‘Showgirls’: Paul Verhoeven on the Greatest Stripper Movie Ever Made
After getting his start in his native Holland with wild, sexually explicit dramas like Spetters and Turkish Delight (a 1974 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign-Language Film), director Paul Verhoeven came to Hollywood in the Eighties and rebranded himself as a can-do-anything sci-fi filmmaker with a slightly satircal bent. If you needed to make a film about a cyborg cop (Robocop) or send Arnold Schwarzenegger to Mars (Total Recall), he was your man. But after tooling around postapocalytic Detroit and outer space, Verhoeven took a step back to his eroticsploitation, semi-perverse roots to make 1992’s Basic Instinct.
Written by Joe Eszterhas, the film racked up more than $350 million at the box office faster than Sharon Stone could cross her legs, and pushed the boundaries of just how far a thriller could go in order to titillate its audience. So it’s hardly surprising that producers began lining up to try and make lightning strike twice by re-teaming Verhoeven and Eszterhas, and letting the filmmakers call the shots. Which is how, three years after Basic Instinct made its debut, Showgirls hit theaters on September 22nd, 1995.
Unless you’ve been living in a bunker without a television — or at least basic cable — for the past two decades, you’ve surely caught at least a few minutes of the dancer-with-a-dream-heads-to-Las-Vegas-to-make-it-big stripper flick. (There’s a good chance it’s on VH1 right now.) Planned as an NC-17 project from the get-go, Showgirls was almost universally panned upon its release, with reviewers citing its over-the-top acting, its kitschy spectacle and general lack of sexual heat as dealbreakers. What they weren’t getting is that these elements were all part of its creators’ master plan — which is why we’re still talking about the film today.
On the occasion of this insanely quotable camp classic-cum-cunning satire of the American Dream celebrating its 20th anniversary, Rolling Stone asked Verhoeven to talk about the making of his infamous movie and shares his thoughts on what he still considers a “perfect” film.
Joe Eszterhas and I first began talking about Showgirls around 1991 or 1992. We’d had some problems on Basic Instinct, with the script and all that, and had a falling out. But then, because of Basic Instinct’s success, he changed his mind. So after a year of animosity, we had a pleasant lunch at the Ivy in Los Angeles, and he presented me with a couple of ideas for another film to work on together — one of which was Showgirls. The idea was to make a film that was situated in the world of Vegas, where the protagonist would be a girl who basically just starts with lap-dancing and then comes into the big casino shows. That was the original idea.
Then Joe found a producer who wanted to pay for the script. [Eszterhas was paid a $2 million advance, with more to come once the screenplay was sold to a studio.] He started to write, and then there was a script, but I disagreed with it at that point — mostly due to the fact that the story was not so original.