Triple Feature

Sex, lies and some videotape take center stage in Bagshawe's (Career Girls) strong and angry tale of lust, greed and envy in the film industry. Eleanor Marshall, president of Artemis Studios and ""the most powerful woman in Hollywood"" at 38, needs a hit film to save her career and desperately wants a baby to fulfill her life. The men in her world include her live-in lover, Paul Halfin, and the chairman and CEO of Artemis, Tom Goldman, whose young ""trophy wife"" is well-heeled but a bore. A script called Triple Feature makes its way to Artemis, written by first-time screenwriter Megan Silver, who metamorphoses from waitress to player with the help of slick agent Dave Tauber. The film becomes a vehicle for a rock star and for a supermodel, Roxanna Felix, whose tantrums threaten to sink not only the $100 million project but Artemis as well, and whose unsavory past sends shockwaves through the industry. The cast and crew go on location in the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, where the characters' ambitious agendas--and an inconvenient monsoon--hold the movie hostage. Bagshawe's characters are familiar but not unrealistic, and she seems to know the movie biz. As a Hollywood novel, hers isn't in the league of, say, Bruce Wagner's I'm Losing You, but it's a firm step up from the work of the Collins sisters and should please any reader who wants a gutsy power-read.