Screenplay — MacDonald Harris

It is 1980's Los Angeles. Alys, a wealthy young dilettante accepts the invitation of a stranger to “get you into pictures” and suddenly finds himself behind the movie screen in the black-and-white world of the Silents-a Hollywood precisely as it was in the 1920's where love is the only subject matter but passion can be expressed solely within the censor's strict limits: where neither love nor death can last beyond the moment when the director says “Print That!”   


Alys's love for the glamorous and elusive Moira Silver inevitably leads him to want to break out of this artificial world with her, back to garishly colourful Los Angeles.


Screenplay is a novel as tauntingly erotic as it is brilliantly imaginative -- a mysterious and captivating novel that, while unique in itself, shares the magic of John Fowles's The Magus and Nabokov's Pale Fire.


First published by Atheneum in 1982, Screenplay is the third in Galileo's programme to reissue this hugely talented author's work, the first two being The Balloonist and The Carp Castle.


Actor and writer Simon Callow has long been a huge fan of the writer-and in particular this book-and has written the Afterword.