Max in Filmland

MAX IN FILMLAND is a fresh and entertaining comedy of manners set in '70s Euro-Hollywood . . . It is 1979, on the cusp of the Greed Decade, when Maxwell Rider arrives in Los Angeles from the East to break into filmmaking. His introduction to international film-maker Alex des Prairies launches Max into an exotic landscape of extreme-narcissists where style is the only currency. Raised in wealthy homes where his mother worked as governess, and shut out of his titled father's life, Max is seduced by the extraordinary lifestyle of Alex's circle. As partner in Filmland Bank, with tough New Yorker Irving Fain, Max agrees to produce Alex's film, and falls for Susie Grass, an elusive heiress whose only asset is a gold mine that she must win from her dissolute father. Max's friends lead him down tangled paths and he must scramble to avoid an FBI sting of Hollywood. When Alex's carelessness on the set results in injury to a young actor, Max initiates a desperate plan to save the actor's life - and forge a link to his own integrity. "I read the last 100 pages at a sitting to find out what happened to Max. . . .the lush, descriptive style makes a nice backdrop for a satire on greed and financial manipulation in the Hollywood of the late 1970s." [Leonard Tourney, Ph. D, Lecturer Emeritus, UCSB's Writing Program, and author of. the Matthew Stock mystery series set in Elizabethan England.]