cover image Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way

Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way

Bruce Campbell, .. St. Martin's/Dunne, $23.95 (309pp) ISBN 978-0-312-31260-2

Satire and sharp one-liners are the engines powering low-budget movie hero Campbell's (If Chins Could Kill ) first autobiographical novel, a funny, breezy, high-camp affair. After dispensing B-movie witticisms on romance and navigating love scenes, Sci-Fi channel schlock film actor "Bruce Campbell" is unexpectedly offered the A-list role of a "wise-cracking doorman" and "emotional lynchpin" in the new Mike Nichols romantic comedy Let's Make Love , starring Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger. After getting fully immersed in calamitous role research at the Waldorf-Astoria, Campbell postures (and annoys) his way through the first read-through with indifferent cast members, runs lines with a timid Gere, crassly advises Zellweger on how to accentuate her bust line, dishes ex-husbands with Liz Taylor and berates the film's director of photography, Oscar-winning Vilmos Zsigmond (whose name Campbell spells Sigmund). After a Secret Service ambush and more movie set mayhem, Campbell's A-List luck finally runs out. But not even a bumbling S.W.A.T. team can stop this determined day player from getting his due. Campbell knows of what he writes, and this endless barrage of extreme silliness obviously spoofs (and quite possibly mirrors) a frenzied acting career made up of equal parts exasperation and hilarity. Agent, Jodi Reamer at Writers House . (June 13)