Synopsis
Barely four years after winning an Oscar, Charlie has sunk into the ranks of Hollywood bottom-feeders - reduced to living in his nephew's pool house, kiting checks and taking the bus to his weekly Debtors Anonymous meeting, where he meets a mysterious ex-CIA agent who proposes to resuscitate Charlie's foundering career - in the beyond surreal world of reality TV.
Charlie puts his tap shoes on to sell a show about a ruthless Uzbek warlord and his family ("think The Osbournes meets The Sopranos") to a rogue division of ABC, known as ABCD, which operates out of a skunkworks in Manhattan Beach, California, and whose mandate is to develop, under top secret cover like that for the Manhattan Project, extreme reality TV shows to bolster the network's ratings.
Warlord becomes a breakout hit and results not only in causing one of America's largest entertainment conglomerates to go into full damage-control mode but also in shifting the balance of power in Central Asia and in proving that in show business it's not over till the mouse sings.
Reviews
Decadent Western entertainment meets totalitarian Eastern politics in Lefcourt's latest novel, a cheeky, over-the-top sendup of Tinseltown, reality TV and the politics of the war on terror. The book opens with Charlie Berns, Lefcourt's protagonist from The Deal, stuck in a Debtor's Anonymous meeting after a string of bad pictures and failed deals. But opportunity knocks when shady CIA operative Kermit Fenster recognizes him and pitches Berns the idea of a reality series about a Central Asian warlord. Desperation wins out over skepticism, and Berns sells the idea to an equally panicked TV exec whose career has stalled. Once the deal is done, Berns and Fenster head off to Central Asia and select Izbul Kharkov, the so-called "Tony Soprano of Turkmenistan," as their subject. Kharkov supplies the requisite TV violence, but the plot stalls when his wife turns out to be a recluse and his son joins the Taliban, forcing Berns to dub in fake dialogue subtitles and write phony story lines. Warlord is an instant hit--until Berns's edits are exposed and the Taliban launches an attack on Kharkov's compound. The heady, winning blend of sly satire and fast-paced storytelling makes for serious fun as Lefcourt deftly skewers one character after another. He also scores points with his comments on the excesses of Western and Eastern culture, but fortunately none of the serious stuff gets in the way of a great read.
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In this rollicking sequel to The Deal (1991), Lefcourt brings his hapless film producer, Charlie Berns, back from industry oblivion in another riotous romp, this time through the disparate worlds of Tinseltown and Turkmenistan. Having failed to capitalize on the success of his surprising Oscar win, Charlie finds himself nearly penniless, homeless, carless, and, what's worse in Hollywood, cell phone-less. Salvation comes in the unlikely form of the enigmatic but ebullient Kermit Fenster, the CIA's man in Central Asia, who makes Charlie an offer he can't refuse: producing a reality TV series recording the 24/7 world of a Uzbeki warlord. The concept, says Kermit, is The Osbournes meets The Sopranos. While Charlie tends to the trigger-happy warlord and his minions holed up at the Pepsi-stocked, soap-opera-obsessed compound in Turkmenistan, network execs back in L.A. suddenly find themselves with a mega, and meshuga, hit on their hands. In this boisterous, laugh-out-loud spoof, Lefcourt manages to skewer every aspect of both Hollywood inanity and foreign-policy insanity. Carol Haggas
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