József Antal Eszterhás (Hungarian: [ˈjoːʒɛf ɒntɒl ˈɛstɛrhaːʃ]; born November 23, 1944), credited as Joe Eszterhas, is a Hungarian-American writer.
He was paid a then-record $3 million for his script Love Hurts, which was produced as Basic Instinct (1992), and following its success, news outlets reported he earned seven-figure payouts solely on the basis of two-to-four page outlines.
His publications include American Rhapsody (2000), and two volumes of memoirs: Hollywood Animal (2004), an autobiography, and Crossbearer (2008), which detailed his adulthood return to the Catholic faith he was raised in.
He decided to pursue writing as a career after winning a competition in 1966 sponsored by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.
[13][14] After previously living in Malibu, California, he and his wife moved to Bainbridge in 2001, as they felt it provided a better environment to raise their children in.
[7] Eszterhas began his career with a stint at the Dayton Journal Herald,[10] before moving to The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, where he was one of the first reporters to cover the Kent State shootings in 1970.
[18][13] He and fellow Plain Dealer journalist Michael Roberts spent the next three months reporting on the story, and their work was published as the book Thirteen Seconds: Confrontation at Kent State.
[21] Eszterhas became a National Book Award nominee for his nonfiction work Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse in 1974.
[22] A studio executive who read the book contacted Eszterhas, telling him that it was "very cinematic" and suggested he could be a screenwriter.
Copies of the letter were circulated around Hollywood and the missive was credited with loosening the stranglehold of power that CAA had on the entertainment industry.
[23][24][25] A spec script Eszterhas wrote originally titled Love Hurts became the subject of a bidding war amongst various production companies in Hollywood, eventually selling for a then-record $3 million in 1990.
Released in 1992 to more than $400 million at the box office, Basic Instinct and its success led to Eszterhas becoming one of the most sought-after screenwriters at the time.
Showgirls, which debuted in 1995, was seen as a critical and financial disaster, winning the year's Golden Raspberry Award for "Worst Screenplay".
[30] Jade, whose script Eszterhas sold in the wake of Basic Instinct's success,[31] was released three weeks later to low grosses and negative reviews.
[26] The one-two punch of back-to-back box-office bombs in the same year saw Eszterhas' reputation as the highest-paid screenwriter take a hit.
[33] In 2011, it was announced actor-director Mel Gibson had commissioned Eszterhas to write a screenplay: a historical biopic on Judah and the Maccabees, titled M.C.K.B.I.
When asked about their shared Catholic faith, Eszterhas said of Gibson, "In my mind, his Catholicism is a figment of his imagination.
[4] It tells the story of his return to the Roman Catholic Church and his new-found devotion to God and family after surviving a throat cancer diagnosis in 2001.
[43] Among many damning statements is Eszterhas' claim that while staying at Gibson's Costa Rican estate to work on a script, he became so afraid that he slept with a golf club in his hand.