The Manhattan Beach Project: A Novel [Paperback]

Peter Lefcourt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 13, 2007

Barely four years after winning an Oscar, Charlie has sunk into the ranks of Hollywood bottom-feeders -- reduced to living in his nephew's pool house, kiting checks and taking the bus to his weekly Debtors Anonymous meeting, where he meets a mysterious ex-CIA agent who proposes to resuscitate Charlie's foundering career -- in the beyond surreal world of reality TV.

Charlie puts his tap shoes on to sell a show about a ruthless Uzbek warlord and his family ("think The Osbournes meets The Sopranos") to a rogue division of ABC, known as ABCD, which operates out of a skunkworks in Manhattan Beach, California, and whose mandate is to develop, under top secret cover like that for the Manhattan Project, extreme reality TV shows to bolster the network's ratings.

Warlord becomes a breakout hit and results not only in causing one of America's largest entertainment conglomerates to go into full damage-control mode but also in shifting the balance of power in Central Asia and in proving that in show business it's not over till the mouse sings.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Decadent Western entertainment meets totalitarian Eastern politics in Lefcourt's latest novel, a cheeky, over-the-top sendup of Tinseltown, reality TV and the politics of the war on terror. The book opens with Charlie Berns, Lefcourt's protagonist from The Deal, stuck in a Debtor's Anonymous meeting after a string of bad pictures and failed deals. But opportunity knocks when shady CIA operative Kermit Fenster recognizes him and pitches Berns the idea of a reality series about a Central Asian warlord. Desperation wins out over skepticism, and Berns sells the idea to an equally panicked TV exec whose career has stalled. Once the deal is done, Berns and Fenster head off to Central Asia and select Izbul Kharkov, the so-called "Tony Soprano of Turkmenistan," as their subject. Kharkov supplies the requisite TV violence, but the plot stalls when his wife turns out to be a recluse and his son joins the Taliban, forcing Berns to dub in fake dialogue subtitles and write phony story lines. Warlord is an instant hit--until Berns's edits are exposed and the Taliban launches an attack on Kharkov's compound. The heady, winning blend of sly satire and fast-paced storytelling makes for serious fun as Lefcourt deftly skewers one character after another. He also scores points with his comments on the excesses of Western and Eastern culture, but fortunately none of the serious stuff gets in the way of a great read.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In this rollicking sequel to The Deal (1991), Lefcourt brings his hapless film producer, Charlie Berns, back from industry oblivion in another riotous romp, this time through the disparate worlds of Tinseltown and Turkmenistan. Having failed to capitalize on the success of his surprising Oscar win, Charlie finds himself nearly penniless, homeless, carless, and, what's worse in Hollywood, cell phone-less. Salvation comes in the unlikely form of the enigmatic but ebullient Kermit Fenster, the CIA's man in Central Asia, who makes Charlie an offer he can't refuse: producing a reality TV series recording the 24/7 world of a Uzbeki warlord. The concept, says Kermit, is The Osbournes meets The Sopranos. While Charlie tends to the trigger-happy warlord and his minions holed up at the Pepsi-stocked, soap-opera-obsessed compound in Turkmenistan, network execs back in L.A. suddenly find themselves with a mega, and meshuga, hit on their hands. In this boisterous, laugh-out-loud spoof, Lefcourt manages to skewer every aspect of both Hollywood inanity and foreign-policy insanity. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (August 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416572767
• ISBN-13: 978-1416572763
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,047,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Peter Lefcourt


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

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious, February 10, 2005

By 

Addicted Reader (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Manhattan Beach Project: A Novel (Hardcover)

This just might be the funniest book you'll read this year. Lefcourt skewers everything in his path: Hollywood, the television business, the State Department, political correctness and Central Asian politics. The story becomes more and more absurd, and just when you think he's never going to pull it together, he ropes you right in. Though this book is a sequel of sorts to his first novel, the delicious cult favorite, "The Deal," (the hero, Charlie Berns, returns) you don't have to have read that book to enjoy this one.

There's one caveat, however. If you read this book, you just might be hooked and want to go and read his six other books, each one a little gem in its own right. Don't say I didn't warn you.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last, comic relief from today's reality craze, April 11, 2005

By 

S. Frome "Author" (Litchfield, CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Manhattan Beach Project: A Novel (Hardcover)

It's been said that the spiritual ancestors of Hollywood producers are not charlatans and snake oil purveyors after all. They're a band of half-crazed itinerant jugglers. In this spirit, Peter Lefcourt has created a non-stop insider's sendup of the misnomered TV reality shows. In Lefcourt's view, the fallout from Hollywood has reached such a pass, that even in the bowels of Turmenistan, a demented warlord and his deranged minions are already afflicted by the U.S. entertainment industry. As it happens, these and other deadbeats crawling around the wastelands of Centra Asia are ripe for the last-ditch efforts of Charlie Burns, our washed-up producer hero, and other equally desperate TV executives back in L.A. in a never-ending hilarious series of machinations and complications. As it turns out, actual explosions, rampant sex of all sorts and assasinations, just aren't enough. All of this has to be tweaked with bogus subtitles and recycled plot lines so that potential viewers will keep tuning in for thirteen consecutive episodes.
In truth, things have gotten so bad that, in actuality, even the weather channel is now featuring victims of tornados, blizzards and floods who gleefully comment on footage of their own near-death experiences. It therefore might not be too much of a stretch to soon discover that the weather hawkers want more: people trapped in earthquakes in remote regions of the world replete with witty repartee and compelling, escalating complications that will hold viewers and outdo the major channels. To boost their flagging ratings, they will doubtless have no choice but to call on Peter Lefcourt.

(Mr.) Shelly Frome, Professor of Dramatic Arts Emeritus, Litchfield, Connecticut

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AN OSCAR RATED COMEDIC ADVENTURE !, March 26, 2005

By 

Herbert Siegel (Litchfield ,CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Manhattan Beach Project: A Novel (Hardcover)

AN OSCAR RATED COMEDIC ADVENTURE!

In today's uncertain world a book has emerged filled with welcomed comic relief.

Peter Lefcourt has a unique talent for unveiling the funny and the absurd often hidden by a serious façade. In this latest book we travel with him in his battle ready literary Hummer. He takes us from Hollywood to Central Asia. We meet a cast of offbeat characters swimming in a broth of intrigue, backstabbing and ambition sprinkled with the salt of active indolence. In all a real tight dysfunctional group of comical misfits.

At a time when the world is fending off a host of anxieties it's important to lighten up...his writing, this novel, offers a welcome escape with countless moments of fun filled adventure. If you are familiar with Lefcourt's writing style, you know it's a book not to be missed!

> Recent medical reports state that laughter is very healthy
for ones heart. Reading this book could add years.