Peter Lefcourt’s Followers (31)

Peter Lefcourt

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http://www.peterlefcourt.com/

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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 hi 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, was one of the ten books that John Gotti reportedly ordered from jail, and was adapted into a movie -- starring William H. Macy, Meg Ryan and L.L. Cool Jay -- that premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Subsequently, 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 fits 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 it in his lifetime. The book continues to sell well in trade paperback -- it's in its fifteenth printing, and, as such, acts as a small but steady cottage industry for its author, who, at this point, would almost rather keep optioning it than have it actually made. But not really.

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. In a paroxysm of misplaced guilt, the editors of "People," to make amends, declared it a "Beach Read," which helped put the book ephemerally on the Best Seller lists during the summer of 1994. Anecdotally, however, the author spent a lot of time combing the beaches that summer without seeing a single person reading his book.

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 his dick caught in the zeitgeist. After President Clinton got his caught in a younger zeitgeist, nearly costing him his job, 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 lead ...more

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Average rating: 3.77 · 2,050 ratings · 253 reviews · 21 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Dreyfus Affair: A Love Story 3.92 avg rating — 1,027 ratings — published 1992 — 9 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Purgatory Gardens 3.68 avg rating — 151 ratings — published 2015 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The First Time I Got Paid For It: Writers' Tales From The Hollywood Trenches by Peter Lefcourt (Editor), Laura J. Shapiro (Editor) 3.48 avg rating — 157 ratings — published 2000 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Deal: A Novel of Hollywood 3.85 avg rating — 142 ratings — published 1991 — 19 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Woody 3.79 avg rating — 133 ratings — published 1998 — 10 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Di and I 3.66 avg rating — 134 ratings — published 1994 — 10 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Manhattan Beach Project: A Novel 3.43 avg rating — 108 ratings — published 2005 — 10 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Abbreviating Ernie 3.72 avg rating — 60 ratings — published 1997 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Eleven Karens: A Novel 2.83 avg rating — 78 ratings — published 2002 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	An American Family 4.04 avg rating — 45 ratings — published 2012	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Peter Lefcourt (?)

“Why should his sexual preference preclude his being voted into Hall of Fame?"
"You don't know much about baseball, do you, doc?”
― Peter Lefcourt, The Dreyfus Affair: A Love Story

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Peter Lefcourt’s Followers (31)

Peter Lefcourt

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Topics Mentioning This Author

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Peter Lefcourt’s books