Precious little about filmmaking in these pages, but a great deal about deal-making and even more about getting back at your...
The highest-rolling screenwriter in Hollywood history tells all.
Eszterhas gives the big picture up front: He’s repeatedly set records for the biggest payments for the screenplays for phenoms (Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct) and bombs (Showgirls, Jade) that have gone on to gross over a billion dollars; he’s “the only screenwriter . . . who had groupies”; and a lot of qualified judges think he’s the devil. “I don’t mean to sound insufferable, but . . .” he compares himself to Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner (“Compare myself to other screenwriters? Say what?”). Behind the self-aggrandizing headlines is the story of a kid rescued from Hungary’s postwar refugee camps to land in Cleveland, where he battled the brothers at his Catholic school and lied to his parents about bogus honors. But his life becomes far more arresting the moment he arrives in Hollywood and starts dishing dirt on everybody from Michael Ovitz to himself. Eszterhas is brutally candid about his early years as a screenwriter, when his price soared even though his scripts were either unproduced or turned into duds like F.I.S.T. He’s less candid about his shortcomings as writer (every failure is blamed on megalomaniac directors, poor casting, blinkered reviewers, or studio execs too stupid to see that every word in an Eszterhas script was golden), as husband (he embarrassingly reproduces the journals of his second wife, Naomi Baka, to confirm his version of the breakup of his first marriage, which just happened to fall apart as Naomi’s bridegroom was running off with Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone), and as colleague (his often hilarious accounts of industry infighting infallibly vindicate his judgment at the expense of everybody else’s).
Precious little about filmmaking in these pages, but a great deal about deal-making and even more about getting back at your family, your childhood tormentors, and the Nazi Party. Eszterhas’s memoir may be the longest gotcha ever penned.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41355-3
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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