---
product_id: 11803621
title: "Hollywood Animal: A Memoir"
brand: "joe eszterhas"
price: "$59.21"
currency: USD
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.us/products/11803621-hollywood-animal-a-memoir
store_origin: US
region: United States of America
---

# Hollywood Animal: A Memoir

**Brand:** joe eszterhas
**Price:** $59.21
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Hollywood Animal: A Memoir by joe eszterhas
- **How much does it cost?** $59.21 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.us](https://www.desertcart.us/products/11803621-hollywood-animal-a-memoir)

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- joe eszterhas enthusiasts

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## Description

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Almost Fantasy...
  

*by J***) on Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2022*

If you know the slightest anything about movies then you've read, heard about and/or seen the characters screenwriter Joe Eszterhas has written about here, probably fantasized about having the life they've had. After reading this you might want to think again and then fantasize about something, anything, else.The man is definitely a HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL---"Denizen" might be a better word---and his memoir work here proves that there are only very few that live on such an exalted level. Very few reach this plain and very few, in actuality, would want to. You have to be a narcissistic hedonist masochist with a strong desire for self destruction to  truly "want" a life like this. Superficially it sounds good; realistically it sounds like a nightmare.Eszterhas reached a plateau in Hollywood no other screenwriter had before or since. The epitome of "Right Place--Right Time--Right Who-You-Know" he reached rarefied status: paid millions to write a script from just a couple lines pitched; had two hits with FLASHDANCE and BASIC INSTINCT but then continued to fail upwardly with SHOWGIRLS and JADE with an ego and super-powerful industry friends that wouldn't quit.HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL is the telling of that journey. Often it's compelling and hurtful when he writes of his family, escaping the Holocaust from his native Hungary and the reader understands the drive he inherited from these beginnings. That's historically hypnotic and empathetic. The Hollywood tales read like dark fantasies with sex, drugs, booze and sleaze wrapped in gilded packaging and that ultimately becomes distasteful.Eszterhas is an engaging writer, tells it like it was as he remembers it and lays the territory out without sugar coating. He wraps it all up at the end with a pitch for another, more peaceful, kind of life and living but by the time that happens the reader's sympathies are with the worn out members of his family and one wants to say, "What took you so long?"

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    If you have ever dreamed of going to Hollywood and working as a writer, read this book FIRST!!
  

*by D***. on Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2022*

This book provides a -warts and all- description of exactly what it takes to become a working writer in Hollywood. Joe Eszterhas describes his amazing journey from the dirt poor refugee camps of Hungary (where his family survives on pine needle soup) to the adventures of his youth in the Hungarian enclave of Cleveland, OH. He describes his tortured relationship with his father and mother, how he ascends to the heights of screen writer mega-fame in the sleaze pit of LA and back to reality as he moves his family away from Hollywood and back to sanity in the tiny town of Bainbridge Ohio. Do you dream of going to Hollywood as a writer or actor? Read this book first and see if you are willing to pay the ultimate price that fame demands.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Finest Autobiography I've Read in Twenty Years
  

*by A***O on Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2004*

Every life is intrinsically interesting; every life has its tremendous highs and abysmal lows.  But very few people can tell their own story.  First of all you need a photographic memory, and Joe Eszterhas has it.  Next you need an ability not to write chronologically, because nothing is as deadly as "the next day I did something different."  Eszterhas has the utterly brilliant ability to write in intellectual sequence: one idea comes up, it is dealt with fully, from all autobiographical angles, and then we segue into the next idea.  Each idea is a topper.  I thought by page 100 that I had already read a tremendous book; what could possibly be left?  Well, each new 100 pages topped the previous ones.  But the trick is not to get ahead of your autobiographical story.  In other words, life's ordinary sequences must not skip around, in the sense that what you find out now can take away from any surprise in finding it out later.  This is incredibly hard to mesh with intellectual sequencing.  Thus, although Eszterhas skips around in periods through his life, nevertheless he preserves a rough chronological order that is more satisfying than real chronology because it is artistic.  Finally, if you have all these attributes, you still have to write good prose.  Eszterhas is no Nabokov, he is no Christopher Hitchens.  In short, you don't see his words, you see through them.  He is a master of the unobtrusive word, the unobtrusive sentence.  It's like looking at a film; no one seems to be "explaining" it to  you.  Eszterhas uses performatives with ease.  Of course, he's one of the most successful screenwriters of all time.  Actually, the theatre lost a great playwright when he went to Hollywood.  There isn't a word in his book about any desire to write for the living theatre, and yet that's the kind of writing he does. He gains his laughs by skillful echoing of previous remarks, the way that is so effective in live theatre and so unappreciated in film.  As I read this amazing book, I paid the author what perhaps is a reader's best compliment: I went and replayed his films as he discussed them.  What an amazing treat!  "Jagged Edge" was better than when I first saw it, although now I knew with great regret that Jane Fonda had turned down the role eventually played by Glen Close; how much superior Fonda would have been!  "Music Box" was the biggest revelation, given the eerie, creepy, and unintentional parallel to Joe Eszterhas' own life.  I hadn't previously seen "Flashdance," but oh, how marvelous!  And "Basic Instinct"?  A movie that, if Hitchcock had directed it, would have been at the top of his oeuvre.  I even liked "Showgirls," which I think will get an underground following as soon as people get over the idea that it's supposed to be sexy.  As for all the reviewers who have "reviewed" this book without reading it, and who have nothing but contempt for a great author, I hope you spill coffee on your keyboards.  I'm afraid Eszterhas hurt himself with his brutally self-deprecating title; he sort of invited the sleaziest reviewers to review his book just because they already knew what they were going to say before they skimmed it.  Finally, if you're going to be a great autobiographer, you have to give the reader her money's worth.  You can't skimp because the reader has paid good money to read about you.  Eszterhas doesn't skimp; he has never skimped on his writing in his life.  What you get is solid gold.  If to some people it looks tawdry, it's their own fault.

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*Product available on Desertcart United States of America*
*Store origin: US*
*Last updated: 2026-02-16*