Hollywood, From the Inside Looking In : PAY OR PLAY by Jon Boorstin, Carroll & Graf, $22, 278 pages

A certain audacity and courage are at work when a writer chooses Hollywood as the theme of his first novel, and even the most accomplished effort is invariably shadowed by the master storytellers who have come before. So Jon Boorstin deserves credit for both savvy and sheer chutzpah in writing “Pay or Play,” a satire of the contemporary movie industry in all of its dread and folly.

Of course, Boorstin brings a Hollywood resume of his own to “Pay or Play.” He is a producer and screenwriter who earned an Oscar nomination for one of his documentary films, and he has already shared something of his filmmaking philosophy in “The Hollywood Eye: What Makes Movies Work.” And I suspect that Boorstin’s book represents a good-humored but sharp-edged payback for the hard bumps of his own career in the movies.

Indeed, the local color and little details of Hollywood folkways in “Pay or Play” are convincing and compelling precisely because Boorstin has been there and done that. Elmo Zwalt, for example, is a struggling screenwriter who lives in a faux chateau overlooking the Cahuenga Pass--”a swath of urban waste in the death zone below the high-water mark of its cacophony,” as Boorstin puts it with characteristic flourish that borders on self-satire.

Jason Fo, the third-generation Hollywood scion who wants to make Zwalt’s script into a movie, chooses to leave his Jaguar at home and drive a car from Rent-a-Wreck to a fund-raising dinner to make himself seem more humble and compassionate. “Walking would have been better,” Boorstin writes, “but walking was out of the question in Los Angeles.”

Boorstin neglects no opportunity to slice up the movie industry and its denizens with the edged weapons of caricature and parody. The movie Zwalt has written is “The Agonizer.” Zwalt’s agent is a slouching beast named Doberman who climbs out of the mail room at the Consolidated Creativity agency--”the ninth circle of hell for his chosen profession.” The movie features Klaus Fortner, an action hero “with Tartar cheekbones and the square mandibles of a fashion model” who is rumored to have been “a contract killer for the Yakuza in the Balkans.”

So “Pay or Play” is something of a roman a clef, and we are intended to recognize real Hollywood luminaries behind the fanciful and sometimes farcical characters. But not a moment in the lives of these movers and shakers of Hollywood is free of some satirical edge. Even the sex scenes are played for laughs, and the surreal coupling of Klaus Fortner and his hard-bodied lover is less a matter of pleasure than a contest of will and strength:

“Klaus summoned his martial discipline,” Boorstin writes. “Pain is a state of mind. Master the negative chi.”

“Pay or Play,” like all Hollywood novels, is really a morality play in disguise, a near-mythic quest for the Holy Grail of the green-lighted script. Will Zwalt’s movie get made? Will the filmmaker’s vision survive the tampering of conniving agents, myopic studio executives, charlatans posing as script doctors and vainglorious movie stars?

Indeed, the real hero of Boorstin’s book is a kind of holy fool named Homer Dooley, a hapless but high-principled documentary filmmaker, who is summoned to Hollywood from the snowy wilds of Vermont and finds himself caught up in the tangled webs that are woven around “The Agonizer.” The homeless Homer spends the night on the bleachers outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on the night before the Oscar ceremonies. He then wins an Oscar for his short film “Granite Plywood” (what started out as a commercial film unintentionally became an explosive documentary). Homer then finds himself miraculously anointed as the director of “The Agonizer,” and manages to survive an apocalypse on the set of the movie that is worthy of Nathanael West.

Jon Boorstin, a documentary filmmaker himself, clearly identifies with Homer. But Boorstin and his favorite character are dissimilar in at least one crucial way--Homer is presented as something of a simpleton, but the author, always smart and knowing in telling the story of “Pay or Play,” is no one’s fool.