Joe Eszterhas: Hollywood Animal: A Memoir of Love and Betrayal

Reviewed by JULIE MIDDLETON

The movie Flashdance made a star of Jennifer Beals, Basic Instinct launched Sharon Stone, Showgirls showed a lot of flesh and Sliver was a flop.

They are a few of the movies bearing the imprint of Joe Eszterhas, all of which helped cement a reputation - unfair, he says - for upping the amount of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll at the movies.

Now the most high-profile, richest, stroppy, reviled scriptwriter in La-La Land has come out with a doorstop of a memoir - 730 pages - which has a fair amount of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll in it.

Eszterhas says he is the Hollywood animal of the title, and in the early stages of the book you can believe it. This is not a man who plays the Hollywood boot-licking game, nor engages in Tinseltown politics - he tells what he thinks of other Hollywood animals, ranging from controversial star agent Mike Ovitz, to actress Sharon Stone - whom he seemed closer to than the book actually states - and assorted others who strongly influence what we see on screen.


But there is a softer side to the book, the tale of an immigrant clawing his way up in America. The memoir cuts between Joe the adult and Joe the little boy, born in Hungary as US bombs rained on his village hear the Austrian border. Eszterhas' early life was spent in various Austrian camps: "One day someone shot a horse and after months without meat, everyone ate it. We got very sick. The smell of shit and vomit was everywhere."

The centre of Eszterhas' life was his father, Istvan, whom he always saw as an erudite novelist. His dad brought the family to the United States - Cleveland - in 1950. Istvan spent most of his life in the US as editor of a Hungarian-language newspaper run by Franciscan priests.

Eszterhas junior starts his working life as a journalist in Cleveland, then migrates to the music magazine Rolling Stone. A book he writes, Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse, which has been nominated for a national award, is spotted by a film executive who reckons it was cinematic, and that starts him off.

Later, Eszterhas' private and work lives start colliding, with disastrous results.

The young Joe had grown up believing his father's protestations that the Komchis (Communists) were bad and the Zsidos (Jews), good. "Remember this. Jews are people like any other people, some good, some not so good," his father would say. "Just like Hungarians."

But Eszterhas' life - and those mantras of his father - were to be rudely overturned. He had just written and seen finished a film called Music Box, about a Hungarian immigrant who comes to America from the refugee camps and raises his kids successfully. One of them, a woman, becomes a criminal lawyer.

One day, out of the blue, he is prosecuted for war crimes allegedly committed in Hungary years before. His daughter defends him and he is cleared on the charges. Only then does she discover that he is guilty.

The movie got great reviews but did little business.

About a year later, Eszterhas discovers that his father is being investigated for war crimes, mainly for a book he had written in Hungary. In hearings, he learns that " ... my father had indeed worked in the propaganda ministry ... had written hundreds of vicious anti-Semitic editorials ... had even edited Government-funded anti-Semitic publications ... and had even organised a book burning."

He discovers even his mother, racked by mental illness before her death, had been a member of the most virulent anti-Jew party in Hungary. He learns that the "refugee camps" he was raised in were actually safe havens set up by the Germans for friendly Hungarian Government officials.

The revelations are shattering. But Istvan is not tried and not deported. However, father and son are separated ever after by an enormous emotional gulf.

After writing the book, Eszterhas said to an interviewer: ' "Now I've stopped hating my father and all that's left is the love. He's dead now but he still makes me cry."

You could make a movie about it.

* Hutchinson, distributed by Random House, $45.