offers up to $2 million.

“The whole town’s playing,” Jeff Berg told me. He was excited.

“Joe,” he said, “this is where I live and breathe.

“I’ll tell you where I think this is going,” Jeff said. “I think I can get you four million dollars for this, without Winkler, or I can get
you
three with a mil as Winkler’s producing fee. If you want my advice, we don’t need Winkler. Take the four million and whoever buys it will put on a producer.”

I told Jeff I didn’t want to do that. I’d asked Irwin to produce it. He was, in my mind, the best producer in town. And he’d stayed my friend, albeit a little shakily, through the Ovitz mess.

“You’re handing the guy a million dollars on a silver platter,” Jeff said. “He didn’t have anything to do with developing this. His name isn’t helping us sell this. The studios don’t care who’s going to produce this. Many of them would prefer to use their own producers. I’m not going to say to you that Irwin Winkler is ever exactly a liability, but he doesn’t bring anything to the party here.”

I told Jeff I was sticking with Irwin and at three o’clock that afternoon, the auction ended. Mario Kassar, the head of Carolco, bought
Basic Instinct
for $3 million (and another $1 million for Irwin to produce). More significantly maybe in the context of Michael Ovitz’s threats, every studio entity in town with the exception of Fox had bid for it.

You talk about kissing the sky? Six months after the Ovitz business, I had set a staggering new writer’s record. It was more money than most directors and some stars were getting
.

Guy was right: The town ran on greed
.

Daily Variety
put a big bold headline across the top of the front page that said, “A NEW ERA DAWNS IN HOLLYWOOD.” The story said, “In what must have felt like vindication for Eszterhas in his battle with Michael Ovitz …”

It was big news everywhere, even on the wire services and in the daily
papers.
CBS even put an interview with me on its
Nightly News
. Most stories mentioned my letter to Ovitz in their second paragraph.

The day after the sale, I took Steve to a baseball card show in San Jose and bought him six Rickey Henderson rookie cards.

The best news to me was that we could buy our big house now. I’d made so much money on
Basic
that whatever Michael Ovitz did or tried to do, Gerri and I and Steve and Suzi would be okay.

· · ·

Gerri and I hadn’t made love for years … until now, down here in Captiva, Florida, on this balmy summer afternoon. We were sky-high, celebrating the $3 million I’d gotten for writing
Basic Instinct
.

Steve and Suzi were outside playing on the beach. The day was sun-kissed. There was a tropical breeze.

We spoke afterward about the money—how it would free us, how we could now buy a house big enough for the kids to have their own bedrooms, how all the years of struggle and battle had been worth it.

We didn’t realize until years later that even though we could buy our big house now
… we weren’t free …
that, on that afternoon in Captiva, we should have been talking not about money … but about why we hadn’t made love in years.

I was driving by the CAA building one day and, without giving it a thought, I stuck my hand out the window and gave the building my middle finger.

It was a kind of reflex action.

It felt so good that I did it every time that I passed the building from then on.

It felt so good that I was still doing it ten years later, when Michael Ovitz was long gone from CAA.

I even did it on film for ABC’s
20/20
. They didn’t get the shot right so we kept driving around the building over and over again as I pumped my middle finger into the air.

A reporter asked me after my letter became public if I was afraid of Michael Ovitz.

I listed the reasons why I wasn’t afraid of him:

CHAPTER 11

[Flashback]

Attempted Murders

OBIE

Lots of things aren’t fair, are they, Mom?

OBIE’S MOM

How do you mean?

OBIE

In life.

OBIE’S MOM

No. But we live with them.

OBIE

I know. But they hurt.

Big Shots

I’D BEEN BEGGING
my parents for a pet and my mother brought home a kitten she’d found huddling in a gutter. We named her Caesar, kept her in a box with a clock, and fed her with a baby bottle.

As the kitten got older, she went pee-pee in only one spot: on my father’s newly typed manuscripts. My mother thought that was funny.

My father said Oszkár Moldován and the other linotype operators were laughing at him because his writing always smelled like cat piss. My mother thought that was funny, too.

When I got home from school one day, Caesar was gone. I looked everywhere in the apartment, in the circulation office downstairs, in the printing shop, in the concrete yard, in the alley. I even looked in the Num Num Potato Chip factory truck lot. I was frantic.

“Stop looking for the cat,” my mother said without warning at dinner. “Your father killed it.”

My father said, “
What did you say?
”

“You killed it,” my mother said, looking him right in the eye.

“How can you say such a horrible thing?” my father said. His voice was high. He looked like he was in shock.

“You and your precious writing,” she spat at him. “Caesar knew its worth!”

“What’s wrong with you, Mária?” he said. “Why are you angry with me? What have I done to you?” He looked like he was going to cry.

She said nothing and literally ran out of the room.

Radio Free Europe said the Communists had launched a Sputnik with a dog named Laika in it.

I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table one day, the ice bag on her head, pressing on her temples as hard as she could.

“Are you all right, Mama?” I asked.

My mother said, “It is up there.”

“What?”

“The Sputnik. It is up there going around and around shooting out its rays. Around and around, it never stops.”

On another day when I asked her how she was feeling, she said, “I couldn’t sleep all night. I kept hearing that poor dog howl.”

I said, “What dog?”

“That Laika,” she said, “up there howling, going around and around. Didn’t you hear her?”

I said, “No, mama.”

She said, “Honestly, I really don’t understand how you and your father can sleep through that poor dog’s misery.”

“Ex Libris”
is what it said on the bottom of the pieces of paper which my father was sticking into his books.

It said “Dr. István Eszterhás” on the top next to a design which he had drawn: a globe with the holy crown of St. Stephen on top of it.

My mother was holding one of these pretty pieces of paper.

“How much did these cost?” my mother said.

“Not much,” my father said, “hardly anything.” He said one of the Franciscans had printed it for him downstairs in the printing shop.

“But still
something,”
my mother said. “There must be the cost for the paper it’s printed on.”

My father shrugged. “Almost nothing,” he said.

“We live like paupers,” my mother said. “There are lice in the clothes that we buy. We eat fruit that is almost spoiled with worms inside sometimes. The boy’s
shoes
fall off his feet. And you buy fancy decorations for the books that your
kurva
gives you—”

“
Stop it!
” my father cried.

“—Your
kurva
gives you at the library.”

“
Stop it now!
” he cried, slamming a book to the table.
“Enough!
I have nothing!
Nothing!
I can at least have this in my books like I had in my books in Hungary!
At least this!
Do you understand me, you crazy woman?
At least this!”
He was trembling. His face was purple.

“Ex Libris!” She laughed in a high, tinny voice. “Ex Libris!” I saw she was shaking, too.

I came home from school one day and she was at the kitchen table cooking something. I kissed her on the cheek as was my usual custom when I got home from school. She wouldn’t even look at me.

I started talking to her but she didn’t respond. She kept her eyes on the stove. I asked her what was wrong but she didn’t say anything. I was sure that my parents had discovered something awful that I had done.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked my mother.

She didn’t answer me. She wouldn’t look at me.

I found my father in the printing shop wearing his dark green visor and looking at the page proofs of that week’s newspaper.

“What’s wrong with Nana?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He didn’t look up from the proofs.

“Did I do something, Papa?”

I saw him smile slightly. “Probably,” he said, “but if you did I don’t know about it yet.”

“She won’t talk to me,” I said.

“She won’t talk to me, either.”