Pacific Tremors

Keneret, the director, and Spear, the Anglo-American historian-critic, have committed the great Hollywood sin: they've gotten old. Spear, fading in the Malibu hills, is consoled and diverted by his wonderful granddaughter, Jennifer, a San Francisco lawyer. Keneret, given one more chance to make a film by Duggan, his mercurial billionaire backer, centers it around Leet de Loor, a young French woman he's discovered in Fiji. As the two brilliant veterans slide toward oblivion, the equally brilliant young women rise in the paradisal new world of the Pacific Rim, even as it trembles in its terrestrial and human faults. Richard Stern's affectionately deadly humor recreates the old Hollywood and the new in the tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West.