REVIEWS |
My Books
The Manhattan Beach Project
"The Manhattan Beach Project"
Charlie Berns is back, this time in the frighteningly absurd world of reality television. Merely four years after winning an Oscar (as readers of "The Deal" will recall), Charlie is flat broke once more, reduced to living in his nephew's poolhouse, kiting credit cards, and attending meetings of the Brentwood chapter of Debtors Anonymous. At one of these twelve-step meetings, he meets a CIA agent named Kermit Fenster, who pitches him the concept of a reality show about an Uzbek warlord -- "Tony Soprano meets Genghis Khan." Charlie puts his tap shoes on again and manages to sell the series to a covert division of ABC, called ABCD, which operates out of an unmarked office building in Manhattan Beach developing the kind of extreme reality shows that the parent company - the vertically integrated conglommerate with the amusement park in Anaheim -- doesn't want to be too closely associated with. The analogy is "The Manhattan Project" during World War II, in which scientists worked in top secret developing the Atomic Bomb. With the aid of Kermit Fenster, Charlie finds a colorfully ruthless warlord in Western Uzbekistan named Izbul Kharkov, hires a Polish documentary film crew and begins to shoot the daily life of the warlord and his family -- the sullen fundamentalist son who runs away to join the Taliban, the lesbian daughter who takes showers with the Polish camerawoman, the absent wife who is either hidden away in her room or in Azerbaijan getting a face life. The show, of course, becomes a major hit, causing the network simultaneously to celebrate and to deal with the damage control of explaining how it was developed. Then things heat up in Uzbekistan. The Georgian Mafia wants a piece of the action; the CIA and the Treasury Department want to look into certain activies going on at the warlord's compound; the Taliban decides to issue a fatwa against the show as blasphemous and shut it down; the Uzbek Mafia tries to elbow in on the Georgian Mafia's extortion racket; and, as if all that weren't enough, "Entertainment Tonight" sends over a crew to do an on-site interview with the cast of the new hit show. All at the same time. It hits the fan. Big time. And it takes all of Charlie's nimble skills to tiptoe out of this mess. Smelling sweet no less. 
Eleven Karens
Eleven Karens
Not since Flaubert’s L’Éducation Sentimentale has a book so poignantly described man’s helplessness in the face of woman. In this novel of sexual edification, the narrator (who may or may not be the author) recounts his experiences with eleven fascinating women -- all of whom happen to be named Karen. In an attempt to explain this statistical anomaly, Peter Lefcourt takes us on a journey that begins in the fifth grade, when he is the groom at his own shotgun wedding, and ends in his early middle years, when he has a very short but nonetheless searing assignation in a hotel room in Paris with a woman whom he bumps into in a museum backing away from one of Monet’s water lilies. In between, his Karens include a high school cheerleader who teaches him how to run the bases; a disciple of Margaret Mead whom he meets playing volleyball in a nudist camp in Pennsylvania; a student at an exclusive prep school in Manhattan who drops her clothes out his hotel room window; a lovely Italian with Monica Vitti eyes who steals his heart on the via Appia Antica in Rome; a blind poet with a dog named García Lorca whom he picks up in his cab on a rainy night in New York; an African capitalist who literally takes the shirt off his back in Togo; a waitress who appropriates his sperm in Quebec; a Strip Scrabble hustler who takes public showers in a bar on Canal Street; and an actress in L.A. who can’t decide whether she is Vivien Leigh or Joan Collins. Painstakingly researched, with eighty-eight footnotes to provide historical context and ironic counterpoint, Eleven Karens is a coming of age story and a fervent homage to women -- a beach-read Bildungsroman observed through the delightfully cracked lens of one the most unique comic voices writing today. 
The Dreyfus Affair
The Dreyfus Affair
Very loosely based on "The Dreyfus Affair" in France, this is the story of the love affair between the star shortstop and second baseman of a major league baseball team and how organized baseball deals with this public relations Chernobyl. Randy Dreyfus is a blond, blue eyed, six-foot-four-inch future Hall of Famer with The Los Angeles Valley Vikings, an expansion team in, at the time the book was written, the near future. He is married to a former Miss California, Susie Dreyfus, has two twin-eight-year old daughters, a hyperactive Dalmatian named Calvin, whom he puts a contract out on in a fit of madness, and a 5600 square foot house in the San Fernando Valley. Everything is wonderful in Randy's life until he falls in love with his second baseman, D.J. Pickett, an African American gay man, who has spent his life in the closet. Randy does his best to deny his feelings, secretly consulting an Egyptian psychiatrist, who counsels him to just go with the pitch. Eventually he does, and manages to live a dangerous life trying to hide his affair with D.J. while staying married to Susie and hit over 300. Randy and D.J. eventually get caught by a hidden surveillance camera kissing in a Neiman-Marcus changing booth in Dallas. When this picture is made public, America is shaken with a scandal that rivals the real Dreyfus Affair a hundred years ago in France. The affair is the biggest story in America -- cluttering the tabloids and the talk shows. Its worst nightmare come true, Organized Baseball goes into extreme damage control mode by trying to explain Randy and D.J.'s love affair as a substance abuse problem. The media circus continues, reaching its climax when a hard-boiled reporter named Milt Zola, smelling a hoax, exposes baseball by writing the present day version of Emile Zola's J'Accuse!. 
The Deal
The Deal
Charlie Berns is a veteran Hollywood movie producer who has had a run of very bad luck. His wife has left him; his agent won't return his phone calls; his gardener has uprooted unpaid for plants; his pool man has chain-sawed a lemon tree into his pool; his phone has been disconnected. Charlie decides to pull the plug in a particularly appropriate way for Los Angeles: asphyxiation by Mercedes exhaust. His suicide is interrupted by the visit of a long lost nephew from New Jersey, who has come to Hollywood to make it big as a screenwriter, bearing a screenplay about the life of the 19th century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Charlie decides to postpone his suicide in order to option the script and sell it to the studios. But first he has to get it rewritten. With the aid of an alcoholic screenwriter named Madison Kearny, Charlie converts Lionel's literate PBS style script into an action adventure middle-eastern espionnage movie entitled: "Lev Disraeli: Freedom Fighter," and he packages it with a black action movie star named Bobby Mason, who has been looking for material to shoot in Israel following his conversion to Judaism during a shoot in the Holy Land. And he's off and running, pulling off one of the biggest hustles in the history of the movie industry. The only person who seems wise to Charlie's scam is a mid-level creative executive named Deidre Hearn, a young woman in her thirties with her own problems. Deidre watches in amazement as Charlie gets the studio to fund the picture with blocked currency in Yugoslavia and start shooting. When Bobby Mason gets kidnapped by Macedonian separatists, Charlie figures out an ingenious way to keep his scam going. When Deidre comes after him -- like Martin Sheen going up the Mekong to terminate Marlon Brando -- wonderful things happen... 
The Woody
The Woody
You think you’ve got problems? Senator Woody White is being sued by his ex-wife, blackmailed by his present wife, shaken down by a Vermont maple syrup kingpin, terrorized by his neo-fascist housekeeper, and pursued by Trent Lott over a fender bender in the Senate Parking Garage. As if all this weren’t disheartening enough, Woody has been stricken with an untimely case of ED, discovered during a tryst in his Peru, Vermont, A-Frame with a lobbyist from the condom industry. Up for reelection, Woody understands the political dictum that no one can be elected in this country if the voters suspect he is hormonally challenged. A little too early for Viagra, he resorts to a testosterone patch and winds up with a great deal more than he bargained for. With the aide of his Chief of Staff, Ishmael Leibowitz, a closet heterosexual who has gone into deep cover within a coterie of gay senate aides, Woody battles not only to keep his EQ up above the Moderate to High range, but also to recapture the support of the people of Vermont, Ted Kennedy, Dick Gephardt, and the President of the United States. The Woody is a brilliant comic romp through the demented, spin-filled world of Washington sexual politics. It answers the question foremost on everybody’s mind these days: just how hard is it to remain in public office in late 1990’s America? Di & I
Princess Di's in love. At last. After Camilla, the lemon peeler, the loo, the cellular phone, and the workout photos, Di's finally found the right guy -- Leonard Schecter, an American commoner with a taste for long-legged women and epic poetry. During a diplomatic reception at the Togolese Embassy in London, Di and Leonard take one look at other, and their knees go weak. They fall madly in love and carry on a temptestuous affair under the noses of Diana's bodyguards, her inlaws, Princes William and Harry, the world-wide paparazzi and Barbara Walters -- an affair that takes them from The Royal Box at Ascot to a McDondalds franchise in Rancho Cucamonga. What do princesses really want? You're about to find out, as Di and Leonard take off on a wild, incognito jaunt to freedom, while Scotland Yard, MI6 the FBI and Charles conduct a world-wide search, culminating in a showdown between the Prince of Wales and the only man to ever find the way to the heart of the woman who walked away from the throne of England. A hilarious odyssey through the world of the madcap royals and their dysfunctional relatives, DI AND I is Cinderella in reverse -- the most unlikely and charming love story since Edward VIII ran off with Wallis Simpson. And a lot funnier. 
Abbreviating Ernie
Abbreviating Ernie
When Dr. Ernest Haas, a cross-dressing Schenectady, New York, urologist, slips into a size 8 beige knit dress, handcuffs his Prozac addicted wife Audrey to their stove, and expires in the act of making love to her, it creates serious problems for everyone involved. Especially for Audrey. Does she go down with the ship in the ultimate whither-thou-goest gesture? Or does she become proactive and resort to her Sunbeam Multi-purpose Carving Utensil to sever her ties with her late husband? So begins the most controversial domestic violence case in the history of upstate New York. The political correctness of spousal dismemberment is an issue that polarizes women and anti-vivisectionists alike. Audrey's trial becomes an international cause celebre exploited by everyone from Feminists to Forensic Urologists. The story is populated by Lefcourt's usual deliciously zany characters -- a Schenectady police detective with a Forget-It-Jake-It's-Chinatown concern for Ernie Hass's missing penis, a deaf-mute 15/16ths Mohawk Indian burglar hooked on motivational tapes, an intrepid People Magazine writer with a fondness for Doestoyevsky and vodka, a gorgeous Asian Hard Copy reporter who flagellates herself in a bathtub full of lilac petals, and a vindictive Rottweiler with his own agenda. As in The Deal, The Dreyfus Affair and Di And I, Peter Lefcourt's writing is not just hilariously funny and deadon true but romantic and sexy as well. There is at least one love scene that you may never recover from. As well as enough laugh-out-loud moments to keep you from reading this book in bed with anyone trying to get a good night's sleep. 
The First Time I Got Paid For It
The First Time I Got Paid For It
I co-edited this anthology for the Writers Guild Foundation. It contains pieces by a number of illustrious screen and television writers, including myself, about our first paying jobs. Contributors include Academy Award winning screenwriters Tom Schulman("Dead Poets Society"), Stephen Zaillian("Schindler's List", Bo Goldman("One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", and has a introduction written by fellow Oscar winner William Goldman("All The President's Men"). |
|