Joe Eszterhas’ Wild Tales, from Writing ‘Basic Instinct’ on Cocaine and Jack Daniels to an Unhinged Visit with Mel Gibson

From the late 1970s, when he made his screenwriting debut with “F.I.S.T.,” to the late 1990s, when his high paychecks and button-pushing erotic thrillers like “Basic Instinct,” “Jade,” and “Showgirls” invited both reverence and scorn, Joe Eszterhas was a ubiquitous presence in the entertainment press. Whether sparring with Sylvester Stallone over screen credit, trading threats with CAA power agent Mike Ovitz, or battling with directors and studio executives for creative control, Eszterhas — a Hungarian-born former journalist who made his name at Rolling Stone during its heyday — could always be counted on for attention-grabbing copy.

Then, 25 years ago, Eszterhas and his wife Naomi left Southern California for Ohio to give their sons what they thought would be a more stable upbringing than Los Angeles could provide, and his profile in Hollywood became less pervasive. He was still capable of commanding the spotlight when it suited him — as when he went public about his tumultuous collaboration with Mel Gibson on an unproduced project about the Maccabees —, but for the most part, Eszterhas seemed content to live a mild-mannered life in Ohio, going to his kids’ ball games and carrying the cross at his Catholic Church.

Now, however, the octogenarian screenwriter is back in the news. He’s written a sequel to his biggest hit, “Basic Instinct,” and is once again giving interviews — including a five-part, five-hour career deep dive on the “Ugly, Irresponsible & Childish” podcast. Nearly 50 years after writing “F.I.S.T.” for director Norman Jewison, Eszterhas said he’s still as in love with writing as ever.

“They say you can ruin your eyes and your social abilities in the process,” Eszterhas told IndieWire, “but I’m still tickled by the notion that you can go up into some little room and make something up, and something comes out of it that can entertain people for a couple hours.”

Five years after “F.I.S.T.,” Eszterhas found success rewriting “Flashdance,” and spent the rest of the 1980s building a varied and influential body of work. There was the courtroom thriller “Jagged Edge,” which introduced a number of themes and motifs — particularly sexual and romantic betrayal — that would obsess Eszterhas in many later films; a Bob Dylan vehicle (“Hearts on Fire”); an action-comedy for kids (“Big Shots”); and two excellent adult dramas directed by Costa-Gavras (“Betrayed” and “Music Box”). But what really made Eszterhas famous — and infamous — was the release of “Basic Instinct.”

‘Basic Instinct’©TriStar Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

“Basic Instinct” would become both a box office smash and a lightning rod for controversy, accused of trafficking in homophobic stereotypes in its tale of a bisexual author (Sharon Stone) and the morally compromised cop (Michael Douglas) who has an affair with her despite (or because of) the fact that he strongly suspects she’s a serial killer. Eszterhas made headlines before the movie even came out when his spec script earned him $3 million for what was supposedly about 13 days of work — though Eszterhas said that timeline is misleading.

“Really, I was thinking about that script for years and years,” Eszterhas said, noting that the inspiration for Sharon Stone’s Catherine Trammell began with an affair he had in college with a faculty member’s wife. “I truly fell in love with her. She was a smart, sassy, and sexy woman I learned a lot from, and she never really left my head.” Over 10 years later, Eszterhas was a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer when he met the second person who would exert a powerful influence on “Basic Instinct.”

“I was a police reporter, and I got to be drinking buddies with a policeman who had shot three or four people,” Eszterhas said. “The rap on him was that he liked pulling the trigger a little too much. I couldn’t tell you why, it’s just the magic of creation, but somehow the two characters came together in my head, and I started playing with the notion of a relationship between this smart woman who was proud of her sexuality and this jaded cop.” Eventually, Eszterhas felt the characters were ready to come out of his head and onto the page, and he wrote the movie in a mad rush.

“I went to Hawaii and essentially let the sun beat me up for 10 or 12 days,” Eszterhas said. “I had a fondness for snorting cocaine at the time, so I did that, and I drank Jack Daniels and listened to nothing but The Rolling Stones. The whole thing was like being seized by some kind of creative, semi-demonic power and taking dictation. But there was a lot of thought that went into it, both conscious and unconscious, for years.”

Writing “Basic Instinct” on spec was in keeping with Estzerhas’ preferred method, which was to originate and complete his own material rather than writing for hire. “I wanted to be more in the position of writing and presenting it rather than having to pitch it,” he said. “The only screenwriter I’ve ever truly admired was Paddy Chayefsky, and he said make the pizza in a way where it’s fully baked, so nobody can piss in it. I always fought against it getting pissed in. If it’s your creation and it’s not an adaptation, you have to fight for it if you believe in it.”

Joe EszterhasNaomi Eszterhas

Eszterhas said that although he has regrets — like the time he called director Arthur Hiller “a doddering old fuck” during what Eszterhas described as “gigantic” and “ferocious” battles on “An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn” — he’s managed to stay friends with collaborators like Sylvester Stallone and Paul Verhoeven even after contentious creative disagreements. On “F.I.S.T.,” which was Stallone’s first film after writing and starring in the Academy Award-winning “Rocky,” there was a major public dispute between Eszterhas and the actor over whether Stallone deserved a writing credit on the picture.

“Esquire did a big profile where Sly had himself photographed with a punching bag,” Eszterhas said. “He was swinging away at it, and he said, ‘That’s Eszterhas.’ When they called me, I said, ‘I’m a refugee kid. I’ve been in more barroom brawls than he has, and he fights like a sissy.’ That really blew everything up.” When “F.I.S.T.” came out and died both critically and commercially, Stallone suddenly didn’t want to take credit anymore. “He gave an interview and said, ‘I didn’t write that at all. Joe did all the writing.'”

A month later, Eszterhas and Stallone had lunch together and hit it off. They made plans to work together again — according to Eszterhas, Stallone “was desperate” to star in “Basic Instinct” — but their last collaboration was on the ill-fated “An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn,” a bizarre curiosity about a director who disowns his own movie. The production became so contentious that the actual director — the aforementioned Arthur Hiller — really did take his name off the movie, giving “An Alan Smithee Film” an odd meta-quality.

The movie was made even stranger by then-Hollywood heavyweights like Jackie Chan, Whoopi Goldberg, and Robert Evans playing heightened versions of themselves — not to mention an unsettling performance by Harvey Weinstein as a private detective that has, to put it mildly, not aged well. Stallone’s work in the movie remains one of its few high points, as he pokes fun at his own reputation for rewriting scripts, hogging credit, and trying to steamroll his directors. “Of the stars I’ve worked with, he’s certainly at the top of the list,” Eszterhas said. “We really enjoy each other’s company.”

‘An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn’©Buena Vista Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Eszterhas is less charitable when it comes to another ’80s action icon he worked with, Mel Gibson. In 2011, Eszterhas teamed with Gibson to write a historical epic about Judah and the Maccabees for Gibson to direct. The tale of Jewish rebel warriors seemed to be an odd fit for Gibson, whose standing in Hollywood had been severely diminished by public antisemitic tirades, and Gibson seemed an odd match for Eszterhas, who received the Emanuel Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his writings about the Holocaust in Hungary.

Gibson convinced Eszterhas that his intentions were pure, and Eszterhas saw such a rousing story in the Maccabees that he convinced himself that Gibson was shooting straight with him — an assumption that became less and less plausible the more time Eszterhas spent in Gibson’s company. Eszterhas wrote an Amazon Kindle book about the experience, “Heaven and Mel,” which hilariously and harrowingly recounts the violent, bigoted tirades the screenwriter said he witnessed while working with Gibson.

The final straw for Eszterhas came when he brought his wife and teenage son to Gibson’s compound in Costa Rica, and Gibson spewed vitriol to everyone within earshot. “He went totally nuts the night before we left, and had we not left, we would have had to be as nuts as he was,” Eszterhas said. “He was running around saying ‘Fuck God’ and all this stuff. My 15-year-old son literally took a butcher knife from the kitchen and slept with it under his pillow. It was a horrible experience.”

Eszterhas said that although he’s had his arguments with directors (most of them far less dramatic than his encounters with Gibson), he never seriously considered directing himself. “It’s a very specific talent, and I never felt that I had it,” he said. “I had the talent for going up into a little room by myself and making things up. I never felt I had that ability to organize a whole group of people or create the visuals.”

The only time Eszterhas ever came close to directing came at the behest of Steven Spielberg on an extremely unlikely would-be collaboration.

“I wrote a script called ‘Sacred Cows,’ a political satire that was way out there,” Eszterhas said. “It was about a sitting President who has all kinds of personal issues and a drinking problem. In the middle of a campaign, he goes back to the farm town where he had grown up and has too much to drink and falls asleep in a barn. He wakes up and hears a cow, so he does what he used to do as a little boy: He goes into the barn, and he fucks the cow.”

Eszterhas was astonished when his script began circulating in the early ’90s, and word came back that Steven Spielberg allegedly wanted to direct it. “He called and said, ‘I love this, I’m going to direct it,'” Eszterhas said. “Of course, once the word spread, he started getting flak from people around him.” Spielberg reached out to Stanley Kubrick to produce, but when Kubrick declined — “He said, ‘Steven, this may be the funniest piece I’ve ever read, but I don’t want to get within a thousand miles of it'” — Spielberg pulled out of the project.

“Sacred Cows” went through other potential iterations, with both Miloš Forman and Tony Bill coming in and out as directors, and eventually Spielberg came back around and tried to convince Eszterhas to direct it himself, with Spielberg producing. “If I ever came close to directing, it was at that moment,” Eszterhas said. “The truth was that at that moment I had just met Naomi and didn’t want to be away from her. Steven understood that, but he said, ‘You’re an idiot.'”

Eszterhas’ gift for provocation, as exemplified by “Sacred Cows,” will presumably be on full display in the upcoming “Basic Instinct” sequel, which he said he was inspired to write after seeing reactions to the original film at various repertory screenings around the world. Although a Michael Caton-Jones-directed sequel was released in 2006, Eszterhas wasn’t involved and felt that its bleak tone missed the point of what made the first movie so popular. “The second one was drab and didn’t have a sense of excitement. I think I can create that again.”

‘Sliver’©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

Eszterhas knows there’s something funny about an 81-year-old man writing an erotic thriller, but said he has a “29-year-old co-writer” inside of him. “I call him the twisted little man,” Eszterhas said. “I have cognitive abilities that are still good, and he has horizontal movement abilities that are still good, so we’re the perfect team. I may have lust in my heart, but he translates it to other organs.” Eszterhas said he also has a part for Sharon Stone in the sequel, even though their relationship has been, to put it charitably, complicated over the years. (Last year, Stone told The Guardian, “Joe Eszterhas couldn’t write himself out of a Walgreens drug store.”)

“She and I have had some issues through the years,” Eszterhas said. “When we did ‘Sliver’ together, we had a lengthy dinner. She brought some terrific dope with her. We smoked the weed, we drank a lot, we went back to her place, and we wound up on the rug next to a dollhouse. What happened next was a memorable experience for me, but evidently it wasn’t for her. And the fact that I wrote about it in [the 2004 memoir] ‘Hollywood Animal’ offended her. But she was wonderful in ‘Basic,’ and if she decides to do this one, she’ll be good again. I’m absolutely confident that the performance she will turn in at 68 will be as — let me pick my word carefully — stimulating as the one she gave when she was younger.”

Looking back on his career, Eszterhas credits his background as a journalist with giving him a broad range of knowledge about human behavior that he drew on for decades as a screenwriter. Long before he left Cleveland for Hollywood, Eszterhas had a Zelig-like ability to find himself in the orbit of major historical figures — he interviewed everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimi Hendrix to Charles Manson, and became friends with Black Panther Huey Newton when Newton started hanging around the Rolling Stone offices.

“Huey Newton came to the office all the time, because we had the prettiest assistants and secretaries in town,” Eszterhas said. “Rolling Stone didn’t have any air conditioning, so when it got warm in San Francisco, everyone went topless. Huey loved that.” Although he had a front seat to a pivotal moment in American history, Eszterhas said he didn’t fully grasp it at the time. “I only appreciated it in retrospect, because I was experiencing a bit of culture shock. I’d come from Cleveland and went right into the vortex of a cultural revolution. The first time I visited Rolling Stone in my little suit and tie, they thought I was a narc.”

Now, Eszterhas fully appreciates both the education he got at Rolling Stone and the unique position of having earned a fortune telling the stories he wanted to tell. “To come out of the refugee camps and experience America in that way, I’ve been very blessed,” Eszterhas said. “I really am an example of the American Dream — to be able to see this country and put it through my own filter and then give it back to people having lived it…I understand what it means, and I’m grateful for it.”