In Heaven Everything is Fine

June 9, 2008
On March 3, 1983, Peter Ivers was found murdered in his loft on skid row in L.A. When Ivers died, much of the history of his experimental television show, New Wave Theatre
, went with him. In this frustrating book that is part detective story and part pop history, screenwriter and producer Franks awkwardly weaves interviews with Ivers’s many friends and associates—from Harold and Anne Ramis to Paul Michael Glaser (Starsky & Hutch
)—into his chronicle of Ivers’s life. Franks recreates the thriving theater and music scene in New York and L.A. in the late 1970s and early 1980s as he traces Ivers’s move from the Harvard Lampoon
to his work with David Lynch. Ivers’s most brilliant moment came with the creation of New Wave Theatre
, which brought together comedy and punk music in a new way, featuring acts from the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and the Circle Jerks alongside Beverly D’Angelo and John Belushi. Because it tries to cover so much material—Ivers’s unsolved murder, the history of New Wave Theatre
—it fails to cover any of it effectively; nevertheless, it provides a new look into a now mostly forgotten moment of pop culture.

Starred review from July 15, 2008
Frank (coauthor, "Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies") presents a time line revolving around Peter Ivers and his friends"National Lampoon" founder Doug Kenney and actors Stockard Channing and John Lithgow, among the gifted writers and actors he met at Harvard. Frank intersperses newly documented interviews to write an engrossing account of the players who formed a loose collective of tragicomic artists responsible for "Animal House" and "Caddyshack" and who influenced the likes of "Saturday Night Live" and MTV. Yet Ivers's own workincluding his recently rereleased debut record, "Knight of the Blue Communion"proved too challenging for mainstream consumption. In 1983, he was murdered inexplicably and, treated with carelessness and indifference, the case remains unsolved. A music television pioneerhost of L.A.'s "New Wave Theatre", a fusion of stand-up comedy, performance art, and punk/new wave musicIvers and his never-ending tug-of-war between artistic purity and the pursuit of fame and fortune provide the backdrop for this story of hit-and-miss successes, both personal and professional. Overdue and highly recommended, this work assays a crucial era of popular culture history.Eric Pasteur, Peoria P.L., IL

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2008
Peter Ivers never quite entered the pop-cultural mainstream, though he influenced such contemporaries and friends who did as National Lampoon cofounder Doug Kenney, John Belushi, and David Lynch, who called on Ivers to write In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song) for his reputation-making cult-movie Eraserhead. Ivers presaged punk rock with his Peter Peter Ivers Band (later just the Peter Ivers Band), formed after drifting out of the fatally overhyped late-1960s rock group Beacon Street Union. He is probably best remembered as host of New Wave Theatre, a 1980s TV venture that progressed from an L.A.-based UHF channel to the USA cable network. On it he delivered zany stream-of-consciousness raps before and after clips of then-cutting-edge acts like Dead Kennedys and Circle Jerks. Proceeding via snippets from interviews with the likes of Chevy Chase and Steve Martin, Frank and Buckholtz describe Ivers appeal and try to illuminate his mysterious bludgeoning death in 1983, a murder still unsolved. An appreciative look at a figure peripheral to a clutch of now-aging major stars.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)