In 1990, Joe Eszterhas became the highest paid screenwriter of all time by selling the script for Basic Instinct to Carolco for $3 million. He ushered in a brief era of lucrative deals for high-profile screenwriters, making millions of dollars for scripts that never got produced, and a few that did, only to bomb at the box office. Perhaps Eszterhas' most notorious work was Showgirls, a campy flop directed by Eszterhas' Basic Instinct collaborator Paul Verhoeven and recipient of a record seven Razzie Awards for the worst film of the year.
Showgirls has since been rehabilitated as a cult classic, and in some circles, a brilliant piece of cinema. The website Slant Magazine places Showgirls on its list of 100 Essential Films, calling it "undoubtedly the think-piece objet d'art of its time." Returning to Las Vegas to screen his ode to sex in Sin City, Eszterhas reflects on the genesis of Showgirls, the heady days of celebrity screenwriters, and his own time away from the movie business.
Some people view Showgirls as one of the worst movies of all time, some see it as great camp entertainment, and some consider it a misunderstood masterpiece. How do you see it now?
I'm not sure how much I think about it. I wrote it a long time ago and it came out a long time ago. Certainly, a lot of things have happened in my life since then. Paul and I always felt—from the first time that he read the script—that the script was very funny. We both howled all the way through it when he read it. I think it's hard to conceive how lines like, "How does it feel not having anybody coming on you anymore?" weren't meant to be funny. We always saw a terrific amount of humor in it. ... The only thing I know is that I would say literally thousands of people since this movie came out have come up to me—many of them women—and almost whispered, looking around, "I really loved Showgirls." I'm more amused than anything else.
I read that there was a sequel planned initially that would have followed Nomi to LA where she would take on Hollywood.
No, that's absolute bullshit. No, I never think in terms of sequels when I write something. This was a one-shot piece. We wanted to do a musical set in Vegas. The initial beginning to it was that we both spoke about it as a rock musical. One of the things that didn't work in the movie, to my satisfaction certainly, was the music. Prince was initially going to do the music, and for whatever reasons, he pulled out of it, although there are a couple of Prince things still left in the score. But the rock musical aspect of it I don't think was ever really realized in the film. But there was never any plot to do any sequel; it was a one-shot thing.
You haven't had a film produced since 1997. Have you retired from the movie business?
No. I just finished a script, actually, called Children of Glory, for Synergy. For creative reasons, and in terms of the endless battles that I had with directors and producers and studio heads on the 15 movies that I wrote, I thought I'd save myself some remaining years by doing some books, and I did American Rhapsody and Hollywood Animal, and I'm also doing a thriller called Fun for Knopf, and I've just finished a book called The Devil's Guide to Screenwriting, which I think will make a lot of people laugh, and others have near-strokes. But I got ill [Eszterhas struggled with throat cancer and had much of his larynx removed] in the process of it—I'm in remission, and everything is good, health-wise—and after getting into the third book, I kept getting offers to do stuff and I thought, well, this offer was really too close to my heart, because it's a piece that dealt with the Hungarian revolution in 1956. But I had great fun doing the script and I'll probably do more in the next five years than I did in the previous five.
Why do you think the brief era of high-paid celebrity screenwriters like yourself and Shane Black didn't last?
Well, if you remember, shortly after the Basic Instinct sale, and it was after a couple of Shane's sales, Jeff Katzenberg wrote a very famous memo—at the time he was, I think, over at Disney—and he wrote a very famous memo talking about how if script prices stayed at this level or escalated, the industry was going to be ruined because of other prices, directors' prices and actors' prices would also significantly increase. ... And when that era ended—don't forget that the resulting publicity that writers got came from the business pages—it came from the notion that screenwriters were suddenly making these astronomical amounts of money, even though historically they'd been at the bottom of the totem pole. Well, what was also important to remember, though, at the same time, was that even though we were making those kinds of dollars, the totem pole hadn't changed. If you look at Basic Instinct, yes, I did sell it for $3 million, but Paul Verhoeven was paid eight to direct it, and Michael Douglas was paid 15 to star in it. So the numbers escalated, but the totem pole was the same.