Joe Eszterhas

The conversation opens with Joe Eszterhas's walking cane. He says it was carved by the Dogon people of Mali, by a family that has been doing the work for 100 years. He also says many of that family were killed in what he calls "the Rwandan wars", a claim he makes in passing and that the conversation does not examine. He calls the cane heavy, beautifully made and "a close companion of mine for many years."

Rogan looks up Dogon mythology and reads it aloud, saying first that he does not want to misspeak. In the account he reads, the supreme creator Amma tries to procreate with the earth, but the pairing is flawed. Amphibious water spirits called the Nommo then come down to earth from the Sirius star system in a giant ark-like vessel. The vessel carries the eight original human ancestors along with the seeds and animals needed to populate the world. Rogan calls it "a very strange descendant of the ark." Eszterhas says he did not know the story.

Eszterhas cites a recent biography about a couple who are not named in this excerpt. According to it, the couple watched Basic Instinct together at least 15 times, including on their anniversaries, starting when they were courting. He says he is "not sure what that says" and notes that some people think the film had an amatory effect on them. He then jokes about whether watching it 15 times could push someone "to the point where you go to war with Putin." Rogan pushes back: "Well, in his defense, Putin attacked first."

He sums up his career like this: 18 of his films have been made, out of "like 34 scripts," and 16 have never been produced. He gives credit for his sexually charged material to an inner figure he calls the twisted little man, who he says is 29, was born 29 and will die 29. As he puts it, he is "just an old guy giving him the space."

I say there's a twisted little man inside me who lives in some spot that I'm not sure where it exactly is

He mentions a recent deal for a third Basic Instinct film that he says was worth a record amount of money. He separates it from the existing sequel, which he dismisses and says "I had nothing to do with." The transcript gives his working title for the third film as "his basic insane Jezebel," which may be garbled. He says the twisted little man wrote the story and that it continues in the same vein, "so let's see what happened."

When Rogan points out that he talks about himself as if he were another person, Eszterhas compares the twisted little man to a child's invisible companion. He says he has others too: Mark Twain and Jesus of Nazareth. The twisted little man is the darkest of the three. He describes Twain as a cross between the other two and says, "I absolutely love him."

Asked whether writing Basic Instinct felt like channeling someone else, Eszterhas says he wrote it in 13 days and that it "just poured out of me." He then explains that the two lead characters, Catherine Tramell and Nick Curran, came from material that had been building up for years.

The first source was an affair in college. He was 18 and "very green" after growing up as an immigrant kid, and she was a 39-year-old faculty member's wife. He calls her sophisticated, smart, beautiful and sassy, "exactly the kind of woman I've always fallen for." At the end of the year, he says, he learned she took up with a different student every year and her husband looked the other way. He uses the story to make a broader point: as a shy immigrant who did not know the country, he learned a great deal from the women in his life, and he always preferred their company because they "weren't armored off in male macho."

The second source came later, when he was a police reporter at the Plain Dealer. He is unsure of the timing and puts it at "almost a decade and a half later, a decade later." He became close friends with a cop who had been involved in three or four shootings, and the two drank together a lot. He began to wonder how the man really felt about those shootings:

Was it an itchy trigger finger or did he just get off on it?

He says both characters stayed in his head for a long time without connecting, until, "thanks to the twisted little man," they came together as a love story. He describes thinking about it both consciously and subconsciously, and waking in the middle of the night to jot down notes, something he says happens when he is deeply into a script.

He wrote the script alone in Hawaii. He says he let the sun beat him up, snorted some cocaine, which he calls a habit of his at the time, and listened to the Rolling Stones constantly. He traces that taste back to loving the blues as an immigrant kid and says the Stones "just blew everything else out" during that period. Back home in Marin, he typed up the script and was about to send it to his agent as Love Hurts. On his way out the door, he says, the twisted little man had another idea, and he went back inside and changed the title to Basic Instinct.

His agents auctioned it. Eszterhas speaks warmly of his main agent, whose surname is rendered here as “McElwain” and later as “McElwyn,” and who "became my big brother." He says ten days later everybody had bid, and the script sold for a record $3 million. It then became a major hit, and he says it is still trending today.

His account of the first reviews changes as he tells it. He starts by calling the critics "mildly critical," then corrects himself: "No, actually, the critics were really after the movie." He says opinion has shifted since. His main example is Camille Paglia, whom he calls a leading feminist critic and says came out strongly against the film. He says that in the past five or ten years she has reversed her view and now calls it a post-feminist classic about "women who don't have to hide their sexuality." Rogan calls it a wild turnaround. Eszterhas says he has never met her.

Eszterhas says he doesn't listen to critics and hasn't across all 18 films. He passes on two directors' views. Richard Marquand, who directed Jagged Edge and Hearts of Fire, told him "critics should be taken out into the backyard and shot." Mike Figgis, who directed One Night Stand, said "critics should be taken out of the backyard and headbutted to death." Eszterhas adds: "I was sympathetic to both things."

Rogan recaps how the film grew out of an affair with an older woman and a friendship with a cop who "might have been a shady cop." Eszterhas agrees and points to another influence: four years covering police, two in Dayton, Ohio, and two in Cleveland. He describes driving a company car with a police radio and racing to whatever was happening, sometimes getting there before the police.

The scene that stayed with him most was a shooting in a Dayton suburb. He found the front door wide open and no police yet. Inside were the body of a man who had shot himself, blood all over the wall, and the man's wife, whom he had shot. At the back of the house an elderly woman was screaming and crying in Hungarian, the language Eszterhas grew up speaking fluently. The transcript identifies her only loosely as a family member. He says the scene is still with him today.

He also describes covering the Glenville uprising in Cleveland. He recalls “I think” six or seven police officers being shot and killed. That uncertain recollection should not be used as the police death count: the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History at Case Western Reserve University records three policemen killed at the scene and seven confirmed deaths across all sides, including three nationalists and a bystander. He was crouched behind a car with about ten people, a few feet from a badly bleeding, moaning cop, while shots came from an apartment building. He knew both sides personally from the police beat. The wounded officer was a Hungarian man the transcript calls Elmer Joseph, who used to stop by the police beat office. The shooters were a group of black nationalists led by Fred Ahmed Evans. Evans sometimes dropped in wearing a dashiki at 2 a.m. during Eszterhas's overnight shifts, and the two had long talks, drinking beer and smoking dope.

I found the whole thing so frightening and so disturbing that I pissed my pants.

He lists other uprisings he covered: Detroit, two in Cleveland and one in Newark. He says he was deeply involved in the civil rights movement and covered whatever was breaking, "much of it was dark stuff." By the time Tramell and Curran came together on the page, he says, all of this had gone into them.

Eszterhas says he and Hunter Thompson became friends partly because their backgrounds matched: both were poor kids who dreamed of being novelists. Both turned to journalism first "because no one made a living writing novels." The transcript names Thompson’s early newspaper as “National Enquirer” here, but later in the same interview Eszterhas explicitly recalls reading his Latin American reporting in the National Observer. Those inconsistent names should not be treated as two independently verified stages of employment. The broader contrast is that Thompson went on to Rolling Stone while Eszterhas began locally.

He argues that the job put them on top of "a culture that was exploding," and he calls the state of white racism toward Black Americans at the time "horrendous." He links his eye for dark material to experiences that came even earlier: seven years in refugee camps in Austria, then a childhood "dirt poor in an urban city," where he says he also saw dark and deeply affecting things.

Rogan suggests that writing from real experience explains why the work is so dark, and Eszterhas agrees. As a boy in a very poor part of Cleveland's West Side, he slept on a living-room couch that looked out over a bar. He says he was fascinated by the neon lights and the Puerto Rican sex workers outside. One night, at 12, he watched one man stab another to death and saw the victim fall and bleed out.

His broader claim is that "almost everything in my scripts" has some personal tie, and he goes through several films as examples:

Big Shots: a small film about a white kid and a Black kid trying to make a friendship work, drawn from his son Steve's experience with a Black friend in Marin County. Checking Out (with Jeff Daniels): a comedy about midlife crisis that came from his own fear, in his early to mid-30s, that he was going to die. He laughs that he is now 81 and talking about that fear. Betrayed: released in the 1980s, after several widely covered incidents in Oregon and elsewhere in the Northwest involving right-wing militias. He places it before Timothy McVeigh but in roughly the same period. He went to one of the right-wing gatherings under a false name, drawing on his reporting background, and built the romance between Debra Winger and Tom Berenger out of what he saw. Telling Lies in America (with Kevin Bacon and Brad Renfro): semi-autobiographical, about the bullying and other problems he faced in high school and about becoming an American citizen. It was shot in front of the apartment building where he grew up.

During the Telling Lies in America shoot, Eszterhas says, a Cleveland TV reporter interviewed an old man watching the filming who had worked as a bartender there and knew him growing up. Eszterhas says the man "nailed it":

Joe is just a fucking refugee trying to make his way in the world