On March 3, 1983, Peter Ivers was found murdered in his loft on skid row in L.A. When Ivers died, much of the history of his experimental television show, New Wave Theatre
, went with him. In this frustrating book that is part detective story and part pop history, screenwriter and producer Franks awkwardly weaves interviews with Ivers’s many friends and associates—from Harold and Anne Ramis to Paul Michael Glaser (Starsky & Hutch
)—into his chronicle of Ivers’s life. Franks recreates the thriving theater and music scene in New York and L.A. in the late 1970s and early 1980s as he traces Ivers’s move from the Harvard Lampoon
to his work with David Lynch. Ivers’s most brilliant moment came with the creation of New Wave Theatre
, which brought together comedy and punk music in a new way, featuring acts from the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and the Circle Jerks alongside Beverly D’Angelo and John Belushi. Because it tries to cover so much material—Ivers’s unsolved murder, the history of New Wave Theatre
—it fails to cover any of it effectively; nevertheless, it provides a new look into a now mostly forgotten moment of pop culture. (Aug.)
