COMMENTARY : Filmmaker pens tale of spiritual journey

BY FRANK LOCKWOOD

Posted on Saturday, October 4, 2008

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Hollywood loved Joe Eszterhas when his best friends were Jose Cuervo and a carton of Salems, when profanity poured from his mouth and successful screenplays flowed from his typewriter.

But the new Eszterhas makes his old colleagues uncomfortable.

The man who wrote Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge and the jaw-droppingly awful Showgirls has given up the bottle. He has smoked his last cigarette.

He has stopped writing sexand-violence-drenched scripts.

He has moved to Ohio and — you can probably guess where this is going — he has found God.

Eszterhas, 63, describes his transformation in a new autobiography, Crossbearer, which is being published by St. Martin’s Press.

Some people think he has gone “nutters,” Eszterhas said. Others assume it’s a scam, a way to sell books, or a phase.

But Eszterhas told me that he’s a changed man.

“I have a devout faith,” he said. “I go to church every week, sometimes several times a week. The presence of the Eucharist, in my body and in my soul, gives me an experience that I think is empowering and strengthening.

“ It’s almost a kind of high.”

The old highs, from nicotine and tequila, nearly killed him. In 2001, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. Doctors sliced out the tumor and gave him a choice: Change or die.

But decades of addiction weren’t easy to beat.

Battling withdrawal, afraid he wouldn’t make it, absolutely desperate, Eszterhas says he sat on a curb near his house and cried out to God for help.

It wasn’t a high-decibel plea. A tracheal tube pierced his throat. He couldn’t swallow or speak coherently. But Eszterhas says God heard him seven years ago, and his life was transformed.

To an evangelical’s ears, it’ll sound like Eszterhas is describing a “born-again” experience, but Eszterhas, a Roman Catholic, prefers not to use that term.

“I have not had the bornagain baptismal ritualistic ceremony,” he said.

He didn’t repeat a sinner’s prayer at an altar or ask Jesus into his heart.

His conversion wasn’t tallied by any denomination.

But Eszterhas says God has saved him from cancer, from the bottle and from a four-pack-aday habit that he developed growing up in Cleveland.

The screenwriter, who grew up Catholic but left the faith as a young man, describes himself as a “baby Christian.”

“I’m doing my best, but nevertheless this will be a long process,” he said.

Eszterhas says he walks three to five miles per day, and spends much of that time praying.

He is also hitting the books.

“Most of my reading these days is in terms of my faith,” he said. “I don’t have a very good knowledge of Scriptures. I’m trying to learn more about the Bible.”

The man who gave America Flashdance and Jade has expressed regret that his movies glorified smoking. Since turning to God, he says he has passed up opportunities to churn out more R-rated scripts.

“I don’t regret what I’ve written, but all of that material emanated from a very dark place that I don’t want to re-enter again,” he said. “I say I was a child of the darkness, and I think I was, and that I’ve become a child of the light. I see more brightness in people, I see more brightness in life.

“ I have no interest in re-entering those dark places.”

The man who made millions in Hollywood now volunteers to be a cross-bearer at Holy Angels Catholic Church in Bainbridge Township, 25 miles southeast of Cleveland. He wears a crucifix. And he focuses on rearing four young sons with his second wife, Naomi.

(The kids aren’t allowed to watch his old R-rated movies, he says. )

Life in the Rust Belt, he says, is better than it was in Malibu.

“I’ve never been happier,” he said.

Eszterhas’ spiritual memoir could leave some readers dissatisfied. Crossbearer contains more expletives than the typical religious book. It includes sweeping denunciations of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy. And it bears witness not only to God, but to the existence of UFOs.

The scriptwriter isn’t waiting for the movie industry to embrace his newfound religion.

“Hollywood has no patience and no understanding of either people who believe in God or of faith itself,” he said.

But he says his life has been forever changed.

“It’s very difficult to describe what the presence of God means in your heart to people who don’t have that, but it’s a feeling unlike any other, and it’s a feeling I’ve never had,” he said. “I truly wrote the book as a ‘Thank you’ for God.”

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