The Shooting Script: A Novel of Suspense - Hardcover

Klavan, Laurence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345462769 ISBN 13: 9780345462763

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2005

Synopsis

Following his critically acclaimed novel The Cutting Room, Laurence Klavan returns with The Shooting Script. Establishing shot: New York City, present day. Zoom in on a run-down tenement building, somewhere west of Times Square, the home of Roy Milano, a thirtyish, divorced typesetter who lives for the movies. In fact, by pursuing the legendary uncut print of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Roy has become something of a minor celebrity among the fellow misfit film fanatics he caters to in his homemade newsletter, Trivial Man. But there’s nothing trivial when Roy’s old rival Abner Cooley shows up with a check in his hand and the words “Someone is trying to kill me” on his lips.

With his mother ailing, Roy needs the money as badly as Cooley needs someone to head off a trigger-happy stalker who’s determined to put both him and his controversial new screenplay into permanent turnaround. And though Roy does his best, like many a private eye before him, he quickly finds his head turned by an enticing distraction. Not a femme fatale, but a flick.

Roy is all but powerless to resist an e-mail from a mysterious fan that lures him with the promise of an elusive treasure as fiercely sought after by the celluloid cognoscenti as the Ark of the Covenant was by Indiana Jones. It’s Jerry Lewis' famous unreleased drama, The Day the Clown Cried. But when he arrives at a rendezvous too late to save a dying man, Roy realizes he’s stumbled into a dangerous race to possess a piece of cinema history. To catch up, he’ll have to match wits with a rogues’ gallery: a bored and bitter superstar comedian, a hot-shot producer turned drugged-out has-been, a ferocious German actor who likes to role-play off-camera, a mercurial director with a scary sense of humor, and a hard-bitten cop who’s mad about movies.

Meanwhile, Roy will be tempted by the wiles of three fetching females–and tormented by a single-minded psychopath with more faces than Lon Chaney. He’ll even go on location, pursuing and being pursued from the mansions of the Hamptons to the harbors of Maine, the boulevards of L.A. to the canals of Amsterdam. No one’s ever gone to this much trouble just to see a movie. But for Roy, the reward far outweighs the risk. And a chance to glimpse the Big Picture might just be worth coming face-to-face with the Big Sleep.

About this title

About the Author

LAURENCE KLAVAN won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original for Mrs. White, written under a pseudonym. He is also the author of The Cutting Room, the first novel featuring Roy Milano. His work for the theater includes the librettos for the Obie Award—winning musical Bed and Sofa and the acclaimed Embarrassments. He lives in New York.

Reviews

A whirlwind of movie trivia whips up Klavan's (The Cutting Room) second hyperactive, hilarious yarn starring Roy Milano, the hardcore film fanatic last seen gleefully pursuing Orson Welles's lost treasure The Magnificent Ambersons. But Roy is now facing desperate times as a walking billboard for the Union Square Farmer's Market to pay for his suddenly mute mother's convalescence. Roy's unrewarding pavement pounding brings him face to face with the ultimate "trivial person success story," arrogant Abner Cooley, who brags he's been commissioned to write a script for the 12-part cult fantasy novel The Seven Ordeals of Quelman. Abner's stroke of fortune has made him a target for fanatic Quelman fans, one of whom is trying to kill him. Abner hires Roy to find his attacker, but Roy is soon sidetracked by the prospect of obtaining a priceless copy of Jerry Lewis's unreleased Nazi drama The Day the Clown Cried . The plot thickens when Roy finds the movie's owner, Ted Savitch, dead of a heart attack—or was it murder? A retired television star, Savitch's daughter, Dena, and a whole gaggle of oddballs sweep Roy from Manhattan to the Hamptons, on to Los Angeles and a bicycle built for two in Amsterdam, and all the while he's dodging bullets and Oscar statuettes in hectic hot pursuit of the elusive stolen videotape. A gratifying ending drops the curtain on this wholly entertaining sequel: a frenzied encore for suspense fans and an edifying indulgence for seasoned film buffs.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Hard-boiled nerd Roy Milano is back in another screwball adventure, this one revolving around Jerry Lewis' unreleased 1972 Holocaust movie, The Day the Clown Cried. When an anonymous caller claiming to possess this obscure treasure turns up dead, Milano embarks on a strange quest around the globe, chased by a mystery man whose unpredictable attacks invariably remind our idiosyncratic hero of some useless tidbit of arcane movie lore. Klavan's best moments come from his wry impersonations of Jerry Seinfeld (Howie Romaine), who has run out of things to buy and toys with acquiring Clown, and Robert Evans (Troy Kelvin), who seems bent on remaking Clown with Bjorn Bork in the lead. The swift and senseless plot flies off its tracks here and there, and Roy's non sequiturs grow a bit thin, but there is enough delightful insanity along the way to please fans of silly suspense (from Jonathan Lethem to Kinky Friedman). David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

SEQUELS ARE AS OLD AS MOVIES THEMSELVES, IF YOU COUNT A SERIAL LIKE The Perils of Pauline. The first sequel to win the Best Picture Oscar, though, was The Godfather Part II in 1974. The first one to be nominated in that category was probably The Bells of St. Mary's in 1945, the sequel to Going My Way, which won the year before. Bing Crosby repeated his role as...

Sorry. Occupational hazard.

A year ago, I had discovered the most sought-after "lost" film, the full version of Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons. I thought I would like being a movie detective. After all, it beat just being what I was: a "trivial man," a person devoted to finding, hoarding, and recounting arcane movie information--in other words, a loser, I think it's generally called.

Word of my discovery had spread through the "trivial" community like a virus that caused self-loathing. From obscure fan Web sites to tiny film festivals to dusty memorabilia stores, it was rumored that I had found, then given up--without even seeing!--Ambersons. In the trivial world, which is populated by people even less socialized than I, the rumor led to incredulity, awe, and (of course) jealousy and hatred.

My little newsletter, Trivial Man, which I publish out of my jammed apartment on West Forty-third Street in New York and subsidize through typesetting work, suddenly exploded in popularity, which meant it actually sold a few copies. I began to receive phone calls from trivial people seeking my deductive services, people not accustomed to navigating in the real world.

"I've got a movie I want you to find," they'd say.

"For how much?" I'd ask, now priding myself as a professional.

Then there'd be a pause, and then I'd hear a dial tone.

I already had something over many of my colleagues: I was presentable--imagine Zeppo Marx crossed with John Garfield--had even, amazingly, been married, and still stayed in contact with my ex-wife, Jody. If you can't deal with the present, you can always depend on the past. In our own ways, Jody and I both knew this.

It was during one of Jody's usual phone calls--to ask me who was playing whom in an old movie we both, by chance, happened to be watching--that the whole thing began.

"You mean, the bandit?" I asked, muting the volume. "Akim Tamiroff." Then Call Waiting, a recent upgrade to my phone system, clicked in. "Hold on. Hello?"

There was a pause. I heard a voice I recognized. It was old, and it was downbeat.

"Roy? It's about your mother."

I don't mention my parents too often, and for good reason. Neither has the faintest idea what I'm doing with my life. Make that singular: my mother doesn't, my father's dead. But before he died, he didn't have a clue about it, either.

It always surprised me about my mother, because she loved movies, so I'd assumed my obsession had some genetic basis. (My father, who worked in insurance, never liked to leave the house for any reason, let alone movies. His usual review after seeing one consisted of three words: "Piece of crap.") My mother, however, persisted in hoping that my vast store of trivial information could lead to gainful employment, marriage, and DNA propagation. No such luck.

"What do you do with a thing like that?" she'd usually ask after I'd made the mistake of sharing some little-known fact with her, like, for instance that Maggie Smith had replaced Katharine Hepburn in Travels with My Aunt. "Why don't you write your own column?"

"I put out my own newsletter," I'd reply. "I sort of do that already."

"No, I mean, you know, for real."

I assumed she'd be encouraged by my discovery of the complete Ambersons, and the idea of dealing with her ("What do you do with a thing like that? Why don't you join the FBI?") caused me to stay mum.

Now Mom was the one who was mum.

Apparently she--as my aunt informed me on the phone--was no longer speaking. There seemed no physical problem; it was apparently a head thing. It wasn't unprecedented--once, my mother had hidden under the kitchen table all afternoon; another time she'd been found wandering the neighborhood in her nightgown--but this event, or so my aunt believed, was a keeper. No amount of medication mattered. My mother was no longer a moving picture; she was a still.

"But what do you want me to do?" I asked Aunt Ruby, as I followed her down the stairs. I hadn't been in the old family house in the Westchester suburbs since Thanksgiving; now it was March.

"Help pay for the upkeep," said my aunt. She was a frighteningly practical and direct woman, a registered nurse, and my mother's only other relation. She referred to her kid sister as if she were no different from the familiar, crumbling home we were in. That was life to Ruby: we all just became a question of maintenance.

"Well...for how long?"

"For as long as it takes."

"But--" I stammered lamely, "she's only seventy. She could live another twenty years."

My mother was no vegetable. Lying silently in bed, she still showed a hearty appetite and flicked efficiently through TV stations. Her eyes had even sparkled a little when I walked in. Still, none of my small talk had brought a response.

"Twenty years or even twenty-five," Aunt Ruby agreed, unhelpfully.

"Well, she's got health insurance--Medicare--doesn't she?"

"These days you can never have enough."

This was true. I myself at thirty-six--the time everything "starts to go," my aunt once remarked--was uncovered. I was running out of reasons to resist. "But things are just starting to pick up for me."

"Good. Then it shouldn't be a problem."

I stopped at the front door. "You have no idea what might have caused her to become like this?"

My aunt only shrugged. "Something must have rubbed her the wrong way."

For Aunt Ruby, the comment summed up diseases, accidents, even death itself. It made a funny kind of sense, yet I had to keep fighting this lost cause.

"Look, let me know if she says anything, okay?"

"Don't worry, Roy. You'll be the first to know." It was the only time I had ever heard Aunt Ruby laugh.

I had no siblings, so I had no choice.

As usual, remembering trivia was my way to deal with anxiety. Standing outside the house, I remembered that the original stars of Sons and Lovers were supposed to be Alec Guinness and Montgomery Clift. The film was finally made with Trevor Howard and Dean Stockwell.

The picture had been nominated for the Oscar; my fate would be less prestigious. Just as I was on the verge of a new career in detection, I had to do something that I'd never done before, something truly frightening. I had to get a real job.

A WEEK LATER, I WAS STANDING ON THE STREET, HOLDING A BAGUETTE AND a balloon.

Trivial people take all kinds of part-time, low-paying jobs, some more humiliating than others. Through contacts, I'd managed to secure employment at the Farmer's Market in Union Square. Here, upstate farmers sold produce to gullible urbanites willing to shell out exorbitantly for organic goods. A friend who'd been laid off from a film journal had been helping out at several stands and tipped me off to similar opportunities. I could do pickles, pretzels, or bread. The latter was a staple and so seemed the least demeaning.

"U-shin sent me," I'd said, mentioning my friend.

Annabelle, the young lady farmer at the Nature's Meal booth, had a pretty face the color and texture of a leather belt. She looked at my pale skin and slender frame with amusement.

"Okay, pavement boy," she said. "Here you go."

Then she handed me the balloon and the loaf. She pinned a button on my chest that read RISING BREAD, FALLING PRICES! Her bakery, located in Millwood, two hours from Manhattan, was having a sale.

"Just stand there," she said, in a gruff and grizzled rasp. "And look pretty." Then she shook her head in dismay, as she might have at a newborn calf too weak to survive.

I was secretly hoping that my city ways and her country manner would cause romantic sparks, as in a Tracy and Hepburn film. But Annabelle quickly moved away from me and arranged some zucchini and pear muffins.

As I stood there, mortified, I recalled that Spencer Tracy had been replaced by Gregory Peck in the movie of The Yearling. The whole film had been remade from scratch, just like, well, a burnt loaf.

Then, to my horror, I saw Abner Cooley.

Abner, of course, was the original trivial person success story. His Web site, PRINTIT!.com, had grown from a homemade operation--done, literally, out of his parents' house on Long Island--into a grassroots phenomenon. It mostly featured negative gossip on forthcoming films secretly slipped to him by bitter studio underlings. Frightened and annoyed executives had seduced Abner with consulting jobs, and then he'd parlayed his popularity into a book deal and a TV hosting gig. The latter came courtesy of his boyfriend, Taylor Weinrod, recently promoted to V.P. at Landers Classic Movies, or LCM, the old movie cable network.

As his success had--you'll pardon me--ballooned, so had Abner. Never a sylph, he now threatened to topple over from his own girth, and a wispy blond beard, as ever, couldn't give shape to his face. Formerly obnoxious, he was now unbearable, and never more so than today, when he saw me...and my balloon.

"Milano!" he said, with barely disguised glee. "What a pleasant surprise!"

Abner had never forgiven me for my Ambersons coup, and seeing me in my current position clearly warmed his overgrown heart.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345462769
• ISBN 13: 9780345462763
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288