Boy Wonder
James Robert Baker
Fourth Estate pbk, 423 pgs, £6.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
No less an authority than Edmund R. Frye once memorably described Shark Trager as "arguably the quintessential Hollywood wunderkind producer of the last quarter century". Maybe the list of his achievements isn't all it could have been - for every Academy Award winner, at least one Red Surf - but to deny the man's impact is to deny the work: the renewing Blue Light (1984); the astonishing patrio-Americana of multi-Oscared Home To The Heart (1987); and bone fide Art House blockbuster White Desert (1973). When he hit the zeitgeist - 1978's Disco smash Mondo Jet Set - he helped define an era. Shark Trager may not have always commanded the prestige he craved or deserved, he may have been vilified in those troubled final months, but Hollywood today would be a very different place had it not been for this maverick, visionary talent.
Boy Wonder is an oral history of this "narcissistic genius-as-monster", told by the dozen or so who knew him best: friends, his estranged father, and the woman author Baker describes as his 'Rosebud' - Trager's model-cum-actress lover Kathy Petro. Their words form a remarkably candid, painful, fascinating document of the troubled prodigy.
Trager was, in truth, parts of many of La-La Land's most dramatic, flamboyant figures somehow compressed into one creative/destructive whole. That dichotomy fuelled his excess, crippling potential greatness, giving rise only occasionally to a singular, pure scree-vision. His sense of timing, however, was impeccable: The Condoist (1975) was predicated on predicting the supernatural wave spearheaded by The Exorcist; Hail! (1979) was a disaster movie when the world went looking for The Disaster Movie; Blue Light and Home brilliantly latched into the soul of a spiritually busted America. Sometimes he was Spielberg or Lucas (famously, he never directed again after little seen student masterpiece Pillow F**k), sometimes Russ Meyer or Roger Corman.
Elsewhere, though, he was to succumb, like Dennis Hopper and Coppola before him, letting artistry and profligacy subsume inherent genius. Those that knew him describe a man sustained by copious drugs, nourished by a legendary sexual appetite. Most disturbingly, Boy Wonder documents for the first time Shark's disturbing fixation with Petro from his teens onwards, from the legendary surreptitious bathroom masturbation film through his notorious courting of lookalikes. Hitchcock's Vertigo is a dangerous blueprint by which to live your life.
James Robert Baker's novel is a monstrous, cynical, offensive, and very funny sprawl. Sensibly he realises early on that any tale of Hollywood is inevitably bigger than real, more than life. As such he cranks the whole up just a notch, viewing all of this through the magnifying-glass of stardom and money. The book balances on the edge of absurdity and hysteria throughout - Shark is born at a drive-in showing Lewis' Gun Crazy, and goes out in suitably operatic fashion - but is pitched at just believable enough. Bouncing our anti-hero between the Art House, crowd-pleasers and bottom line schlock engages us throughout.
First presented to an unenthusiastic public in 1988, this reissue will hopefully earn Boy Wonder the place it richly deserves in the pantheon of great contemporary film-literature, alongside the likes of Roszack's Flicker and Dunne's Playland. In satirising Hollywood it acts as a kind of history, a paean even, in love with its excess even as it condemns. That, in the end, is its not inconsiderable charm.