The Devil's Guide to Hollywood
The Screenwriter as God!
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Joe Eszterhas has written some of Hollywood’s biggest hits – Basic Instinct; Flashdance – and walked away with some of the largest writing cheques in the industry’s history. In The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood he reveals everything he knows about the movies – the players, the personalities, the legends – and screenwriting itself, revealing all that has inspired, amused and enraged him in Hollywood since his career began. Hilarious and colourful but also practical, this is required reading for anyone who’s ever thought of writing for the screen, and for anyone who wants the inside story on the organised insanity of the movie business.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After 31 years in the Hollywood trenches and 15 films including Flashdance, Basic Instinct and Showgirls, screenwriter Eszterhas delivers a dishy, catty mix of reminiscences and Hollywood trivia in the guise of a handbook for wannabe screenwriters. Writing in a format perfect for readers with ADD, Eszterhas offers hundreds of instructive epigraphs, each an excuse for a short, gossipy paragraph. He includes a smattering of basic advice (avoid having your ideas ripped off by going to pitch meetings with a witness), warnings about producers, agents, directors and actors ("The word star is rats spelled backwards"), self-aggrandizing tales of wheeling and dealing, and tangents about various sexcapades (his own and other screenwriters'). He doesn't stint on snide comments about people he's worked with, like Sharon Stone, or about those he's refused to work with, like Michael Ovitz. Eszterhas includes fun quotes from Hollywood legends like Ben Hecht and Raymond Chandler and his fellow Hungarian, Zsa Zsa Gabor, but his forte is skewering sycophants and phonies in this opinionated showcase of the underside of Hollywood life.
