Neighborhood tales from a town called Hollywood

It would actually be a shock if a story collection set in Hollywood, featuring an assortment of folks from the entertainment industry -- including a temperamental actress, her beleaguered personal manager, a hot young actor, a press agent, a screenwriter, a talent agent, various studio executives and a Realtor who models herself on Zsa Zsa Gabor -- were to reveal this world to be anything but shallow.

“I’m an agent,” declares Stacy Shuman, a down-to-earth woman who freely admits she needs to lose 10 pounds, clean up her home and find someone more emotionally satisfying than her current boy-toy: “I spend my time making people’s deals, finagling rewrite money, angling for more back-end points. I don’t think great thoughts.”

But although it’s obvious that the characters in Peter Bart’s collection “Dangerous Company” will never be mistaken for Immanuel Kant or Albert Einstein, it also seems fair to say that these industry insiders are probably no shallower than many people in other walks of life.

What may surprise the star-struck outsider picking up this book to get the scoop on life in Tinseltown, however, is how unglamorous they all are.

As public relations man Stanley Harmon confides: “When you’re the press agent for a movie star, one thing you don’t want to do is sit next to him [on a plane] for eight hours. You don’t want to hear him kvetch. You don’t want to know about his love life. In fact, you really don’t want to know much about him at all for one important reason: There’s nothing worth knowing.”

But of course there are things worth knowing about any set, and Hollywood insider Bart, editor in chief of Variety, a GQ columnist and a former studio executive, is a knowledgeable and enlightening guide to today’s Hollywood.

He is also a deft, polished and entertaining writer. The 13 linked stories that make up “Dangerous Company” provide a nicely observed group portrait of some of the men and women to be found in and around the film business.

The characters in these stories all happen to be neighbors in the Hollywood Hills. They live on a street called Starlight Terrace, which, as we learn in the first story, was the brainchild of one Eva Vaine, formerly Eva Vajna, a self-described “middle-aged Hungarian yenta actress” turned Realtor who spotted the potential in a rundown street called “Rattery Lane,” re-christened it “Starlight Terrace” and sold the homes on it to a motley crew of film people at inflated prices.

But the key to many of the characters we meet in these stories is that they have no way of judging anything except by its price tag. They not only lack values in the honorific sense, they don’t even have much sense of what shoppers would call a good value.

This, certainly, is true of the rivals in the story “Power Play,” Justin Braun and Josh Litwin, former friends and business partners locked in a nasty game of one-upmanship that started years ago when Justin found a way of cutting Josh out of his share of the profits.

Yet scruples crop up in odd places. In the title story, they prevent a woman who is a TV executive from giving a break to an appealing young actor she has slept with, even though (or perhaps because) they were actually starting to like each other.

In “The Ghostwriter,” the aforementioned money-grubbing agent, Stacy Shuman, is much perturbed when she learns that the hot new script by the young screenwriter she represents was written by his father. And conscience of a subtler kind plays a role in the surprisingly touching story of Nancy Mendoza, “The Arbiter,” an in-house censor who comes to appreciate the difference between the gratuitous and the genuine in the cinematic treatment of sex.

All of the stories are satirical, often in a rather obvious way that shows us things that we probably already know. But a few are quite trenchant. Some unpleasant surprises await a studio executive in “Day of Reckoning,” when he decides to share with his supposedly liberal colleagues his newfound knowledge that he’s gay.

And Eric Hoffman, a studio lawyer dragooned into playing a rather different role in “Friend of the Family,” discovers that in the case of two of his clients, a producer and a director, “family values” are in even shorter supply than he would ever have guessed.

Bart’s writing is crisp, efficient, unobtrusive. He has a good ear for dialogue -- and for the catchphrases that are so characteristic of this milieu. He has also managed, quite cleverly, to find a way of interweaving the various stories and characters via the device of neighborhood meetings, where the residents of Starlight Terrace get together to kvetch about potholes, garbage collection and everybody’s least favorite neighbor, Barry Gal, who has the gall to use the street as the site of some unusually disruptive on-location filming.

Although Bart tries to give each story a bit of a twist, he doesn’t always succeed. Some end flatly; others have that satisfying sense of closure that marks a well-plotted tale. But all of them succeed, at the very least, in capturing a slice of life, served up with savvy and flair.