Force Majeure. Signed.

Hapless, unsuccessful screenwriter Bud Wiggins makes his way along the margins of Hollywood, sustained by false hopes and memories of fleeting fame, in a portrait of the mysteries, horrors, and desperate anxieties of the film business

Heavily in debt and depressed, forever-up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter Bud Wiggins, who chauffeurs a limo to earn a steady income, drifts aimlessly from bed to bed and from one wacky script idea to the next. Bud, striving to feel "rooted and mature, in the Now," lives with his suffocating, kvetching mom, Dolly, master of the Jewish guilt-trip. Bud is haunted by memories of Jeanette, the "smart hillbilly Baptist from Tennessee" he almost married, and of Brian, a surgeon roommate who committed suicide. Screenwriter Wagner ( Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills ) peoples this wickedly sardonic, literate, frequently hilarious novel with familiar types--a nihilistic producer, an aging film star, an obnoxious mogul--and with startling characters like The Rav, a wild-eyed mystic would-be rabbi. Wagner gleefully rips out the livid, still-beating heart of Hollywood to expose its class system, its built-in vulgarity, its shrinks, AA meetings, starlets, harlots, climbers and burn-outs. Wagner is a hip sociologist of ferocious veracity and methodical precision.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Smashing debut novel in which screenwriter Bud Wiggin, a Thomas Wolfe for failed screenwriters, seems to be a stand-in for author Wagner--screenwriter of the stupid but successful Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills and Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Wiggin never achieves Wagner's modest triumphs, however: his scripts only blacken his standing in the Business. Force Majeure novelizes some high-class short stories about Wiggin that struck loving chords in Hollywood when published earlier: they join here with compelling density into one large arc of characterization as Bud falls from failure to total moral disaster. The episodes trace his horror story from script to floppo script, each chapter giving him one large antagonist to play against: giant studio-exec Joseph Harmon, who seduces Bud in Harmon's white Bentley convertible; aging genius Caitlin Wurth, Hollywood's most dazzling screenwriter, who has mental problems and makes endless, raging phone calls on outdoor phones and at last gives Bud her brilliant screenplay of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove for him to rewrite and sell as his own; Jerry Linley, alias the mystically wise Rav, a con man who grants himself a background as a Holocaust survivor and now believes it--and many other huge rascals. The darkly downbeat climax is intentionally unfilmable (Bud has fellatio with a ten-year-old girl), although Oliver Stone has already optioned Wagner's screenplay of the novel. Despite a lack of rising action and some verbal leaps that never find a foothold, this is superb stuff--the best yet about Hollywood's humiliated lower orders as they grasp at recovery programs or head for high-priced mental farms. Bud is magnificently memorable, his brain in flood with three-act scripts that rival Postcards from the Snake Pit, Miss Lonelyhearts, Sunset Boulevard or Look Homeward, Oscar. Richly done boffo winner. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Once Hollywood screenwriter Bud Wiggins was hot; now he's not. Now, scrambling to take meetings so he can pitch projects, he's driving a limo and living with his mother. But with a contact or two (Bud still knows people) and some luck, he gets a part in a B horror movie and writes its sequel, becomes companion to the hottest "script doctor" in town (who leaves him a script to make his own), and hooks up with a self-described hack who can't help making money. All of which keeps alive the dreams--of the big project, or the perfect wedding--which finally turn sour. The messages here are that there are no new ideas in the story business and that it's hard to get a second meeting or a third act. But Hollywood as setting for satire or black comedy gets tiresome, and despite some nice one-liners and bits here, few beyond film buffs or those in The Business will go the distance with Bud Wiggins. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/91.
- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.