Screenplay

It is 1980's Los Angeles. Alys, a wealthy young dilettante accepts the invitation of a stranger to "get you into pictures" and suddenly finds himself behind the movie screen in the black-and-white world of the Silents: a Hollywood precisely as it was in the 1920's where love is the only subject matter but passion can be expressed solely within the censor's strict limits: where neither love nor death can last beyond the moment when the director says "Print That!" Alys's love for the glamorous and elusive Moira Silver inevitably leads him to want to break out of this artificial world with her, back to garishly colourful Los Angeles. Screenplay is a novel as tauntingly erotic as it is brilliantly imaginative--a mysterious and captivating novel that, while unique in itself, shares the magic of John Fowles's The Magus and Nabokov's Pale Fire. Actor and writer Simon Callow has long been a huge fan of this writer - and in particular this book - and has written a fascinating Afterword. Callow has always longed to make a movie. AUTHOR: MacDonald Harris was the pseudonym of Donald Heiney. He wrote 16 novels and one book on sailing (he was in the US Navy during WW2) and lived for most of his life in Newport, California. In 1982 he received a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his entire body of work. Simon Callow is a BAFTA nominated actor who's work includes Room With A View, Shakespeare in Love, Amadeus and Four Weddings and a Funeral. He is also an accomplished writer who contributes articles on musical theory and literature to the New York Review of Books and has published biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton, Orson Wells, and Wagner, among others.

About the Author :
MacDonald Harris was the pseudonym of Donald Heiney. He wrote 16 novels and one book on sailing (he was in the US Navy during WW2) and lived for most of his life in Newport, California. In 1982 he received a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his entire body of work. Simon Callow is a BAFTA nominated actor who's work includes Room With A View, Shakespeare in Love, Amadeus and Four Weddings and a Funeral. He is also an accomplished writer who contributes articles on musical theory and literature to the New York Review of Books and has published biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton, Orson Wells, and Wagner, among others.

Review :
"Screenplay is one of the most haunting books I have read in a long time...Harris is ever in control of his material as the story progresses with the logic of dreams, and with their strangely predictable shocks of recognition, their symbolic furnishings. Yet woven into the archetypal longings of Alys's dream are the illusions of our common, collective false dreams--the movies." -Dorothy Bryant, The San Francisco Chronicle "This novel hasn't lost any of its luster since its original publication in 1982--it's both ingeniously plotted and lyrically written." -Kirkus Review "Unlike most fantasies, or at least most novels that have more to do with fantastic concepts, even fantastic erotic concepts, than with people, Screenplay grows on you. MacDonald Harris is a gifted craftsman, a meticulous writer whose powers as a storyteller are as compelling as the sexual tensions he imagines." -Elliot Anderson, Chicago Tribune Book World