Hollywood Animal (55 page)

Mario Kassar at Carolco called me to say, “
Joey
, that three million dollars for your script was the best investment I ever made. I paid you peanuts for a money tree.”

I knew how much Mario was enjoying the fruits from his money tree. He had been soundly trashed by a lot of people in Hollywood for paying a writer, any writer, $3 million.

It was payback time for Mario now.

He’d paid $3 million to make $450 million.

· · ·

A few months after the release of
Basic
, my Marin County producer friend Ben Myron, who’d just produced the powerful independently made
One False Move
directed by Carl Franklin, came up with a movie idea.

“A dark musical,” Ben said, “like
Flashdance
but much darker, about Vegas. The underside of Vegas. The real Vegas, the one the casino PR people try to hide.” I told Ben I thought it was a great idea. A dark musical seemed like a fresh and original concept to me in 1992.

Then Ben said, “Verhoeven!”

I laughed. “He’ll kill
me
, I’ll kill
him
, life is too short.”

“He’s never done anything like this,” Ben insisted. “He’s got a jazzy style. He’d be perfect for it.”

“Call him,” I told Ben. “See if he wants to have lunch with us. He might just say he never wants to see me as long as he lives.”

“Let’s bet,” Ben said. “You gave him the biggest hit he’s ever had. He’ll be there.”

We met at the Ivy on Robertson. I hadn’t seen Paul since our session with the protesters in San Francisco. He was friendly, but wary, with an edge.

Ben pitched his idea and Paul loved it.

“We do it honest,
ja?
” he said. “We go there, we research.”

“You mean you’re committing to do it?” I asked.

“Of course not. I commit when I see a brilliant script.”

“Why don’t you commit to develop it with a studio?”

“Oh no,” Paul said. “So you can get three million dollars because the studio thinks I’ll direct it? I’m not going to do that for you.”

“I got three million dollars without you being anywhere near the project on
Basic
,” I said.

“True. But you also had a finished script. You do what you did with
Basic, ja?
Then I see if I will direct.”

“This is different, Paul. I wrote it, then we sent it out to the studios. You came into it after Carolco bought it. If I do this as a spec, and the town knows I did it with you or with you in mind—and you pass—I’ll never sell it.”

“That’s the risk you run to get me,” Paul said.

Ben said, “What if we don’t talk about making a deal now? What if we go to Vegas, the three of us, and see what we find there. We’ll do the research, we’ll interview people. Then we’ll decide if we want to do it.”

“Who pays for Vegas?” Verhoeven asked.

I laughed. I knew that while I had made $3 million on
Basic
, Paul had been paid $7 million to direct it.

“I’ll pay for it,” Ben said.

“You are not rich.” Paul smiled. “You are a struggling producer. Joe is very rich. He should pay for all of our expenses.”

“Fine.” I laughed. “I’ll pay for all our expenses.”

“The beginning of some justice,
ja?”
Paul said.

Ben hired a researcher to lead us around and we flew into Vegas. What we found was a hidden sexual carnival. There were no hookers walking the streets anymore thanks to the town’s new corporate-run squeaky-clean image. But the Yellow Pages listed hundreds of escort services.

You could order a woman the way you’d order a pizza … short, blond, tall, brunette, anchovies, etc. And she’d be at your hotel room door in an hour, dressed to look like somebody’s date or wife so no questions would be asked by hotel security.

On the fringes of the downtown area, lap dance clubs, many still run by the mob, welcomed tour groups of men bused there by the hotels. The lap dancers were, for the most part, stunning, statuesque Playmate-types who picked up as much as $1,000 in tips each night.

A lap dancer took you into a dark back room, took all her clothes off, and danced on your lap stark naked, often bringing you to climax.

She was allowed to touch you but if you touched her—and didn’t tip her—security would bounce you out. If you touched her and tipped her
enough
, everybody looked the other way.

The showgirls, meanwhile, who’d often been used as hotel-comp hookers in the past, didn’t do that (or as much of that) as before. Their world was a catty and competitive place where women worried about their understudies, and put ice on their nipples and coke in their noses before they went onstage.

As we did the interviews, I resolved to make this script as real as possible, even though much of it was grim, especially the part that had to do with sexual violence.

Over and over again, we heard stories of rape. A young dancer brutally raped by a high roller who then bought her a $10,000 diamond ring to shut her up … a lap dancer gang-raped by a group of male strippers in Hawaii … a showgirl on vacation with her boyfriend in Mexico raped by police responding to her calls that the boyfriend was having a heart attack. (The boyfriend died and, after the rape, police forced her to drive his body back across the border.)

Back in L.A., Paul said he agreed there was a powerful, original, but very dark story here.

“Are you going to commit to direct it?” I wanted to know.

“Not until I read your script.”

It was the same ring-around-the-rosie as before.

“I’m not going to write it for free and take the chance of not selling it if you
decide
not to direct it.”

“Then,” Paul announced, “I say to you goodbye.”

We were stuck. He wouldn’t commit to direct it and I wouldn’t write it for free with him already involved. When Robert Evans heard about the stalemate, he howled.

“Eszterhas and Verhoeven together again after
Basic Instinct?
Lap dancers, music, tits and ass and pussy? You tell me who’s not going to want to see that movie!”

Evans told his independently wealthy brother, Charles, about it and Charlie, in his late sixties, asked me how much it would take for me to write the script. I told him to call my lawyers.

My lawyers set the terms. Charlie would have to give me a $2 million advance. After I wrote it, if we sold the project to a studio, Charlie would get his $2 million back—and a $1 million profit. He would also be a producer of the movie.

If I wrote the script and couldn’t sell it, Charlie would be out the $2 million. Charlie knew that if Paul committed to direct it, we could sell it anywhere. He asked to meet with Paul.

“Tell me the truth,” Charlie said to Verhoeven. “What are the chances you’re going to direct this?”

“I don’t know,
ja?
” Paul smiled. “It depends on the script. If it’s brilliant, yes. If it’s shit, no.”

“I’d like to have a better idea of what you’re going to do before I lay out two million dollars.”

“Very understandable,” Paul said.

“So how about it?” Charlie said.

“Oh, I can’t tell you that until I know if it’s shit.”

“But Joe won’t write the script until he gets paid,” Charlie said.

“That’s right.” I smiled.

“But is that fair?” Charlie said to Paul. “That I just write him a check for two million dollars under these conditions?”

“Certainly not,” Paul said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t do it.”

Charlie sighed.

“Also,” Paul said, “you have to understand, you can be a producer but you won’t be a producer.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t
do
anything. You will have your name on the movie but that is all. I have my own producer, Alan Marshall, and Ben Myron will be a producer.”

“But I don’t want to do anything,” Charlie said.

“Then why do you want to be a producer?”

“I want my own trailer on the set,” Charlie said.

“A trailer, fine. You can have a trailer.”

“I want to meet the girls in the movie.”

“That’s okay, too,” Paul said.

After the meeting, Charlie drew me aside and asked me what my hunch was. Would Verhoeven direct the script if Charlie paid me $2 million to write it?

“Yeah,” I said, “I think he’s into this. I think he will if the script’s good.”

“You think the script will be good?”

“Well,
Basic Instinct
was pretty good, wasn’t it?”

“This is a musical not a mystery,” Charlie said.

“That’s true. But
Flashdance
was pretty good, wasn’t it?”

“You rewrote that. That wasn’t your original,” Charlie said. “I did my homework on you.”

“That’s true, too, Charlie.”

“I wish I could be sure you’ll write a good script. I wish I could be sure he’ll commit to direct it.”

“That’d make it easier for you, Charlie, wouldn’t it?”

Charlie said, “Yes it would.”

He decided to take the chance.

The morning after he wired my lawyers the money—$2 million up front—Charlie Evans woke up and had himself taken to the hospital.

He was having heart palpitations.

Verhoeven just laughed.

“Who wins?” he said. “Joe wins.”

I had a $2 million advance to write the script called
Showgirls
, but it would have to wait. There was something else I had to write first …

A few months after
Basic
’s release, I was at dinner in Robert Evans’s fabled house around the corner from the Beverly Hills Hotel. The dinner was our first in-depth discussion of the script I would write,
Sliver
, and Bob, now in his mid-sixties, his skin sun-tooled to nearly black leather, had asked two bimbos to join us, a fortyish mother and her young daughter.

Halfway through the dinner I said, “This is the way it’s going to work, Bob. I write the script the way I want to write it. You have no input. You give me no ideas. When I’m done, I give you the script and you get it made.”

When the dinner ended, he drew me aside and asked, “You want mom or the kid?”

I wanted neither.

I didn’t want to be compromised by Evans, as so many in Hollywood had been through the years. He had a shoeboxful of Polaroids he had shown
me
… explicit,
Hustler-like
shots of women who were now married to famous and powerful men.

“Pussy hair, my boy,” Evans said to me, “is stronger than universal cable.”

He was famous for greeting new screenwriters with a special present. There would be a knock at the screenwriter’s hotel door and the screenwriter would open it to find one of Bob’s stunning bimbos standing there.

One poor schmuck with an Underwood (Jack Warner’s phrase) even fell in love with one of these young women, a romance that ended when he discovered that part of his new love’s job was to report the details of his sexual performance to Evans. That kind of personal knowledge, to Bob, meant power and deals and movies made, and …
input
into a screenplay.

I was doing
Sliver
, an adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel, as a favor to Guy, who was urging me to do it as a favor to Evans. Bob’s career, which had reached the pinnacle of Hollywood success during his years as the head of Paramount and his fabled marriage to Ali MacGraw, was pretty much over.

He and his brother, Charlie, had been busted for cocaine; Bob had even been implicated but ultimately cleared on a murder charge. He had spent, by his own admission, “years in the fetal position,” unable to get up in the morning. His office was filled with framed, yellowing headlines and photographs which his staff called “The Hall of Shame.”

But there was a disarming candor about Evans. In a town of pretentious phonies, Evans almost bragged about how broke he was. And he was a flatterer.

“The only reason
Sliver
is going to get made,” he said, “is because of you.”

It was only partially true.

Yes, I was the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood and my presence meant a lot to the project and to Bob, but studios didn’t green-light movies because of the screenwriter’s name.

Evans had been desperate to get me to do this project.

“This movie,” Evans said of
Sliver
, “is all about pussy.”

I didn’t think Ira Levin’s well-crafted novel was about
that …
but what Evans said didn’t surprise me. Evans thought everything was about
that
. And from his point of view, from inside this grand house full of mirrors and candles and vivacious, uninhibited young women frolicking in the pool and the guesthouse and Bob’s mink-rugged bedroom … maybe it was all about
that …
although Bob claimed, “I haven’t been able to get it up since 1978.”

The house, I thought, smelled of scented candles, mildew, and come (one reason maybe for all the scented candles).

Evans’s charm kept me interested. The day we had our first meeting with the studio, Bob insisted we have lunch at his house first. It was a feast of freshly flown-in caviar and lobster and bottles of Dom Pérignon, with the butler and
the
maid in hovering attendance, and I thought there was something deeply touching about this man, broke and supported by his brother, making such a grand
event
out of a meeting with a studio.

Evans was
so happy
to be back in business!
So happy
to be having a meeting with the studio about a film that looked like it might actually be made!

A block-long limo took us to the meeting. Evans was dressed in his monogrammed slipper shoes and as he went through the doors of the administration building at Paramount … I stopped him and wiped some white powder off his black cardigan sweater.

“Jesus, Bob,” I said.

After
Basic Instinct
was released, I started spending time with the biggest star in the world.

Sharon Stone was funny and bright and I thought I saw occasional flashes of Catherine Tramell: a world-weary cynicism sometimes clouded her eyes.

“She
is
Catherine Tramell,” I remembered Verhoeven saying, “she
is evil,”
but I didn’t believe him.