Joe Eszterhas - On Screenwriting October 6, 2006

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Complete program at: http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=368

Screenwriter and author Joe Eszterhas discusses the writing process, and offers some advice for aspiring screenwriters.

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Joe Eszterhas, best-selling author and legendary bad-boy screenwriter discusses his new book "The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: the Screenwriter as God!."

Mike Ovitz told him his Wilshire Blvd. "foot soldiers" would hunt him down. He's antagonized almost everyone at the top in Tinseltown. And now, Joe Eszterhas tells everything he knows - in brief, quotable bursts - about the business, the history of Hollywood, and how to write screenplays that make millions. Idiosyncratic, gruff and as shaggy as Eszterhas himself, "The Devil's Guide to Hollywood" makes a character/leitmotif of Eszterhas' fellow Hungarian Zsa Zsa Gabor ("Money is like a sixth sense that makes it possible for you to fully enjoy the other five."), and makes the case that Marilyn Monroe was the sharpest tack in Hollywood ("Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents."). Refreshing, dirty, tough, there's no book like it. - Books Inc.

Joe Eszterhas has written fifteen films which have made more than a billion dollars at the box office. Among them are Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Flashdance, Showgirls, Betrayed, Music Box and F.I.S.T. He is the author of the recent New York Times bestsellers American Rhapsody and Hollywood Animal. In 1975, his second book, Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse, was nominated for the National Book Award. He was a senior editor at Rolling Stone from 1971 to 1975.