Joe Eszterhas' Conversion Story

The screenwriter behind Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995) has a new project — Infamous Hollywood Screenwriter to Pen Film on Our Lady of Guadalupe - Patroness of the Unborn. From the report:

In 2001, faced with throat cancer resulting from his smoking and alcohol addictions, which threatened to kill him, Eszterhas turned to God in desperation.

"Seven years ago, I sat down on a curb near my home, sobbing, and asked God to help me," he writes in a September 2008 Washington Post article. "I cried and begged God to help me ... and He did. I hadn't prayed since I was a boy. I had made fun of God and those who loved God in my writings. And now, through my sobs, I heard myself asking God to help me ... and from the moment I asked, He did."

God, he says, cured him of his disease, but, more than that, He gave him the strength to turn away from his worldly life and back to the Catholic faith. "Not only did He give me the strength to be able to defeat my addictions," he wrote, "He saved my life. My throat surgeon ... told me seven years after the surgery that I am 'cured.' Not that I am in remission, but that I am cured. ... My life has turned inside-out. I have stopped my excesses and replaced them with prayer and long walks. I am carrying the cross as often as they'll let me at Holy Angels Church in Bainbridge Township, Ohio. And I have written a book as a thank-you to God. Not just for saving my life, but for saving me."