"The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!" by Joe Eszterhas

Oh, you know the best advice I ever got? ... If someone gets in your way, step on 'em. If you're the only one left standing there, they hire you.

The above is not a quote from Joe Eszterhas’s The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God! Rather, it’s a quote from what is perhaps Eszterhas’s most infamous movie: Showgirls. Eszterhas — whose screenwriting credits also include Basic Instinct, Flashdance, and Jagged Edge — acquired a reputation as “the rogue elephant of screenwriting.” Certainly he’s one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood history; hits and flops have flowed from his manual typewriter in equal measure, and both have caused a lot of controversy. His personal image in his heyday as a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, obnoxious bad boy only added to his allure. On the heels of his 2004 memoir Hollywood Animal, Eszterhas published The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood in 2006.

Written McNuggets

Humorist “Kin” Hubbard once said, “Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.” This quote came to mind when I started reading The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood. The book, after an acerbic foreword that skewers self-proclaimed screenwriting guru Robert McKee (a subject that Eszterhas returns to throughout The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood), begins with a section called “Pursuing Your Dream” that consists of a string of quotes by other Hollywood personages interspersed with pithy observations from Eszterhas himself. I finished these literary hors d’oeuvres and, ready to get into the meat of Eszterhas’s work, turned to the next section (“Learning the Business”).

At that point, however, I discovered that the whole thing is written this way. I kept thinking this collection of brassy, bite-sized chunks of gossip, bragging, mudslinging, and tawdry tales of sordid sex was going to turn into a book, but it never quite does.

The resulting text is pretty disjointed. This isn’t necessarily bad; sure, The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood doesn’t reward sustained reading, but it’s a great book to leave on the back of the toilet and dip into for a few minutes’ entertainment while your pants are around your ankles. Somehow, I don’t think Eszterhas would be offended by that.

Step 1: Read The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood. Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit!

There are two reasons to read a book like this: to be entertained by war stories told by a colorful curmudgeon, or to get actual advice about screenwriting. Readers looking for the first subject will find plenty to satisfy them in The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood. The book is jammed with Ambrose Bierce-like definitions of “reelspeak” (“‘Parallel Creativity’ — the phrase that will be used by someone who has plagiarized you.”), admiring accounts of screenwriters who have prevailed over Hollywood venality (or embraced it in entertaining ways), quotable quotes from Eszterhas’s fellow Hungarian, Zsa Zsa Gabor; and plenty of skewering of Hollywood types.

Readers looking for practical advice from Eszterhas will have a harder time finding what they’re looking for — and may not find it all that useful when they encounter it. Sure, it’s there, but it’s sprinkled among reams of fart jokes and stories about jerk producers and their jerky ways. When you do manage to pan a nugget of wisdom out of the dross, it’s likely to be either really obvious (“All it takes to become a successful screenwriter is to sell one script”) or else the sort of advice that mainly works if you start by being Joe Eszterhas (leading off a negotiation by sticking a hunting knife into a conference table, for example). The most useful tips are either negative in format — things not to fall for, things you shouldn’t do, people not to trust — or things to remember in order to stay sane (e.g., “YOU are the storyteller, not the director… in musical terms, you’re the composer — the director conducts the orchestra.”).

Don’t Let Anyone Walk Over You

In the end, though, The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood is an entertaining read that does have a genuine point about the undeserved contempt the film industry has for writers and the likely cause of that contempt (i.e., fear). Eszterhas rages against Hollywood’s marginalization of his fellow writers; moreover, he seems to truly want us to stand up for ourselves and succeed instead of being ground up by the Hollywood machine.  After all, as one of Eszterhas’s characters says in Flashdance:

When you give up your dream, you die.

Well said, you magnificent Hungarian bastard.

Discount Dreams (or "Why This Blog Exists")

One of my favorite places to shop is the dollar store. If your mental image of dollar stores is one of narrow, dingy aisles blocked by ample posteriors in double-knit slacks, buzzy fluorescent lights, and despair, you need to come check out the one by my house – it’s really nice, and the assortment of merchandise is an ever-changing kaleidoscope of off-brand foods, cheap toys, tacky kitsch decorations, and cleaning products (often with labels in French or Spanish).  My favorite area of the store, however, is down the third aisle from the right, across from the mailing supplies and next to the stickers.

That’s where you’ll find the books.

And I’m not talking about schlocky romance paperbacks or things like Chicken Soup for the Soul, either, although both of those things can be found at the dollar store. I’m talking about hardcover books of every genre imaginable. Self-help books. Political screeds. Science-fiction novels. Memoirs. Thrillers. Chick-lit. Even genuine literature.

For a buck apiece.

The first time I happened upon the books at my local dollar store, I didn’t give it much thought. I grabbed a couple of books that looked interesting and moved on to the kitchen utensils (by the way, my dollar store also has an amazing assortment of kitchen utensils. Check ’em out – they’re on the left wall). I figured, “Hey, even if these books are awful, so what? I’m only out a dollar on each one. A newspaper would cost that much.” And they weren’t awful, and I started buying more. It got to the point that whenever I went to the dollar store, I went to the books first, and there were usually several that hadn’t been there the last time. I often just bought an armload of whatever new ones they had, except the ones that I knew immediately I wouldn’t be interested in (sports memoirs, for example). They started to pile up.

A normal person would probably look at the pile of 10-plus books and think, “Gee, I should hold off on buying more until I’ve read these.” I am, as my wife would tell you, not a normal person. The stack continued to grow. Before long, I had to split it into two stacks, then three, to avoid a book-a-lanche. Part of it was, I’m sure, nothing more than avaricious book-lust – They’re books! CHEAP books! However, there was something else in play as well, something that perhaps only a writer would think of.

See, it’s monumentally hard to write a book, and even harder to get one published. To make the attempt requires a willingness to dream big and ignore the odds. Each of these books represented someone’s dream – and, moreover, a dream come true, because some publisher picked it out of the slush pile and gave it form. I imagined how excited the author must have felt holding a copy of his or her book, the same book I was now holding in the dollar store, across from the mailing supplies and next to the stickers.

I was buying dreams at a deep discount.

It felt like I was doing more than just scoring some extraordinarily cheap reading material. I was giving these poor remaindered dreams a second chance to live – and how could I leave any of them behind? Finally the day came when I counted my book stash out of idle curiosity and discovered that I had more than fifty of them in the queue. Jeez, I thought, I could read one of these every week for a year and not get through all of them. And then I raised my eyebrows and thought, Why not actually do that?

And that thought led directly to this blog. For an annual budget of fifty dollars, plus tax, I intend to read and review a book a week, not counting Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks. I plan to post the weekly reviews every Saturday; I may also post other entries on other days as well. I hope it’ll be fun for the readers (if I get any) as well as for me!