SHOOTING STAR

A fraught-with-pretensions tale of movie mayhem from Green (Night Angel, 1989, etc.) in which life imitates art imitates life, etc. Here, actress Nyla Wyatt is currently working in Santa Fe with avant-garde director Leonard Jacobs, her former mentor and lover, as he improvises scene after scene of Trial and Error to reflect his cast's mishaps, obsessions, and fears. Then an actress who switches roles with Nyla is murdered (a similar fate befell another actress in a previous Jacobs/Nyla collaboration). Meanwhile, a crazy fan is escalating his demented pursuit of Nyla (first letters, then videotapes, then potshots at her car, etc.), and pi. Harm Bohland is called in to protect her. Harm suspects the director, his screenwriter wife, the assistant director, Nyla's agent, even her alcoholic, former star mother—everyone, in fact, but the guilty party. Several more will die before Harm and Nyla and the cops get the goods on the baddies—on film, of course. One more entry in the illusion-is-truth genre, meant to be tantalizing but, in this case, merely tedious.