All This & Popcorn Too

THE BEACH HOUSE (366 pp.)--Stephen Longstreet--Holt ($3.50).

Mike Zelsmith, film producer, is on the skids. It is years since he won his last Academy Award. His marriage is heading for the breakers while he guzzles Scotch on the rocks. Fed up with Mike's arty epics and domestic antics, his movie magnate father-in-law cuts off his bank credit. The Hollywood gripevine says that Mike Zelsmith, whom "even intellectuals respect," is about to make his first "quickie," a $300,000 thriller.

But Mike, who collects Goya etchings and reads Bernard Shaw, has "an ego as big as a horse . . . the loud ego of genius, real genius." Raking together the cash and crew to shoot the picture, he explains to his scriptwriter how he intends "to sneak in the truth" and make it the kind of Zelsmith Production people respect: "I give them the sex and the brawl, but also a little of the ache and the agony of life. The lousy beauty of it, the crummy pleasures of kids and family life, and art shots and a pain in the heart."

Booze & Benzedrine. Mike's own pain in the heart is Mollie, a trig little blonde with "small and perfect . . . breasts . . . out of a sweet period of Greek art." She lives among the "beach bums," the has-beens and would-be's of Hollywood. Mollie becomes Mike's "protege" in a sun-decked beach house on Cortez Beach ("better than Malibu"). Mike figures he can mold Mollie into another Garbo. Between picture takes, they swap dialogue. She: "That moon looks low enough to bite." He: "I have got a terrible yen for you. It's like a stomach full of broken glass." When words fail him, Mike swabs beach-tar stains off Mollie's feet and kisses her "long thin toes."

But Mollie's nerves are taut as piano strings. She throws hysterical fits, fluffs her lines on the set. Running off the unpromising dailies (rushes), Mike buries himself in booze and Benzedrine. The movie and the illicit love affair have a sudden downbeat ending. A sculptor lures Mollie off to Mexico and death by pneumonia. Even with this morbid added feature, the sneak preview of Mike's film draws laughs in the wrong places and he knows he has produced a flop, and probably his last picture. "It's a dying town . . . the last days of Pompeii . . . The Cadillacs are already beginning to flee the doomed city, carrying the family silver and Picassos."

Thalberg Syndrome. Novelist Stephen Longstreet scratches the surface of Hollywood by merely scratching its back. Infected with a bad case of producer worship, or Thalberg Syndrome, The Beach House implies that its hero is a mute, inglorious Milton gagged by a lack of cash and artistic credit. But as Novelist Longstreet portrays him, he seems more like a shark whose teeth have gone bad.

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