Washed-up Hollywood producer Charlie Berns has mailed in his updated obit and is about to suck his Mercedes tailpipe and fade to black when a miracle materializes: his nephew, a wannabe screenwriter from New Jersey, has scripted the life story of Queen Victoria's prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, which Charlie manages to turn into a hot property that reinstates him as a player. But as the deal heats up, conceptual changes morph the project into Lev Disraeli: Freedom Fighter, an action thriller with a black Jewish superstar, a Yugoslavian location, and a mad Polish director. Is Charlie being eaten alive by the system? Or is he giving Hollywood hotshots a run for their money?
Peter Lefcourt's hilarious satire proves the old adage that, in Hollywood, you're never quite as dead as people give you credit for.
Screenwriter Lefcourt's first novel is a hilariously entertaining insider's look at the business of making movies. Charlie Berns is a down-and-out producer, so "out" that he's become a virtual unknown. Berns has taped up the windows of his house and sent his up-to-date obituary to the newspaper, and he's about to kill himself via carbon monoxide poisoning, courtesy of his Mercedes, when his plans are interrupted by the appearance of his nephew, Lionel Travitz, a fledgling screenwriter. Lionel has written a screenplay based on the life of Queen Victoria's prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. Suicide plans are put on hold as Charlie, now proud owner of a "property," is back in business. He manages to secure black superstar Bobby Mason for the lead along with enough money to begin production. After a rewrite and a "conceptual change," Bill and Ben becomes Lev Disraeli: Freedom Fighter and the film begins shooting in Yugoslavia. When the leading man is kidnapped, however, Berns must do some tap-dancing to keep his movie alive. A cast of colorful, memorable characters and dexterous, witty writing make this a laugh-out-loud, thoroughly enjoyable novel. 25,000 first printing; BOMC selection. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From School Library Journal
YA-- Charlie Berns, a movie producer with nothing to promote, is literally saved when his nephew Lionel appears with a script in hand. His story, "Bill and Ben," dramatizes the historic rivalry between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, at least until the studio executives, actors, agents, and publicity departments get into the act. The plot is transformed into a terrorist movie starring a black actor as the black-belt, Israeli hero, now called Lev Disraeli. The deal keeps changing, and only Charlie knows the score. This is a racy, irreverent, hilarious poke at Hollywood and its denizens. The plot (of the book and the movie) moves cleverly and quickly, while the characters (in the book, not the movie) are believable. Four-letter words abound but fit naturally in the setting. Mature YAs interested in the movie industry will need no cues for laughs. --Judy Sokoll, Fairfax County Pub . Lib . , VA Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Peter Lefcourt is a refugee from the trenches of Hollywood, where he has distinguished himself as a writer and producer of film and television. Among his credits are "Cagney and Lacey," for which he won an Emmy award; "Monte Carlo," in which he managed to keep Joan Collins in the same wardrobe for 35 pages; the relentlessly sentimental "Danielle Steel's Fine Things," and the underrated and hurried "The Women of Windsor," the most sordid, and thankfully last, miniseries about the British Royal Family.
He began writing novels after being declared "marginally unemployable" in the entertainment business by his agent. In 1991 Lefcourt published "The Deal"--an act of supreme hubris that effectively bit the hand that fed him and produced, in that wonderfully inverse and masochistic logic of Hollywood, a fresh demand for his screenwriting services. It remains a cult favorite in Hollywood and was one of the ten books that the late John Gotti reportedly ordered from jail.
Subsequently he has divided his time between screenplays and novels, publishing "The Dreyfus Affair" in 1992, his darkly comic look at homophobia in baseball as a historical analog to anti-Semitism in fin de siecle France, whose film rights The Walt Disney Company has optioned twice and let lapse twice in paroxysms of anxiety about what it says about the national pastime and, by extension, Disneyland.
In 1994, he published "Di And I," a heavily fictionalized version of his love affair with the late Princess of Wales. Princess Diana's own step-godmother, the late Barbara Cartland, herself no slouch when it came to publishing torrid books, declared the book "ghastly and unnecessary," which pushed the British edition briefly onto the bestseller lists. "Di And I" was optioned by Fine Line Pictures and was abandoned after Diana's untimely death.
"Abbreviating Ernie," his fourth novel, was inspired by his brush with notoriety after the appearance of "Di And I." At the time he was harassed by the British tabloids and spent seven excruciating minutes on "Entertainment Tonight." He was subsequently and fittingly bumped out of People Magazine by O.J. Simpson's white Bronco media event of June, 1994.
Lefcourt's research on a movie about the 1995 Bob Packwood scandal was the germ for his fifth novel, "The Woody." He saw the former senator's battle with the Senate Ethics Committee as evidence of the confusion in America regarding appropriate sexual behavior for politicians. Packwood became a sacrificial lamb by getting his dick caught in the buzzsaw of the zeitgeist.
His subsequent book, "Eleven Karens"--an erratically erotic fictional memoir of his love affairs with eleven women, all of whom happened to be named Karen, was published in 2003. He is still defending himself in a number of law suits brought by several of the apparently insufficiently fictionalized Karens.
He followed that with "The Manhattan Beach Project," a nominal sequel to The Deal, in that it follows the adventures of that book's hero, the intrepid Charlie Berns, who finds himself broke and attending meetings of the Brentwood chapter of Debtors Anonymous. Charlie manages to sell a reality TV show about the daily life of a warlord in Uzbekistan ("The Sopranos" meets "The Osbournes") to a secret division of ABC, named, appropriately, ABCD, charged with developing extreme reality TV series from a clandestine skunkworks in Manhattan Beach.
His latest book is entitled "An American Family," and it tells the story of an immigrant Jewish-American family on Long Island, beginning on the day John Kennedy was shot and ending the day before 9/11. This multi-generational saga, told from the point of view of five siblings born in the 1940's, traces the Pearl family's odyssey into the melting pot of twentieth century America.
He continues to dabble in film and television. He was the writer/creator of the Showtime TV series, "Beggars & Choosers," a darkly comic send-up of the television business. More recently, he spent a season in the writers' room of "Desperate Housewives," where he helped concoct some of the Byzantine plot lines of that infamous dark suburban soap opera.
Praise for Lefcourt's novels:
"You can count the wonderful novels about Hollywood on two hands...The Deal is one of them." --LA Times
"...A hilarious romp through the world of national politics. [Lefcourt's] hapless hero is the perfect foil for all that's gone wrong in Washington...An irreverent, amusing read." --USA Today
"This neon farce lights up the political spectrum to the left and the right of the primary colors...The Woody is like the best of farces, less interested in mocking historical figures and more keen to turn its light elsewhere." --LA Times
"A good-natured romp through the dream factory of the 1990's." --The New York Times
"Lefcourt flirts with offensiveness but never goes all the way." ----Kirkus Reviews
This was my first Lefcourt book. I was too cheap to buy the 11 Karens in paperback, so here I was looking at an old (1991) novel that I could buy and be happy with. As old fan of Hollywood books and novels, this ranks among the funniest I've read. It is a quick read, but more satisfying than the typical Hollywood farce. It tells you more than you wanted to know about Benjamin Disraeli. However, the satire does not get out of hand and somehow you could almost envision the plot twists actually happening in real life. The book is well written and funny as can be. I hope the reprint wins Lefcourt new fans. I'm one. The book really gets Hollywood. Bravo!
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Peter Lefcourt could've given us a savage portrayal of studios meanies. Instead he gives us a fun world of open minded, flexible studio outsiders who make anything and everything happen on the way to producing what is supposed to be a blockbuster film. You'll like the characters - they're a little sweet and goofy even though Lefcourt shows that they can be vapid. It's a lot of fun.
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I read this book when I needed a distraction. I was expecting a blowoff novel about shallow movie people but it's really so much better than that. Some stuff in here is achingly funny, so hilarious I had to put the book down several times because I couldn't read as I was laughing so hard. Lefcourt can really write and has a fantastic sense of humor. I want to read more of his books now.
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