Peter Lefcourt

PETER LEFCOURT

Peter Lefcourt is a refugee from the trenches of Hollywood, where he has distinguished himself as a writer and producer of film and television. Among his credits are "Cagney and Lacey," for which he won an Emmy Award; "Monte Carlo," in which he managed to keep Joan Collins in the same wardrobe for 35 pages; the relentlessly sentimental "Danielle Steel's Fine Things," and the underrated and hurried "The Women of Windsor," the most sordid, and thankfully last, miniseries about the British Royal Family.

He began writing novels in the late 1980's, after being declared "marginally unemployable" in the entertainment business by his then agent. In 1991 Lefcourt published The Deal -- an act of supreme hubris that effectively bit the hand that fed him and produced, in that inverse and masochistic logic of Hollywood, a fresh demand for his screenwriting services. It remains a cult favorite in Hollywood and was one of the ten books that John Gotti reportedly ordered from jail.

His most recent sortie into the world of film and television was a stint as Show Runner/Executive Producer of the late, lamented Showtime succes d'estime, "Beggars & Choosers," a show that he co-created with the late Brandon Tartikoff and that ran for 42 episodes, from June, 1999, through February, 2001.

He has divided his time between screenplays and novels, publishing The Dreyfus Affair in 1992, his darkly comic look at homophobia in baseball as a historical analog to anti-Semitism in fin de siecle France, which The Walt Disney Company has optioned twice and let lapse twice in paroxysms of anxiety about what it says about the national pastime and, by extension, Disneyland. He is hopeful that a major(or even minor) motion picture will be made from this book in the author's lifetime. The book continues to sell well in trade paperback and is in its fifteenth printing.

In 1994, he published Di And I, a heavily fictionalized version of his love affair with the late Princess of Wales. Princess Diana's own stepgodmother, Barbara Cartland, who was herself no slouch when it came to publishing torrid books, declared Di And I "ghastly and unnecessary," which pushed the British edition briefly onto the best-seller lists. Di And I was optioned by Fine Line Pictures, in 1996, and was quietly abandoned after Diana's untimely death the following year. Someday it may reach the screen -- when poor Diana is no longer seen as an historical icon but merely as the misunderstood and tragic figure that she was, devoured by her own popularity.

Abbreviating Ernie, his next novel, was inspired by his brief brush with notoriety after the appearance of Di And I. At the time he was harassed by the British tabloids and spent seven excruciating minutes on "Entertainment Tonight." He was subsequently and fittingly bumped out of People Magazine by O.J. Simpson's white Bronco media event of June, 1994.

Lefcourt's research on a movie for HBO about the 1995 Bob Packwood canard was the germ for his next novel, The Woody. He began to see that the former senator's battle with the Senate Ethics Committee was a dramatization of the total confusion in America regarding appropriate sexual behavior for politicians. Packwood became the sacrificial lamb -- taking the pipe for an entire generation of men. Basically, he got it caught in the buzzsaw of the zeitgeist. After President Clinton got his caught in the buzzsaw as well, The Woody became all the more topical. It asks the question: What is the relationship between a politician's sexual competence and his popularity in the polls? If Packwood had been as smooth as Clinton, he would be the majority leader of the Senate today instead of the poster boy for Sexual Harassment.

His sixth book was entitled Eleven Karens -- an erratically erotic memoir of his love affairs with eleven woman, all of whom happened to be named Karen. Though it has received an enormous wave of indifference from the major movie studios, which he takes to be a good indication of its literary value, it has received some careful scrutiny on the part of the attorneys representing various Karens mentioned in the book.

His most recent book, The Manhattan Beach Project, came out in February, 2005, from Simon & Schuster, is a nominal sequel to The Deal, in that it follows the adventures of that book's hero, the intrepid Charlie Berns, who after winning an Oscar for Best Picture a scant four years ago, already finds himself broke, living in his nephew's pool house and attending meetings of the Brentwood chapter of Debtors Anonymous. It is, among other things, a comment on the short shelf life of fame and fortune in the movie business.

This time Charlie raises himself out of his own ashes by producing an outrageous reality television series called Warlord: logline: "Tony Soprano meets Genghis Khan." The show is shot in Uzbekistan for a rogue division of ABC, called ABCD, which operates from a bunker in Manhattan Beach developing top secret extreme reality television concepts -- ideas so extreme that the parent company in Burbank has built a firewall of deniability between itself and the division.

This one, unfortunately, turned out not to be his swan song for his already-crumbling career as a television writer. He continues to work sporadically in this town, though he suspects that a fatwa has been issued against him from the Ayatollas on Dopey Drive in Burbank.

He is bringing Charlie back, one more time, as one of six characters whose adventures at the Cannes Film Festival comprise the story of his new novel, in progress, tentatively titled, "Jet Lag."

Peter lives with his wife Terri, who is not a Karen, in Santa Monica, California, in a modest, but not unsubstantial, house that is seven minutes from the Pacific Ocean, where he often walks to sort things out. They spend the occasional weekend in their time/share in Tashkent.