Throughout the '80s and '90s, a corpulent, gargoyle-faced beast named Joe Eszterhas reigned as the most hated man in Hollywood. While Billy Wilder put on a suit and tie, headed to the office every day, and waited for phone calls from studio heads that never arrived, Eszterhas scooped up multi-million-dollar paydays for sordid pitches scribbled haphazardly on cocktail napkins.
Throughout the glory years, Eszterhas' disturbingly leonine mug adorned many an aspiring screenwriter's dartboard. Along with Shane Black, Eszterhas came to symbolize an era of greed and excess. Civilians who couldn't tell Sam Fuller from Yosemite Sam were regularly assaulted with screaming headlines about the latest Eszterhas or Black spec-script bonanza.
Becoming the poster boy for Hollywood excess engendered a Hamlet-like sense of guilt in Black. A particularly fascinating passage in a 2005 Los Angeles Times profile of the writer-turned-director deals with the strangest, most masochistic manifestation of this anguish:
Success had already taken a toll on [Black's] psyche. "The biggest task I had to face was managing to believe that I in any way deserved it," Black said of his swift rise, "especially in light of all the people who had worked just as hard, as strenuously, but to whom it didn't come quite so easily."A falling out with his best friend in the mid-'90s only added to his guilt. The man, whom he'd first met at UCLA, had decided he wanted to be a writer too, but his career never caught fire. Black said "he was very angered by my success," and several months after they stopped speaking, Black received a letter. "[It] said, 'I still hate you, I don't want to see you anymore, but here's a bank account number. Wire as much as you think our friendship is worth into it.'"
Black, who sent the man a large sum, remains stunned. "I said, 'Is this what writing does? Does it make you lose your friends? Make people hate you?' "
Needless to say, that is a very un-Joe Eszterhas-like way to handle the situation. I suspect that Eszterhas would have turned the tables on his former compadre by sending him a huge bill charging him a steep fee—say $3 million annually—for every year of unearned friendship selflessly provided to his jealous ex-chum. If Eszterhas felt any anguish whatsoever over his gaudy good fortune, it's probably because he felt grievously underpaid at $3 to $4 million per bad idea.
In the Darwinian ecosystem of Hollywood, screenwriters occupy a position just below the bottom; if they're allowed on film sets at all, it's generally so they can serve coffee to production assistants. In the minds of executives, screenwriters are to be neither seen nor heard. Yet Eszterhas continuously made a public spectacle of himself, feuding with producers, stars, directors, and most famously, super-agent Mike Ovitz. In a notorious bit of show-business lore, the unflappable Ovitz reportedly responded to Eszterhas' threat to sign with another agency by saying, "You're not leaving this agency. If you do, my foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out."
Screenwriters are replaced and re-written on an hourly basis. Yet Eszterhas had the brass cojones to insist that his words were sacrosanct. Like his hero, Paddy Chayefsky, Eszterhas angrily demanded that his precious, precious dialogue couldn't be altered or re-written. Eszterhas wasn't about to let Johnny Improv or Joey Script Polish change a lovingly crafted line like "Well, she got that magna cum laude pussy on her that done fried up your brain!" with something less soulful or authentic.
In his characteristically self-indulgent memoir, Hollywood Animal, Eszterhas posits himself as the conscience of screenwriterdom, a proud culture warrior who used the power he accrued writing about ice-pick-wielding lesbian serial killers and plucky prostitutes to single-handedly win a place at the table for long-suffering scribes.
Eszterhas took it upon himself to elevate the screenwriter's status in Hollywood by being as obnoxious, greedy, and power-crazed as any director or actor. He expected his fellow ink-stained wretches to erect statues of him in tribute. Instead, they burned him in effigy.
So if Eszterhas was/is arrogant, publicity-hungry, ridiculously expensive, and mindlessly confrontational, why did Hollywood indulge him and his Texas-sized ego for so long? The answer, not surprisingly, is money. For far longer than logic would dictate, studios treated Eszterhas as the King Midas of screenwriting, a magic man with a roster of iconic hits to his name: Flashdance, Jagged Edge, and Basic Instinct. Besides, in Hollywood, success begets success: studios began paying Eszterhas $3 million for every glorified airport paperback of a script he churned out because, gosh darn it, everyone else was doing it. It's that lemming mentality that creates monsters of id and ego like Eszterhas, and sustains them through flop after flop.
But as the '90s wore on, folks began to notice that the most expensive scripts (Showgirls, One Night Stand, Jade, Last Action Hero) had a curious way of turning into the most expensive flops. A quick glance at Eszterhas' filmography reveals a few big hits, but also an alarmingly high rate of failures, both high-profile (Showgirls, Jade, One Night Stand, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn) and less so (F.I.S.T, Big Shots, Checking Out, Nowhere To Run). By the time 1998's An Alan Smithee Film: Burn, Hollywood, Burn hit theaters, it had become glaringly apparent that Eszterhas didn't possess a magic formula for box-office bonanzas. He was just a prolific hack who pumped out a mess of tacky, incredibly commercial scripts, some of which hit, but most of which missed.
Burn Hollywood Burn, today's entry in My Year Of Flops, is both the film that effectively killed Eszterhas' screenwriting career, and the ultimate expression of its creator's lovingly crafted persona as a sharp-witted working-class outsider intent on beating Hollywood at its own dirty, loaded game. Eszterhas wasn't technically the director—that "honor" belonged to an ancient husk named Arthur Hiller—but everyone knew it was Eszterhas' baby. His ugly, ugly, hateful, hateful baby.
Eszterhas was finally going to stick it to the loathsome Hollywood phonies who made him rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams. But by 1998, his star had fallen precipitously, as evidenced by the low-wattage nature of the film's cast and crew. In 1972, teaming Love Story director Hiller with Burn Hollywood Burn stars Eric Idle, Ryan O'Neal, and um, perma-tanned Hollywood survivor Robert Evans would have qualified as quite the coup. In 1998, it more or less meant "our top 10 choices all passed, then Jan-Michael Vincent gave us a tentative 'maybe,' but ultimately couldn't squeeze the film into his comic-book convention schedule."
Eszterhas and Hiller's loving catalog of lazy show-business clichés concerns the sad fate of Trio, a high-concept, $200 million buddy movie pairing Sylvester Stallone with Whoopi Goldberg and Jackie Chan. Not surprisingly, the filmmakers resorted to Chan and Goldberg—who, let's face it, has always been a huge action-movie draw, as evidenced by such super-hits as, uh, Burglar, Jumping Jack Flash, and that direct-to-video movie she did with the talking dinosaur—after Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis wisely passed.
A clearly embarrassed Idle plays Trio's tormented director, Alan Smithee, a revered editor who resorts to drastic measures once he sees how the studio has butchered his creation in post-production. Idle's Smithee longs to take his name of the turkey and replace it with a Guild-approved pseudonym, only—here's the high-larious part—the Guild-approved pseudonym is Alan Smithee! So the official fake name is the character's real name! Are you laughing yet? Busting a gut? Short of breath from a solid hour of non-stop guffawing at that inspired twist?
Now here's the even more hilariouser part: In what is very transparently not a stupid, stupid gimmick to raise interest in a terrible film, Hiller was so unhappy with the way the film was edited that he had his name taken off it and replaced with—are you ready for this?—Alan Smithee! So An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn is technically directed by Alan Smithee! The director's guild was so delighted by the filmmakers' antics that they officially retired the "Alan Smithee" pseudonym after the film's release, no doubt out of abject shame.
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