By Kendra Hibbert
March 12, 2004
Who doesn’t hate celebrities? More to the point – who doesn’t love to hate celebrities? Everyone has at least one famous person they’d wish would shut up and stop doing outrageous stunts just to get on the news, be it Rosie O’Donnell or Tom Cruise or an Osbourne or a Bennifer everyone’s got some hang up about the excess of Hollywood. Some would say it stems from jealousy, some would suggest it comes from the injustice of watching some Botox-lipped starlet get an Oscar when there was at least three better performances in her category. Regardless of the reasons the fact remains that our culture is obsessed with celebrities - and obsessed with pointing out that we are obsessed with celebrities.
There are two new books on the shelves that concern themselves with the wacky world of Hollywood. The first HOLLYWOOD: INTERRUPTED is written by Drudge Report contributor Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner, who used to write for Spy and also helped internet big boy Harry Knowles write his bio AIN’T IT COOL (a book that very much celebrates the culture of celebrity). What really comes through in these 400 pages is that these are journalists who love to hate celebrities, who are caught in a tug-of-war between their obsession with and their repulsion of famous people and their problems. That these guys are really understanding of the attraction of Hollywood scandals because they, like most of us (all of us if you include the ones who don’t admit it) can’t hear enough gossip about some celebrity going way off the deep end.
 |
HOLLYWOOD: INTERRUPTED is a book we should all read but not admit we read because that would acknowledge that we have an unhealthy obsession with those Hollywood types. It’s a book about the excesses of Hollywood, the actors who snort too much cocaine and wind up screaming incoherently and waving a gun around in the middle of the street, the actresses who say they’ve never had plastic surgery even though those cheekbones from the movie they were in in ’98 look nothing like they do now. It’s about Scientologists, pet psychiatrists, transvestite hookers and out of control children. It’s a collection of tabloid fodder and industry secrets everyone in Hollywood knows but doesn’t want you to know. It’s a chance for those who hate a certain celebrity to get down some hard proof that that said certain celebrity deserves to be hated and a chance for those who love a certain celebrity blindly to reevaluate the source of their affections. However it is not, despite what the authors may suggest, an important book about how we must stop Hollywood from producing these people who perform these “heinous” crimes. In fact it’s more of a book that celebrates these crimes than one that deplores them.
Make no mistake: Breitbart and Ebner are strongly against celebrities getting away with murder just ‘cause they’re celebrities, but it’s not like some of these crimes that they “expose” aren’t well-known to everyone who is going to pick up this book. Eddie Murphy’s tranni hooker debacle for example or Robert Downey Jr’s drug problem – who really didn’t know about these things? This just in – Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown have marital problems – shocking! The tone of this book is very much like reading the Enquirer or Star or any other tabloid magazine that thrives on celebrity gossip. It’s a fun read but you have to take a grain of salt with everything said. It’s so totally one-sided, so completely anti-celebrity that you can’t help but question these writers’ viewpoint and their motivations. In their eyes no famous person can do any right – on one page they’re slamming Jack Nicholson for being secretly pro-life yet hiding it from the public, on another they’re slamming actors for voicing their political views.
Make no mistake this book is a bitch fest, but it’s a bitch-fest of the best kind. It appeals to all of our secret hatreds of the Hollywood species. It confirms all of our secret suspicions that actress A is anorexic or actor B prefers the company of men and makes us therefore feel better about ourselves. If you’re looking for a deeper understanding of the psychology of why actress A is anorexic then look for another book. This is strictly superficial fame-bashing but, like I said, we all need some of that in our life.
 |
For a more in depth look into the pathology of a Hollywood insider, look no further than Joe Eszterhas’ HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL the epic 700-page autobiography from the screenwriter who broke the bank time after time on bids for his screenplays – from being the first screenwriter to break the $1 million mark to later making the incredible $4 million sale for a 4 page outline. He wrote FLASHDANCE and BASIC INSTINCT and SLIVER and SHOWGIRLS but most of his sales were for scripts that are still unproduced. HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL is a memoir where chapters about his big sales are interspersed with ones about living in the refugee camps in Hungary and growing up in a poor ethnic ghetto in Cleveland. It is therefore a book as much about the big shot as it is about the little guy and seeing the little guy in the big shot and vice versa.
It is, despite its huge page count, nothing short of mesmerizing. You can’t finish it in one night but you’ll want to. From the first chapter where Eszterhas basically lays down his life, the details of his poverty stricken youth, his years as a journalist and eventual acceptance and reverence in Hollywood circles, briefly mentioning the horrible things he was witness to and even the terrible things he did himself (namely SHOWGIRLS) and yet, despite laying it out all on the line in this first chapter he still manages to make every chapter, every page absolutely riveting and still full of incredible surprises.
Perhaps it’s that fact that Eszterhas was diagnosed with lung cancer and being that close to death made him think about his life and put his heart and soul into writing his story down on paper because really, this is a beautifully written bio. Not since Katherine Hepburn’s ME has there been such a well-written Hollywood autobiography. Not since Robert Evans’ THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE has Hollywood debauchery been so thoroughly described in first person. And – get this – no pictures. None. Not one. No press photos of Eszterhas walking down the red carpet at the BASIC INSTINCT premier. No candid pics of Joe and Sharon Stone having drinks by the pool at his summer home. Nothing. It’s as if Mr. Eszterhas wants to be taken seriously as a writer rather than a Hollywood insider. Gasp! Is such a thing possible?!
And the contents of the book seem to support this theory. More space is dedicated to Eszterhas’ writing about how he stuck to his guns, how having the integrity of his script intact for filming, not allowing the director or the actors or the producers to change one word of his script meant more to him than the money, more than the fame or the potential to rub elbows with studio big shots. Sure he wrote some of Hollywood’s biggest stinkers but at least he stuck to his guns. At least he didn’t buckle under the studio pressure for rewrites as the majority of screenwriters are notorious for doing. And that same philosophy extends to other areas of his life – sure he cheated on his first wife every chance he got, but he stayed married to her for 24 years and was always there for his children and that makes him a stand-up guy in his mind and, to us the reader, if nothing else it makes him a complex subject and at least honest enough to reveal all his faults despite knowing what divulging this information might do to our opinion of him.
So yes, read HOLLYWOOD: INTERRUPTED for all the gossip on your favorite celebrity wack-jobs but then I encourage you all to pick up HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL too and see what the motivations are for these wack-jobs and discover that maybe they aren’t wack-jobs after all, or rather yes they are wack-jobs but they’re wack-jobs just like you and me.
Next Column: More from Hollywood with two authors who also act - Steve Martin with his THE PLEASURE OF MY COMPANY and Carrie Fisher with her newest THE BEST AWFUL.
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
