- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Orion; paperback First edition (19 Nov 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0575065494
- ISBN-13: 978-0575065499
- Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.6 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,061,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Scriptwriter Alan Tate, down on his luck, meets Andree, a German producer, who invites him to "string a few words together" for a film. Alan's life begins to liven up, with girls on tap, a real-life bank robbery and police officers suspecting his play is some kind of master plan.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
"Losing the Plot" is a rollicking read. Don't expect to sleep if you start it at night; and give your bed-partner due warning if you can't belly-laugh silently.
Always witty, often hilarious, this is the story of Alan Tate, a once-successful screenwriter whose life is a mess -- aging, broke, being sued for divorce. Scrabbling around for elusive commissions in the savage world of scriptwriting, he's suddenly offered a plum job. Trouble is, he's been set up and finds himself the prime suspect in a murder. Struggling to extricate himself, Tate knows exactly how the plot would go if this were a movie. But this time the plot is driving him, and he's clueless.
I hugely enjoyed this novel. Tate is an anti-hero for our times: as inept in the face of impossible odds as the rest of us would be without the scriptwriter on our side. "What are you DOING?" he demands of himself at a critical moment. "In suite 367 is someone who framed you for murder and all you can do is think what films it reminds you of."
But that's the twist of the whole story. Movies are not just Tate's profession, but his whole frame of reference. In one lovely scene, he's at a wealthy stranger's house, raiding the fridge at midnight, and finding only caviar and foie gras: "What the hell, let's be Richard Gere for a while." In hairier moments, Tate's thinking is paralyzed by images from Hitchcock and Tarantino, of Humphrey Bogart or Harrison Ford resolving the situation with a flick or the tongue or a whip, and by his overwhelming desire for scriptmaking's standard quick fix -- "What we need is for that door to open and the finest hacker in Europe to walk in."
Author Paul Wheeler weaves a deft counterpoint between the familiar scenarios of action movies and the "reality" of Tate's predicament, played out against the backdrop of the screenwriting business (Wheeler's own profession). The result is rich satire. All movie buffs -- and who isn't, these days? -- will get a kick out of this sparkling novel.
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