Playboy Interview: Joe Eszterhas

When Joe Eszterhas speaks about how his famous feud with Michael Ovitz punctured the veneer of Ovitz, then considered the most powerful man in Hollywood, the writer credits his ancestry.

''They say that if a Hungarian walks into a room and there are a hundred people in that room and one has an ingrown toenail, the Hungarian will go right up to the person with the ingrown toenail and jump up and down on it. That situation was clearly Ovitz' ingrown toenail.''

The 53-year-old Hungarian immigrant has stomped on many ingrown toenails over the past two decades while becoming Hollywood's highest-paid screenwriter--and its most contentious. He has received an unprecedented $4 million for a script. His film hits--sex-soaked and highly castable sagas such as ''Flashdance,'' ''Basic Instinct'' and ''Jagged Edge''--have grossed more than $1 billion total. Even his strikeouts are memorable, including ''Jade,'' ''Sliver'' and the critically reviled ''Showgirls.'' And in a world where screenwriters expect their words and plots to be altered at the whim of more powerful directors, producers and stars, Eszterhas refuses to suffer such indignities quietly.

That attitude began with his first movie script, when he challenged Sylvester Stallone to a fistfight after the ''Rocky'' star rewrote Eszterhas' screenplay ''F.I.S.T.'' and demanded a writing credit. Eszterhas has battled with director Adrian Lyne over the ending of ''Flashdance,'' defied a studio chief on the ending of ''Jagged Edge,'' clashed famously with director Paul Verhoeven and Michael Douglas on ''Basic Instinct'' and incurred the wrath of feminists everywhere for writing the lap-dance fiasco ''Showgirls.''

In Hollywood, people still talk about his most potentially lethal confrontation. Eszterhas risked career suicide by leaving Creative Artists Agency and angering its then-chairman, Michael Ovitz. Eszterhas wanted to rejoin his former agent and friend Guy McElwaine, who had returned to agenting at a CAA rival after a stint as a studio president. Eszterhas reveals that when he broke the news to Ovitz during a volatile meeting, Ovitz threatened him, saying, ''My foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out.''

Rather than face those foot soldiers silently, Eszterhas wrote a detailed summation of the meeting, along with his ''fuck you'' response, and defiantly mailed it off to Ovitz. Within days, it mysteriously became the most widely faxed memo in Hollywood, setting off a media firestorm. (Who actually leaked the memo had been a long-guarded secret--until this interview.) Despite vehement denials from a clearly stunned Ovitz, Eszterhas became a standard-bearer for an industry that felt CAA was becoming too powerful for anyone's good.

Eszterhas was born in 1944 in Hungary, under circumstances that make his defiance and anger understandable. He spent the first six years of his life in refugee camps filled with poverty, despair and suicide, until his family emigrated to the U.S., where they continued to live in poverty. His father, Istvan, worked long hours at a Hungarian-language newspaper and barely had time for his son. Even Eszterhas' close relationship with his mother, Maria, unraveled. Already traumatized by the indignities of the refugee camps, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and had extended relapses during Eszterhas' early teens. He was a self-conscious boy with a heavy Hungarian accent who tried to fit into a tough neighborhood on Cleveland's West Side by joining a gang. Finally, his rage manifested itself when, at the age of 13, he brained a bully with a baseball bat, nearly killing the boy. Afterward, he retreated into a cocoon that would shape his future as a writer. He read, wrote, and listened to rock and roll and Cleveland Indians games on the radio, diversions that remain passions in his life.

A much different Eszterhas emerged from that cocoon in high school and college, when he became a crusading and controversial journalist. Named the country's top collegiate journalist while at Ohio University, he used the acclaim to gel a job covering crime at Cleveland's ''Plain Dealer.'' There he flourished, making international headlines when he published photographs that authenticated articles by Seymour Hersh about the massacre of Vietnamese women and children in My Lai. His rise at the paper was short lived, however. Eszterhas was fired in 1971 for writing an article critical of his employers--just as the paper was being sued for a story he wrote. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a $60,000 judgment for a woman who sued because Eszterhas characterized her as having been a cooperating source in his story when in fact he hadn't spoken with her.

Unfazed, Eszterhas moved to ''Rolling Stone'' and became, along with the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, a cornerstone of the magazine's gonzo journalism. Covering subjects including motorcycle gangs, Evel Knievel and a remembrance of the Kent State shootings, Eszterhas was soon drawing praise and job offers from Hollywood. He made that transition with his first screenplay, ''F.I.S.T.''

His films have featured a broad range of characters, from World War Two war criminals (''Music Box'') to right-wing extremists (''Betrayed'') to hypochondriacal advertising executives (''Checking Out''). But he has made his fortune and reputation writing steamy crime mysteries laced with sex, including ''Jagged Edge'' and the Paul Verhoeven-directed ''Basic Instinct,'' in which Sharon Stone became an international star simply by uncrossing and crossing her legs. Eszterhas stayed too long in the sex genre, as evidenced by the weighty flops ''Showgirls'' and ''Jade.'' The failure of those films has prompted him to change course.

As he works on multimillion-dollar script assignments--one is about the Russian mafia; another concerns U.S. militia groups--Eszterhas has two recent movies that he hopes will help him recover.

''Telling Lies in America'' is a coming-of-age story about a teenage Hungarian immigrant (Brad Renfro) who latches on to a smooth-talking DJ (Kevin Bacon). That film's gentle tone is offset by the raucous mock documentary ''An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn,'' in which Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Chan, attorney Robert Shapiro and producer Robert Evans play themselves. The film is about a director named Smithee who makes a $200 million action film from which he wants his name pulled. He can't remove it, however, because when a director pulls his name off a film, the Directors Guild requires that the director's name be replaced by a specific pseudonym--Alan Smithee. Frustrated, the director steals the master print and destroys it.

Even that film couldn't escape controversy, as Eszterhas clashed with its director, Arthur Hiller, former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. After Eszterhas made his own cut of the film, Hiller abruptly withdrew his name--meaning that ''An Alan Smithee Film'' became a film directed by Alan Smithee.

There were other feuds as well, especially with agents. Eszterhas left Arnold Rifkin, the William Morris agent who put together ''Alan Smithee,'' even though Rifkin stocked the film with his clients Stallone, Goldberg and Chan. Eszterhas became disenchanted when he dropped his latest spec script, ''Male Pattern Baldness,'' on Rifkin's desk and mentioned that Betty Thomas was ready to direct it. Rifkin told him he wouldn't have time to read it for a week or two. By that time, Eszterhas was being wooed by ICM, the agency that represents Thomas. She will shoot the comedy as her next film.

Though he has always isolated himself from the Hollywood social scene, Eszterhas' personal life became tabloid fodder during the making of ''Sliver.'' The film's co-producer (and Eszterhas' friend) Bill Macdonald fell in love with Sharon Stone and left his wife, Naomi Baka. The emotionally distraught Baka became a fixture in the Eszterhas household. Before long, Eszterhas fell in love with her and left his wife of 24 years, Geri, and their two children.

One bitter and expensive divorce later, Eszterhas lives happily with Naomi in a two-storied Spanish Mediterranean-style home just past Malibu in Point Dume. Since marrying, Eszterhas and his second wife have had three sons, Joey, Pompi and John Law. His ex-wife still doesn't speak to him, but he has regained closeness with his grown children from that marriage, Steven and Suzanne.

To get to the bottom of the Eszterhas mystique, Playboy called onMichael Fleming,a columnist for ''Daily Variety'' who has chronicled many of the writer's deals and feuds. Fleming reports: ''Though I've interviewed him many times, Eszterhas' physical presence is always daunting. He's tall and barrelchested, and his lion's mane of hair and his beard make him seem as though he could fit in easily with the motorcycle gangs he once wrote about for 'Rolling Stone.' Belying that hard-edged image and his controversial press is the fact that the man is actually gentle, particularly in the company of Naomi and their three sons.

''The living room of Eszterhas' home features posters from his films and other mementos, including a framed T-shirt that reads Catherine Did It, with one of the I's pictured as an ice pick. It was the shirt worn by gay protesters who were so angered by 'Basic Instinct' that they tried to publicize the surprise ending.

''Eszterhas is a journalist's dream. As a former journalist, he's honest about how much money he makes and will come clean on the creative spats common in filmmaking that are hushed up by just about everyone else in Hollywood. It's doubtful that anyone else of his stature would have dared write 'Smithee' or push it into release with such kamikaze ferocity.''

Playboy: You've written Smithee, a movie that satirizes the filmmaking process. Take us through the task of putting such a movie together.

Eszterhas: Naomi was the first person who read it. Next was my agent at the time, Arnold Rifkin. No response for a couple of days. Then Arnold called and said, ''Listen, what you should do is put this script in a drawer and not show it to anybody, because it's going to destroy your career and mine.'' I had put months of work into this--and my heart and soul--and I'd certainly never heard this kind of response from an agent. I was in shock. I said, ''You're chickenshit, and that's bullshit. This is a funny script, and that's a chickenshit response.'' I hung up on him.

Then we arranged a meeting. I walked in with Naomi and the Tanzanian fighting stick that Smithee carries in the movie. Sure enough, Arnold goes right into this rap about how this script is going to destroy my career and his career, how everyone in town is going to be offended by it and how I can't do something like that. Naomi just looked at him and said, ''What are you? The poster boy for the industry?''

Playboy: Our sources tell us it was one of the most raucous meetings on record.

Eszterhas: When Arnold started talking about the script, I had a feeling, because he was speaking so vaguely, that he may not have read it. In Hollywood, people have their readers read scripts and they get the readers' notes. So I said to him, ''You didn't read this, did you?'' And he said, ''Yeah, right, that's why I stayed up till five in the morning, because I didn't read it.'' He was being facetious, but I didn't know that at the time. I took the fighting stick and slammed it into the table. I felt like I was going to have a stroke. Naomi started giggling and said, ''Oh my God, look at that dent in the table.'' Now, this was a big, ornate mahogany conference-room table, and there was a dent in it. And Arnold is now feeling the dent and trying to make it go away with his hand. So Naomi and I walked out thinking we had real problems because the agency that represents us isn't behind our script, and our agent thinks it's going to destroy our careers. What could we do?

Playboy: What did you do?

Eszterhas: We Xeroxed the thing and two days later sent out 250 copies to everyone in town. We started getting very positive responses. Steven Spielberg wrote me a letter that said, ''I think this is really funny, wicked but not mean.'' Sherry Lansing loved the script, and Ronnie Meyer loved it, and they let Rifkin know how they felt about it. Rifkin starts thinking, Well, wait a minute. All these heavy people like the piece. So he begins putting it together. The script had originally called for Schwarzenegger, Willis and Stallone to play themselves. The big breakthrough was Stallone. I got a call from Sly. He said, ''This thing is hilarious. You've clearly gotten much crazier in the years I have known you. This is very funny.''

I said, ''Are you going to do it?'' And he said, ''Well, after all the good things that have happened to me in 25 years in this business, if I can't laugh at myself, then who can?'' So we had Sly. I heard Willis was out. Schwarzenegger didn't really respond. And then Whoopi Goldberg heard about the project and called Rifkin, who was also her agent. We got on a conference call and Whoopi said to Rifkin, ''If I'm not in this project by the end of the day, you are fired.'' Suddenly we had Sly and Whoopi, but we needed to get one more superstar. Rifkin worked hard to get Jackie Chan into it. And once Jackie agreed, we had a go movie.

Playboy: Although Smithee is a director who steals his movie because it has been ruined by controlling stars and studio executives, he seems more like a typical screenwriter, who generally has little control over his scripts.

Eszterhas: Bob Rafelson said he very much wanted to direct it, but he wanted to make Smithee a screenwriter, because that's the way it happens in Hollywood. I said, ''By God, Bob, I've spent my career fighting that. I'm not going to do a movie about yet another screenwriter getting fucked over.''

Playboy: When you cash a seven-figure check for one of your scripts, aren't you obliged to bow to the whims of financiers, directors or stars?

Eszterhas: This is a collaborative process, but that doesn't mean taking orders and dictation. Collaboration isn't what one of my colleagues, Ron Bass, says it is. Ron says he's there to serve the director's vision. I disagree. The vision belongs to the writer. Realizing the vision on-screen is what the director does. Too many screenwriters hurt themselves by destroying what they've written because they've been told to.

Playboy: How willing are you to change your writing?

Eszterhas: I always go over the script with a director, scene by scene, line by line. With Paul Verhoeven that was always an interesting experience because he would draw on his copy of my script. Sometimes the drawings would be so startling that it would bring us to an absolute stop. The one I remember from Showgirls was a dialogue scene between two people. I looked at his drawing and said, ''What is that?'' And Paul said, ''That's a pussy.'' And I said, ''What's a pussy doing in this scene?'' He said, ''Well, you have to have something in the background.''

Playboy:Smithee director Arthur Hiller walked away when you recut Smithee, meaning that An Alan Smithee Film was actually directed by Alan Smithee. Explain how that happened.

Eszterhas: When Arthur pulled his name off, he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, ''Everyone's going to think it's a publicity stunt.'' Arthur directed this movie brilliantly. He shot every single word of the script as written. That was the problem. This is a talking-heads documentary. His cut was a river of words that drowned us. The mistake was mine. I overwrote the script to the point where I'd put people to sleep. All I did was admit that and correct it. Also, Arthur didn't think the piece needed music. I took out 22 minutes and put in music.

Playboy: This came after a loud exchange between you and Hiller following a test screening?

Eszterhas: After my cut was screened and the backers decided that's what they were going with, he was upset. And that upset me. I said, ''Listen, what you really should do is kiss my ass in Times Square.'' Arthur smiled and said, ''You know, I've already called Mayor Giuliani and we're setting up the time.'' That's why I was so surprised the next afternoon when he informed us he was taking his name off the project.

Playboy: You're best-known for blockbuster movies. Have your high-profile deals helped redefine the way screenwriters are regarded?

Eszterhas: I'd like to think so. If you look closely at this, even in terms of the numbers, the truth is that there are maybe two or three other guys who make $3 million to $4 million a script. Screenwriters want to be viewed with respect, as creative entities, so they should care more about what they've written and not shmooze three different script ideas to different studio heads. Faulkner and Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker came out here for the money while they wrote ''serious'' novels on the side. The only screenwriter who defied that and put every ounce of his being into what he wrote and then fought to preserve it on-screen was Paddy Chayefsky--and it ultimately killed him. Screenwriters need to be more like Paddy and less like William Goldman. There's a story in Goldman's Hype and Glory that is emblematic of the kind of screenwriter not to be. He describes sitting in a meeting with a producer, who is coming up with ideas Goldman thinks are really lame. But Goldman pretends to listen and take serious notes so the producer will think he's listening--because Goldman wants the money. That's not the way to be a screenwriter who demands the level of respect paid to novelists or playwrights. There is no honor in hooking. The Faulkners, the Fitzgeralds and the Parkers who came here were proud of hooking because they were making money to support their serious writing. My contention is that if you're hooking, you're hooking.

Playboy: Although you have helped up script prices, you're not beloved by screenwriters.

Eszterhas: Of course there is resentment. But I feel terrific warmth from young writers who are coming up. I get 50 to 100 fan letters every month from them. Writers have always been a resentful breed. I understand that these colossal numbers for scripts have put a gigantic bull's-eye on my back. Hey, I'll take it.

Playboy: Screenwriters usually don't get blamed for the big bombs. Because of your high profile, you do. Do you wish you could blend into the woodwork when a picture doesn't work?

Eszterhas: No. If I've been saying publicly for years that the screenwriter deserves as much attention as the director, then it's only fair to share the blame. Of course I mind getting terrible reviews. Showgirls left me reeling in pain.

Playboy: It also brought you the wrath of every critic in the country, it seemed. What's it like to work so hard creating something that becomes a national joke?

Eszterhas: The artistic criticism you grin and bear. But some of it got very personal. There were descriptions of the way I look, the way I carry myself, things that were really vicious. It's painful when that happens. But you go on.

Playboy: In the weeks before Showgirls opened, you made some startling claims. We'd like you to interpret each of them.

Eszterhas: I know what's coming. They were silly. Go on.

Playboy: Even though women were protesting the film, you said Nomi Malone, the lap-dancing character, is all about female empowerment.

Eszterhas: Where did I say that? I think what I meant was that at the end of the movie she turns her back on Vegas and goes off and leads her own life. She is a star. We see the billboard as she leaves, and she doesn't want that stardom or to pay the price of fame. That's what I meant.

Playboy: You recommended that underage kids get fake IDs so they could get into the film, which is rated NC-17.

Eszterhas: I said that kids who have the fake IDs should use them to get into the movie. Lots of kids of a certain age--and they are not under 15--have fake IDs. My grown kids had them, everybody had them. If you have to take only seven seconds out to push the movie from NC-17 to R, is there anything kids can't see? Anything that would corrupt 15-year-olds, anything that they haven't heard about? Come on, this is the Nineties. When they're 11, kids are talking about stuff that is mind-boggling. I was responding to the taboo NC-17 rating. The movie shouldn't have been NC-17.I thought that the NC-17 rating was silly to begin with.

Playboy: You described the film as a spiritual message that is delivered on a personal level.

Eszterhas: In retrospect, it was a godawful stupid thing to say. I think the religious right in this country has a strait-jacketing, chilling effect on artistic expression. I was sort of thumbing my nose at the whole thing in what I considered to be an impish way. But it was a stupid thing to do. People took it literally.

Playboy: That included Hollywood's head lobbyist, Jack Valenti, who questioned your sanity and debated you on the Today show. If your statements were designed to draw attention to the film, he certainly took the bait by appearing on TV with you.

Eszterhas: There was a wonderful moment when we were debating. Jack said to me, ''You're just here promoting your movie.'' And I said to him, ''Jack, you're here with me. You're promoting my movie too.''

Playboy: The hype didn't help. What went wrong with Showgirls?

Eszterhas: Paul Verhoeven and I had come off Basic Instinct. We thumbed our noses at the negative reviews when the movie went on to do $350 million around the world. That created a certain hubris on our part. Looking back on Showgirls, I would start with the script. When Paul and I first went over it, we laughed out loud at a certain kind of sardonic, nearly surreal humor exemplified by a line like, ''How does it feel not to have anyone coming on you anymore?'' There was a surrealism we thought was organic to the savage Vegas underside we were trying to put on-screen. That didn't work, and the humor was seen as inadvertent at best. And the rape scene was a deadly mistake. In retrospect, we should have taken Molly into that room but never gone in there with the camera and showed what happened. It was the final nail for people watching it. The fact that it went out with an NC-17 rating instead of an R put a 20,000-watt glare on the movie that it couldn't withstand. And Paul had to take out only seven seconds to make it an R for video. Originally, the tag line was going to be ''the musical that rocked the world.'' But the musical aspect was forgettable and got lost. And then, of course, there were mistakes in casting. I guess I don't want to say anything more than that.

Playboy: Well, without trashing anybody, Elizabeth Berkley was clearly in over her head. Didn't Drew Barry more want that role, while Madonna wanted the role of Cristal?

Eszterhas: Paul went to see Drew in Seattle and felt she couldn't dance well enough for the part. Madonna had problems with the script and wanted to have a lengthy discussion about it. Paul, God bless him, said he liked the script very much and didn't want to indulge in those discussions.

Playboy: Many of the moviegoers rebelled against what they considered to be gratuitous nudity.

Eszterhas: We were trying to show this seedy, squalid underside of Vegas, where nudity is ever present. I don't think Paul put so much nudity on-screen because he wanted to titillate people. He did it because every dressing room and every lap-dancing place we were in was filled with nudity. In my mind the nudity was boring and so ever present that you were left almost crying out for people to put on their clothes.

Playboy: You and Paul share an affinity for this kind of steamy material, but you seem to clash creatively all the way through. What is the dynamic between Paul and you?

Eszterhas: He is my evil twin.

Playboy: How are you different?

Eszterhas: Paul told me that the most sexually enjoyable woman he had ever been with was one who defecated at the same time she had an orgasm. I'm not into that. We're very different in some ways. I've changed a lot of diapers in my time and it's a different context for me. But we both love pushing the envelope, to move people and be provocative. Bring us together, and things can get a little hairy.

Playboy:Showgirls was immediately followed by Jade, another bomb.

Eszterhas: Three weeks after Showgirls, Jade never had a chance. I was relatively happy with the movie. Billy Friedkin did a brilliant directing job. We had serious problems with David Caruso insisting on a different ending and reinterpreting scenes that were in the movie.

Playboy: What scenes did Caruso want to change?

Eszterhas: One was a love scene. The underlying dynamic had to do with a genuinely passionate and blazing affair between David and Linda Fiorentino. David didn't want that; he wanted to be cool. Without that passionate underpinning I don't think people would have understood the level to which they cared about each other. David also wanted to change the ending.

Playboy: All your films seem to entail some sort of off-camera conflict. You sold Basic Instinct for a record $3 million in 1990, only to exit the film after your first creative meeting with Paul Verhoeven and Michael Douglas, the film's star.

Eszterhas: At the meeting it became clear very fast there were serious problems with the script. Michael is militant that his character is one-upped by Sharon's character all the way through, that he's used, that there is no redemption, that she gets away with it and, metaphorically, that evil isn't punished. And the ending he wants is that he kill Sharon. Paul doesn't disagree with that, but he insists that we need more sex. At the low point of the meeting, I'm arguing with Paul and he finally says, ''I'm the director, yah? You're the screenwriter, yah? You do what I tell you to do.'' And I said to Paul, ''Listen, if you come across this table at me again like that, I'm going to hit you.''

Then Paul brought in Gary Goldman, with whom he'd worked on Total Recall. Gary did four drafts. I thought that I wouldn't recognize the movie, so I put it out of my head. But a friend called me one day and said he'd had lunch with Paul and that Paul said he was shooting my first draft.

Playboy: So you patched up the relationship but had an even bigger feud later when you sided with gay activists who felt your script was homophobic. Michael Douglas called you an opportunist. What happened there?

Eszterhas: I had lived in San Francisco and had friends in the gay community. One day I was told they wanted to meet with Paul because they had problems with the script. Paul felt it was censorship and didn't want to meet. I never wanted to cause pain of any kind with something I'd written. Growing up I was called all kinds of names that gave me an immediate identification with black people, Jewish people, gay people. Some of the things they objected to were easily fixed, like when Michael Douglas' cop friend uses the word dyke. I didn't think any damage would be caused by removing that word. But Paul said no. Paul and Michael felt I had betrayed them. And Paul was even quoted as saying that the reason I did this is that I was physically afraid of the gay community in San Francisco, a comment that was patently absurd.

Playboy: Then you saw his cut and changed your mind again.

Eszterhas: The movie came out, the protest was launched and it became clear that the movie was not homophobic. The protest collapsed almost immediately.

Playboy: It was Michael Douglas' movie, but Sharon Stone stole it. Who else was up for her role?

Eszterhas: I keep reading comments from various actresses who say they passed on the part. I can't speak for Verhoeven on who was approached. I know Lena Olin was. She passed. In the end, the actresses who wanted to do it were Sharon, Kelly McGillis and Mariel Hemingway. I saw Sharon's test. It was brilliant and it got her the part.

Playboy: Stone's crotch-shot scene is undoubtedly the most famous scene from any of your movies.

Eszterhas: Exactly.

Playboy: Sharon Stone and Paul Verhoeven have differing versions of how that scene happened. She says she was duped into flashing the goods. Verhoeven says it was planned. Was it scripted?

Eszterhas: No. In the previous scene, before the interrogation began, the script said it should be obvious that she's not wearing underwear. Paul showed that in the interrogation scene. I'd read all this stuff about Sharon saying she was duped into it. I don't know, but I do know that scene had to be lighted.

Playboy: Where did the idea for Basic Instinct come from?

Eszterhas: I'd done three movies about men manipulating women through the heart. In Jagged Edge it was a lawyer betrayed by her client. In Betrayed it was an undercover FBI agent who became personally involved with the main person she was investigating. In Music Box it was a daughter who loved her father but had to reconsider who the man was. Here, I wanted to do a piece where a sexy woman, who happens to be sociopathic, uses her own brilliance and manipulative abilities to flummox a streetwise, very smart veteran cop.

Playboy: Generally, where do you get your ideas?

Eszterhas: I've always said I have a twisted person inside me who decides to do these things whenever he or she--because I do have a strong feminine side--decides to write. Once I get a notion, I kick it around a long time before I start writing. With Basic, it was maybe six months to a year before I started to write it. I was playing with the nature of evil, about being so spiritually jaded that killing becomes a thrill. There's a Nathanael West line I've always loved: Some people's palates become so jaded they can't taste oranges anymore. I had that in mind on an inner level. I've always been fascinated by the nature of evil. The greatest evil perpetrated in my lifetime was the Nazi evil and what was done in Europe. I've done a terrific amount of reading on it. I've done research in the course of my journalism career. I've interviewed sociopaths and people who've killed, always trying to answer the greatest mystery of all: How does a human being bring himself to kill another human being?

Playboy: Have you figured it out?

Eszterhas: The closest I can figure is compartmentalization. I played with it in Jagged Edge, Music Box and Betrayed. Someone can have a sterling silver front, seem to be a productive and even humane member of society, but in some hidden core, some compartment, there's evil. Jagged's Jack Forrester is a successful, brilliant, charming and educated member of society who kills his wife and a maid simply for his own career advancement. Let's say Glenn Close hadn't found that typewriter. If they'd gotten married, would they have been happy? Would Jack have killed again? My suspicion is no, not unless the same circumstances arose. In Basic, Catherine surrounds herself with people who have killed, she gravitates to them. One reason she has an attraction to Nick is that he too has killed. When she asks if Nicky got too close to the flame, she knows exactly what she's talking about. From within the context of her own evil, she knows Nicky knows the thrill she experiences in killing. It's a uniquely dark piece, but under everything it really is a startling and graphic examination of evil. That one Sharon flash scene became so glaringly sensationalized in the media that it obscured what the movie is really about. People didn't go back to see it for that flash of Sharon's itty-bitty little hairs. It was for this startling and frightening girl who, in a dark human sense, fascinated them.

Playboy: Take us through a typical working day.

Eszterhas: I like to work from early in the morning until noon--my best writing hours seem to be from six to one. After that I'm pretty burned, and I spend the rest of the day with my family. I like to clear my head with swimming or taking a long walk with Naomi. Before I fall asleep, I usually know roughly where I'm going the next day. If it's really working, sometimes it feels like the characters are talking to me, coming alive and shaping their own destinies, and I'll get up at four to write them down. I feel like I'm taking dictation. I work on a manual typewriter, and use two fingers--my middle fingers. I must hit the keys much harder with my right, because my right middle finger is always blistered. I'm so paranoid and ignorant about technology, I take the material and put it in a briefcase and carry it up to my room and return with it the next day.

Playboy: As a former reporter, do you do a lot of research?

Eszterhas: Yes, and I always do it myself. Betrayed took a lot of research and I actually went to a neo-Nazi jamboree in Idaho to talk to people. Music Box took a lot of time, and I went to Dachau and Mauthausen. Then I went to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for two weeks, and spent a lot of time at Yad Vashem, the biggest Holocaust museum and historical records site in the world. I researched the events that took place in Hungary. I researched my first film, F.I.S.T., for almost a year, talking to old union guys. Basic didn't require any overt research, partly because I had been so fascinated with the theme, and in my journalism, I had spoken to so many people--criminologists, people who've killed. The greatest amount of research I've ever done on a movie was the 23 years of working in Hollywood that I poured into Alan Smithee.

Playboy: Your first big original hit was Jagged Edge, which hatched a successful formula for you: a violent crime followed by a whodunit laced with hot sex. You made several others, including Betrayed and Music Box. But you became famous not because of these scripts, but because of a memo. You told your agent at the time, Michael Ovitz at CAA, that you were leaving that agency, and you claim that he threatened to hurt your career. You then recounted the exchange in a letter to Ovitz, which was widely circulated. Did you leak it to the press?

Eszterhas: You know how many times I've been asked that question?

Playboy: You've never answered it.

Eszterhas: You think I should answer it for Playboy?

Playboy: Yes.

Eszterhas: I haven't in the past, but I will now. I knew my best protection would be if this letter went out to the public. I was convinced that Ovitz meant what he said and that he was going to try to put my career into the john. I felt the only way to ward that off was to go public. I didn't want to do that myself. Director Costa-Gavras and I had done two movies together. I wanted him to have a copy of the letter. Costa had gone back to Paris. Instead of sending the letter to his parents' address, I sent it to Costa's agent, John Ptak at William Morris, and asked him to send it to Costa. But I didn't seal the envelope. Ptak showed it to Sue Mengers, and the next day it was all over town. [Ptak, now a CAA agent, confirmed he read the letter at Eszterhas' urging and that he showed it to Mengers. He denied allowing it to be copied and was sure he wasn't the only person who received a copy.]

Playboy: So you didn't actually leak it, but you ensured it would happen.

Eszterhas: I did. I felt it was the only way to neutralize the threats that had been made. It was good strategy.

Playboy: The letter proved to be Ovitz' first public embarrassment. Were you shrewd enough to know that this conflict might help your career?

Eszterhas: Listen, this was Mike Ovitz, the most powerful guy in the business. I was trying to survive and I was really frightened. There was a 2000-pound gorilla out there whom I'd defied, who could do whatever he wanted to quietly hurt my career. I don't think my hassle with Ovitz helped my career. What helped was that six months after the hassle with Ovitz, I sold Basic Instinct for $3 million, and the film did $350 million around the world.

Playboy: At the height of the Ovitz controversy, what was the most memorable response?

Eszterhas: The most touching one came from Ray Stark. We had to give up the new house that my ex-wife and my kids were excited about moving into. Ray Stark sent a $2 million check to my agent's office and said, ''Send this to Joe, there are no strings. I want him to buy his house.'' I called Ray, thanked him and said, ''Of course I can't accept this, but I'll remember it to the day I die.''

Playboy: What do you think of Ovitz' unceremonious exit from Disney?

Eszterhas: I hope he has learned. I think what caused the whole thing with me was absolute hubris. I was clearly not the first guy this had happened to. I hope he's learned to be more human and that you can't cause pain to others or injury or make threats and get away with it.

Playboy: Your current wealth is a far cry from the difficult circumstances you grew up in. Describe your childhood.

Eszterhas: We were in refugee camps in Austria for six years. I came to this country when I was six years old, in June 1950. We were displaced persons waiting for a country that would allow us in.

Playboy: What were the camps like in Europe?

Eszterhas: They were barracks. You'd have eight or ten families living in one barracks, separated by sheets. There were periods when there wasn't any food, and we ate pine-needle soup for six weeks. I was sick a lot. I had rickets and various malnutrition-caused illnesses. I remember some of it. The older kids in the camp would always talk about going out to the railroad tracks, which were at the back of the camp. I think I must have been four. Sometimes people would lie down on the tracks and commit suicide. Especially old people. I went there with a group of kids, waiting for the train to come by. An old woman in a babushka and white clothes went out and lay down on the tracks, and a train was coming. I just ran away, before the train came. There was a pervasive and never-ending fear in the camps. The military presence was always there because the camps were run by soldiers. When we came to this country I remember we were on a troop carrier. My dad tells me that when we approached the New York skyline I turned to him and said, ''Papa, what big barracks they have here.'' I had never seen anything except barracks.

Playboy: How did the hard times affect your parents?

Eszterhas: My mother was destroyed by the war and by the refugee camps. She was a very shy, very gentle, very religious woman, withdrawn from the world but not from her family. I can imagine what the war, and the cruel and brutal invasions of privacy in the barracks, must have done to her. When we got to Cleveland we were in dire poverty. She worked in a printshop behind the newspaper office, and my dad worked as a linotype operator. I was 13 and my mother was my life. I was always around her while my father was busy with the paper. And overnight she became a schizophrenic.

Playboy: What happened?

Eszterhas: She stopped talking. For a month. She stopped taking me to school. Then she started talking about rays being after her and people watching her. She cemented the windows in the dead of summer because she thought people were trying to get in. Did the same thing to keyholes, would cut the ends off plugs that went into the wall from radios because she said the rays were assaulting her mind. I essentially withdrew from her. I didn't know what was going on. Part of the problem was that she spoke only Hungarian and there were no Hungarian psychiatrists. My father tried to hide it from other people as much as possible. And what was very difficult is that she would go through periods when she was fine, for two weeks. I must have been about 14 when I really put up a wall with her. We went on a family vacation to a little cabin, and the whole thing started again. I just started to run. I ran and ran through fields, jumping fences, till I fell down. I couldn't run anymore, I couldn't walk. I lay there for about an hour and then walked back to the cabin. Something finally changed forever after that.

Playboy: Your father was a writer. Did he steer you in that direction?

Eszterhas: My father and I are very different people, and I wasn't particularly close to him. There's this thing that happens when you're an immigrant child and you think your parents are old-country and don't really know what's going on here. All of that was aggravated by seeing my father embarrassed in different ways, being called names, and not doing anything about it. My dad's not a confronter and in situations where he was belittled or, in my eyes, humiliated by someone, he would turn and walk away. I didn't respect his response.

He would urge me to read and I didn't listen. It was a West Side Story kind of neighborhood. Everybody was in gangs; it was ducktail haircuts, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in your T-shirt sleeve, black leather motorcycle jackets. We were all split into different gangs by ethnicity with zip guns, knives. I had a thick accent. There was an older kid on the playground who was a bully and who called me Greenhorn, Howdy Doody and Schnozz, because I had a prominent nose. One day when I was 13, we were on the playground and he called me some names. There was a ball game. He was up at bat. I was sitting there with a bunch of kids, watching. And from one moment to the next, I found myself behind this kid with a baseball bat in my hand, and I hit him as hard as I could in the back of the head.

Playboy: Why?

Eszterhas: There was no thought process that I can remember. It happened like a reflex, like a sudden explosion of the spirit. They took the kid to the hospital. They thought he had a cerebral hemorrhage. It turned out he didn't; he had a bad concussion. But I wound up in juvenile court, with my parents next to me. To go to an American juvenile court with two ethnic parents who were crying much of the time was one of the worst experiences of my life. And it sank in: What if this kid had died? I really hurt somebody, and it finally sank in that if I was going to continue doing these things and living this way, I would do nothing with my life. We didn't have a TV, and the only other escape was reading. So I started to read.

Playboy: What happened to the boy?

Eszterhas: I never saw him again. He moved out of the neighborhood shortly thereafter. But it was like an earthquake had happened inside me. I started to read. There was a bookshop about four or five blocks from where we lived that sold used paperbacks for, like, two cents or a nickel or a penny. I just started reading, and the guy at the bookstore liked me and let me take the books out as if it were a library. My life was reading and basketball and listening to the Cleveland Indians and rock and roll on the radio. And I thought, Well, maybe I can write.

Playboy: After college, you became a reporter for The Plain Dealer. You got a reputation as a hard-hitting and controversial reporter. What was your toughest assignment?

Eszterhas: At a wedding, the bride's former boyfriend showed up at the church and shot the new husband and took the bride hostage. He took her to an apartment in Cleveland Heights and held her there. I was 23 and assigned to cover the story. Classic competitive journalism, with everybody trying to get the scoop. After about 12 hours of the standoff, I suggested to my city editor that we fly his mother in from a rural town in Pennsylvania. He thought it was a great idea. I picked her up at the airport with a photographer.

When we got to the scene, the cops went ballistic. But they were also being pressured politically to get it over with. The mother said she loved her son, that she could talk to him. And I had talked the mother into taking me into the house with her. The cops finally agreed to this, hating me every second. It was a long stairway that led to where her son was. There were cops with guns on both sides. The mother is in front of me as we go up the stairs. She gets to the top, I'm crouched right behind her. She says, ''Bobby? Baby?'' We hear two gunshots the instant she says that. The guy shoots the girl and shoots himself. He dies, the girl lives. She's damaged but alive. I am haunted by that. It was my idea to bring that mother in. What was I caring about? Was it that this was an absolutely sensational story that scoops the world's press and gets me the kind of headlines that I want and the paper wants? The mother showing up triggered the shooting. He hadn't shot the woman and he hadn't shot himself until that happened.

Playboy: What did you do?

Eszterhas: I filed the story, which won awards all over the state. I was praised and lauded. It was a classic piece of on-the-spot reporting.

Playboy: Another big story was your authentication of Seymour Hersh's widely denied reports about a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers in My Lai. How did you find the graphic photographs?

Eszterhas: Sy Hersh had done some remarkable reportage and written these stories that described My Lai. They were released through a small, independent wire service, but there was no proof and he was taking a lot of flak. People were saying the stories were made-up. One day I got a phone call from a guy who said, ''My name is Ron Haeberle and I went to school with you. I read some of your things in college and in The Plain Dealer.'' He goes on to tell me that he has seen Sy's stories, and that he was there at My Lai, taking pictures. I was flabbergasted and told him to bring them right in. So he brings in these pictures and they are in the most bold, striking color. I can't describe to you how I felt when I looked at those pictures. They match the horror of the Auschwitz photographs. The notion that American soldiers did this to kids, old women, was overwhelming. The Plain Dealer ran the pictures, and Hersh's stories were immediately authenticated. I wrote Haeberle's account of it, then I wrote the Life magazine account as well. And it became an international cause célèbre, one of the things that really helped end that war.

Playboy: The most controversial story you wrote at The Plain Dealer was about the Ohio River bridge collapse. The paper was sued by a woman you claimed you'd talked to, when in fact you had not. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a $60,000 judgment against the paper. Were you wrong?

Eszterhas: I was never even deposed in the case. The Plain Dealer fired me for writing an article in the Evergreen Review that was critical of The Plain Dealer. At the same time, The Plain Dealer was being sued because of the bridge story I wrote. I had met the mother involved in the case the night that the bridge collapsed, so I knew what she looked like. I wrote a short piece for the paper about that night, and a longer, more in-depth article later. She wasn't there when I researched that longer piece, but I did speak to all the neighbors and her children about her attitude. Maybe I should have explained she wasn't there. I think that if I could have explained the intent, it may have had a different outcome.

Playboy: After that, you went to Rolling Stone, and joined Hunter S. Thompson as one of the magazine's main gonzo journalists.

Eszterhas: I got a call from [Rolling Stone editor] Jann Wenner, who had seen my work. I idolized Rolling Stone, and each week would go to the only newsstand in Cleveland that carried it. On a trip to California the year before, I'd stopped at the Rolling Stone offices, gotten all the back issues. They didn't want to give them to me because I had a suit and tie on and they were convinced I was a narc.

Playboy: Did you eventually fit in?

Eszterhas: I was a Midwesterner with a European background, an altar boy in a not-very-good leather jacket and a pair of jeans that I had picked up at the Army-Navy store. And this was Rolling Stone, the hippest place in the country. I had met Hunter at a party about five or six days after I arrived in California. We were all sitting around with these big jugs of chianti, people were smoking dope, and here comes Hunter, wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, holding a little doctor's bag. He sits, barely says anything to anyone and out of this doctor's bag he pulls the biggest hypodermic needle I've ever seen, loads it up with some fluid, sticks it into his navel and shoots it all in. I turned to him and introduced myself when he still had the hypodermic in his hand, and he mumbled something to me I could barely understand. I said, ''What was that?'' And he said, ''Ether, it was ether.''

Playboy: Was it always that wild?

Eszterhas: In the early days, we were competing with the world. It was an amazing place to work. Hunter's presence was always utterly wild, mad. He hovered over everything. He was out at the Seal Rock Inn, phoning in demands for more drugs and more money and more booze. We'd have breakfast across the street at noon, and he would knock down six lines of coke and four bloody marys and then he would be ready for the day. Once, when he was offended by Jann, Hunter took a fire extinguisher and sprayed him.

We would do a story about corrupt narcotics agents, and some of the better-known dope dealers in town would pay us homage by handing us gigantic bags of grass. It was their way of saying ''Good story.'' Once, I got nearly half a shopping bag of the greatest weed in the world from a dealer who was so excited about my new story that he delivered it himself.

Playboy: Some of your critics say you were well suited to write screenplays because you'd embellish dialogue in your stories to make them more dramatic. Is that true?

Eszterhas: Well, it was the new journalism. Capote started it with In Cold Blood. You re-created, you used quotes secondhand, you did nonfiction as fiction. It was a faster, more subjective form of journalism that isn't being done by many people today. But in those days, Hunter was doing it, Tom Wolfe was doing it, Capote was doing it, and those were some of the people I admired most.

Playboy: How did you part with Rolling Stone and get into the film business?

Eszterhas: Jann was moving the magazine to New York. My ex-wife was pregnant with our first child. I'd fallen in love with California. I happened to get the call that was probably the most important in my life, from Marcia Nasatir at United Artists. She said, ''I think you have cinematic talent. Do you have any interest in doing this? Why don't you go back home and see if you can come up with some ideas?'' I sent her a list of about half a dozen. One was F.I.S.T., about the making of a union. I was hired, having no idea how to write a script. I spent about nine months researching, going around the country talking to guys who'd been involved in union actions. And I wrote a 70-page document. UA thought that there was a movie there. It was very undefined, unfocused. Then Norman Jewison got involved.

Playboy: Starting off with director Norman Jewison and Sly Stallone is heady stuff. Did screenwriting feel like a natural fit?

Eszterhas: I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was so nervous about what I was doing during that time that I would get up each morning and throw up. The first draft of F.I.S.T. was 400-some pages. Norman held it up and said, ''Well, it weighs like War and Peace, kid, but it doesn't read like it.'' I was so green that I had a scene that was a six-page monolog. Norman said, ''Six pages? That's six minutes of screen time. They're going to throw tomatoes at the screen.'' Jewison was like a teacher in the best grad course anyone could take.

Playboy: How did you land Stallone?

Eszterhas: We wanted De Niro to do it but he wouldn't respond, neither yes nor no. We waited a month for his answer. Sly had come off Rocky and was suddenly on the cover of Time and Newsweek. He committed to the movie. Everyone was very happy about getting Sly, and I was too. He was the hottest young actor in the country.

Playboy: Stallone came back and did Smithee, even though the two of you had clashed on F.I.S.T. Why?

Eszterhas: I read a piece in Army Archerd's column in Variety that said Stallone was going to do a new script he had just written called F.I.S.T., about the labor movement. I'd spent two years doing that. I'd put everything that I had into it, and suddenly Sly's claiming he's written the thing. I was outraged. At the moment of my greatest rage, I get a call from an AP reporter doing a mild feature about how happy I must be to have the biggest star in the world in my first screenplay. I go nuts and I say, ''This guy's trying to steal the script I've worked on for two years.'' Sly reads this and of course goes berserk. The piece goes out all across the country. Sly sets up a punching bag in his office that says Eszterhas on it, he's photographed hitting it. Norman says, ''I don't think it's a good idea if you come to the set.''

Playboy: That was the first of many Hollywood controversies for you. How did Stallone end up getting a credit for the screenplay?

Eszterhas: Lynn Nesbit, my book agent in New York, sold the novelization of F.I.S.T. for $400,000. I'd spent two years working on the screenplay and was paid $80,000. I was broke and here was $400,000. But there was a hitch. The cover art had to be from the movie, and Sly had to approve it. Sly's lawyer comes back and says, ''Yes, Sly will approve the cover art, but only if he gets credit on the screenplay.'' I said yes. I desperately needed the $400,000, which made it possible for the first time in my life to buy a house.

Playboy:F.I.S.T. tanked, and it was five years until Flashdance. What did you do in between?

Eszterhas: I'd been doing scripts that weren't made. I set a record for a spec script called City Hall, which sold for $500,000 in 1980 but was never made.

Playboy: Then you got your first real taste of success rewriting Tom Hedley's script for Flashdance. How different were your versions?

Eszterhas: Tom had the title, he had the notion of the kind of dancing. But his story was completely different: It was about a relationship between a young woman and an older married man who has kids. A bunch of Hell's Angels come into the neighborhood, and the stars fight the Hell's Angels. It was a totally different piece.

Playboy: Having been rewritten by Stallone, was it tough for you to rewrite someone else's work?

Eszterhas: It was. I had never done that before. What made it easier for me was that I didn't think Hedley's script would work and I thought I could improve it. And I got to work closely with Don Simpson.

Playboy: Simpson, a studio exec at the time, was as famous for his excesses as he was for his successes. Was he supportive when you clashed with the director, Adrian Lyne?

Eszterhas: Two weeks before Simpson and I were to shoot, we had a bizarre meeting at Caesars Palace in Vegas. It was a combination script meeting and audition for young dancers. Simpson has a giant Jacuzzi in his suite. And, you know, he's got a cigar in his mouth, a bottle of Tanqueray on one side and various white powders on the other. We're sitting around talking about the script, and every five minutes we have an absolutely gorgeous, nubile woman come in and dance. This was not the most work-focused script meeting I've attended. Adrian had the notion that the dancer character should have been sexually abused by her father. I said, ''Adrian, this is a powder-puff little fable. You cannot bring that kind of horrendous thing into it.'' Adrian and I went around and around. Don sat back and puffed his cigar, sipped Tanqueray. Adrian and I got into such a heated thing that I went upstairs, grabbed my bag, checked out of the hotel and went to the airport. Don told me that Adrian came down looking for me, was told I'd left and said, ''He's gone? How could he have left?'' And Don said to him, ''Adrian, when the gorilla shits in your face, you get out of the way.'' But we prevented the concept from being put into the movie.

Playboy: Jennifer Beals was a total unknown who was perfectly cast. Was Demi Moore really a finalist?

Eszterhas: There were three finalists. I happened to be there when Demi did her audition. She was sensational. She had special charisma. It came down to Demi, a New York model named Leslie Wing and Jenny Beals. And the studio had some difficulty making a decision. They gathered about 100 of the toughest sort of macho grips and Teamsters on the lot, brought them in and sat them down. Michael Eisner got up and said, ''Guys, I'm going to ask you a real simple question. Which of these three women do you want to sleep with?'' Jenny won hands down and got the part.

Playboy: During the filming of Sliver, your second film with Sharon Stone, you became embroiled in a personal rather than a professional scandal.

Eszterhas: That's very combustible, personal territory.

Playboy: It is. In fact, the behind-the-scenes story became more interesting than the actual film. The relationships among you, Naomi, Naomi's then-husband, Bill Macdonald, and Sharon Stone were beyond Melrose Place.

Eszterhas: You know I'm not going to address any of this in specific detail.

Playboy: But both you and Naomi talked about it as it was unfolding and afterward. Why not now?

Eszterhas: There are three beautiful babies in this house, and everything that happened, happened four years ago. There was a lot of pain for all of us involved. The only thing I will say is that Army Archerd was inaccurate when he said that I introduced Bill Macdonald to Sharon Stone simply so that I could have Naomi for myself. That would be a horrendously manipulative thing to do. It would be the kind of evil we see in Basic Instinct, and I am not capable of that. That's all I'm going to say.

Playboy: We respect your right not to rehash a scandal everyone knows so well, but one more question: Do you regret doing those interviews, baring yourselves in the media and helping it be played out so publicly?

Eszterhas: We were trapped. My agent got 30 calls in one day from different media, including the tabloids. We were on Maui one day on the beach at the Ritz-Carlton, and Naomi was on my lap. We looked around and there was a photographer to our right and another to our left, from the Enquirer and the Star. We conferred with some of our friends, who said that if you don't talk to anybody they will write it uglier than if you do talk.

Playboy: Were you satisfied with the media coverage?

Eszterhas: We couldn't read it. The pain from it is over now for the most part. I will always regret the pain that the breakup caused my kids, but that's the only part of it that I regret. I couldn't be happier on a personal level. All of it was worth it because the woman who came into my life is a treasure. She is the sun in this house, and she shines brightly each day. But, boy, it's been a long, painful road.

Playboy: You mention she's the first person to read your scripts. She also was executive producer on Telling Lies, and she accompanies you to meetings, which is unusual. How does her presence influence the way you do business?

Eszterhas: She's smart and she's tough and she's my best friend. She's well read, her experience in life has broad horizons. She worked for a time pumping gas and in a factory and for many years wrote speeches for American Express. That combination is rare, and I would be foolish if I didn't solicit her opinion and advice in every facet of my life. The first couple of times she was in a meeting with me, some executives sort of raised their eyebrows. But I think everyone's gotten used to the fact that we are a tag-team act. On the simplest level, the meetings are much more fun for me when she's there.

Playboy: Splitting with your ex-wife so suddenly after 24 years led to a rancorous divorce. Do you have a relationship with Geri now?

Eszterhas: I don't now, though I would certainly like to because there are two beautiful grown children. She has opted not to do that. What happened caused her a terrific amount of pain and the kind of cataclysmic emotional upset that I can only imagine. What Geri and I did is what many couples do. We put everything into the kids. And in the course of doing that, we grew apart. If I could speak to her I would say, ''Forgive me for all the pain I caused you. I fell in love. I couldn't help that, nor did I want to help that. I know that doesn't explain the pain that's been caused in your life. But it's the only thing I can say.''

Playboy: Do you have any other regrets?

Eszterhas: When I was a young reporter and a young man I wish I would have been more concerned with the human beings I was writing about than about getting their stories. I wish my ambition would have been tempered with more compassion and sensitivity. It's one of the things that made me want to get out of journalism. As a journalist you mute what you really care about, so that you can cover those stories. I had a prof in journalism school who said to me, ''You'll know you're a really good reporter when you can go to an autopsy and eat a cheeseburger while watching it.'' Well, that's a horrible, insensate violation of the spirit. But there was an attitude in journalism that you weren't supposed to allow yourself to be moved internally or in any way traumatized or damaged.

Playboy: So you don't miss journalism?

Eszterhas: Not at all. My intent was always to move to another form. I thought that form was going to be novels. As it turned out, the form is screenplays. The notion that I can sit in a little room and play God and make up stories and characters out of my guts and heart and head is one that I love.

Meaty Myths

Really Lousy Eyesight

Hmm... I heard there was a great b rother near here. This must be it.

Can I help you?

Wow! Is this place classy!

Is your Limb Bothering You?

Oh, It's Stiff A Lot.

Why Don't you show me so I can tell you who to see.

That's Not a Foot!

Well Hell! Let's not Quibble about a few Inches!

We both love pushing the envelope, to move people and be provocative. Bring us together, and things can get a little hairy.