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    Hollywood Animal
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    Hollywood Animal
    Unavailable
    Hollywood Animal
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Hollywood Animal

    Written by Joe Eszterhas

    Narrated by Eric Bogosian

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    He spent his earliest years in post WWII-refugee camps. He came to America and grew up in Cleveland-stealing cars, rolling drunks, battling priests, nearly going to jail. He became the screenwriter of the worldwide hits Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, and Flashdance. He also wrote the legendary disasters Showgirls and Jade. The rebellion never ended, even as his films went on to gross more than a billion dollars at the box office and he became the most famous-or infamous-screenwriter in Hollywood.

    Joe Eszterhas is a complex and paradoxical figure: part outlaw and outsider combined with equal parts romantic and moralist. More than one person has called him "the devil." He has been referred to as "the most reviled man in America." But Time asked, "If Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Eszterhas?" and he was the first screenwriter picked as one of the movie industry's 100 Most Powerful People. Although he is often accused of sexism and misogyny, his wife is his best friend and equal partner. Considered an apostle of sex and violence, he is a churchgoer who believes in the power of prayer. For many years the ultimate symbol of Hollywood excess, he has moved his family to Ohio and immersed himself in the midwestern lifestyle he so values.

    Controversial, fearless, extremely talented, and totally unpredictable, the author of the best-selling American Rhapsody and National Book Award nominee Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse has surprised us yet again: he has written a memoir like no other.

    On one level, Hollywood Animal is a shocking and often devastating look inside the movie business. It intimately explores the concept of fame and gives us a never-before-seen look at the famous. Eszterhas reveals the fights, the deals, the extortions, the backstabbing, and the sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll world that is Hollywood.

    But there are many more levels to this extraordinary work. It is the story of a street kid who survives a life filled with obstacles and pain . . . a chronicle of a love affair that is sensual, glorious, and unending . . . an excruciatingly detailed look at a man facing down the greatest enemy he's ever fought: the cancer inside him . . . and perhaps most important, Hollywood Animal is the heartbreaking story of a father and son that defines the concepts of love and betrayal.

    This is a book that will shock you and make you laugh, anger you and move you to tears. It is pure Joe Eszterhas-a raw, spine-chilling celebration of the human spirit.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 27, 2004
    ISBN9780739311332
    Unavailable
    Hollywood Animal
    Author

    Joe Eszterhas

    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 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. He lives with his wife, Naomi, and their four sons in Bainbridge Township, Ohio.

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    Reviews for Hollywood Animal

    3.5/5

    37 ratings5 reviews

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    • 1/5
      wasted money and time
    • 4/5
      "Basic Instinct" screenwriter's autobiography.One thing you'll work out pretty quickly is that Mr Eszterhas is not what you'd call a humble man. But humble people seldom write interesting autobiographies.This is a venomous, slanderous, back-biting book and all the better for it. Interesting Fact: Sharon Stone claims it's all lies, but who believes a word she says?
    • 5/5
      Not what you'd expect from the guy responsible for Basic Instinct, Jade, Sliver and Show Girls. I thought that I'd despise him, but I came away with nothing but respect. In part an insight into the movie industry (it's as brutal as you'd imagined) and in part an auto-biographical confessional. An editor should have noticed the sagging that happens to the narrative about four fifths of the way through, but otherwise this is an addictive and guilty pleasure of a page-turner. Brash, touching, hilarious, vulgar, insightful but always absolutely honest. A wonderful auto-biography, highly recommended.
    • 2/5
      The longer this book went on (and it seems to go on forever about two thirds of the way through) the less I cared about what Eszterhas had to say.Whilst parts of it are undoubtably interesting, huge slabs of it aren't. The inclusion of apparently every letter he ever wrote and the pointless excerpts from his wife's diary are completely inane and superfluous.In the end the author comes across as a self-indulgent, ego driven loud mouth who got paid a hell of a lot of money for writing the scripts of some completely forgettable trashy movies.
    • 4/5
      Interesting but self-absorbed. And a lot of background information was assumed knowledge instead of given. Perhaps I needed the footnotes or a computer in my car so I could have looked up the films and people on IMDB.com. Enjoyable.