{"id":2170,"date":"2009-02-06T15:14:52","date_gmt":"2009-02-06T20:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=2170"},"modified":"2013-05-10T15:09:26","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T19:09:26","slug":"february-6-2009-joe-eszterhas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2009\/02\/06\/february-6-2009-joe-eszterhas\/2170\/","title":{"rendered":" Joe Eszterhas"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

BOB ABERNETHY<\/strong>, anchor: We have a Road to Damascus story today about a hard-living, cynical Hollywood writer who says he hit bottom one day and was transformed by God. He used to specialize in scripts full of sex, violence, and evil. Now he\u2019s a family man in Ohio. Our story is from Bob Faw.<\/p>\n

BOB FAW<\/strong>: Once dubbed by Time<\/em> magazine \u201cAmerica\u2019s king of sex and violence,\u201d Joe Eszterhas now bears the cross. This is more than ritual.<\/p>\n

JOE ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: It\u2019s a very, very serious and sacred moment to me.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: You write, \u201cI carry the cross as though I were actually carrying Christ.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: Yes.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: Worshipping at Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where he now lives, Eszterhas resembles only physically who he once was:\u00a0 Hollywood\u2019s highest-paid screenwriter, churning out erotic sizzlers like \u201cBasic Instinct,\u201d where depravity \u2014 indeed, evil \u2014 triumphed.<\/p>\n

Actor WAYNE NIGHT (as Police Interrogator John Corelli in clip from \u201cBasic Instinct\u201d): Would you tell us the nature of your relationship with Mr. Boz?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"JoeActress SHARON STONE (as Catherine Tramell in clip from \u201cBasic Instinct\u201d): I had sex with him for about a year and a half.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: I was drawn to dark subjects and dark themes, and I wrote out of a very dark space at that particular point in my life.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: The 16 films he wrote grossed over $1 billion, financed homes in Malibu and Maui, along with an outrageous lifestyle.<\/p>\n

(reading from notes): \u201cI\u2019ve been a bad boy all my life. I was the king-daddy of sex and violence, the wild hair, the rogue elephant, the drinking, drugging, wild man, the cocaine cowboy.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: That\u2019s all true. Yeah, I did do all that. The booze was out of control. The waking up in the morning and not knowing where I was or who I was with was out of control.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: The alcohol and the cigarettes almost killed him. In 2001, doctors removed 80 percent of his cancerous larynx and inserted a trachea for breathing. Unable to change his ways, high-flying Joe Ezsterhas crashed.<\/p>\n

\"JoeMr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: It was probably the most desolate moment of my life, and a block away from here I sat down on a curb, sweating, shaking, trying to get the bugs out of my trachea, trying to breathe properly, and I started to cry.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: Slumped on that curb, Eszterhas says he felt a dazzling presence, and he heard a voice within.<\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: And I kept hearing this voice saying, \u201cPlease God, help me,\u201d and I realized it was my voice inside my head and that I was praying.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: He was, he writes in his memoir \u201cCrossbearer,\u201d God-struck, and the ultimate Hollywood animal who had scorned religion did not find God. God, he says, found him.<\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: When you\u2019re absolutely cracked open, and you\u2019re completely vulnerable and desolate, when I opened myself up to the possibility of God entering my heart, I think God did. That day I was ambushed by God.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: That recognition of weakness, says Rabbi David Wolpe, who has studied and written about how the desperate find faith\u2014that recognition is the beginning of strength, even salvation.<\/p>\n

Rabbi DAVID WOLPE<\/strong> (Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, CA): I do think that great joy and great sadness or illness sort of crack open something inside you, and it makes you open to things that you before that thought were absurd or ridiculous.<\/p>\n

\"FatherFather DAN SCHLEGEL<\/strong> (Church of the Holy Angels, Chagrin Falls, OH): Somebody wrote God comes through the wound, and, you know, sometimes it\u2019s not until we\u2019re really broken people that God has an entryway into our lives.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: Father Dan Schlegel is Joe\u2019s priest at Holy Angels.<\/p>\n

Fr. SCHLEGEL<\/strong>: For Joe, I think that there were other gods before him, whether it was alcohol, or whether it was power or money or prestige, or whatever it was, and when all those things didn\u2019t work anymore and he was broken, in\u00a0 a sense there\u2019s an openness for God to come in.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: Joe Eszterhas had lived through radical change before. Born in Hungary during the Second World War, he spent nearly five years in refugee camps. But the change, which began on that sidewalk in 2001, his wife Naomi recalls, took some adjustment.<\/p>\n

NAOMI ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: His transformation, to use that phrase, was so gradual. It was very gradual. Joe is a cynic. He\u2019s had a very \u2014 he had a hard life, you know. He ate pine-needle soup in the refugee camps. He was scalded in the refugee camps. He had rickets. He lived in abject poverty. So when he first took those baby steps toward God, it wasn\u2019t without cynicism. I think he went, \u201cOK, I\u2019m going to go down this road.\u201d<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: For Eszterhas that road meant, with his entire family, starting to attend church weekly, also reading and studying widely about God and theology. Still, he found himself unsure, tentative, even wary until one Sunday when his former priest, Father Bob Stec, approached him after a service.<\/p>\n

\"FatherFather BOB STEC<\/strong> (Pastor, St. Ambrose Catholic Church, Brunswick, OH): I was literally just drawn to stop and simply share with him a simple phrase: \u201cJoe, the best is yet to come\u201d\u2014 with a message of hope, a message of assurance that it was going to be OK. It was just as if God said, \u201cJoe needs to hear these words today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS (praying): \u2026to Christ our Lord. Amen. <\/em><\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: Now, devoted to his wife and four young sons and pronounced cured of cancer by his doctors, Joe Eszterhas says life has never been better.<\/p>\n

Ms. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: I think he\u2019s more careful. He\u2019s more Christian. He\u2019s more\u2014less cynical and more willing to believe the goodness in people than he is the darkness. I always tell him, \u201cYou\u2019ve been co-opted by God, and now you\u2019re working for him, because you used to dance with the devil.\u201d<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: The question you would ask yourself is, then, why do I deserve to be singled out like this?<\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: I don\u2019t. I don\u2019t. I don\u2019t know why God has blessed me and graced me the way God has. In terms of my own view of my life, you know, it\u2019s something miraculous. I thank God for gracing me. I always will. But in my own mind I don\u2019t deserve it.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: And it is that sense of mystery, even wonder, which he conveys at public readings of the book he subtitles \u201cA Memoir of Faith.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: This is how I found God, or how God found me.<\/p>\n

\"RabbiFAW<\/strong>: Recently Eszterhas has completed two screenplays, each one a thriller, but neither focusing on the perverse or the tormented.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: You can\u2019t write \u201cblood and hair on the walls\u201d with God in your heart?<\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: Yeah, you know, to get involved in that thought process, I don\u2019t want to do that. I don\u2019t want to do that.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: Walking with his wife, or alone, three times every day Joe Eszterhas prays \u2014 mostly what he calls \u201cthank you\u201d prayers.<\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: I pray for God\u2019s presence to be in my heart, to continue to be in my heart<\/p>\n

Rabbi WOLPE<\/strong>: What I tell people to pray for who are in trouble is closeness, is to not be alone; is to feel that God is with you. That prayer \u2014 that\u2019s a powerful prayer. That\u2019s a real prayer, and that\u2019s a prayer I believe that gets answered.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: And seven years after being what he calls God-struck, Joe Eszterhas, a lifelong skeptic, has no doubts that his prayers have been heard.<\/p>\n

Mr. ESZTERHAS<\/strong>: I think questioning and doubt are good, and I think they build faith, in my own particular case. Seven years down the line I can say to you that my life has been transformed, and I find a sense of solace and strength that simply wasn\u2019t in my life before.<\/p>\n

FAW<\/strong>: Joe Eszterhas then, born anew \u2014 from Malibu to Ohio; Jack Daniels to Sprite; Sharon Stone to Jesus. From darkness into light.<\/p>\n

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a Road to Damascus story today about a hard-living, cynical Hollywood writer who says he hit bottom one day and was transformed by God. He used to specialize in scripts full of sex, violence, … More →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":17597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4689,4166,945,10318,943],"class_list":["post-2170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-conversion","tag-hollywood","tag-joe-eszterhas","tag-movies","topics-faith-and-spirituality","faith-christian"],"yoast_head":"\nFebruary 6, 2009 ~ Joe Eszterhas | February 6, 2009 | Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""My life has been transformed. I don't know why God has blessed me and graced me the way God has. 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