Joe Eszterhaus is My New Hero.

I picked up The Devil's Guide To Hollywood, and you know what? It's kind of changing my life.

Backstory: Joe Eszterhaus is a screenwriter, a very famous, very notorious, very wealthy screenwriter. He has written, among other scripts, Flashdance, Basic Instinct, and, of course, Showgirls. And yes, this is the man I am referring to as my new hero. He's from Cleveland. He's Hungarian. He's pretty over the top and has been referred to as wildly sexist, a hack, and one of the worst screenwriters to ever write a script. Of course, his films have grossed, I believe, billions of dollars.

But the money isn't what I'm connecting to here. And honestly, it's not the book either--a collection of quotations and advice from Eszterhaus himself, as well as quotes from all kind of Hollywood icons that he has, presumably, encountered in his travels. There are a lot--a lot--of quotes from Zsa Zsa Gabor in this book. I think that gives you a sense of what we're working with here. He also rips some folks apart, talking about having slept with Martin Scorsese's wife (I think it's Scorsese), and criticizing the words of writers like William Goldman, whose Adventures in the Screen Trade is one of my favorite books of all-time (and whose The Princess Bride is my favorite book of all-time).

But none of that is what's so exciting to me.

The subtitle of the Eszterhaus book is The Screenwriter as God, and fundamentally, the entire book is geared towards reminding us writers that we are the backbone of this whole damn enterprise. Nothing happens without a script. And yet, everyone, at every step of the creative film process, undermines and undercuts the writer, offering notes, making changes, presuming to know how to identify and fix "problems" in the script, even if they have never written a script themselves. This doesn't happen quite so much in theater, but it happens. I've experienced it. I've let myself be affected by it. I've had decent experiences with it and created some good works because of it.

But yo.

Yo.

A lot of bending over backwards get done in that process. A lot of self-doubt arises out of that process. Projects die in the water because of listening to other folks and not defending your work, not fighting for your work, not fighting for the honor of your words. You end up listening and being polite and waiting for folks to make something happen, but yo--why?

I'm not sure why I'm saying yo so much.

But folks, here's what I'm saying here.
The work is good.
I know the work is good.
People know the work is good.
And I'm letting them--I have let them--settle for the work being good, as if that's enough in and of itself.
It is not.
The plays need to be produced.
These plays need to be produced.
They need to be produced properly.

And I'm the only person who can ensure that those productions come to fruition.