Screenwriting

Interviews, Screenwriting

Joe Eszterhaus: Playboy 1998

I’ve been thinking about Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhaus lately. The pair worked together on Basic Instinct and Showgirls. When I learned Eszterhaus was the subject of a 1998 Playboy interview, I bought a copy on Ebay and began reading.

Eszterhaus was born in Hungary, grew up in Cleveland, worked as a reporter for the Plain-Dealer, then landed a job at Rolling Stone. At RS, he worked with Hunter S. Thompson and once watched him get high at a party. In 1978, his first effort made it to the screen: F.I.S.T.

Next, Eszterhaus rewrote Flashdance, helping make that movie a hit.

When this interview was published, Showgirls had flopped and had been widely panned. In more recent years, there’s been a reappraisal, including It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, by critic Adam Nayman.

Here are a few Joe Eszterhaus highlights from that 1998 interview:

  • On Paul Verhoeven: “He’s my evil twin.”

  • On the success of Basic Instinct grossing $350 million worldwide: “That created a certain hubris on our part.”

  • On Showgirls: “There was a surrealism we thought was organic to the savage Vegas underside we were trying to put on-screen.”

  • A play-by-play of a Verhoeven-Eszterhaus confrontation. Verhoeven: “I’m the director, yah? You’re the screenwriter, yah? You do what I tell you to do.” Eszterhaus: “Listen, if you come across the table at me again like that, I’m going to hit you.”

  • Playboy: “You describe [Showgirls] as a spiritual message that is delivered on a personal level.” Eszterhaus: “In retrospect, it was a godawful stupid thing to say. I think the religious right in this country has a straitjacketing, chilling effect on artistic expression. I was sort of thumbing my nose at the whole thing in what I considered to be an impish way. But it was a stupid thing to do. People took it literally.”

  • Drew Barrymore and Madonna were intrigued with the Elizabeth Berkley part. Verhoeven visited Barrymore and told Eszterhaus she couldn’t dance well enough. Madonna wanted script changes; Verhoeven refused.

  • On screenwriters: “The vision belongs to the writer. Realizing the vision on-screen is what the director does. Too many screenwriters hurt themselves by destroying what they’ve written because they’ve been told to.”

  • On writers slumming in Hollywood: “The only screenwriter who defied that and put every ounce of his being into what he wrote and then fought to preserve it on-screen was Paddy Chayefsky it ultimately killed him. Screenwriters need to be more like Paddy and less like William Goldman. There’s a story in Goldman’s Hope and Glory that is emblematic of the kind of screenwriter not to be.”