by Shelly Frome

            It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what prompted me to write an antic, edgy novel about L.A..  I could start with Oscar Levant’s vintage remark:  “If you keep peeling away the tinsel, you can finally get to the real tinsel.”  In my case, I found myself stripping away  the illusions I encountered wondering if there was some way to get to something that actually mattered.

As for the illusions.   Once, when visiting an executive I knew at Paramount, she became antsy about moving her pricey sports car.  It seems the vast parking lot doubled as a pond and waterway; a situation she accepted as routine under the near-drought conditions and blazing sun.  At the same time, the mother of my nephew’s best friend was busy a few miles south stalking the sidewalks of Melrose.  This too was routine, trying to waylay Jay Leno and talk him into putting her on his show as a brazen housewife.  Either that or, if worse came to worse, getting him to feature her son Howie who, well past the age of thirty, still hadn’t been alone with a woman.  Anything to connect to the entertainment industry.   My brother-in-law, the pharmacist, was not only impressed by her dogged pursuit, he was still brandishing photos of a movie star who’d seen better days, one he’d corralled a few years back while filling her prescription.  It soon became no surprise when staying at the Avalon at the corner of Olympic and Beverly Drive, everyone behind the reception desk was quick to note they were really actors or would-be screenwriters; the waiters and waitresses undiscovered talent.  It goes without saying that most of those congregating around the adjacent pool were flaunting an outlandish outfit and hawking their charms and winning smile or a script or a new wrinkle for a project.  In turn, the object of their affections was trying to convince the hawkers and flaunters that he possessed an untold pipeline to instant success.  Later on, a short walk up the street revealed a paunchy middle-aged man standing in front of Al’s outdoor news-stand yelling into his cell phone, “Listen to me, Harry!  I’m telling ya the me you think you’ve known has breached the barricade. I’m gonna be on the back lot taking a meeting.  I kid you not! All this, as they say  just for openers.

Unlike my encounters in New York as a starving actor, these Angelenos came in all ages and sizes, perpetually reaching for a brass ring that was just around the corner.  Or within driving distance and within reach by, perhaps, hooking up in Malibu, Burbank, Laurel Canyon or on some veranda in the Hollywood Hills.   In contrast, in “the big apple” it was all compressed and clearly mapped out.  Meetings took place in midtown, probably in the Brill Building or a few blocks away on the phone with the likes of agent Tony Rivers.  Directly south—almost within walking distance bordered by the Hudson and East River--there were the mean streets, areas you thought twice about as you neared the corner of Hester and Mulberry.  You measured time by your track record and how many years it had been since your twenty-fourth birthday.  Of course the simplest gauge was to ask yourself how long you’d been holed up in this cold-water flat in the dead of winter, on the fringe and on the brink of either selling out or slip-sliding back to Des Moines, Duluth or Claxton, Georgia.  Even the mobsters knew exactly where they were headed.  No such gauge, however, west of Almeda all the way to the Santa Monica Pier and the churning surf.  No way, in fact, to really tell if you were ever truly physically “there” or entertaining some façade or figment that passed for it and kept the dream machine going.     

            Still and all, there were signs that something might actually be percolating under the veil of sun and smog.  At the park fronting the Pier, a shaggy-looking guy in his early thirties who very well could have been from East L.A. was telling a well-tanned homeless man, “I tell you, you better watch out, you know?  It’s going down tonight.”  Was he rehearsing for a TV show, or was something dicey about to happen?  And though she was reluctant to talk about it, my sister, who has a home just off La Cienega and Orlando, had had bars installed on her windows.  And my mother’s house, about ten miles east, had been fitted with iron bars even more foreboding.  A bit north, during the ritual morning coffee klatch right off Fairfax at the Farmers Market, I overheard industry wannabes and self-styled insiders talking about someone coming in from Vegas to bankroll a deal.  I’m not certain if it was a front or had to do with a reality show, a video game or some Internet ploy.  But from their conspiratorial tone, they reminded me of Danny DeVito in L.A. Confidential, muttering, “Now remember, folks, this is hush-hush, strictly on the Q.T.”  

            By then, imaginatively, the lines began to blur.  While visiting a contact at an old vintage studio tucked neatly away, a police helicopter circled overhead while my wife and I were driven by a sound stage housing episodes of a low-grade TV cop show.  A few moments later, our guide took us past weathered back lots—the façade of a western town, a crumbling moon walk, etc.--that seemed to be crying out to be brought back to life.  Perhaps offering itself as an arena where tinsel and trouble could meet.    

And that’s as close to the springboard as I can get.

            At some point, those on the fringe of both sides of the coin, something blowing in on the dry Santa Ana winds and a whimsical, thirty-something animator/script doctor trying to shape a dicey storyboard came into play.  Call the scriptwriter Ben.  As the tale opens, Ben is faced with turning his career around within the next few days or else.  With this time-frame in mind (which also happens to coincide with an upcoming birthday), Ben is willing to vie for any opportunity, including a chance to create a new vehicle for an aging but still nubile rock star.  As a result, he is unwittingly set on a collision course with a rangy tracker (call him Deke) in cahoots with a Vegas mob, and Molly, a wannabe actress and delivery girl heading down from the farm belt of Salinas in an old pickup.   Before long, and under greater pressure than he ever bargained for, Ben finds himself in grave danger, involved with Molly and well past the point of no return.

            Somehow, an assorted cast of characters began cropping up to drive the story and either help or hinder Ben on his heady journey toward some inkling of what really matters in this loopy world.   Included are a Russian producer on the verge of deportation, a bungling point man for the mob, an undercover Chicano cop (and Ben’s best friend), and a dozen or so others.  Apart from the old rundown movie studio and various locales in and around L.A. and Santa Monica, the storyline also wends it way down from a rugged spot in the Rockies, a train ride along the Columbia River, an encounter in downtown Portland, a rummage through the Salinas Valley and a foray into the Vegas Strip.

            Even though the odds nowadays are well over a hundred to one, the tale not only came together but was published.  Still you never know if there’s any correlation between what you thought you were doing and feedback from those, as they say, in the know.  Here are a few of the advance blurbs:

     Shelly Frome is a professor of dramatic arts emeritus at the University of Connecticut.  Aside from the recently published Tinseltown Riff  and The Art and Craft of Screenwriting, his books include The Actors Studio and the mystery novels Lilac Moon and Sun Dance for Andy Horn.   He has written numerous articles published nationally and internationally on acting and film along with twenty-five plays, and was a professional actor in New York and the summer theater circuit.  His features and profiles appear regularly in The Country Magazine, an arts periodical that covers upstate New York, the Berkshires and Northwestern Connecticut.  He lives in Litchfield, Connecticut. 

by Shelly Frome

Reviewed by

Robert Crooke

Ben Prine is on his last chance in Hollywood, writing a screenplay for a faded pop star who hopes to save her own career. In the process, he stumbles into a wide-ranging criminal scam and meets a star-struck girl named Molly, whose Chevy pickup carries suspicious cargo. The roguish Leo funnels cash out of Budapest to finance Angelique’s career-boosting movie and fancies himself a sort of Hungarian Otto Preminger. Meanwhile Ben’s sometime buddy, C.J. Rodriguez, a morally vague police detective,

spends a lot of shift-time at the beach. These could be characters from Elmore Leonard’s

clever Hollywood gambit, Get Shorty, in which mobsters became producers, hit men longed for participation points—preferably gross—and nobody noticed anything odd about anything.

But actually you’ll find Ben Prine and the others in Tinseltown Riff, an entertaining new mystery novel by Shelly Frome. Cynical, yet inappropriately optimistic, and not as smart as they think, Frome’s characters are obsessed with Hollywood like children with their toys—think very naughty children.

What makes Ben sympathetic is that he knows Hollywood is a big, nasty playpen. And you can’t help feeling for a 31-year old orphan abandoned by his mother when he was three and who isn’t sure of his real birthday. But even “Aunt June,” the kind woman with whom he was left and who lets him crash at her place, has lost patience with his extended adolescence.

Tinseltown Riff describes a West Hollywood of faded boulevards, seedy hotels, and grade-B movie studios, whose dormant sets are available for quickie TV pilots and commercials—or criminal activity. It’s a Hollywood so narcissistic and

self-referencing that it exploits its own demise as entertainment. Cemeteries full of dead film stars have “old movie nights” at which films are projected against mausoleum walls and folks watch from the lawn.

Even in the nicer neighborhoods up in the Hills, something’s off about the sun and glitter. Behind ubiquitous Venetian blinds, desperate starlets age and rock stars snort coke. Around the pools, agents sun themselves like lizards. In health clubs scattered across the valley, young and old alike work their surgically-corrected bodies into the false perfection of mannequins. These are the walking dead in a spiritual desert blown by arid

Santa Ana winds.  And when a mobbed-up, Las Vegas tracker named Deke heads toward L.A. on a collision course with Ben, the already sharp narrative adds a dimension, drawing apt connections between two desert cities and their similarly misbegotten dreams.

In fact, I couldn’t help making other connections with recent news headlines—all those hyped real estate values, sub-prime loans, and synthetic risk instruments that snagged both the bit players and the superstar investment banks. It’s as if America chases the same fantasy on Wall Street as in Hollywood or Vegas, a single, common dream of

striking it rich. The ethical thrust of Shelly Frome’s dark, funny and trenchant riff is that it’s a bad dream, from which Ben Prine will soon wake.

Robert Crooke’s latest novel is Sunrise.