Is Joe Eszterhas A Plagiarist?
Wacko Joe Eszterhas has been called plenty of things — often alongside rather flowery descriptors — but no one has ever called the Hollywood screenwriter responsible for Basic Instinct and Showgirls a plagiarist.
Until today.
New York magazine’s Vulture blog has turned up some unattributed passages in Eszterhas’ Devil’s Guide to Hollywood (St. Martin’s Press) that appear to have been lifted from writer Shaun Considine‘s Mad as Hell, an out-of-print 1994 biography of screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky.
Specifically:
On page 176 of The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood, Eszterhas quotes Chayefsky on dialogue: “I’d like to find a tape recorder as clever as I am in dialogue.
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