Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  They took my fingerprints and papers were filled out and Father John signed a paper which said he’d be responsible for making sure I would go to court when I had to. The attorney drove us home and on the way he dropped Father John off at the hospital.

  My mother was on her knees in the kitchen, praying, the rosary around her neck. She never looked at me. The telephone rang. Father John was calling from the hospital to say that Jimmy Murphy was out of surgery and the next two or three days would determine if he’d live.

  When my mother heard my father tell me that, she stopped praying and began a long, wailing cry.

  “Do you want something to eat?” my father asked.

  I shook my head.

  He looked like he wanted to say something to me but turned away.

  “Go to sleep,” he said, “you’re tired.”

  I lay down on my couch in the living room and stared at Papp’s Bar’s blinking neon sign. The apartment was dark. I could hear my father snoring in their bed and I could hear my mother, still on her knees praying in the dark kitchen.

  I thought about what I had done. Had I killed a human being? Is that what it felt like to kill a human being? Was it possible not even to feel very much after killing a human being? How could I have done that? Why did I do this to this particular kid? Other kids had called me names, other kids had hit me. What was going to happen to me? Was I going to live in a jail?

  I thought about trying another deal with God. Please, God, let Jimmy Murphy live. Please, God, don’t let me go to jail. If you do that, God, I won’t do any of the bad things I’ve done anymore.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to make a deal with God. I’d tried a deal with God about my mother and what had happened? My mother was gone. There was a scary stranger on the kitchen floor in her place, gibbering away with her toothless mouth, dodging rays coming out of the electrical outlets.

  So much for deals with God.

  So much for God.

  · · ·

  The next morning two men in suits from the Juvenile Bureau came and so did John J. Vasko and asked me endless questions about what had happened.

  I told them the truth. I didn’t know why what happened had happened. I told them about the fights Jimmy Murphy and I had had and the names he had called me. But I told them I’d had fights with lots of other kids who had called me names.

  That afternoon Father John called to tell us that Jimmy Murphy was better and the doctors thought he would live. My mother stayed on the floor praying for most of the day. Soon afterward we heard that Jimmy Murphy would fully recover with no brain damage.

  John J. Vasko said he had worked out an arrangement with Jimmy Murphy’s parents. If we paid the family $5,000, they would urge the juvenile authorities to file no charges against me. Vasko said he had a friend, a Hungarian judge, who could persuade the juvenile authorities to file no charges—but only if Jimmy Murphy’s family urged them first.

  “Five thousand dollars?” my father said in shocked disbelief. His salary at the newspaper was $100 a month.

  “I’m sorry,” John J. Vasko said, “it’s the only way. You somehow have to get the money.”

  My father asked the Franciscans for the money—the newspaper’s circulation was booming, thanks to his efforts, many of the Franciscan priests were driving shiny new cars—but the Franciscans turned him down.

  He went to see Father John and asked to borrow the money but Father John said he wouldn’t lend it to him.

  Father John said that he might, however, lend it to me.

  “Me?” I said.

  I went down to the rectory. It was the first time I’d been inside Father John’s house. He was wearing a battered pair of black pants and a white T-shirt. Classical music was booming. A half bottle of Tokay wine was on the cocktail table in the living room. He was a barrel-chested, muscular man in his forties with thick silver-black hair. He spoke to me in Hungarian.

  “Let’s go for a walk, young man,” he said.

  He came out that way, in his T-shirt and sandals, and we headed toward the West Side Market, which was closed on this day. He lit up a cigarette as we started to walk. When I lit up one of mine, he reached over nonchalantly and backhanded the cigarette out of my mouth.

  “You haven’t been to confession in a long time, have you?” Father John said as we walked.

  “No, I guess not.”

  He grinned. “Do you think your sins are too great to be forgiven?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  “I do. We all sin, Jozsi. We’re all human. We’re all weak.” He looked at me. “Me too,” he said. “You know that.”

  I knew he was talking about the night I’d seen him kissing the funeral director’s wife.

  “Are you stealing?” he asked.

  “No, Father.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Jozsi,” he said. “I don’t lend five thousand dollars to liars. Are you stealing?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “And you are doing other things that you shouldn’t be doing and you know you shouldn’t be doing, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  We stopped and sat down on a wooden stall at the market. There was no one else around.

  “Do you know what I do on my weekends, Jozsi?”

  “No, Father.”

  “I go down to the jail looking for Hungarians. There are always Hungarians in jails on the weekends. Sometimes I talk to them. Sometimes I pray with them. Sometimes I pay a few dollars and bail them out so they can go home. I would be particularly sad, Jozsi, if I found you in one of those jails when I went visiting. Do you know why?”

  “No, Father.”

  “Because you don’t belong there,” he said. “Because you don’t belong there! But unless you do something with your life, you will go there. You’re too smart to go there. You have too much potential to go there. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “No you don’t!” he said, louder now. “You have no idea what I’m saying to you! Do you listen to your parents? Do you listen to your father? What does he say to you?”

  “He tells me to make something of myself. He tells me to read.”

  “And do you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It’s boring.”

  “Because he reads! Because you see him reading and you think he’s nothing but a stupid hunkie. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know anything about America, all he knows is hunkie business—is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know, Father.”

  “Oh, stop all this goddamned foolishness,” John Mundweil said to me. “Yes, Father, no, Father, I don’t know, Father. We’re not in the confessional now. I’m talking to you like a man. I’m not talking to you like a boy in a class. Talk to me!”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that is what I think. I think that sometimes, but then. …” I felt myself choking up.

  “What?”

  “I look at my father working, or with the damn Franciscans, or on the street, and I feel … I feel …”

  “What?”

  “I feel so sorry for him, for both of them.”

  He looked at me a long moment, nodded, and looked away.

  Finally, very quietly, he said, “So you run from them—from both of them—so you don’t have to feel sorry for them, so they don’t cause you pain. You run—on the street, in the alley, running, stealing, hitting people with baseball bats—that’s how you run. Yes?”

  “I don’t know, Father,” I said. “Maybe. She’s … my mother is … she’s … sick.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I hear your mother’s confession. And I hear your father’s confession. A priest always knows too much. A priest always knows things he doesn’t want to know.”

  He grinned suddenly and I smiled a little bit. He lit up another cigarette. I badly wanted one but there was no way I was go
ing to reach for one.

  “Your father and your mother are the best thing you have in your life,” Father John said. “Don’t reject them. Embrace them. Listen to them.”

  I started to cry. I didn’t say anything for what seemed a long while and John Mundweil put his arm around me.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t know her. She’s somebody else.”

  “Try,” he said. “You must. I know it’s not easy. I know more than you know about your parents. They are good people. Human. Like you. Like me. But good people. Both of them.”

  I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  “That’s the promise I want from you,” John Mundweil said. “Try. If you promise to try, to listen to your parents, to do something with your life I will give you the five thousand dollars.”

  I said, “How can I ever pay it back, Father?”

  “I said ‘give’ not ‘lend,’” John Mundweil said.

  I looked at him.

  “If you promise to try,” he said.

  I nodded slowly. “I promise to try.”

  “Then you will make something of your life,” he said. He was smiling at me.

  “We will go back to the church,” he said. “I will hear your confession and then I will give you the money. Good?”

  I nodded.

  We went into the dark church and he got into the confessional in his T-shirt and sandals and I confessed my sins.

  I told Father John about all of it … the drunks that we had kicked and rolled in the alleys, the break-in at the grocery store, the stolen cars, the circle jerks, the whore whose wig fell off, the zip guns, the knives, all of it.

  I never choked up. I just told it and he never interrupted me. I felt I wasn’t confessing all this to God. I felt I was confessing these things to a friend who cared about me. At the end he said, “Say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys and I’ll meet you back in the rectory.”

  I said the prayers but my mind wasn’t on the words. I wasn’t going to jail.

  Father John was at the screen door of the rectory when I got there. He handed me the check, pointed his finger in my face, and gruffly said, “You made me a promise, young man!”

  I said, “Yes, Father.”

  He said, “And stay away from Puerto Rican whores. They’re all sick and your fasz will rot off.”

  I said, “Yes, Father,” and he slammed the door.

  He had used the word fasz and not pimpli. Pimpli was a boy’s penis; fasz was a man’s.

  CHAPTER 12

  Your Basic Shit Storm

  CATHERINE

  I’m a writer. I use people for what I write. You write what you know. Let the world beware.

  Basic Instinct

  WHILE WE WERE in Florida celebrating the Basic Instinct sale, Irwin Winkler stayed behind to mount the movie with Mario Kassar at Carolco.

  Irwin called me after his first couple of meetings. He wasn’t happy.

  “They’re not interested in what I think about casting or a director,” Irwin said. “They’re treating me like some rookie producer.”

  Without even consulting Irwin, Carolco had signed Michael Douglas to play the lead—Nick Curran, the burned-out homicide cop. It was, Irwin and I agreed, perfect casting, but the fact that it was done without even consulting Irwin, my producer, gave us pause.

  I was happy about Michael’s commitment to the movie for another reason: Michael Douglas was one of CAA’s premier clients.

  “Does this mean an easing of tensions with CAA?” I asked Guy.

  “Forget it,” he said. “Carolco’s trying to hush it up but they’re paying Michael fifteen million dollars to do it. For that kind of money, Ovitz himself would’ve signed to do one of your scripts.”

  It was the most an actor had ever been paid in Hollywood history.

  I was amused by the irony: a screenwriter finally bursts into the stratosphere with his price … and is almost immediately dwarfed by the actor’s price.

  Irwin and I decided to move quickly on our own to find a director who was in sync with our vision of the movie.

  I viewed my script as a psychosexual thriller with erotic content but I didn’t want it to turn into porn. All the scenes in the script with any nudity had a descriptive tag line: “It is dark. We can’t see clearly.” Irwin and I wanted those scenes to be about shadows and arty camera angles, not about skin, and certainly not about full-frontal nudity.

  Our choice was Milos Forman, whose work we both admired, who had directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus.

  Irwin reached Milos’s agent, who said Milos was on a bicycling tour in the South of France. We somehow finally got him the script and his agent said he liked it very much and wanted to talk. Irwin and I were happy.

  With Milos directing it, Basic would be the kind of classy daring movie we wanted it to be.

  It was then that Carolco announced that, without even consulting us (once again), they had made a deal with a director: Paul Verhoeven.

  He had recently directed Total Recall (which I’d hated) and RoboCop (which I’d loved). Before that, he had made a series of daring and sexually explicit films in his native Holland. In one of them, a penis was severed … and then levitated … over opening credits.

  Milos Forman he wasn’t.

  When I got back from Florida, I flew down to L.A. for a “creative meeting” with Michael and Paul at Irwin’s house. I knew Michael slightly but had never met Verhoeven.

  Within minutes, it became obvious to Irwin and me that we were involved in a fiasco. Because neither Michael nor Verhoeven liked my script—for which Carolco had paid this record amount of money.

  “But what is this script about? What is it about?” Verhoeven kept yelling in a thick Dutch accent. When I told him it was about evil and psychological and sexual manipulation and homicidal impulse, Verhoeven looked at me blankly.

  Michael kept talking about redemption.

  “Where is the redemption here?” he asked. “You can’t do a picture where evil triumphs at the end. Is that the message we want to send? That evil triumphs?”

  Michael’s actor’s ego was also involved.

  “I’m the star of the movie and she one-ups me at every turn,” he said.

  I thought: how absurd. I’d written a script that everyone in town wanted to buy. I’d sold it for a headline-making fortune. And now, after paying me that fortune, the buyer wanted me to turn my creation inside-out.

  Verhoeven was listing the many changes he wanted. I argued each one and said I wasn’t going to do it.

  His answer was the same each time. “I am the director, ja?” he said, “and you are the writer, ja? You will do what I say, ja?”

  I said no—no jah, no jah! I wasn’t going to do that.

  I told him he was right. He was the director—not the writer. He didn’t know anything about writing, so he should do what he was supposed to do, shoot the damn script, ja?

  Verhoeven, really yelling now, said, “I am the director and you are the writer, ja?”

  And this time I yelled back into his face: “If you say that to me one more time, I’m going to come across this table at you!”

  Michael jumped up and said, “Gentlemen, gentlemen!”

  Irwin tried to make the arguments in defense of my script, but I saw that these guys weren’t having any of it. They wanted their changes. Verhoeven also made it clear he wanted the film to be sexually explicit with full-frontal nudity.

  This, I knew, was going to be a disaster. I wasn’t going to make these changes. Period. I wasn’t going to mutilate my own child. It was what screenwriters in Hollywood had always done and were always doing to their creations … making changes they despised just to get the money and the screen credit.

  It wasn’t ego that was keeping me from doing that to my script; it was self-defense. I didn’t see how I could have any respect for myself as a writer if I did that. And if I didn’t have any respect for myself as a writer, then how could I ever write anything I believe
d in? How could I sit down and write anything again?

  I had only two choices: either make the changes or withdraw from the project. I knew how I’d look to much of Hollywood if I withdrew.

  Like an ego-mad ingrate.

  I could hear the dialogue at Morton’s: “Can you believe the guy? They pay him $3 million and then he’s got the balls to piss on the movie because they want him to make some changes? He’s a screenwriter—that’s why you need ’em—to make changes!”

  I also knew there was no way to withdraw quietly after the banner headlines about the sale of the script.

  And, too, there was the never-ending presence of Michael Ovitz. I could just hear what he’d have to say to the studio heads about the kind of team player I was.

  But I had never made a change on a script that I didn’t agree with. I wasn’t about to start now.

  “What can we do?” I said to Irwin, who was shocked by what had happened.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t had a meeting like that in all these years of producing. Let’s think about it.”

  I went to Guy’s office, told him what had happened, and told him I wanted to withdraw from the project.

  “Christ,” Guy said, “you don’t want to do that. A lot of people in this town will never understand that. For three million dollars, they’d kill their mothers, and their kids, never mind some words in a script. You’re going to look like the ultimate prima donna. You’ve got enough people who are just jealous about a writer getting three mil. There must be hundreds of screenwriters who want to kill you on sight. I’m not even going to mention what Ovitz is going to be saying.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “please don’t.”

  “Can’t you just make the changes?” Guy said.

  “I can’t,” I said. “They’re wrong. Verhoeven’s wrong. Michael isn’t thinking about the movie, he’s thinking about his star image. The changes would destroy the movie.”

  Guy said, “Let me talk to them and see what their take on the meeting is.”

  I went back to Irwin’s house and told him my mind was made up.

  “Yeah, I agree with you,” he said, “but you’re going to take some flak.”

  I shrugged. He smiled.