Setting Free the Skeletons: Book review of Hollywood Animal by Joe Eszterhas
Lotus House Books, one of my favourite bookstores in Mumbai, is having a clearance sale.
Those of you who know the place, also know that a couple of years ago Lotus moved from its quiet idyllic off-S.V. Road location to a petrol pump.
The new store location was better for parking, sure, but it had none of the charm and peacefulness of the original location. So it comes as a great relief to know the store’s moving back.
Virat Chandok, one of the few bookstore professionals whose recommendations I always follow – and said recos always turn out to be worth their price in gold – was there, and when I asked him, as I always do, for a reco, he suggested Mario Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat.
So that’s definitely now on my MBR list (Must Be Read list, as against my TBR list which is simply To Be Read). I’d read Llosa’s Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter years ago and liked it, but nothing since.
We also talked about Orhan Pamuk who’s now suddenly become the new ‘overnight’ literary sensation, and about how, long before My Name is Red (Pamuk’s best new work) and Snow (his newest novel) he was writing brilliant, quirkily original Kafka-meets-Phil-Dick-in-the-middle-east kind of novels, and how the literary world is as subject to fashion as, well, the fashion world.
I also bumped into young Chandrahas Choudhry, a writer working with Wisden Cricket Almanac (though he said he’s about to leave). I didn’t recognize him at all, but he introduced himself, and I immediately remembered him as a child prodigy writer who had had a book published when he was 14.
The book was published by Rupa & Co, who were my publishers at the time (about ten years ago) and Chandrahas and his father had visited my house a few times to ask my advice about his pursuing a literary career.
Later, I remember Chandrahas calling to ask for advice on becoming a cricket commentator, sort of like Harsha Bhogle, and since he’s now with Wisden (for a few more days anyway), I guess cricket remains a great love for him.
I remember thinking back when his first book was published that any writer who gets a book published at 14 can go only one of two ways: Straight to the stratosphere, in which case he becomes, like, a Jonathon Safran Foer (whose new book has been on my MBR list for months now, not because of the media hype over it but because I was one of the early discoverers of his brilliant debut Everything is Illuminated) and becomes a Young Turk, or he never writes another book again, or at least not for a decade or two.
I really wish Chandrahas well, and hope he can cling to his original dream. Or not, if he doesn’t want to. Because in the end, it’s what you want to do with yourself, not what life does with you, that matters.
Anyway, that day I only picked up a copy of an old Le Carre, one of the few I missed out on over the years (it was Single & Single, and for the record, my favourite Le Carres are The Little Drummer Girl and The Night Manager).
Later, I dropped by at Danai, one of my other favourite bookstores.
The thing I really love about Danai (and Lotus) is the number of unusual, really good, new books they stock that you don’t usually find anywhere else. Like they had piles of copies of David Gregory Roberts’ Shantaram long before any other bookstore in town – in fact, they still do.
Anyone who knows and loves books as much as I do, knows that no two bookstores have exactly the same selection of books (apart from the typical airport ‘top ten’ bestsellers, about which we shall speak no more), not even two branches of a chain store.
This is because each bookstore attracts a different clientele, sometimes subtly different, but more often totally different.
So Strand, Lotus and Danai, while all are excellent literary lovers’ stores, will have completely different kinds of books.
In fact, my friend Virat at Lotus, is often as likely to recommend a book he bought at Strand.
That’s mainly because Strand has the ability to import and stock, in sizable numbers sometimes, books which no other store in India can get hold of easily.
Anyway, I picked up three books at Danai.
One was a very interesting new look at the man history remembers as Vishnugupta, or Kautilya, or Chanakya.
It’s called Building an Empire: Chanakya Revisited by Mohan Mishra and is a very interesting reappraisal of the legendary king-maker brahmin, based largely on new historical material and interpretations of Arthashastra.
A second book was The Great Moghuls by Bamber Gascoigne, an interesting and short but insightful look into our former sultanate masters.
Though I personally think Emperors of the Peacock Throne by Abraham Eraly is the best single-volume history of the Moghul Raj.
The third book was Hollywood Animal by Joe Eszterhas.
Eszterhas is the big-name Hollywood screenwriter (you have to say ‘screen’writer because ‘scriptwriter’ could imply even television writing, and over there, the difference in pride, prestige and price is enormous) who wrote films like Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Jade, Showgirls and Flashdance, among many others.
He’s notorious for his bullish temperament, personally colourful life, and his huge earnings. Said to be the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood (which means the world, basically), I thought his life would be an interesting insight into the workings of the movie biz.
I haven’t read a good biography lately, and after all the historical, archaelogical and academic research I’ve been doing for the past couple of months, I thought a nice ‘writing life’ bio would cleanse my palate.
What I didn’t expect was a movie that was more exciting and thrilling to read than any of Eszterhas’s films!
Hollywood Animal more than lives up to its name.
It’s the biography of a man who lived (and by all accounts, still lives) a larger-than-life life in the world’s most sadistic, masochistic, brutal creative enclave.
Well, technically, he doesn’t live in Hollywood, he only works there, but you get my point: The book exposes more sordid stories of drugs, sex, money-grabbing deals, and other shenanigans in Hollywood than any dozen biographies of movie stars or directors.
Eszterhas grabs his life story, as well as the stor of the hundreds of big-name directors, producers, stars, studio heads, agents, and other people he interacted with over a thirty-year career, and throws it at you in small bite-sized portions, short paragraphs set off by white space, like little sound-bites.
The shocks keep coming at you so fast you just can’t put the book down.
I started to read a page or two and ended up with half the book done, at 3 in the morning, and I still had to force myself to put it down.
I won’t spell out any of the incidents and anecdotes mentioned in the book, there are just too many to even count, but let me tell you, if you want a book that shows you Hollywood with no holds barred, this is the one.
It blows your brain.
Be warned: it’s very explicit in its language, contents, details.
Which is partly why it’s hugely fun to read.
Probably the best ‘Hollywood Insiders’ story I’ve read since Julia Phillips’ You’ll Never Eat Lunch and William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade.
Just remember, this is the guy who wrote Basic Instinct.
And this book is ten times as filled with ‘masala’ as that film!
It made me heave a giant sigh of relief that I never went over there, even though I have had a couple of offers to write Hollywood scripts, one a pretty sizable offer.
I couldn’t have survived a day.
How someone like Eszterhas not only survived, but thrived, is itself a lesson worth learning – it takes a shark to swim with the sharks. And from his own bio, it’s evident that Eszterhas is the Great White of Hollywood screenwriters.
And to a writer, his biography is like what the biography of Jaws would be to other sharks!
It’s a Must Read, if you have even the slightest interest in Hollywood films, lifestyles, or in how insane Americans can be in general, and movie people in particular.
Check it out.
And I can guarantee that after you finish reading it, you’ll never want to eat lunch in that town again!
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2005 at 11:17 am. It is filed under Ashok.
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