SOURCE: “Politics Is—Surprise!—Show Biz,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 18, 1990, p. 4.

In the following review, Reeves offers a generally positive assessment of Hollywood, though he argues that Vidal's observations about the relationship between Washington and Hollywood are not particularly original.

I was in my 40s, living in Paris, when I tried my hand at writing a novel. For a long time I figured that one day the most important of reportorial assets, my legs, would go, and I’d have to find work I could do without leaving the house—preferably a house in the South of France, or Big Sur, or Ravello, where Gore Vidal lives above the Gulf of Salerno in Italy.

My fiction career ended, more or less, after I had created a world crisis that could only be solved by a quick meeting of the President of the United States and...