Laurence Klavan, The Shooting Script

The Shooting Script

Laurence Klavan

Ballantine, March 2005, $23.95 244 pp.

ISBN 0345462769

Roy Millano considers himself a "Trivial Man," a person so obsessed with movie arcane that he doesn't have a life and his only source of income is a newsletter he produces. He considers himself a movie detective after finding the original, long-lost version of the movie "The Magnificent Ambersons" (See THE OUTING EDGE) even though he was almost killed while pursuing it.

Now Roy's mother is ill and his aunt wants him to get a real job to pay for her care. When he gets an e-mail from an anonymous person telling him that he has a copy of the Day the Clown Cried, a Jerry Lewis drama that was never released, Roy rushes to meet the man. When he arrives at his hotel room, the man is dead and there is no tape. Forgetting about his mother's illness, Roy follows the trail to the tape and is stalked by another "Trivial Man" who is willing to kill anyone who gets in his way of finding and keeping the tape.

THE SHOOTING SCRIPT is a story of what happens when obsession is taken to extreme; Laurence Klavan has a protagonist with a refreshingly unique voice who can quote movie trivia at the drop of a hat, especially when he is nervous. The dangerous situations Roy finds himself in pursuing the movie does not deter him from going after what he wants even though he knows he might get killed by his obsessive stalker killer.

Harriet Klausner