Eszterhas, Joe 1944- (Josef Antony Eszterhas, Joseph A. Eszterhas)

PERSONAL:

Born Josef Antony Eszterhas, November 23, 1944, in Csakanydoroszlo, Hungary; immigrated to United States, naturalized U.S. citizen; son of Stephen George Istvan (a novelist) and Maria Anna Eszterhas; married Geraldine (Gerri) Javor (a police reporter), 1972 (divorced, 1994); married Naomi Baka (an artist and producer), July 30, 1994; children: (first marriage) Steven, Suzanne; (second marriage) Joseph Jeremiah, Nicholas Pompeo, John Law. Education: Ohio State University, graduated, 1966. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Reading.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Chagrin Falls, OH. Agent— Rosalie Swedlin, Creative Artists Agency, 1888 Century Park E., Ste. 1400, Los Angeles, CA 90067.

CAREER:

Writer, novelist, screenwriter, producer, public speaker, and actor. Plain Dealer, Cleveland, OH, reporter, c. early 1970s; Rolling Stone, San Francisco, CA, began as staff writer, became senior editor, 1971-75; screenwriter, novelist, and freelance journalist, 1974—. Executive producer of films, including Betrayed, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists, 1988; executive producer, with others, of films Music Box, TriStar, 1989, Nowhere to Run, Columbia, 1993, Sliver, Paramount, 1993, Jade, Paramount, 1995, and Showgirls, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1995. Has also appeared in films, including Telling Lies in America, Banner Entertainment, 1997. Spokesman for Cleveland Clinic antismoking campaign "Join Joe," beginning 2003.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Named Best Feature Writer, Associated Press, 1969; Best News Story award, 1970; National Magazine Award nomination, 1973, for Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

(With Michael D. Roberts) Thirteen Seconds: Confrontation at Kent State, Dodd (New York, NY), 1970.

Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse, Random House (New York, NY), 1974.

Nark! A Tale of Terror, Straight Arrow (San Francisco, CA), 1974.

Hollywood Animal (memoir), Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2006.

SCREENPLAYS

(With Sylvester Stallone) F.I.S.T. (also see below), United Artists, 1978.

(With Thomas Hedley) Flashdance, Paramount, 1983.

Jagged Edge, Columbia Pictures, 1985.

(With Scott Richardson) Hearts of Fire, Lorimar, 1986.

Big Shots, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1987.

(And executive producer) Betrayed, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists, 1988.

Checking Out, Warner Brothers, 1989.

(And executive producer) Music Box, Tri-Star, 1990.

Basic Instinct, Tri-Star, 1992.

(And executive producer) Sliver, Paramount, 1993.

(With Leslie Bohem and Randy Feldman; author of story, with Richard Marquand) Nowhere to Run, Columbia, 1993.

Showgirls, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1995.

(And executive producer) Jade, Paramount, 1995.

Telling Lies in America, Banner Entertainment, 1997.

(And executive producer) An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Buena Vista, 1998.

Basic Instinct 2, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2006.

Szabadsag, szerelem (also known as Children of Glory), Flashback Productions, 2006.

OTHER

F.I.S.T. (novel; based on screenplay of the same title), Dell (New York, NY), 1978.

(With others) Pals (teleplay), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 1987.

American Rhapsody (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 2000.

Also author of unproduced screenplays Male-patterned Baldness, Sacred Cows, Foreplay, Gangland, Land of the Free, Reliable Sources, Blaze of Glory, and Evil Empire. Composer of song "I Wanna Be Mike Ovitz" for film An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. Contributor of articles to newspapers and magazines.

ADAPTATIONS:

American Rhapsody was adapted as an audiobook.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joe Eszterhas has achieved widespread fame as a top Hollywood screenwriter whose successes include such films as Flashdance and Basic Instinct. Yet before he conquered the movie world, Eszterhas had already established himself as a cutting-edge, radical journalist for Rolling Stone magazine. He wrote his first book, Thirteen Seconds: Confrontation at Kent State, with Michael D. Roberts in 1970. Thirteen Seconds is a widely praised investigation of the massacre of student antiwar demonstrators by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in May of 1970. The authors interviewed numerous witnesses and participants in the tragic confrontation to tell the story with "relentless honesty," remarked Newsweek reviewer Peter S. Prescott.

Eszterhas wrote two additional books on controversial social themes while working as a reporter. Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse, which was nominated for a National Book Award, examines the social context of a seemingly senseless act of violence by an alienated youth in a small Missouri town in early 1972. Charlie Simpson, a volatile, long-haired farm boy with what Eszterhas terms "revolutionary" pretensions, killed several townspeople and himself with an M-1 carbine following months of petty conflict between Simpson's band of youthful hippies and their conservative elders. In Nark! A Tale of Terror, his 1974 probe of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics/Drug Enforcement Administration, Eszterhas "gives solid evidence of the corruption and inhumanity" among narcotics agents, noted New York Times Book Review critic Robert Sherrill. The author argues that the government's antidrug force devotes excessive attention to small-time marijuana raids while generally leaving major hard-drug dealers alone.

Eszterhas turned to screenwriting in the mid-1970s, coauthoring the story and original screenplay for F.I.S.T., a drama about labor unions that starred Sylvester Stallone. The author later reworked his story into a novel published under the same title in 1978. F.I. S.T. traces the rise and fall of labor leader Johnny Kovak, a son of Hungarian immigrants who organizes truckers in Cleveland in the 1930s, rises to become a powerful national figure, and is ultimately undone by his connections with organized crime.

Other films written by Eszterhas have garnered mixed reviews while doing well at the box office. Flashdance, about the coming-of-age of a young woman steelworker in Pittsburgh who dreams of becoming a dancer, was generally judged superficial in plot but rich in visual appeal. Nevertheless, it was popular among audiences and became a box-office hit. Some reviewers of Jagged Edge, a 1985 murder mystery starring Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges, credited Eszterhas with providing enough narrative twists to keep the audience guessing but considered the film short on characterization.

In Big Shots, an adventure-comedy about two twelve-year-olds in the inner city, Eszterhas's story centers on a white suburban boy named Obie who joins forces with Scam, a street-smart black youth, in an attempt to recover Obie's stolen watch, a keepsake from his recently deceased father. What begins as an alliance of convenience blossoms into friendship as the boys discover shared interests and concerns despite their very different backgrounds. Eszterhas takes a darker look at American race relations in the 1988 release Betrayed, which was directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras. The film concerns a Midwestern white supremacist organization recruiting members from among the region's destitute farmers. The undercover FBI agent assigned to infiltrate the group inadvertently falls in love with its handsome, virile, seemingly forthright leader while seeking to betray him.

Many critics were disappointed with Eszterhas's farcical screenplay for the 1989 film Checking Out, which is about a young man's obsessive fear of death, and Music Box, about a woman lawyer defending her father, who is accused of being a war criminal. Of the latter, New Republic reviewer Stanley Kauffmann complained that Eszterhas's screenplay "gets muddled as it goes and gets worse as it ends." While the story is mainly about discovering the truth about the accused's past, Kauffmann felt the more important theme is whether "human beings [can] prevail upon their own minds to convince themselves that the past did not exist and only the present is true," an underlying idea Kauffmann felt Eszterhas almost completely ignores.

During the 1990s Eszterhas wrote a series of steamy, violent movies that were repeatedly panned by the critics, among them Basic Instinct, Sliver, Showgirls, and Jade. Basic Instinct, the most successful of this series and a film that earned Eszterhas three million dollars, is about a woman named Carolyn who kills men as a kind of grisly research method for her novels. After murdering a rock music promoter, she lures a police investigator into her web of sex and deceit. Though Basic Instinct was a commercial success, reviewers did not appreciate the film. Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, complained that the solution to who is the murderer in the film does not depend on the characterizations or anything else that is revealed to the audience: "This is not a movie where the outcome depends upon the personality or behavior of the characters. It's just a wind-up machine to jerk us around." As for the gratuitous sex scenes—many of which were edited out before the movie was released—Ebert commented: "Seeing movies that walk the ratings line like this, I realize that good soft-core is more erotic than trimmed-down would-be hard-core, and that the movie would have been more of a turn-on if it hadn't tried so hard. The sex resembles a violent contact sport, with a scoring system known only to the players."

Despite such critical reaction, Eszterhas was encouraged by the financial success of Basic Instinct to write several even more prurient movies. Sliver was adapted from a book by Ira Levin about voyeurism in America. In the film version, Carly Norris (played by Stone) moves into a new apartment building that, unbeknownst to the tenants, has been wired with video cameras in every room. Carly learns that many of her fellow tenants are very strange characters, and things get even weirder when she learns one of the residents has been thrown out of a window to his death. Carly wonders whether one of her two romantic interests could be the killer. Mixed into this basic plotline, which is only very loosely based on the Levin book, are plenty of sex scenes, which are watched by Zeke, the owner of the apartment building. Calling Sliver a "terrible movie," National Review critic John Simon complained about the dialogue, plotline, and even the acting, finally concluding that "it makes … scant difference which of Carly's swains is the defenestrator, since both are unappetizing enough."

Showgirls, which was called "spectacularly trashy" by Owen Gleiberman in his review for Entertainment Weekly, is about a woman named Nomi who tries to make it in Las Vegas as a showgirl and ends up working as a stripper. "The framework is tested Hollywood formula," commented John Leland in Newsweek: "girl comes to the big town with high hopes and discovers the price of success. When she finally crawls and claws her way to the big show, Nomi learns—hello!—that shaking one's naked body for tourists is a mean and exploitative business." Particularly offensive to critics and audiences alike is a "brutally ugly rape scene," as Gleiberman described it, that seems to have no other point than to shock. "To say this movie is smarmy is to understate the case," asserted Leah Rozen in People. "To say it stinks is more like it." Eszterhas received a similarly poor reception for his thriller Jade, which Entertainment Weekly contributor Ken Tucker described as resembling "a mediocre episode of NYPD Blue with some naughty bits thrown in." The basic plot of the film involves a woman who is using sex to blackmail her lovers; People writer Ralph Novak maintained that this "convoluted, sex-obsessed mystery" makes little sense.

After writing several box-office flops, Eszterhas decided to give the sex-and-violence films a rest and try something different. He proceeded to write two small-scale productions, Telling Lies in America and An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. The former is a semiautobiographical story of a young man named Karchy who comes to America from Hungary. Feeling ostracized by his fellow classmates at his Catholic high school, Karchy latches on to unscrupulous disc jockey Billy Magic and becomes his apprentice and gofer. In this capacity Karchy learns of Magic's shady business dealings, while also learning about sex and love from a girlfriend in this coming-of-age story. Critics were more receptive to Telling Lies in America than to Eszterhas's previous works. Newsweek reviewer David Ansen, for example, felt that the writer "redeems himself" with this film. Although Brian D. Johnson, writing in Maclean's, felt that the film "ends … with a feat of moral fudging," Entertainment Weekly contributor Caren Weiner called the "overall effect … bracingly adult." Of the reactions to his film, Eszterhas told Dana Kennedy in Entertainment Weekly that after reading "in a couple of articles that ‘Joe has redeemed himself,’ … I started to feel like [convicted Watergate felon] Charles Colson when he discovered Jesus. People forget I [was involved with] 16 movies and some have been critically acclaimed."

Eszterhas perhaps released some of his pent-up frustrations with Hollywood in his satirical work An Alan Smithee Film. The title is a joke about a film-industry practice in which directors who are ashamed of their work put the fake name "Alan Smithee" on the credited director instead of their own names. In the film, when a director whose real name happens to be Alan Smithee wants to distance himself from an action-adventure film he has made, he runs into a quandary. Not knowing what else to do, he destroys the original print of his movie only days before it is to be released and ends up being sent to a mental hospital. An Alan Smithee Film is presented in a documentary-like fashion with various players in the scenario—including actors such as Sylvester Stallone playing themselves—trying to figure out what went wrong. The answer, Eszterhas implies, through several satirical scenes that poke fun at the writer's own disasters, has to do with the corrupt and inefficient way Hollywood operates. While appreciating the effort Eszterhas makes with this movie, some reviewers felt, as Deborah Young explained in Variety, that there are too many in-jokes that will be above most audience-members' heads. Young concluded that the movie is "a caustic but under-funny ‘expose’ of the venality of the motion picture business."

After completing An Alan Smithee Film, Eszterhas retreated completely from Hollywood. Moving back with his family to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, he began working on his first book in over twenty-five years, American Rhapsody. Still in the mood to spoof the lifestyles of the glitterati, Eszterhas produced a lengthy satire about former President Bill Clinton and Hollywood. Much of the book is supposedly based on fact, with those portions of the book's passages published in regular text; these factual sections are intermixed with fiction indicated by bold text. Most notably fiction is the book's final chapter, which is narrated by Clinton's penis, named Willard. In addition to being a satire, though, American Rhapsody is also a eulogy to the hopes of the Baby Boomer generation, of which Eszterhas is a part, as that generation is represented by Clinton. Eszterhas, reported Rex Roberts in Insight on the News, "confesses, in his author's note, that he feels a kinship with Clinton," and writing American Rhapsody became "an odyssey of self-discovery. ‘I was lost in a mirrored sea of my own creation, in snorkeling pursuit of myself and Clinton, swimming through his past in search of my own soul.’"

Many critics found American Rhapsody funny but flawed. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly, for example, described the work as "outrageously funny, particularly to readers with a healthy inner snickering teen," but "also flagrantly self-righteous, a finger-wagging indictment of how the hopes of the 1960s … went astray." Newsweek critic David Gates remarked that although much of the book is supposedly based on facts, the author presents no real evidence that anything in it is actually true: "Eszterhas apparently did no reporting (and certainly no footnoting): like everybody else, he seems to have gotten his facts and gossip from TV, books, magazines and the Web." Bruce Fretts, writing in Entertainment Weekly, went even further, indicting American Rhapsody as "a work of horrifying tastelessness, yet one so fascinatingly appalling that you simply cannot turn away." In particular, Fretts criticized Eszterhas's efforts to "conflate Tricky Dick [Nixon] with Slick Willie [Clinton]," a device that reaches "complete absurdity." On the other hand, Library Journal reviewer Karl Helicher felt that "the author's probing analysis and extensive reading results in a novel that rings more true than many of the ‘nonfiction’ accounts of the President and First Lady Hillary."

Some time after returning to Ohio, Eszterhas found himself facing a serious health crisis when he was diagnosed with throat cancer. Delicate surgery helped clear away the cancer while leaving Eszterhas still able to talk. The disease went into remission, and in its aftermath, the screenwriter became a reformed smoker and a crusader against the effects of tobacco. His bout with the disease also prompted him to reassess his lifestyle. In the process, Eszterhas decided to record his own version of his life and career in Hollywood, in counterpoint to the well-publicized, almost legendary exploits that garnered much coverage in the tabloids and newscasts. The result is Hollywood Animal, an exhaustive account of Eszterhas's life from his childhood, to his days as Hollywood's best paid, most brazen screenwriter, to his time of gentler repose in his native Ohio. Though the memoir might serve in some ways a confessional and catharsis for Eszterhas, its pages remain filled with high-powered, often lurid Hollywood insider observations and gossip. He relates how actress Sharon Stone, in gratitude for the career-making role he created for her in Basic Instinct, repaid the screenwriter with a one-night stand. He recounts in depth the highly personal but highly public feud he had with super-agent Michael Ovitz in 1989, when Eszterhas fired Ovitz's firm and Ovitz allegedly made threats against the screenwriter's life and career. Eszterhas does not deflect attention from his own sins, recounting his many affairs, his belligerent and pugnacious nature, his numerous battles with people up and down the Hollywood hierarchy, his use of alcohol, and his heavy smoking. "None of this is new, but when done right, it can be terribly entertaining—much in the same way that a good formulaic Hollywood film, after eighty or so years, continues to entertain and propagate itself worldwide," mused Mark Peranson in Cineaste.

"Regardless of the hubris involved in expecting any reader to slough through a book of this length, Eszterhas still knows how to tell a story, and his tales, no matter how they've been rehashed in the Hollywood trades, retain an unbridled fascination," commented Marshall Heyman in WWD. "In short, if you are in the market for scabrous diversion, Hollywood Animal will deliver the goods, but you must expect to have your brain scrambled along the way," observed New Yorker contributor Anthony Lane. Peranson concluded that "even if you don't buy the argument that the author—who has slept with a gun next to his bed since his young adulthood—is truly a man of integrity, the bulk of Hollywood Animal succeeds, with a supreme lack of self-effacement, in capturing the effect of what happens when the rock 'n' roll lifestyle bodyslams into the town that runs on greed."

In a television interview with Greta Van Susteren, reprinted on America's Intelligence Wire, Eszterhas said that the title of the book "describes a form of behavior that I found myself engaging in, and I describe the behavior as sort of soulless and insensate, and it's treating people not in a very humane fashion. I found myself, after nearly thirty years of screenwriting, behaving in some ways that I didn't like." Eszterhas further indicated that the book was not strictly about Hollywood. Instead, he told Van Susteren, "The book is about my life, and part of my life takes place in Hollywood. But I wanted to write a book that was as honest as possible about my life, my mistakes, and my road from the refugee camps all the way to Hollywood and then back to Ohio." Peter Bart, writing in Daily Variety, observed that although the book "describes a spiritual journey, Hollywood Animal is steeped in rage and resentment directed at the various players who, he believes, betrayed his talents." In end, Bart concluded, Eszterhas "has turned out a book that is at times powerful, at times disorienting. The talent remains; despite himself, so does the anger."

Eszterhas seeks to avail the Hollywood hopeful of his hard-won experience in The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!, a frank and opinionated guidebook to the commercial aspects of screenwriting. Eszterhas draws on his deep reserve of experience to explain the details of the moviemaking process and to establish the role of the screenwriter within it. He advises aspiring screenwriters to not live in Los Angeles, so as to remain unaffected by the dreamy and unrealistic nature of the town and the many executives and others who make films for a living. He stresses a fundamental truism of the writing life, especially pertinent for screenwriters: writing is accomplished only by sitting down and writing, not by talking about one's projects, ideas, and achievements. He is clear about the predatory nature of Hollywood, and offers warnings about agents, producers, directors, even actors and other performers. Throughout the book, Eszterhas also includes personal anecdotes and gossipy stories about persons he has known and worked with throughout a long, prominent, and highly successful Hollywood career. Booklist reviewer Kristine Huntley called the book "a laugh-out-loud funny and useful guide for those who aspire to making it big in Hollywood."

The independent-minded Eszterhas's lucrative career has spanned both successes and failures, the writer having garnered praise for his books—especially his early works—his blockbuster movie hits and staggering critical failures. In his sixties he also began a battle with nicotine addiction after being diagnosed with throat cancer. "How to reconcile the millionaire screenwriter and the rebellious, experimental journalist?" queried Jack Lule in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. "Rather than a radical departure from his early work, his film career drives home the point that literary journalism, for Eszterhas, was an expressive vehicle, a channel for his narrative and dramatic talents." Lule concluded that it was natural for Eszterhas to move from journalism to screenwriting, because "his work simply could not be confined to the conventional news story. The traditional journalistic report is derived from language determinedly dispassionate and apolitical. … Language orders experience, Eszterhas knew, and he resisted having his experience ordered in traditional ways. His work can be understood as a challenge to the benefit and possibility of objective, unbiased, apolitical reporting. Instead, he celebrated passion, commitment, and engagement."

Eszterhas's work "makes the confrontation between traditional and literary journalism difficult to ignore," asserted Lule. "His precise rendering of scenes, his experimentation with point of view, and his dramatization of differences with other reporters—all these challenged conventions of journalism and showed once again the power of a story well told by its teller."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 185: American Literary Journalists, 1945-1995, First Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Eszterhas, Joe, Hollywood Animal, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Love, Robert, The Best of Rolling Stone: Twenty-five Years of Journalism on the Edge, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1993.

Wolfe, Tom, and E.W. Johnson, editors, The New Journalism, Harper (New York, NY), 1973.

PERIODICALS

America's Intelligence Wire, January 28, 2004, Greta Van Susteren, transcript of TV interview with Joe Eszterhas; January 29, 2004, Bill Hemmer, transcript of TV interview with Joe Eszterhas, and Laura Goldberg, "Memoir of Basic Instinct Screenwriter Details Hungarian-Born Father's Involvement with Anti-Semitic Propaganda"; December 6, 2004, Martha Irvine, "Joe Eszterhas Writing Feature Film about Hungarian-Soviet Water Polo Match."

Booklist, February 15, 2004, Brad Hooper, "Late Arrivals," review of Hollywood Animal, p. 1003; September 15, 2006, Kristine Huntley, review of The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!, p. 15.

Chicago Sun-Times, March 20, 1992, Roger Ebert, review of Basic Instinct.

Cineaste, fall, 2004, Mark Peranson, review of Hollywood Animal, p. 60.

Daily Variety, February 2, 2004, Peter Bart, "The Writer-Warrior: Angry as Always; Joe Eszterhas Says He's a Changed Man, but His Memoir Finds Him Still at Odds with the Industry," review of Hollywood Animal, p. 4.

Entertainment Weekly, October 6, 1995, Owen Gleiberman, review of Showgirls, p. 40; October 27, 1995, Ken Tucker, review of Jade, p. 71; November 10, 1995, Anne Thompson, "The Thrill Is Gone: Can This Career Be Saved?," p. 7; November 7, 1997, Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of Telling Lies in America, p. 60; November 21, 1997, Dana Kennedy, "Telling Truths in America," p. 94; May 1, 1998, Caren Weiner, review of Telling Lies in America, p. 74; July 28, 2000, "Joltin' Joe: Why Tackle Clintongate Now? Eszterhas Tells All," p. 27, and Bruce Fretts, "Oral Fixation: Forget Showgirls, Joe Eszterhas's Expose of the Lewinsky Affair—among Other Scandals—Is Even Sleazier," p. 174; February 6, 2004, Benjamin Svetkey, review of Hollywood Animal, p. 154.

Guardian (Manchester, England), February 10, 2007, "Raging Bull," Peter Bradshaw, review of The Devil's Guide to Hollywood.

Hollywood Reporter, April 3, 2003, "Eszterhas Suits up for ‘Bowl,’" p. 19.

Independent (London, England), February 11, 2007, Christopher Fowler, "Don't Listen to Him; He Made Showgirls," review of The Devil's Guide to Hollywood.

Insight on the News, September 11, 2000, Rex Roberts, review of American Rhapsody, p. 26.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2004, review of Hollywood Animal, p. 163.

Library Journal, August, 2000, Karl Helicher, review of American Rhapsody, p. 131.

Los Angeles Magazine, August, 1996, Andy Meisler, "Say It's a ‘Go,’ Joe," p. 46.

Maclean's, November 3, 1997, Brian D. Johnson, review of Telling Lies in America, p. 78.

National Review, June 21, 1993, John Simon, review of Sliver, p. 76; November 6, 1995, John Simon, review of Showgirls, p. 67; August 14, 2000, Lucianne Goldberg, "Blue Rhapsody"; February 23, 2004, "A Delicious Morsel from Joe Eszterhas's New Expose of Hollywood," p. 12.

New Republic, February 5, 1990, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Music Box, p. 26; October 23, 1995, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Showgirls, p. 29.

Newsweek, November 28, 1970, Peter S. Prescott, review of Thirteen Seconds: Confrontation at Kent State; September 25, 1995, John Leland, review of Showgirls, p. 88; October 20, 1997, David Ansen, review of Telling Lies in America, p. 68; July 24, 2000, David Gates, "Mondo Bizarro," p. 54.

New York Daily News, January 29, 2004, Sherryl Connelly, "Screenwriter Tells All about Sex, Scandals, and Saving His Own Life," profile of Joe Eszterhas.

New Yorker, February 9, 2004, Anthony Lane, "Back to Basics," review of Hollywood Animal, p. 78.

New York Times Book Review, July 7, 1974, Robert Sherrill, review of Nark!, p. 1; September 17, 2006, Joe Queenan, "Basic Instinct," review of The Devil's Guide to Hollywood, p. 9.

People, October 9, 1995, Leah Rozen, review of Showgirls, p. 26; October 30, 1995, Ralph Novak, review of Jade, p. 19; July 31, 2000, Dan Jewel, review of American Rhapsody, p. 41; August 26, 2002, "Smoking Gun: A Screenwriter Asks Hollywood to Kick a Nasty Habit," p. 15; February 16, 2004, Sean Daly, review of Hollywood Animal, p. 43.

Publishers Weekly, June 26, 2000, Bridget Kinsella, "Hollywood's Hold on Politics," p. 22; July 17, 2000, review of American Rhapsody, p. 187; July 31, 2000, Daisy Maryles, "Bad Rap on Rhapsody," p. 21; September 26, 2005, Jason Anthony, "Controversial Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas Will Share Some of His Insights in The Devil's Guide to Hollywood," p. 10; July 24, 2006, review of The Devil's Guide to Hollywood, p. 52.

Spectator, March 13, 2004, Toby Young, "Dishing Only Some of the Dirt," review of Hollywood Animal, p. 38.

Time, September 25, 1995, Belinda Luscombe, "Go, Says Joe," p. 78; July 1, 1996, Belinda Luscombe, "Seen and Heard," p. 67; February 2, 2004, Lev Grossman, "His Instincts Are Basic: Hollywood's Most Notorious Screenwriter Tells All," review of Hollywood Animal, p. 74.

Variety, October 6, 1997, Deborah Young, review of An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, p. 54; June 5, 2000, Jonathan Bing, "Scribe Eszterhas Plays Rhapsody in Green," p. 6; July 17, 2000, Charles Lyons, "Eszterhas Invitation Rescinded by Coalition," p. 4; April 2, 2001, Peter Bart, "Burly Bard Back to Heartland," p. 4; February 2, 2004, Peter Bart, "‘Animal’ Magnetism," review of Hollywood Animal, p. 6; September 25, 2006, "Devil's Handiwork," p. 4.

WWD, January 29, 2004, Marshall Heyman, "Base Instincts," review of Hollywood Animal, p. 4.

ONLINE

Internet Movie Database,http://www.imdb.com/ (April 10, 2007), filmography of Joe Eszterhas.

Joe Eszterhas Home Page,http://www.joeeszterhas.com (April 10, 2007).

MSNBC.com,http://www.msnbc.com/ (September 22, 2006), Brian Braiker, "Eszterhas Defends Hollywood Screenwriters," interview with Joe Eszterhas.

Slate,http://www.slate.com/ (February 3, 2004), Bryan Curtis, "The Condensed Joe Eszterhas: Slate Reads Hollywood Animal So You Don't Have To," review of Hollywood Animal.