It should have been so easy. You have a controversial script by Hollywood's brightest new name kid, attached to one of La-La Land's biggest behind-the-camera talents. Just point and shoot, right? But as industry wannabes Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy discovered, nothing in this world is ever quite what it seems.

Fledgling producers fresh out of USC, they lucked upon a geeky young video store clerk anxious for anyone's ear. He was Quentin Tarantino and the screenplay rights were, of course, to Natural Born Killers. They loved the thing, sinking most of what they had into schlepping it around town. It was hard work, but made some kind of sense until the geek financed his own directorial debut. At Sundance Hamsher watched Reservoir Dogs take its bow and Querentino transform into a 'slightly smarmy, falsely modest Uriah Heep character constantly turning verbal cartwheels...to make people keep looking at him.'

Immediately NBK blew up in their faces - just as Oliver Stone announced he wanted to direct and a lawsuit was filed - leading straight back to the author. Ego-wild, Querentino had hopes of reacquiring the property to sell to Stone directly. A golden opportunity had become the proverbial poisoned chalice.

Killer Instinct looks set to become one of the set-texts on Hollywood vagueries alongside Salmon's The Devil's Candy (on De Palma's Bonfire of The Vanities) or Stephen Bach's Losing The Light (the Heaven's Gate debacle).

Not that it's simply an assassination job on the Pulp Fiction Kid (and, equally, his leeching producer, Lawrence Bender). Not a bit of it. Hamsher was there from the very beginning to the bloody end, and her portrait of Stone's rampant bull-ego and territorial pissing ('frequently and freely') is just as compelling. Like the film, its director was hyped on drugs and self-regard, screaming like a child, both bullying and misogynist; even Mrs Stone started divorce proceedings on the first day of shooting. His first assembly of the finished footage had them reaching for the razor. 'I had stepped through the looking glass into a very weird place', Hamsher writes, 'where the ordinary laws of the space-time continuum didn't seem to apply.'

This is real rabbits-in-the-headlights stuff. For Hamsher and Murphy it was zero to ninety, and it's all they could do to cling to the learning curve as Stone's juggernaut stampeded through their lives.

In the end Hamsher contracts breast cancer, joking that she can at least claim it was Tarantino to blame. For her and her partner the whole NBK experience was a crash course in the vagaries of the Hollywood game. For us, her book is a wonderful evocation of cinema madness in full flood. Not afraid of naming names, it's so good at pricking egos that Mr T himself recently punched Don Murphy out in a Los Angeles diner - and you can't say much fairer than that.