Dishing only some of the dirt

This book, which presents itself as a no-holds-barred account of Joe Eszterhas’s reign as the toughest and most highly-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, is doubly misleading. To begin with, it’s heavily censored; and, secondly, he isn’t the fierce defender of his work that he purports to be, at least not judging from the way he’s allowed the lawyers to decimate this book.

Eszterhas revels in his image as a Hollywood bad boy. When a lowly grip on the set of Betrayed, his 1988 film starring Debra Winger and Tom Berenger, suggests how the film’s ending might be improved, the warrior-screenwriter punches him in the stomach. The director of another of his scripts receives a memo that’s so eviscerating he suffers a heart attack while reading it. Eszterhas is such a tough guy, he wears a black T-shirt that bears the legend: ‘My inner child is a mean little fuck.’

The screenwriter justifies this behaviour on the grounds that it’s the only way he can force these Hollywood philistines to treat him with a little respect. Indeed, he goes further and argues that by refusing to allow his work to be ‘fucked with’ he’s standing up for writers everywhere: ‘I was the man who was single-handedly getting even for all the … stories about the million ways screenwriters were abused and humiliated in Hollywood … I was the rape victim come back as Charles Bronson in Death Wish.’

I’ve no idea whether Eszterhas really is as fierce as he claims to be when defending his screenplays, but the way he’s allowed the British edition of this book to be ‘fucked with’ suggests not.

The main selling point of Hollywood Animal is that it contains hundreds of gossipy tales about various industry bigwigs that Eszterhas has worked with over the years — people such as Sylvester Stallone, Michael Douglas and Glen Close — but readers should be aware that this edition is very different from the American one.