Typical Harold Robbins saga of a woman writer's bruising ascent up the Hollywood mountain. She begins (in braids and Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook-Farm frock) as a mere San Fernando Valley high-school girl, an "A" student with an Einstein poster on her bedroom wall, and a prize-recipient for Creative Writing. Her first step towards Revelation comes when she is raped with a garden hose by a Beverly Hills brat, and she is thereafter taken under wing (and pelvis) by the apologetic owner of the hose, an Oscar-winning but virility-losing writer of screenplays ("Thirty years ago I saw myself as a modern Byron -- Pushkin even!"). Against her mother's objections she puts up an irrefutable argument: "Walter could teach me more about writing than Valley State ever could." The script is littered with such hilarities. Have another: "Women can't write dialogue," sweepingly asserts the cigar-chewing Hollywood agent, and the plucky little heroine rallies to the occasion: "What about Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker?" (Gertrude Stein?!) Unhappily, the production lacks the gloss to ward off ultimate depression; and Peter Sasdy, who has directed a couple of respectable horror films (Countess Dracula, Hands of the Ripper), has here turned out a merely horrible one. With Pia Zadora. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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