GRADE: A-

The biggest surprise about Killer Instinct, the new tell-all memoir from one-half of the untried young producing team that shepherded Natural Born Killers through Hollywood, is how amazingly readable it is. It's smart, gossipy, and genuinely funny, but not revoltingly dishy. It's full of tidbits that make you understand that at its basest level Hollywood really is just another word for "a shitty business," and that only the strong survive. It may even be a pretty good business book, with no-nonsense accounts of how deals are cut with the big players, and how you handle it when the players try to renege. Most surprisingly, there's a real sense of honesty between these covers that helps the reader get over the author's obligatory self-aggrandizement (somewhat suspiciously, everyone in Jane Hamsher's book is portrayed as a nutjob except for, right, Jane Hamsher). It actually seems that Hamsher just had a lot of crap she was dying to get off her chest, and this book looked like a good way to do it.

A true page-turner, Killer Instinct starts with a knock-out premise: ne’er-do-well film school graduates calling themselves “producers” but teetering on the edge of financial oblivion happen to do one of their countless lunches-in-search-of-a-project with an animated loudmouth named Quentin Tarantino who's written a script called Natural Born Killers. Drawn to Tarantino's hyperkinetic blend of sadistic violence and media satire, Hamsher and partner Don Murphy decide to tackle the project. Tarantino is on the verge of a deal to direct his own picture, an unconventional heist film called Reservoir Dogs, and before long that movie has borne him through the festival circuit as the new king of young Hollywood. Hamsher and Murphy, meanwhile, bump up against a series of obstacles as they struggle to get the movie made -- not the least of which turns out to be Tarantino himself, after he decides that he might not want the movie to be made after all.

Thus begins a comic journey into the dark heart of Hollywood and back out, as Hamsher and Murphy face down lawyers, convicts, incompetence, ill will, and a madman named Oliver Stone who decided on impulse that he wanted NBK to be his next project. The portrait of Stone, one of the biggest names in Hollywood, is giddily irreverent. You wonder if Hamsher doesn't understand or just doesn't care what Stone and his cohorts are going to think of her manuscript. To hear Hamsher tell the tale, Stone is a director who indulges himself in constant mind games with his cast and crew, who has an infatuation with drugs but lacks the attention span to sit through a Keith Richards concert, and for whom the act of filmmaking is a controlled accident on the edge of chaos.

The book's cheeky recklessness is a big part of its appeal, and the portrayal of Stone actually seems grudgingly affectionate. While it's clear that Hamsher doesn't really care for his movies or his personality, she's careful to include a few utterances of respect for the man's vision and sincerity, including a big thank you in the acknowledgements. Only Quentin Tarantino -- and his business associate Lawrence Bender, who is the target of a prank that backfires -- are thoroughly skewered. Hamsher goes so far as to include a copy of a bleakly amusing note that she says Tarantino wrote her long after she decided she despised him. ("Dear Jane ... when we sat next to each other at lunch, you wore these great shorts and your leggs looked so sexy ... maybe we should talk.") One wouldn't expect her to get any favors from Hollywood's sizable Friends of Tarantino club.

You have to wonder if Hamsher isn't a little young to already be writing a memoir, much less one that runs roughshod over the toes of Hollywood elite. But finally, doesn’t it make sense that anything that gets a producer’s name mentioned in more and more newspapers is really a savvy career move? That’s one of the many lessons that can be gleaned from Killer Instinct. A cynic’s delight, it will either teach you something about how business is really conducted in L.A., or it'll have you giggling aloud, all your long-held suspicions finally confirmed.