‘Pillars of Fire’ a Far Cry From Shagan’s ‘Tiger’

The Libyans and the Pakistanis, with the help of a German corporation seemingly left over from V-2 days, are completing a nuclear-warheaded missile that will within days obliterate Israel. Only Mossad (Israeli intelligence), assorted military men, undercover good guys and a cynical American journalist using his occupation for deep penetration can thwart Armageddon.

Steve Shagan’s just-published “Pillars of Fire” (Pocket Books: $18.95, hardcover) is clearly the stuff of poolside, sleepless-night and airplane reading (which has replaced the hammock), and the stuff as well of a movie or miniseries. At the moment, Shagan is indeed writing the first two installments of a projected four-part “Pillars of Fire” miniseries for Tom Tannenbaum of Viacom.

It is all a far cry from “Save the Tiger,” the film script that established Shagan’s reputation as a writer and won an Academy Award for Jack Lemmon.

Shagan, who had previously been a publicity and marketing expert in the entertainment field, realized one morning years ago that it cost him $200 a day to get out of bed. That was his household overhead, ticking away like a giant taxi meter. The efforts to make the daily nut were, he also realized, giving him no satisfaction whatever.

He flew to San Francisco, rented a hotel room and, in what he calls three weeks of rage, wrote “Save the Tiger.” It was about a man, not quite unlike himself, who remembers a lost innocence and can’t be sure when the American Dream, of which his own was a part, began to go sour for him. The character Shagan created had compounding business problems, a failing garment factory. But the strength of the 1973 film was the script’s--and Lemmon’s--capturing of a terrible nostalgia for a faded, irretrievable clarity and purpose to life.

Subsequently, Shagan wrote another Los Angeles-based novel, “City of Angels,” which became an unsuccessful movie, “Hustle,” with Burt Reynolds as a detective and Catherine Deneuve as the up-market call girl he loves. It was linked to “Save the Tiger” in its dark sense of promises denied or lost, and of a kind of decay of the spirit.

Then began Shagan’s series of successful thrillers. “The Formula” was filmed with Marlon Brando as a tycoon who played wire brushes while listening to Benny Goodman records. There were also “The Circle,” “The Discovery,” “Vendetta” and now “Pillars of Fire,” all heavily researched, heavily plotted and earning tags like “explosive” and “fast-paced.” More important, nearly all have also for the most part seemed to exist just around the corner, possibly the next corner, from the reality of headlines.

“You have to research to see what all you’re dealing with is not fiction,” Shagan said not long ago. “ Then the novelist can begin to play What If.”

Shagan’s inspiration for “Pillars of Fire” was an NBC News documentary with Garrick Utley about a German firm called OTRAG, which ostensibly designs missiles for the peacetime deploying of communications satellites and other non-lethal payloads. Until world pressure forced cancellation of the deal, OTRAG had a missile test site on 40,000 leased acres in Zaire. It subsequently developed a test site at the edge of the Sahara in Libya, where Moammar Kadafi told NBC he was interested only in the missiles’ peacetime uses--not their sub-orbital capacity for carrying warheads.

“If you believe Kadafi,” Utley said at the end of the documentary, “there’s nothing to worry about. If you don’t, there’s a lot to worry about.”

Shagan the novelist naturally takes the worst-case scenario, twinning the Kadafi-backed missile research in Libya with the Kadafi-financed nuclear plant in Pakistan in a doomsday plot to incinerate Israel.

“The Russians are nervous about all this, too,” Shagan says. (NBC says then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev brought up OTRAG with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt during a visit to Germany in the late ‘70s.) “The underpinning of the book is the fact that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are not going to blow each other up. We were at the brink with the Cuban missile crisis and it didn’t happen.”

But it needs no fiction to demonstrate that the nuclear threat has not receded but only moved to different positions on the chessboard.

Shagan visited Germany’s Harz Mountain tunnels, where the V-2 rockets were stored in the last stages of the war, and he has spent time researching in Israel. Gen. Dado, a hard-line but sympathetic figure in the book, is based partly on an Israeli general he knows, Shagan says. “He never lost the cause, which is survival.”

“Will the killing ever stop?” Shagan says he once asked him. “No. It’s lost its rage now,” he says the general replied. “It’s what we do.”

Whether it is justifiable to build a novel of advocacy, which “Pillars of Fire” assuredly is, from a ground of fact to a kind of superstructure of assumption and invention is a lively question. But fiction has often had, among its innumerable attributes, the qualities of admonition and prophecy, from Charles Dickens on child labor to novels that foreshadowed the ultimate menace of Nazism.

It is a more delicate question still when print fiction is translated to film or television, with their wider audiences and their powerful persuasiveness.

Shagan has no trouble accepting that a best-seller can have--should have--something on its mind. The strength of “Save the Tiger” was that it seemed to speak to a mid-century, mid-life crisis in the American male.

It was what Shagan calls “a passionate piece,” and so, he says, is “Pillars of Fire.”