Joe Eszterhas Shares Hollywood Stories: Stone, Spielberg, Stallone, And Gibson

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Who is your favorite screenwriter?

Acclaimed screenwriter Joe Eszterhas is opening up with Indiewire about his Hollywood stories with some of the biggest actors in the business. And he holds nothing back.

Writing 'Basic Instinct': “I went to Hawaii and essentially let the sun beat me up for 10 or 12 days. I had a fondness for snorting cocaine at the time, so I did that, and I drank Jack Daniels and listened to nothing but The Rolling Stones. The whole thing was like being seized by some kind of creative, semi-demonic power and taking dictation. But there was a lot of thought that went into it, both conscious and unconscious, for years.”

Sharon Stone: “She and I have had some issues through the years. When we did ‘Silver’ together, we had a lengthy dinner. She brought some terrific dope with her. We smoked the weed, we drank a lot, we went back to her place, and we wound up on the rug next to a dollhouse. What happened next was a memorable experience for me, but evidently it wasn’t for her. And the fact that I wrote about it in the 2004 memoir ‘Hollywood Animal’ offended her. But she was wonderful in ‘Basic,’ and if she decides to do this one, she’ll be good again. I’m absolutely confident that the performance she will turn in at 68 will be as, let me pick my word carefully, stimulating as the one she gave when she was younger.”

Steven Spielberg: “I wrote a script called ‘Sacred Cows,’ a political satire that was way out there. It was about a sitting President who has all kinds of personal issues and a drinking problem. In the middle of a campaign, he goes back to the farm town where he had grown up and has too much to drink and falls asleep in a barn. He wakes up and hears a cow, so he does what he used to do as a little boy: He goes into the barn, and he f_cks the cow.”

Steven Spielberg contacted him about doing the film. “He called and said, ‘I love this, I’m going to direct it. Of course, once the word spread, he started getting flak from people around him.”

Sly Stallone On Who Wrote F.I.S.T.: “Esquire did a big profile where Sly had himself photographed with a punching bag. He was swinging away at it, and he said, ‘That’s Eszterhas.’ When they called me, I said, ‘I’m a refugee kid. I’ve been in more barroom brawls than he has, and he fights like a sissy.’ That really blew everything up.” After the film bombed with critics and at the box office, Stallone passed the blame. “He gave an interview and said, ‘I didn’t write that at all. Joe did all the writing.'”

Mel Gibson working on a film in Costa Rica: “He went totally nuts the night before we left, and had we not left, we would have had to be as nuts as he was. He was running around saying ‘F_ck God’ and all this stuff. My 15-year-old son literally took a butcher knife from the kitchen and slept with it under his pillow. It was a horrible experience.”

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Source: Indiewire

Photo Credit: Getty