My Year of Flops: 80s Screenwriters in Excess (from AV Club)
Provocative new piece in AV Club as Nathan Rabin continues his march through a "year of flops" with a look at one-time wunderkind screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (and Shane Black, who, remarkably once donated money to a former 'friend' who bailed from their relationship out of jealousy and basically demanded a ransom to continue). But this is more about Eszterhas, and nobody embodied 80s/90s Hollywood excess and burnout more than he:
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.
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