He was the screenwriting colossus behind Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Showgirls and more. Now clean, ‘Hollywood’s Shakespeare’ talks about today’s scared studios, his refugee trauma – and taking acid with Hunter S Thompson
J
oe Eszterhas was the swaggering pitchman of 80s and 90s Hollywood; the king of the high-concept, precision-tooled blockbuster. He wrote Jagged Edge, co-scripted Flashdance, and pocketed a then record $3m for his Basic Instinct screenplay. Writers typically skulk near the bottom of the industry food chain but Eszterhas flipped the script to make himself a boss and a brand. ABC called him a “living legend”, while Time magazine posed a breathless rhetorical question: “If Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Eszterhas?”
Pride, as any hack writer will tell you, usually comes before a fall, and so it was with Eszterhas, who confused success with excess and barely got out of the business alive. “The coke and the booze,” he says, remembering. “Those weren’t helping my creativity, they were holding it back.” His best years in Hollywood were conversely his worst.
Eszterhas is now 81, gravel-voiced after surviving a bout with throat cancer, and living in Cleveland, Ohio, with his second wife, Naomi. But he never retired, and recently plotted a Hollywood comeback with his idea for a rebooted, re-energised Basic Instinct. Eszterhas received a reported $2m from Amazon MGM studios for his script and stands to make a further $2m if and when it is filmed. Which it will be, the writer insists. “There’s a great demand for it. It’s trending all the time.”
