Film Rights Report

FILM RIGHTS REPORT
Bruce Wagner knows Hollywood cold, and he writes about it in a way that frustrated screenwriters like Michael Tolkin can only dream about. In STILL HOLDING (Simon & Schuster), he serves up another razor-sharp exploration of the depths of Tinseltown's black heart, with clueless young actors, surreal interior monologues, faux Buddhism and creepy celebrity look-alikes.

One of the main characters, Becca, is a Drew Barrymore look-alike who works for an agency specializing in hiring out such people for events (one of the better scenes involves a brawl between two Russell Crowes) and whose acting career has just started to take off with a role as a corpse on "Six Feet Under." In a brilliant meta-fictional twist by Wagner, Becca gets cast in a Spike Jonze movie about celebrity look-alikes, in which Drew Barrymore also has a role.

For anybody looking to take film the next step past "Adaptation," this would be it: a Spike Jonze movie about a book about a Spike Jonze movie. Jonze could play himself, Barrymore could play both herself and the look-alike, and the celebs would line up for cameos—"The Player" for the meta-generation.

Operating on a much more basic level is THE BANG DEVILS (Dark Alley/HarperCollins), a bloody piece of work by Patrick Foss. Starting out like a dissolute narrative of Gen X ex-pats in Japan, the book follows Chris and Jessica, a couple of young, attractive Americans who, by dint of being young, attractive Americans, have the country pretty much at their fingertips—Chris as a nightclub bouncer and Jessica as a hostess segueing into the high-end call girl business.

Foss moves things into Tarantino territory when Chris and Jessica (along with Jessica's problematic boyfriend, Taro) kidnap one of Jessica's moneybag clients, Tamotsu, and hold him for ransom. Things aren't so easy, of course, as the nebbishy Tamotsu turns out to be a high-ranking yakuza whose fellow gangsters aren't much in the mood to parley, and all three of the kidnappers turn out to be much less intelligent than they need to be to survive.

Foss moves from Tarantino to the Jim Thompson side of things as the three start turning on one another and making progressively worse decisions, involving much cutting off of fingers. A sharp narrative, sexy big-city setting and lashings of violence could make for a good low-budgeter by a team looking to make their mark.

With Hollywood's recent penchant for tales of adventure set in the past, you couldn't do much better than to snap up CROFTON'S FIRE (Putnam), by first-timer Keith Coplin, a book that could just as well have been titled "The Adventures of Lieutenant Michael Crofton." The novel starts out in 1868 with Crofton barely surviving getting sucked into Custer's Last Stand, then