Rating: 
Summary: A True Hollywood Story
Review: This excellent memoir holds few punches or salacious detail, wavering between a score settling, bridge burning act of revenge against most of Hollywood and a deathbed confession.
Rating:
Summary: Ich bin ein schmuck
Review: Joe Eszterhas is his own paparazzi. In fact, this is about the only thing he forgot to claim he invented - the new genre of autopaparazziography. This book would have been more honestly entitled "Hollywood Schmuck."
Eszterhas's schmuckery is detailed ad nauseam throughout Hollywood Animal, and there is no need to summarize it here. While styled as a self-critical tell-all, the book is one extended whine. Eszterhas does not have the courage of his crimes; in the best tradition of death row inmates everywhere, he ends up repenting all and delivering indignantly pious lectures after a lifetime of luridly detailed lying, fakery, brutality, abuse, betrayal, and backstabbing. Every morsel of regret is accompanied by a king's repast of denial, evasion, moral equivalence, poor-mouthing, and blaming his endless cast of victims.
Nevertheless, the book merits five stars because of its sheer chutzpah, the only core value that Eszterhas exhibits consistently throughout his life, and because it is the greatest work to date of the autopaparazziography genre.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing Biography
Review: I wasn't really expecting to like this book very much considering the type of screenplays the author has written in the past. I listened to the book-on-tape, and once I started listening I was hooked.
This is a very interesting story of a Hollywood screenwriter who has had everything, and has known lots of important people. But most of all, it is also a story of complicated and interesting person who tells it like it is.
If you are interested in current Hollywood history, then you would find this book very interesting. But if you want to read an autobiography that really gets your attention, this is it too.
I was really amazed at how much I learned from this autobiography. One of the best autobiographies I have read.
Rating: 
Summary: prude world
Review: If you are a prude you will not like this book. If you are not a prude you will like this book.
Rating:
Summary: From immigrant to Hollywood's hottest writer
Review: From his childhood moving to and growing up in the land of opportunity, to his behind the scene encounters in Hollywood, Joe does not sugar-coat his life. He is frank about his mistakes and gives plenty of self-critical stories about infidelity and alcohol abuse without offering excuses. Although the Hollywood mega-deals and his stories of screen writing collaborations are entertaining, the most powerful and emotional parts of the book are about his personal family life and an amazing revelation about his father's past. Again he does not make excuses for anything, and perhaps he is confessing his sins so that others can learn from his mistakes.
That being said he accomplished a great deal in his career- a first generation American who became the top man in one of the most competitve fields. And I'm sure some day the world will eventually forgive him for Showgirls.
Rating:
Summary: Rebel With A Cause...
Review: to destroy himself, but he finally stopped his smoking and drinking. Joe is a one of a kind, rebellious Hungarian who is truly a self-made man. I enjoy his writing immensely. He is good looking in a sinister sort of way. This book covers his life from childhood to the present. His conflict in leaving his first wife for his present wife, Naomi, is a book in itself. The screenplays he has written were excellent movies: Sliver, Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Showgirls, Flashdance...how can you beat that. He was an intimate of Sharon Stone and has had his fair share of women. He is now a father of 6 children and a faithful husband. This book reads like fiction it is so good. The stories of his Hollywood escapades and his opinions are worth reading. I loved the book and couldn't put it down. Joe is recovering from throat cancer and so far he has won the battle. I wish him well.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Be Intimidated
Review: While the size of this book is immense at 700-plus pages, it is a very fast and enjoyable read. Only the last 100 pages seem to drag and slow the pace of the book a bit. All in all, however, it is a completely engrossing read. You'll certainly never look at Sharon Stone the same way again. Great book for the beach.
Rating: 
Summary: A story of greed
Review: Joe Eszterhas had it all, and more, and then blew it in a mysterious way. He found happiness with the woman he calls the sexiest on the planet (Naomi) and seems now to have retired from the business of screenwriting, a business which made him the highest paid screenwriter in the world--not once, but twice. He has left a legacy of interesting films, some good, some bad, but his memoir of writing them (and of his cathartic childhood, the son of Hungarian emigres) is just plain stupendous. It's one book that should have been two, or possibly three.If you wrote, "Jagged Edge," "Flashdance," and or "Basic Instinct," to name only the hits, wouldn't you try to be more discreet about it? And the flops are a true laundry list of disaster. Only in Hollywood could such an auteur not only survive, but thrive. Very few screenwriters can boast of having sex with Sharon Stone, but Joe E. really rubs it in. For all that, his picture of Marty Ransohoff trying to destroy the life and career of Glenn Close is truly a memorable one. I guess Ransohoff won after all, because today one hears as little of Glenn Close as one does of Joe Eszterhas. If you like Hungarian sentiment, add a star. This is almost the Magyar version of Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish."
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