About This Book
In her debut as a novelist, screenwriter Goldemberg ( The Burning Bed ) comes up a trifle tedious with a sporadically amusing fable about the vagaries of fame and fortune in La-La Land. Dick, Dog of Oaxaca, is a yellow-haired mongrel who--banished from the litter following an incestuous outpouring of puppy pubescence in which he tried to mount his dear old mum--is living a carefree life in the Mexican tourist mecca when he is discovered by blonde bubblehead Wanda Sacks (aka Wonder Sex), current casting-couch expendable of sleazeball director Harold LaTorre. Dick is given a part in the mega-hyped flick Escape to Infinity . When his big scene is consigned to the cutting-room floor (because, after 45 takes, he repeatedly upstages the star), Dick momentarily becomes canis non grata . But filmmakers are notorious for changing their minds. Predictably, the producers reverse themselves and Dick quickly rises to stardom in what is eventually released as Twin Dicks --``One Dick is as good as another,'' the producers say. Our hero is afforded star treatment--press agents, speech coaches, bodyguards--which of course leads to analysis and Zen. At times farcical, this regrettably uneven satire plays out as a corny ``sniff and tell'' about artistic non compos mentis in Hollywood. (Mar.)
