It's taken as read that you have to bang a few heads together as well as possessing artistic vision if you're ever going to be a Tinseltown player.

Bartender and bouncer Troy Duffy seems to have cracked that elusive code. He's sold his first screenplay for $300,000 to major player Miramax and gets to direct and score the soundtrack.

He even persuades Miramax mainman Harvey Weinstein to put up $15m…and agree to buy his scruffy bar in a corner of dodgy West Hollywood into the bargain.

The Hollywood Reporter raves and Harvey hails his new charge as "a new and exciting voice in American cinema". It could only happen in the movies…and so it proves.

Duffy is really no more than an arrogant opportunist with a dodgy grasp of the English language. "We're a deep cesspool of creativity," he bizarrely announces at one point.

Surrounding himself with boozing buddies from his bar and the odd family member, he plans a double pronged assault on America's entertainment-obsessed public.

First, there's the film - The Boondock Saints - a saga of good versus evil apparently starring Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh and, erm, Patrick Swayze. (Duffy blithely dismisses Keanu Reeves and Ethan Hawke).

Secondly, there's Duffy's other passion, his band - The Boondock Saints (again), whose real talent (recognised by ex-Doobie Brother Jeff 'Skunk" Baxter) is actually Duffy's brother Taylor.

While Duffy is slamming down the phone on Hollywood's finest with a laughable degree of self-congratulation, Miramax quietly drop the movie. It has, after all, ended up starring Billy Connolly and ex-porn star Ron Jeremy.

Harvey - once Duffy's mentor who recognised talent in a "poor kid from Boston" - suddenly becomes a deceiptful "c***sucker". There's gratitude.

Film-makers Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana - once part of Duffy's inner circle - have put together a frequently hilarious documentary underlining the moral that pride comes before a fall.

Rather than produce a hatchet job, they simply let Duffy hang himself with a verbal torrent of vanity, arrogance, petulance and an attitude of "nobody's fault but yours".

However, the final ironic twist in the corpse of Duffy's career is that their documentary gets a global release. His goes to video...and he doesn't even get any royalties.

Tim Evans