Finished Fr 8/16/19
This is an ancient hardback that I purchased at the library sidewalk sale on Sa 6/19/95 and had never read.
I really liked the novel and it's a nice companion piece to John Gregory Dunne's, 'THE STUDIO' that I finished last week. Both provide insight into the movie industry of the last century. I'd sure like to read a book about the way things are handled today.
Perry and Jane Moss are the perfect couple. He's a tenured professor in a small Vermont college where he's a revered English teacher, and Jane is a published photographer.
They are soul mates, best friends, and still very much in love.
Perry gets an offer to travel to Hollywood and transform one of his published short stories into a television series.
They travel to Hollywood and at first, Perry resists the idea. He feels that his style of writing is far above 'Tinseltown', but Jane makes him give it a chance. She convinces him that he will 'elevate' the projects that he's given.
Everything that could go wrong, goes wrong. After a while, Jane returns to Vermont. She immediately sees that Perry has sold his soul, and this sickens her. She wants to return to what they had, but Perry maintains that they can have it both ways.
Perry spirals out of control, and never quite grasps the moral and ethical climate of the entertainment industry.
It's 'Feast or Famine', and nothing in between, and any moral code gives way to the power of money. Yet money is not the final object of desire, it's the power that it represents.
Example:
When a producer is dropped from a multi-million dollar project this is not seen as a failure, but a win. The fact that he was involved in a project of this magnitude is seen as an unqualified success, and the fact that he lost it is not important. He has proven that he can 'play with the big boys', and his course is set.
The book is easily written, but maybe a little cliched, but I still enjoyed it very much.
Kirkus Review:
"Perry Moss, 42, teaches at Haviland College in southern Vermont, publishes stories in Partisan Review and Playboy, lives happily with second wife Jane, a serious photographer: ""They were tweed. They were corduroy and cotton, with red flannel nightshirts in winter."" But when whiz-kid Archer Mellis, new TV-dept. chief at Paragon Films, decides to turn one of Perry's stories into a TV-series, the tweedy couple flies out for a sojourn in Tinseltown. And so begins an essentially familiar tale of selling out--as Perry, in Hollywood to write the pilot-episode, all too quickly goes Hollywood. . . to Jane's escalating dismay. True, at first Perry is put off by the glitz and the crassness, by boss Mellis, who dresses ""like a Castro-trained insurgent guerrilla."" But his colleagues--exec-producer Ned, director Kenton--are classy guys with theater backgrounds; they're encouraged to make ""The First Year's the Hardest"" (about newlyweds in academia) ""quality"" TV; the pilot turns into a two-hour TV-movie that gets good reviews and high ratings. So all of a sudden Perry is ""hot,"" and keeps putting off the return to Vermont as the show-biz possibilities proliferate. He's horny and high on power and glamour--his voice gets deeper and deeper--while Jane, fed up and neglected, heads home alone. Even after the TV-series production turns into a nightmare (crazy-quilt directives from network bozos, staff purges, disastrous ratings), unemployed Perry determines to stick it out in L.A., somehow get ""hot"" again; he maintains manic optimism with an assist from cocaine, blithely sacrificing his professorial tenure back home; he betrays exec-producer Ned, who's virtually the only gentleman in southern California. But finally, of course, after a farcical interlude with loony producer Larman Kling (""Harpo Marx with a voice"") and a script about a psychic dog, Perry realizes that he'd ""forgotten about friends. Forgotten about everything that mattered. Or used to matter."" And there's a saccharine fadeout on Perry returning to Vermont, ""moving toward the woman he loved."" Wakefield, a novelist (Going All the Way) who has done time in TV (James at 15), fills out this thin, predictable scenario with enough insider-ish, cartoony details to provide fairly steady amusement for media mavens. (One highlight: the moans and murmurs that ensue--""It's genocide. . .""--when Perry's series is scheduled opposite Dallas.) But there's too much blandness and sentimentality here for all-out Tinseltown satire--while Perry, instantly corrupted and superficially redeemed, is too much of a clown to take seriously."
A link to the author's page on wikipedia-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Wakefield
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