Impersonators Anonymous: A Novel

by Rick Lenz

Will hidden demons and hatreds kill completion of the lost John Wayne/James Dean film? A psychological mystery with a Hollywood thriller climax.
 
In the late 1970s, young, would-be movie producer Emily Bennett doesn't believe the story about a 2/3 completed film starring James Dean and John Wayne. But when she meets the old film editor who stole the master negative of the legendary Showdown, she sets out to complete the movie with two uncannily gifted celebrity impersonators, Jimmy Riley as James Dean and Tom "Duke" Manfredo as John Wayne. Together, Emily and her co-stars portray characters entangled in an ambiguous love triangle that mirrors their dysfunctional, real-life dynamic.

Add to the a distrustful prima-donna director and Emily's unresolved issues with her narcissistic brother and dying father. The completed film and story promises its own heartbreaking and existential showdown.

Genres: Fiction, Ebooks

295 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 5, 2021

About the author

I’ve spent the greatest part of my life as a writer and actor. Most of the acting was to make a living and raise my family. I have been a writer longer than I’m comfortable saying. I do it because it gives me joy, whether it’s playwriting, or in the last dozen years, writing books. Like a lot of people, I’m told, I threw away my first attempts at books—maybe two medium length novels. I hope readers come away from my stories knowing something they didn't know before, having been entertained, and wishing it didn't have to come to an end.

To see what I'm doing now, please visit www.ricklenz.com. Thanks!

Reviews

[Richard Lohrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lenz has an insider's view of Hollywood that adds gravitas to a very unique story. Part fiction and part reality, the book mimics the film industry itself - what is real after all in a world that delivers fantasy and reenactment at best? The lines of reality are blurry. Because of that, people in the industry get lost in the same dynamic and while it's exciting and compelling, it can also be destructive. Harmony is hard fought. You feel this book as you read it. This is not a book you can read passively - if so, you'l miss the nuances and complexities. I found it entertaining, though-provoking, and intense.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Face blindness,” - sufferers’ inability to recognize the faces of familiar people.’

It is not often that we find in an actor or writer or performer memoir with that element of truth that must be difficult to write - that stardom somehow escaped them. Rick Lenz has been around the block in the cinematic field and has had contact and interplay with many very famous people - most of which he shared in his entertaining and enormously popular book NORTH OF HOLLYWOOD. His book was more than a gossip column: Rick Lenz looks back at his life from childhood on through years of acting, trying out of major roles and losing them, acting on the stage and screen and television, writing plays and producing because all that happened. Rick next turned his skills to the ever-popular obsession with time travel with his excellent THE ALEXANDRITE and won again.

Now Rick steps back into the Hollywood he knows so well with this fascinating show biz exploration of phantom film and buried cinematic treasure, adds some movie stars we all know, and develops a superb tale that cold easily become a screenplay! So what makes this diversion into another Rick Lenz winner? Simple. It is his magnetic style of writing, prose that approaches poetry on nearly every page, a story that utilizes Rick's Hollywood connection, and the fact that the people he creates (or celebrates...) are so well sculpted that should we pass them on the street we would immediately recognize them. That is a talent in which Rick basks.

A sample of his skill opens this book in1961: `1961–1973 “Mama!” Emily shouted for the seventh time, each time louder than the one before. “You’ll never, never guess!” She slammed the front door shut. “Never in a billion years!” She swooped up her Pekinese, Suki, from the tidy little rock garden that occupied one corner of the foyer. From amidst a meadow of bone-white stones, Saint Francis, surrounded by plaster sparrows gathered at his feet, kept his focus on his birds and ignored Emily, who was furiously petting Suki. “You know that show we saw last night about the new vice president’s wife?” “Yes?” Emily clenched her eyes, sucking in a measured breath. “She’s my new teacher!” “Who is?” “That woman. The one from last night. The lady who’s married to the vice president, Mrs. Johnson.” She glanced down at Saint Francis’s flock. “That Ladybird.” Her mother came down the stairs. “I don’t understand, darling. Your new teacher is named Mrs. Johnson?” “No! She’s named something else. Mrs. Nichols, I think. But she is that vice president’s wife from last night.” She set Suki back next to the birds and Saint Francis. “That Ladybird.” “You’re teacher is Ladybird Johnson … then who is Mrs. Nichols?” “They’re the same,” said Emily. “They’re exactly the same.” Faye Bennett knelt and put her arms around her. “No, darling, they’re not.” She stroked her cheek, then took hold of her shoulders, looking her in the eye. “Your new teacher is Mrs. Nichols. You learned her name today. Right? … I’m right, yes?” Emily looked down and in a small voice said, “Yeah.” “Then she can’t be the vice president’s wife, can she?” Emily collapsed into her mother, burying her head in her stomach. “Why doesn’t anybody ever believe me?”

The synopsis outlines the chief facts of the story: `: Late Seventies: Young, would-be movie producer Emily Bennett doesn’t believe Have Gun Will Travel star, Richard Boone, when he tells her about a 2/3 completed film, starring James Dean and John Wayne. But when she meets the old film editor who stole the master negative of the legendary Showdown, she finds two uncannily gifted celebrity impersonators and with the aid of emerging computer technology sets out to complete the movie. Filming Showdown, Emily and her stars portray characters entangled in an ambiguous love triangle with Oedipal overtones that mirrors their real life dynamic. On top of this and distrusting her prima donnaish director, Emily and her brother (three face lifts) struggle with unresolved issues about their dying father. All these flawed characters find themselves in the titular showdown of their lives when their interwoven back-stories coalesce in a stormy climax that reveals their hidden animosities and demons.’

So we now know that Rick Lenz can likely enter any realm of story telling and succeed. This is one finely tuned machine of a novel. Highly Recommended.

[Neil Muhlberger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impersonators Anonymous by Rick Lenz is an entertaining read with a number of different layers in the action and the characters. The basic premise is that set of individuals set out to complete an unfinished film from 25 years earlier. Each of the characters is wrestling with a sense of brokenness in their lives – two male celebrity impersonators struggling to understand the lines between the celebrity and their own true selves, and a woman who has a form of face-blindness that skews her perception of the people in her life. Others with their own struggles are introduced along the way. Only a few peripheral characters don’t reveal their challenges and sense of incompleteness. The film culture of Hollywood takes its blows as the backdrop of people who have lost any sense of who they really are and what life means to them. Famous celebrities are seen only in terms of their screen persona, the creation of a series of screenwriters. Illusion has become a reality for too many people. Ultimately some key events in the past of each individual, long suppressed, come to the fore and drive the final climax of the story.
The writing is very competent and the author creates a compelling story line as these lives converge on a critical moment. The effectiveness of the psychological layer is less successful. Each character talks about their brokenness, but the reader is often left taking the author’s word for it, rather than developing an honest emotional sense of the scars and pain of each person. Hallucinations try to tell the story, but a sense of friction, keeping the illusions from reaching over into real life, is somewhat lacking. The love triangle never quite takes hold with simmering jealousy taking the place of real emotional connections. The reader is left to observe, not feel.
Certain structural aspects of the book are very much a matter of individual taste. Everything, and I mean everything, is connected and accounted for by the end of the book. I think of this style as “high melodrama” and while it is fun to read on occasion, it is not always my taste. I’m reminded of Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind in this sense. The book can feel like the basis of a future screenplay, rather than a stand alone novel. The author also wrestles with other familiar story conventions. Early on, I started thinking about how the book reminded me of the movie Babes in Arms with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on a show despite their lack of experience. I had to chuckle when, several pages later, the author made the same reference! At the same time, shouldn’t this type of connection have alerted the author that there might be something askew with the book? Updating the setting with a darker tone with sex, drugs, and alcohol may not be sufficient to address the problem.
Some of the Hollywood references are fun. Who knew that Richard Boone was so scientific and philosophical? String theory only started becoming a subject of study in the 1960’s, and here he is, in the early 70’s talking about infinite singularities and quantum leaps? And although the movie Tron used computer generated special effects in 1982, would a set of lesser-experienced movie makers in 1979 have talked about how computers would help them pull off the completion of a movie started 25 years earlier? Do we have some anachronisms at work here?
Overall, Impersonators Anonymous is a fun read, especially for movie buffs. It is somewhat less successful as a psychological drama, but it still has its moments.

[Jennifer Robb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a new author for me, and I feel like the writing had a layer that I haven't penetrated. I think the idea was that we all have different personas that we put on in different situations, and while that is not necessarily bad, it can be if we lose the sense of who we really are because of it.

But I fail to see how a group fashioned after AA but for celebrity impersonators would work. There's no mention of a 12 step program like AA has. I can see celebrity impersonators possibly needing a support group. I'm sure there are common issues that could be discussed: how to find work, how to be paid fairly for your work, how to deal with hecklers, how and when to be in character vs. when to not be in character, etc.

I did find it odd that a person with poor facial recognition sense who sees other people as celebrities on a routine basis would be convinced that she'd found the right people to play John Wayne and James Dean--well, maybe not so much that she would be convinced but that we should be convinced she has--the author does deal with that concern in the book.

For my taste, the book took too long to set up the premise--and then to get to the end without a full resolution was a bit of a letdown (though probably realistic to what would happen in the real world.)

I don't know enough about film to know if there really is a rumor of a movie starring both Wayne and Dean. I could see how that could intrigue many people if there were though, even though I am not a fan of either actor. I could see how it could intrigue an aspiring producer who has an inside track on finding the original film. I would think it would be hard to keep it quiet--something they mostly accomplished in the book.

Note: I received a copy of this book from LibraryThing's Early Reviewer's in exchange for an honest review.

[Gerry Blanchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading “North of Hollywood” by Rick Lenz, I was happy to see that he has a new book out called “Impersonators Anonymous”. The title itself was enough to make me want to read it. The story evolves around a woman who has an affliction called “Facial Agnosia” that causes her to misidentify familiar faces. In this particular case, she sees celebrity faces in place of the real ones. In addition, we meet two men who make their livings impersonating celebrities, and several actual celebrities as well. The writer blends these ingredients smoothly, until it all seems normal. After that, it’s only natural that they would become obsessed with a long hidden incomplete film starring James Dean and John Wayne.

Are impersonators anonymous? Do they lose their own identity and assume the mirror persona of the person they are impersonating? Are they aware of it while it is happening? I have heard of Civil War reenactors who have become lost in the time of that war, and behave and talk like Civil War soldiers in their real lives. Apparently it is a slippery slope, and one rarely explored in literature. Mr. Lenz has himself spent a lifetime in the world of make believe. Having acted in dozens of films, Broadway plays and TV series', he brought the nuances of his world to life in this book so authentically, that I too became obsessed with finishing the film.

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an okay read. The amount of characters and how they are all connected throughout the different years was hard for me to follow. The story line was interesting and I like that there was an actual ending to the book and not one that left you hanging.