In a twist that’s just about as predictable as anything out of his screenplays, former master of glossy cinematic sleaze Joe Eszterhas has undergone a spiritual conversion. You remember Joe from the rollicking ’90s, when he penned such odes to depravity as Basic Instinct, Sliver, Jade and of course, the legendary Showgirls. But time marched on without ol’ Joe, who saw his anomalous coming-of-age tale Telling Lies in America and his off-target Hollywood satire An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn turn into limp box office flops. His oft-threatened magnum opus Sacred Cows, a political fable about a presidential hopeful getting caught fucking a cow, somehow failed to materialize.
Eszterhas has his own sacred cows now, as he reveals in his new book Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith. As he tells the Toledo Blade, it all started in the summer of 2001 when “Mr. Eszterhas was diagnosed with throat cancer. Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic removed 80 percent of his larynx, put a tracheotomy tube in his throat, and told him he must quit drinking and smoking immediately. At age 56, after a lifetime of wild living, Mr. Eszterhas knew it would be a struggle to change his ways.”
Eszterhas found Jesus and become a regular Sunday churchgoer, carrying the cross down the aisle “wearing jeans and Rolling Stones T-shirts when he does it,” so we know he’s still a badass – just a badass for Christ. Indeed, it sounds like the tough guy bluster is still alive and well as “Mr. Eszterhas writes bluntly of his disgust for priests who are pedophiles and bishops who have covered up for them. He and [wife] Naomi decided they could not, in good conscience, donate a dime to the church because of the clerical sexual abuse scandal. He also writes about the inner turmoil he felt when he took his boys to catechism classes or other church events and kept a protective eye on them the whole time, making sure they were never alone with a priest. And he complains about priests' homilies being boring and pointless.”
So this isn’t exactly a Billy Graham primer, but what really raises the bile is when Eszterhas complains “that Hollywood still doesn't do the kinds of faith-based and family-value entertainment that people are desperate to see.” I guess we can expect him to give back all the money he made writing his special brand of family-value entertainment, since he’s already made it clear he’s not giving it to the church.
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