AICN BOOKS! MANHATTAN BEACH PROJECT, THE BONES, and SMALL CRIMES!!

Manhattan Beach Project by Peter Lefcourt

Simon & Schuster

The nice people over at S&S sent along this interesting book only a few days after I requested it. Surprised as I was by the generosity, I was even more insanely shocked to discover what a brilliant book Peter Lefcourt has written.

Hollywood, television, nightmares of different episodes of ‘Friends’ run through my head after reading this book, but Lefcourt brilliantly slams all of your notions about T.V. with this horse whipping tell-all about the boob tube industry. It’s all made up, but it’s not. Lefcourt is no pansy. He hasn’t been pumping gas his whole life, he’s a Hollywood insider and this is all about how to burn your peers to the ground, with a smile. The insider knowledge that follows Charlie Berns, whether it flows momentously from his mouth or the scenic over flowing toilet-like surroundings he finds himself in, it’s all based on something, really, there is no other way. Charlie Berns, I like him. Shit, I even think I’ve met him once or twice. He’s a washed up movie producer who’s just won an Academy Award for Best Picture. As thin as your memory is, Hollywood’s is even more transparently anemic. Unlikely things happen to Charlie Berns, but they’re all brought upon himself due to his own careless belief that life will afford no consequences for his actions of over spending, which leaves him in incredible debt; a hole, in fact, that no mortal could ever climb from. The scene in the beginning, when Charlie begs for change on the bus in downtown L.A., is pure brilliance. The edge of your seat is hot from the uncomfortable feeling you’ll get from reading this little fable.

While slumming it in Debtors Anonymous, Charlie is approached by a fellow Hollywood insider (or so he thinks) who sets his once dead creative spirits aglow (dramatically), with the idea of a television show, excuse me, a reality television show called ‘Warlord’. Yes, that’s right, a show about a guy who kills, rapes, and takes what’s not his, all the time. Loosely modeled on Tony Soprano, (who’s not these days) ‘Warlord’ is set in the hot mess that is Uzbekistan, you know the one, and it’s in Central Asia. Right.

You don’t have a clue where that is.

Well, neither does Charlie, but he’s ready to hire a Warlord to set his show around. His “friend”, who pumped Charlie the idea, is a wild CIA rogue, idiot, psycho, whatever, and they manage to pitch one of Charlie’s old industry contacts with this idea, and they both grab a ton of start up money to grease the Uzbek mafia, government, Warlord, townsfolk, and anyone else who sticks their hand out often enough.

The pitch is this…The Osbournes meet Tony Soprano. To get a show these days you need only five words, according to Lefcourt, and anyone who’s in the business will hand you a huge sack of money to turn those five words into a hit show. If it’s a hit? You are golden. If not, scratch your name out of the white pages.

Then they go to this place, what’s it called? And start filming the show ‘Warlord’, which takes place in and around a local Warlord’s family. There are lesbians, issues with Islam, the Koran, hatred of the American ideal, and bouncing back and forth across the radar screen some good old Hollywood bullshit. The Warlord is nothing more than a broken English-speaking Tony Soprano, with a mock AJ, and girl-loving Meadow (Meadow? Meadow? What kind of name is that?). Lefcourt kept my attention not only with the Warlord show itself, but also with the wild, seat-of-your-pants dialogue that peppers this amazingly rich story. Plus, there’s this juicy subplot with an agent, his rivals, and a division of ABC called ABCD, located in Manhattan Beach, California that doesn’t really exist. Also applied in heavy doses are some great comments on corporate America via the Human Resources department of ABCD. Which makes sense to me since the world has boiled down to one Human Resources Manager after another telling us the right way to do things. Human Resources departments are like cell phones; do you remember when neither one existed?

Make sense? Plus some erection pills, sex, lots of violence and tons of hot dialogue, funny asides and just plain old good times. Make fun of television, sure, but wake up and realize that reality television is here to stay. Why? Costs nothing. Actors? What actors? Locations? Yeah, right. This is Lefcourt kicking ass in Hollywood and informing the emperor that he’s got no clothes on.

Small Crimes In An Age Of Abundance by Matthew Kneale

Nan Talese/Doubleday

Matthew Kneale won the Whitbread Award a few years ago for his first novel, ‘English Passengers’; a sparklingly detailed book that captured the attention of a lot of readers on the literary landscape. Personally? I ignored it, politely and with great silence I picked up something else and turned away from it. His first book will stay on the shelves unread simply because I don’t know when I’ll get to it. But I’m here to tell you about his second book, ‘Small Crimes In An Age Of Abundance’, a brilliant collection from an author whose talents are spilling off each page. You might like short stories; I love them, but these stories are beyond what I’ve read and have really taken me by surprise. I had no idea this guy was this good.

Each story revolves around a small crime. At first I thought there would be a plot line that would reappear in each tale and bring everything around three hundred and sixty degrees at the end. It doesn’t seem like Kneale had me in mind when he wrote this collection. In the opening story, ‘Stone’, we travel abroad to a remote part of China where we meet an obnoxious family looking to pawn their homemade jewelry on some unwitting locals. Their surprise is found in the realization that the country is more rural than they first thought and they get lost in their own arrogance. They think a local in a town they travel to by accident ripped them off, and place the blame wrongly, only to suffer no consequences when they discover the jewelry is not stolen after all. Shame follows them back to the states and finally you feel flush when separating yourself from these people, as if a bothersome burden has been lifted from your shoulders. In ‘Powder’, a middle-aged couple comes across a bag of drugs and a cell phone, and decides to depart their mundane existence by selling it themselves. It’s the act of this crime that sets them free. Their own children discover the source of their new income and the cup runneth over, so to speak. And so we’ve come to another crime. Although this one is more obscure than the first, we know now that Kneale is leading us through human existence, and the torture that surrounds us all in everyday life. ‘Weight’ introduces us to Benny, a fat man, middle aged, like many of Kneale’s characters. He’s in China on a bus tour of the famed Silk Road. He’s lonely and alone, a deadly combination. But he thinks his solution to this unhappiness is embodied in a beautiful girl in the last town on his trip. He pays a large sum of money for her and they move back to Texas to live happily ever after. A different crime, one that Benny doesn’t even see. The ideal he dreamed of never appears, making what you wish for a sorry conclusion to the perfect life you thought everyone around you was living. His fears are personified in an incredibly crass neighbor who’s got his sights set on Benny’s new bride. The closing sentence of this story is shocking in ways that aren’t readily apparent.

These stories are severe in their sharply driven narrative, the flux of detail, and the amount of pain that’s inflicted all around. Kneale has his finger firmly placed on the pulse of the people he writes about. It’s impossible to think of anything else while you read this collection. You begin to recognize the crime immediately and woven together, these stories become an incredible tapestry of human life, warts and all.

The Bones by Seth Greenland

Bloomsbury

Wow. That’s all I can say about this dazzling new book by Seth Greenland. Then again, what more needs to be said about this book that hasn’t already been said by David Mamet and Larry David who are quoted on the back flap of this…dare I say…masterpiece?

Strong words, some would say. Others call this column a rant, better used in a blog.

Whatever. I get it. So should you.

Remember, I’m steering you to the good stuff. Keeping Danielle Steel and John Grisham out of your hands. For purely literary purposes. Like a book doctor, prescribing required literary supplements for your mental health.

Trust me.

Seth Greenland dug up the corpse of Hollywood, left for dead by Peter Lefcourt in ‘Manhattan Beach Project’, and whipped its ass a few more times, dragged it behind his pick-up truck, shat and pissed on it for good measure, finally setting it on fire and then proceeded to eat the ashes and deposit them in the nearest toilet. What is this book about? Hollywood taking it up the dirt road, for good. Comic Frank Bones and Lloyd Melnick haunt this thickly detailed evisceration, wildly and with great effect. You’ll fall in love with Frank Bones (very much like Lewis Black, although I’ll assume this is someone else) as he pisses his comic career down the toilet page after page. Lloyd Melnick, L.A. screenwriter, is so much like Larry David it’s sickening; or, is Larry David the basis for Frank Bones the comic master, central to this massively hysterical gem? Lloyd is married to a woman who’s married to his money, and it’s T.V. money so it’s all over the place. She’s spending most of the book spending his money and trying to find her place, or rather purchase her place, in the hierarchy of L.A.’s T.V. elite. She sounds like Cheryl, Larry’s wife on The L.D. show, but she’s much more obtuse. Frank Bones? He’s trying to get his career started again by doing a show about an Eskimo, for a loosely veiled NBC. All the while, Lloyd is trying to submarine his own career to go off and write his “novel”, but he’s locked into his job writing a show called ‘Happy Endings’. The show is about an Alec Baldwin-inspired asshole who fits the real life actor so perfectly I’d expect a lawsuit to be forthcoming. It takes place in a Vegas massage parlor and becomes a hit after Frank’s porn star ex-girlfriend gets a part. Alec should be laughing, because there is a section in this story about him getting fired off of a movie because he wouldn’t shave his mustache, just like the pre-production of ‘The Edge’ where he wouldn’t shave his beard. Plus, his Achilles heel is his work with animal rights. Umm… Alec, come on, you’re laughing…right? You’re on a show called ‘Happy Endings.’ Holy Hanna, I’m still laughing.

The story dovetails nicely between the two men, comic and screenwriter, and finally ends up almost where it began, with a Phoenix rising out of the ashes to be reborn as something else completely. I looked forward to each chapter of this book with great anticipation. This is probably the best book I’ve read since ‘The Corrections’. Mamet liked it so much after he was sent a copy for a quote that he bought the rights. Expect Seth Greenland and this amazing Hollywood comic tale to land on a jumbo screen near you real soon.

Wow, this book kicks ass!

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Thanks, Frank!

"Moriarty" out.