SHOT ON LOCATION

When the son of Oscar-winning Stacy Jaeger, a giant (300 lb.) figure in American acting, confesses to shooting his sister's abusive lover, Cutler's twosome—redneck Hollywood p.i. Rayford Goodman and gay ghostwriter Mark Bradley, the whodunit's answer to the Keystone Kops—team up again, this time to write Jaeger—A House Divided. But Carey Jaeger recants his confession, sending the case to trial, and Goodman maneuvers too slowly to stay off the jury. Juicy complications loom—as Goodman sets his cap on fellow-juror Sylvia Ferris, while somebody kills Carey's girlfriend and the secretary of Ken Curry, Stacy's Svengali—until Goodman goes too far with Sylvia and gets tossed off the jury, and Cutler (Best Performance by a Patsy, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor) settles into a familiar groove, hiding the characters and their interesting problems behind a smoke-screen of foolish high jinks (mob regular Armand Cifelli, now joined by Arab terrorists and the odd Samoan thug) and the usual endless double- entendre. Cutler's real talent for light banter and heavy plotting gets lost in the shuffle. The guy needs a good coauthor.