I hope it doesn’t come as a shock to anyone that I’ve long taken an interest in Joe Eszterhas’ career. The churner-outer of some of Hollywood’s shlockiest shlock shares an alma mater with me, and one of the most wonderful days I had at Ohio University was in my Mass Media and the Law class, senior year, when we studied the case that put Joe Eszterhas — yes, the writer of “Showgirls” — into journalism-law history (and out of the OU j-school’s Distinguished Alumni honor roll).

Eszterhas doesn’t talk about this case. After he became a success, he always said his career at the Cleveland Plain Dealer foundered on the fight he had with his editors there, over their refusal to publish photos of a then-unknown Vietnam atrocity at a village called My Lai. Never a word about Cantrell v. Forest City Publishing, which led to a landmark ruling that established invasion of privacy as a cause of action in defamation cases. (I think; it’s been a while.) What I most recall was the professor’s deadpan delivery of certain purpley portions of Eszterhas’ narrative, contrasted with the testimony at trial, all of which added up to: He made an awful lot of it up.

“Eszterhas has recently launched a career as a Hollywood scriptwriter,” the professor said. “He seems well-suited to fiction.”

So anyway, it’s always been my pleasure to take note of where Joe is at any given moment, and sometimes these updates are almost too coincidental, like the time, summer before last, when I took Kate to Cedar Point, and the woman at the next table in McDonald’s discarded her copy of the Plain Dealer features section — the one with the story about Joe’s relocation to Chagrin Falls and his change of heart about tobacco products. He confessed that he always included cigarette smoking in his movies as a big f-u to the forces of political correctness, and now he was real sorry, and he was going to make up for it by…I dunno. One hopes he’d make a good movie that featured no smoking, but you can’t have everything.

In any event, now he’s published a memoir — with the unsubtle title “Hollywood Animal” — and the New York Observer has a pretty fair interview with the guy this week:

In the 80’s and much of the 90’s, Mr. Eszterhas was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, sometimes receiving more cash for a script than the film’s director, who would usually find himself in a back-alley brawl with Mr. Eszterhas over their unshared vision. Some of these movies were hits. Some weren’t. One could count on seeing cartons of militantly smoked cigarettes, plenty of on-the-job hanky-panky and, in his late-period panty movies, ruttish lesbians and multiple grand-mal orgasms. “You like to play games, don’t you?” was a line that Mr. Eszterhas wrang out of his Olivetti manual more than once. Plots usually twisted around people who were not what they appeared to be.

That’s OU’s bad boy in a nutshell, isn’t it?

A good read that doesn’t disappoint. Enjoy.

“One-hundred-thirteen years of editorial freedom,” states the masthead on The Michigan Daily. But only about five minutes of simple grammar instruction, to judge from this column that ran in the student newspaper yesterday:

A disclaimer for readers: This column may offend some people, but due to popular demand and much discussion (and maybe even some coaxing), it has been brought to my attention that this column really needs to be written.

Many a Sunday morning I have risen from my bedroom, joined my housemates at our table and drank three cups of coffee, all the while discussing an issue that plagues this campus: The Michigan Hookup. Also known as man�s best friend, giving head, going down and other terminology that I shall never put into print, I am talking about the blow job.

I make it a policy not to jeer at student journalism, having produced too much jeer-worthy material myself. So I’ll leave the jeering to you.

OK, this is the second time this has happened:

I wrote a long entry, wandered off to check a link or three, and lost the whole goddamn thing.

Hence: No long entry today.

No long entry until Sunday.

It was mostly whining about the weather anyway.

Goddamnit.

Snow day yesterday. Snow day TODAY. It’s like: And here’s your second hot-fudge sundae, ma’am. I had enough cabin fever that I just went out to re-shovel the sidewalk.

Now, I’ve gone on at tiresome length here before about how this is actually sort of a favorite chore for me, because, unlike writing or cleaning or child-rearing, it’s a job that gets done and — at least until the next snowfall — stays done. Because I like shoveling, I do it often. Because I do it often, I never have all that much to clear at one time. Because the labor is usually light and exercise is the best aid to thinking invented, I get a little wool-gathering done.

Today I contemplated libertarianism. Ann Arbor has a snow-clearing ordinance that is, I’m told, rigidly enforced. Fort Wayne has a snow-clearing ordinance that is never enforced. Guess which city has more pleasant winter walking conditions? Is man perfectable? I don’t think so. Hence, laws that dictate courtesy to your dog-walking neighbors. On the other hand, there’s talk of now requiring dog-walkers to carry “appropriate equipment” for poop removal, under penalty of law. As one who always does so, I do not fear this proposed ordinance. But I’ve never checked “The Turner Diaries” or “Fun Things to do With Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil” out of the library, either, and yet I fear the Patriot Act.

Just random thoughts while snow-shoveling. My neighbor came out and took a photograph of the piles left by the plow. As though anticipating I’d be wondering about this behavior, she came over to explain: See, she had devoted great time and effort last night to selective shoveling, making sure the snow pushed up by the plow remained in the street, and this morning the city had send a backhoe around to selectively dig out a few properties left dammed behind the plow-wash (if that isn’s a word, it should be), and clear the parts of the road the plow couldn’t reach. Said backhoe had picked up her carefully arranged piles and dumped them right on her park strip!

I admitted to being mystified by the offense here. She explained further that now the road salt in the snow would kill her grass.

“I gotta tell you,” I said. “I’ve never in my life seen a lawn that could be killed by winter,” thinking of the winter when the city of Fort Wayne failed to pick up the last pile of fall leaves from our park strip for weeks and weeks, and then it got snowed on and salted and otherwise abused, and then the idiot macho redneck across the street parked his idiot macho pickup truck with the right-side wheels over the curb on it, and yet — in the spring, tender green shoots.

I didn’t tell her all of this. But I should have, because she remained unsatisfied, and hmpfed back into her house, right past the Howard Dean sign in the front yard.

I went back to shoveling. I reflected that my idiot macho neighbor is smack in the target market for truck balls.

And now it’s 10:20 a.m., the sidewalk and drive are clear, I’ve gotten my cardio in for the day, along with my daily allotment of idle thought. Think I’ll take a shower.

…this must be Screenwriting. The rewrite class meets in the same fashion as the write class, a three-hour night deal, thankfully not on KWF seminar nights.

The big revelation, when you study screenwriting, is how formulaic it is — three-act structure, turning points here here and here — and yet there’s always room to make it fresh. It’s like making a dress. You need a hole to stick your head through, two more for your arms and it has to be open at the bottom, but beyond that, it’s up to you. Make a simple black sheath, make a ball gown, make some old thing out of potato sacks (this is the category my own work falls into). They’re all dresses, but no one confuses one with another.

Sometimes I think I have no actual talent as a writer, only a highly developed ability to imitate others. So I enjoy this stuff, because all you have to do is follow the well-paved path: This happens, then something else happens, then something else happens and you wind it all up.

Remind me of this in another couple months, when I’m sweating blood over this damn thing.

Bad weather has settled in like a curse, although frankly, I don’t mind it. I’m out walking around every day and I don’t have to go to work — if winter went on for six months like this, I wouldn’t mind, as long as I didn’t have to go back to work until spring. But tonight we’re expecting an ice storm followed by a snowstorm, and the strong possibility of a snow day tomorrow, at least for Kate. We haven’t had a snow day yet, a miracle by Fort Wayne standards, when six flakes falling from the sky is cause for at least a two-hour delay. Safety, you know. Liability. And so on.

Speaking of liability and screenplays, Alan had a good idea for one the other day, after reading a down-low paragraph is a story about a plane crash in Lake Erie. The aircraft came down shortly after takeoff from Pelee Island (note that I didn’t say “plunged into the icy waters of Lake Erie,” perhaps proof that the journalese is falling from my prose style), one of the lake’s islands that supports a small year-round community.

Anyway, the paragraph quoted a local woman who heard the crash and immediately went into hysterics. I think this was on a Saturday, but she thought it was Sunday, when, according to island ritual, all the high-school students on the island fly to the mainland for a week of schooling. She thought, mistakenly, that in one crash the island had lost all its teen-agers.

“Now that would be a movie,” Alan said.

“Someone already made it. ‘The Sweet Hereafter,'” I informed him. I bet he’ll be happy when I give up my delusions of Hollywood.

Ice coming down! Followed by snow! Don’t fly anywhere! See you tomorrow!

OK, I got enough crapola from the Teeming Millions about falling down on the blog that I’m going to try — try, people — to reinstate the Big Long Daily Entry. I can’t promise 5 times a week, but I will do what I can. I need to keep a journal.

The problem is, some of the most interesting stuff that happens in the course of my day happens at Wallace House, where everything said is off the record. (Actually, officially it “never happened.”) This is to encourage honesty, of course, and what does that say about our business, I ask you? That when people are quoted in the news media, they’re not being honest? You draw your own conclusions.

I will say this: The twice-weekly seminars we’ve had, particularly recently, have been eye-opening in every good sense of the phrase. Thursday’s speaker talked about the iconography and etymology of judicial language, a subject that, on paper, could induce sleep in a meth abuser. And yet, we laughed with him for a full hour, had another 30 minutes of lively questioning and went home hungry for more. I’ve spent twice that long in comedy clubs and not had such a good time.

An e-mail acquaintance is doing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard this year, and put me on her e-mail list to receive regular long, chatty updates on how things are going. I got one long, chatty update in September. The next one arrived around Christmas. She apologized, saying she’s been, uh, too stupefied: At the end of the day my mind is scattershot from the
ideas I’ve listened to or the classes I’ve sat through, she wrote, and I know exactly what she means. I feel more than scattershot, just…punchdrunk, maybe. Dull-witted. In any event, mostly what I want to do is sit and think, not sit and write.

Dr. Frank came for a mid-week visit the one before last, and left in a similar state of mental exhilaration/stupefaction. Regular readers might recall that he’s now unemployed, so he’s quote evaluating his options unquote. I think, after the week, that his first option is, “Figure out how to become a journalism fellow.” He was a KWF guest for one seminar and two dinner parties, and just the random small talk made him think he’d died and sped heavenward. “More oxygen in that room than any I’ve been in in a long time,” was his assessment.

Now, Dr. Frank is a smart person, and his joy at finding such bright company only reminds me of how dull regular life will seem after this gravy train pulls into the station. One former Fellow pulled me aside after a seminar and said, “Start the Prozac four weeks before graduation. It takes a while to kick in.”

Well, there’s a cheery thought. He also described the Fellowship in the stock line, “Best year of my life.” He follows his with, “Followed by the worst nine months of my life.” Hmm.

OK, then. Another weekend, another six inches of snow. Kate and Alan went sledding while I took care of the grocery accumulation for the week. I bought: Meat. Meeeeaaat. Yes, it’s Atkins, or at least Low Carb Days, around our little household these days. I hate it. I can’t do Atkins pure; it makes me hallucinate about potatoes. I can make a stab at Atkins modified, in which I try to keep my carbs around 30 grams a day or so (a pittance, really), and see what happens. Mostly what happens is, I feel really, really crabby. Then I hallucinate about potatoes.

Oh, well. For now my fat is serving to keep me nice and warm. It hasn’t been above 20 degrees in days, so it’s good for something.

Now, friends, I must go write “coverage.” Coverage, for the uninitiated, is a two- or three-page summary of a screenplay and the reader’s assessment of its relative qualities. It’s hard to forget that “cover” is also the verb horse breeders use to describe what the stallion does to the mare. I’m trying to be gentle, as I will be covered, too, and I’m hoping that what goes around comes around.

Tomorrow, then.

…says it all, doesn’t it? Eminem’s mom carjacked — on 8 Mile.

The morning paper was a harvest o’ amusements today. Elsewhere was this call for auditions for “Menopause the Musical.”

Women, age 38 and older who wear a size 10 or more, should prepare a 1-minute comic monologue and sing a song from the 1960s. Rehearsals will be Feb. 9-29 in Orlando, Fla. The musical is a celebration of women who are on the brink of, in the midst of, or have survived The Big M.

It must be for real. I mean, they have a website.

OK, so it’s cold here this week. Again, it’s Michigan; it happens. It dipped a bit below zero last night, just a few degrees, not terribly far. Uncomfortably cold, life-complicating cold, but nothing terribly dangerous to people with the sense to come in out of it when they can and dress properly when they can’t.

Of course I watched the local news last night, to see what they’d do with it. I wasn’t disappointed.

The stand-up began with the camera focused on a raw chicken, which the reporter had impaled on a stick of some sort. Get it? It’s so cold, the chicken is frozen! Then the guy held up a carafe of what he told us was hot tea. “Watch me throw it in the air,” he said. And he did. There was an impressive cloud of steam. He claimed it froze before it hit the ground, but of course it didn’t, Mr. Lying Liarpants. Then he cut to some time-lapse video showing what happened when they took a large thermometer from the warm studio to the street outside; why, it fell rapidly! Who could have foreseen this astonishing development?

Then he tipped over the chicken on the stick. The camera captured its landing. I don’t know what this was supposed to illustrate. Maybe the reporter thought it might shatter into a million pieces.

My TV friends say this is the latest consultant-driven trend in TV news — props. “If you’re going to report weather, you must have a prop,” they say. Hence the unequipped reporter who squats to pick up a handful of this mysterious substance we call snow, to show how you can pick it right up, and it’s cold on your hand! Hence the rulers in last week’s snowstorm. Hence the chicken.

It would all be amusing, if you didn’t consider that readers are abandoning newspapers by the truckload, preferring to get their local news from television. Yes, there’s a good chance your very own neighbor prefers weather reports with a chicken. I expect I’ll be handed a plucked foul en route to a weather story before the end of my career. Ask now, and I’ll save you the drumstick.

Michael Signorile brings the pain to Mary Cheney:

What is it like, I often wonder, to have your own father court the very religious zealots who believe your kind are emotionally disturbed child molesters? What does it feel like to have your own father empower people who, if they could have their way, would force you to go through “conversion therapy”? What is it like to know that your own family takes cash from people who think you�d be better off dead, and think you�re going straight to hell when that happens?

And for the queer-handed, Jon Carroll offers solace to the southpawed:

In the movie “Cold Mountain,” Nicole Kidman’s character is often portrayed writing letters to her beloved. Since the film is set in the Civil War, she did not use e-mail. Rather, she used pen and ink. In one heart- stopping scene, she paused in her writing and briefly rested her chin on her left hand.

With this one gesture, she says a hearty “blow me” to all the right- handed chauvinists in the world, to the designers of scissors and guitars and school desks, to the tellers of cheap jokes at expensive cocktail parties.

Bonus points for getting “blow me” past the copy desk. Only in San Francisco.

I wrote earlier that my Bible as Literature professor is a whole blog entry unto himself. (Actually, I think the course is called the Bible in English. What-evuh.) I started going with a small group of fellow Fellows, tipped that the professor’s lectures are a show unto themselves, edutainment in the best sense of the word. Whoa. No kidding. Ralph Williams is a local legend at the U of M, and his courses seem to work this way — he lectures to giant, packed halls, while grad students handle the smaller discussion sections. As indolent KWFs, I and my fFs are choosing to attend lectures only, since they are so satisfying, part tent revival, part Shakespeare.

If I had to sum up Williams’ presentation, I’d say one-third Mick Jagger, one-third Jesse Jackson, one-third Laurence Olivier. He starts each lecture with a few handshakes with the crowd, then a recitation the hour’s “rubrics.” Today’s, on the Garden of Eden, were “The song for a woman,” “A man, a woman and a serpent,” “A blessing and a cursing,” “Silent spots in the text: How do you read,” “I don’t know” and “The uncreating word.” (Some of these were obvious, but I still have no idea what “silent spots in the text” were, unless it’s the extended riff he did on the actual meaning of the ancient Hebrew word — “ezer” — used to describe Eve.) His most obvious vocal signature is occasional pauses to exclaim, “Are you following?! Yea/nay?!?”

He dashes around the lecture hall, his enormous hands waving in the air, voice filling every corner, demanding the attention of every pair of eyes. He stands still to demonstrate God blowing the first breath into man, taking Adam’s first respirations with him, and you can hear that, too. It’s all quite riveting. My first thought, five minutes into the first lecture I attended, was, “This guy must be boffo on the Book of Job.” I borrowed my neighbor’s syllabus, and sure enough, there was a special note that the Job lecture would be delivered in two parts on special dates, rooms TBA, with “parents, friends and special guests warmly welcomed to think with us.” When he finishes, I don’t know whether to pack up my notebook or stand up with a lit match.

So you get the idea — academic living legend, very popular, never a dull moment. Now, perhaps, you can get the joke behind the humor paper’s story: Ralph Williams named UM basketball coach.