“F.I.S.T.” starring Sylvester Stallone, controversial thriller “Basic Instinct,” courtroom thriller “Jagged Edge,” notorious Las Vegas expose “Showgirls” and the autobiographical “Telling Lies in America” may not be the greatest movies ever written, but they testify to Eszterhas’ status as arguably the most high-profile Hollywood screenwriter of the past 50 or so years.

Budapest Classics Film Marathon director György Ráduly describes Eszterhas, now 81, as someone whose “contribution to world cinema and literature, along with his remarkable life story, makes him a figure truly worthy of being honored at the 8th Budapest Classics Film Marathon.”

It’s a shame that Eszterhas’ most relevant movie for Hungarian audiences, “Music Box,” about a Hungarian war criminal, is not being shown.

Jószef Antal Eszterhás was born in Csákánydoroszló (238 km southwest of Budapest by road, close to the border with Austria) on Nov. 23, 1944. Together with his mother and father, he escaped Hungary at the end of World War II for an Austrian refugee camp. In “Hollywood Animal,” his autobiography, he wrote that there the family “ate pine needle soup for a month and one day, my father went through his pockets for crumbs, found some, and gave them to me. I ate them.”

In 1950, the Eszterhas family emigrated to America, ending up in Cleveland. They lived above the printing shop of the paper where Eszterhas senior, a respected writer and government official in Hungary, was editor in a “strudel ghetto made up of the ethnic poor.” Eszterhas’ parents, István and Mária, struggled to keep their heads above water. Their situation wasn’t helped by Mária’s harrowing mental illness and István’s lack of practicality.

The Bullied Loner

Young Eszterhas ran wild. In an article for The Wrap website, he wrote: “I was a loner, a bullied refugee kid with a big chip on my shoulder and a bad temper. I got into serious trouble in the back alleys of Cleveland, Ohio. I ran with a gang of other poor kids with chips on their shoulders and zip guns in their pockets. We rolled drunks, broke into grocery stores, stole cars, and got into brass knuckle fights. When I was 13, I hit an older kid, who had bullied me, in the back of the head with a baseball bat. He almost died. I almost went to jail.”

But the boy was also highly intelligent, and from the age of seven, he was going to the movies with his father. Alongside mainstream Hollywood films, he saw Italian neo-realist classics like “Rome,” “Open City,” and “Bicycle Thief.”

“I was watching scenes I’d already experienced,” he wrote.

Eszterhas avoided getting swallowed up by those mean streets or worse, thanks to his father, “a cerebral little man with a bad limp from childhood scarlet fever. […] He convinced me to stay out of the back alleys and instead […] to read. He taught me to never judge a man by his race, color or religion but only by his character. To judge all people with humanity and compassion.”

After swerving onto the straight and narrow, Eszterhas attended Ohio University. He won a competition sponsored by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation in 1966 and received an award at the White House.

As a journalist, Eszterhas wrote for The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, where he was one of the first reporters to cover the 1970 Kent State shootings. He graduated to Rolling Stone magazine, at that time one of the most prestigious gigs for a young, hungry journalist, where he wrote the magnificent “Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse.”

A vivid description of a violent conflict between rural hippies and local businessmen in Missouri in 1972, “Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse” was included in Tom Wolfe’s hugely influential “The New Journalism” (1973) collection. Eszterhas turned it into a book, which was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award.

The Cinematic Leap

According to Eszterhas, a studio executive who read the book told him it was “very cinematic” and suggested he could be a screenwriter. Eszterhas began writing scripts and made his way out to Hollywood.

Today, a throat cancer survivor, recovering addict and devout Christian, Eszterhas lives in Cleveland and is still in the writing game. It was announced in July 2025 that United Artists had paid USD 2 million for the rights to a reboot of “Basic Instinct” with a script by him.

Looking back over his oeuvre, the problem with evaluating Eszterhas’ achievements as a screenwriter is that his brilliance as a self-publicist can obscure his talent.

In “Hollywood Animal,” he writes, “In the year 2000, I was 56 years old, a Hollywood screenwriter, the author of fifteen movies. […] My movies had grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office. I had made millions and millions of dollars writing them. I had sold one script for USD 3 mln, another for USD 3.7 mln, another for USD 4.7 mln. I was the only screenwriter in the history of Hollywood who had groupies. […] I got two thousand fan letters a week.”

Apart from all this legend-burnishing (and to be fair, he’s equally willing to poke fun at himself), there’s no doubt Eszterhas is a serious writer who tackles big subjects. As I said, it’s a shame that the NFI isn’t showing “Music Box,” the 1989 film made from his script about a Hungarian immigrant accused of torturing, raping and murdering hundreds of Jews, gypsies and their protectors during the WWII Siege of Budapest successfully defended by his lawyer daughter but (spoiler alert!) revealed as a war criminal at the movie’s end.

For Joe Eszterhás, “Music Box” eerily foreshadowed real-life events connected to his own beloved father. Rather than spoil the story, I suggest you read “Hollywood Animal,” one of the best books ever written about Tinsel Town. You couldn’t make it up.

For more information of the Budapest Classics Film Marathon 2025, visit nfi.hu/en/budapest-classics-film-marathon-2025.

This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of September 19, 2025.