Synopsis
Pay or Play, now in its first paperback edition, is a wickedly funny satire of the Hollywood film industry and its peculiar marriage of vision and ambition that breeds great accomplishment-and humiliating catastrophe. Screenwriter Elmo Zwalt, his psyche "like a clenched fist," was living on peanut butter and bananas atop the Hollywood Freeway when he finally finished his Very Good Script, The Agonizer. Better than Shakespeare, or even Ben Hecht, it grabbed you by the throat and hauled you panting and screaming through ninety minutes of sex and violence. Elmo wanted to direct it, but so did every director who wanted to gross a hundred million domestic, including Chris Parrott, the lauded auteur of the sorts of films that critics called "wrenching." Then the movie is made-and Elmo finds himself in bizarre company as his script goes from concept to reality. Led by his agent, Jack Doberman, formerly the night man in the mailroom at Consolidated Creativity, Elmo pinwheels through the Hollywood firmament of silky studio execs; conniving agents; desperate producers; control-freak stars; a documentary director snatched from his teaching post at a Vermont junior college, whose documentary about plywood, through believable twists and turns, wins an Oscar; and a host of other unforgettable Tinseltown characters. Hollywood insiders like to say that making the movie deal is harder than making the movie. But, as Elmo learns, there are always exceptions.
Publishers Weekly
Boorstin's Hollywood satire, his first novel, is so good it reads like a documentary even when events are patently absurd and incredible. That's the fun. And that's Hollywood. Elmo Zwalt, his psyche "like a clenched fist," writes a screenplay called The Agonizer. An ambitious mail clerk in a powerful agency snatches it from the trash, but he's muscled out by a seasoned mandarin agent who sells the script to a star with heat, Klaus Frotner (rumored to have been a Balkan killer before he became a star). A producer is attached, and he tacks on a director, Chris Parrott, and a calculating studio exec, Annette Foray. Meanwhile, Homer Dooley, a pedestrian film teacher at a Vermont junior college, makes a documentary about plywood (his first film) which, through believable and hilarious turns, wins an Academy Award. That gets Foray's attention just as her problems with The Agonizer gain force: the rewritten script isn't working and, since the story is set in a rain forest, Parrott has built an $8-million forest set in Culver City because the real jungle "didn't look right." Result: Parrott is out and Homer Dooley, neophyte (but "brilliant" and controllable), is summarily whisked off to New Guinea to put Elmo Zwalt's original vision on film. This doomed escapade brings everyone back to a form of reality in gruesomely satirical scenes that make real life sound completely untrue. Heaping equal scorn on pretentious aesthetes and big-business blusterers, using wild hyperbole in the service of genuine insight, Boorstin has written the definitive send-up of Hollywood. (Mar.)