Earthquake Weather [Hardcover]

Terrill Lee Lankford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2004

A veteran filmmaker and novelist now creates a riveting noir set in the power-mad jungle of Hollywood. In Earthquake Weather a natural disaster shakes a city and an industry to their cores, revealing new layers of deceit, desire, and deadly aggression.

Hollywood. The land of dreams and schemes. Mark Hayes has a dream. To make movies. But that’s easier wished for than done. Years of frustrating career moves have yielded little progress and Mark now finds himself in a dead end job as a “creative executive” for the loathsome producer, Dexter Morton at Prescient Pictures, the hottest new production company in town. A job like that could lead to big things—but Dexter Morton has no interest in promoting Mark’s ambitions. Then a major earthquake rocks Los Angeles and all deals are off. And when Mark finds a body floating in Dexter’s pool he goes from D-Boy to murder suspect before he can say “three picture deal”.

In the interest of self-preservation Mark must find out who the true killer is before he is jailed or becomes the next victim. The list of suspects is long: The hot young screenwriter who has been fired from his own project, the director of Prescient Pictures’ most recent film who will do anything for final cut, the re-write man who has been toiling in anonymity for years because he passed forty ages ago, the wanna-be actress who would do anything—and anyone— for stardom, the blackmailing producer who knows more about the staff of Prescient Pictures than anyone wants to admit.

As the noose tightens around the guilty and innocent alike, tensions rise and the earth rumbles. No one can trust the ground they walk on or the people they work with. In a town where power and control can shift suddenly, everyone wants credit for everything—except, of course, murder.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Filmmaker Lankford serves up an insider's view of Hollywood in this entertaining crime drama about a producer wannabe who gets ensnarled in a murder plot. Mark Hayes has been kicking around the movie industry for more than 15 years with little to show for it. Now in his mid-30s-old for Hollywood-he toils as a creative executive, fancy talk for a "development boy, as we were called by the disrespectful," screening scripts for his hateful boss, Dexter Morton. Although he's had one huge hit, Morton is despised throughout the industry for his two-faced dealings. When he's found floating face down in his swimming pool-his "giant, hairy tarantula" of toupee clogging the filter-nobody really mourns except his now out-of-work employees. As the police drag through their investigation, Hayes decides to launch his own probe, partly out of boredom and partly because he finds himself near the top of the cops' suspect list: after all, Morton had stolen his girl and Hayes found the body. But there's no shortage of suspects; Morton left a trail of bitter screenwriters, producers and even creative executives. Lankford (Angry Moon) shows lively wit and characterizations, and he shines in skewering the practices and personalities of the film industry. Though the story falters when Lankford leaves the entertainment world and steers the action down a more predictable path of drugs and violence, this is a fast, fun read.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In a neat twist on the ending of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, veteran filmmaker Lankford starts his Hollywood noir with a taste of Armageddon--not West's surreal fire next time but the all-too-real L.A. earthquake of 1994. Suffering from post-quake shell shock, Mark Hayes, D-Boy (or script reader) for schlocky producer Dexter Morton, finds his career in tatters, just like his quake-damaged apartment in the Valley. Then he finds a body floating in Dexter's pool and becomes a murder suspect. Along with a motley crew of similarly dysfunctional cronies, including a washed-up writer who spouts cliches about "killing creativity for a paycheck," Mark slouches toward Armageddon or a jail cell, whichever comes first. Lankford nails the updated noir mood, and he fills the tale with juicy insider stuff about the "industry" (like the fact that nobody says the "industry" anymore). It all seems a little like old news, but that's the thing about burned-out Hollywood. West's ashes have been smoldering a long time, and Lankford does his best to fan the flames. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (April 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345467779
• ISBN-13: 978-0345467775
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,107,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Hollywood satire, July 23, 2004

By 

David Montgomery "Book Critic" (davidjmontgomery.com) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Earthquake Weather (Hardcover)

Set in the tension-filled days following the deadly L.A. temblor of 1994, Terrill Lee Lankford's Earthquake Weather is a biting satire of Hollywood cast in the form of a murder mystery.

As a longtime filmmaker, Lankford knows the business from the inside out, and he uses that knowledge to flay Tinseltown's overinflated egos and pretensions with razor-sharp wit.

His main character, Mark Hayes, is a development executive stuck in a dead-end job working for a tyrannical movie producer. When the producer is found dead floating his pool, the list of suspects seems to include just about everyone in Hollywood, including Hayes.

Hayes sets out to find the killer himself, along the way encountering a rogue's gallery of showbiz malcontents that will have readers shaking their heads in disbelief, all the while laughing out loud.

Earthquake Weather is the best Hollywood novel since Michael Tolkin's The Player -- and a fine crime story besides.

Reviewed by David Montgomery, Chicago Sun-Times

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Inside Hollywood, July 25, 2004

By 

Untouchable (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Earthquake Weather (Hardcover)

What better way to grab a reader's attention that to start a book with a major, building destroying earthquake. EARTHQUAKE WEATHER starts with the 1994 Los Angeles quake to get things jumping. We ride it out through the eyes of Mark Hayes who, along with his room-mate handles the terrifying event like a veteran. Apart from providing a rip-roaring start to the book, the earthquake is used as the catalyst for the events that follow over the next few months in Hayes' life.

While L.A. is recovering from the earthquake, Hayes' life gets rocked for a second time when he discovers Dexter Morton floating face down in his swimming pool. Dexter Morton is a movie producer and is Mark's boss, but he is also a detestable man who was sure to have had many enemies any of whom would have had reason to kill him.

Partly because he feels that he may be the number one suspect and partly because he thinks he may know who the killer actually is, Mark throws himself into a spot of amateur sleuthing. The fact that he is suddenly unemployed thanks to his boss's untimely demise has something to do with his interest in the case too.

So what we are treated to is a murder investigation of sorts delving into the more seamy bars and nightclubs around Hollywood. Interestingly, although the main storyline revolves around a murder, it's not the murder itself that gives this book its direction it's the effect that the murder has on the lives of those who were close to the victim.

Through the characters, the grimy second-tier of Hollywood is uncovered as a world of dissatisfied, bitter or downright beaten people who have tried to make it in the industry, only to be eaten up and spat out. Mark Hayes, the narrating voice of the story, works as a lowly creative executive (script reader), working for the tyrannical Dexter Morton. He has aspirations to become a producer himself one day, although as the story progresses that possibility looks more and more remote.

Representing the most common category of failed aspirants is Charity Brown. She is the small-town beauty who came to Hollywood to be an actress and got herself a couple of small movie roles thanks to her stunning looks. Then the roles dried up and she became the trophy girlfriend of Dexter Morton and hopelessly addicted to drugs. The inevitable downward spiral of her life is as common as it is tragic.

Then there is Clyde McCoy, Mark's neighbour and an ex-screenwriter who has turned his back on the business after being burnt on a movie deal years before. He puts forward the plight of the screenwriter as sitting on the lowest rung of the Hollywood ladder. He's a bitter disillusioned man, but he is also the source of many of the insightful stories about the life that he shunned. McCoy is given a fully developed background by Lankford breathing life into his character, yet he remains the great enigma of the story.

I found this to be a hugely entertaining book, with the story smacking of the feeling that, yes, this is what life is actually like for the writers, the aspiring actresses, the hopeful film-makers. Mark's investigation doesn't necessarily roll along at a fast pace, but it opens up the world around him and introduces us to more troubling issues such as the role of drugs and sex in this surreal side of life.

Given that Terrill Lee Lankford has produced, directed and written feature films, his take on the darker side of Hollywood can be considered as coming from the voice of experience. He takes a great poke at a huge and powerful industry while providing a story that is darkly humorous and richly entertaining.

I would categorise EARTHQUAKE WEATHER as Hollywood noir, providing a realistic, but very entertaining insider view of the less glamorous side of the Hollywood film industry.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark and funny, May 4, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Earthquake Weather (Hardcover)

One line typifies the author's cynical vision of Hollywood: after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the narrator notes that the destruction has caused people to re-evaluate their lives and buy new glassware.

I read that, stopped, read it again. And laughed. Lankford's humor sneaks up on you like that in a finely wrought story of frustrated ambition that seems quintessentially American.

The PW et al. reviews tell enough of the story, but they don't truly communicate how authentic this feels, how deeply revelatory it is of the machinations film people not only take for granted, but assume are life itself.

BTW, there is absolutely nothing about this book that makes it remotely like Jackie Collins as another reviewer believes, because Lankford knows how to write.