From Library Journal
Dunne turns the movie-making business inside out.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
It isn't absolutely necessary to have seen the movie Up Close & Personal, starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer (now on video), to fully appreciate this behind-the-scenes look at how Hollywood studios bully screenwriters and waste staggering amounts of money, but it does deepen the pleasure. Dunne is rigorous and worldly in this fast-paced tale of all-or-nothing battles with ego-mad producers, despotic directors, arrogant studio lawyers, and dogged agents. Dunne and Joan Didion, his wife and screenwriter comrade-in-arms, first began work on what was to have been a movie about the ill-fated newscaster Jessica Savitch in late 1987. The tough writing duo was eager to secure a screenplay gig so that they could retain their Writer's Guild health insurance because Dunne was almost certain he would need open-heart surgery (he did). They signed on and inadvertently committed themselves to eight years of full-throttle craziness. Before the final wrap, Dunne and Didion wrote more than two dozen drafts, negotiated a number of contracts, resigned from the project on a regular basis, and played hardball every time some studio scrooge tried to cheat them. Dunne wields the argot of the industry with polished cynicism and savvy bemusement as he reels off one example after another of Hollywood's insane addiction to wastefulness, power plays, and the dumbing down of scripts. A formidable pair, Dunne and Didion are fascinating in their own right, and the glimpse into their lives is every bit as interesting as the filleting of that monster we call Hollywood. Donna Seaman
From Kirkus Reviews
Further proof, elegantly presented, that Hollywood screenwriting is a mad, bad, wasteful, and highly remunerative process. Novelist Dunne (Playland, 1994 etc.) and his wife, Joan Didion, seasoned screenwriters, were approached by a producer with a hot movie idea: a biopic of the late news anchorwoman Jessica Savitch. Her life was a classic American tragedy, with the bonus of a richly prurient overlay: wild ambition, abusive relationships, supercharged sex, drugs galore. Disney was the only studio to express interest. Because money is Hollywood's wizard king, transmuting ideas with alembic ease, it was soon bye-bye to seamy biography and hello to the plucky tale of a sanitized Savitch-like reporter. Ambition became enthusiasm, sex became romance, drugs shriveled to the occasional social drink, and Savitch's abusive Svengali was replaced by the improbably named and conventionally characterized Warren Justice. As draft followed draft, almost every last drop of tragedy was drained away. Perhaps the producer, Scott Rudin, best summed up this new conception of the story: ``It's about two movie stars.'' For whatever reason, this project attracted enough attention to remain alive, but not enough to get made. In other words, it was in development hell. As the years went by, producers came and went, Dunne and Didion were repeatedly on and off the project, more and more drafts were written (for more and more money). Eventually, Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer signed on to star in it, and suddenly there was speed, progress, urgency. A director, Jon Avnet, was found, locations scouted, a crew hired, and just a few drafts later, what was now called Up Close & Personal started filming. It had taken nearly eight years. This is a reasonably familiar Hollywood story, but Dunne's limber prose and acute, acid-tipped observations always keep things interesting: No need for rewrites here. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
...Monster offers a crash course in getting a script through the hazards of the present-day studio system. -- The New York Times Book Review, Larry Gelbart
From the Inside Flap
In Hollywood, screenwriters are a curse to be borne, and beating up on them is an industry blood sport. But in this ferociously funny and accurate account of life on the Hollywood food chain, it's a screenwriter who gets the last murderous laugh. That may be because the writer is John Gregory Dunne, who has written screenplays, along with novels and non-fiction, for thirty years. In 1988 Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, were asked to write a screenplay about the dark and complicated life of the late TV anchorwoman Jessica Savitch. Eight years and twenty-seven drafts later, this script was made into the fairy tale "Up Close and Personal" starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Detailing the meetings, rewrites, fights, firings, and distractions attendant to the making of a single picture, Monster illuminates the process with sagacity and raucous wit.
From the Back Cover
In Hollywood, screenwriters are a curse to be borne, and beating up on them is an industry blood sport. But in this ferociously funny and accurate account of life on the Hollywood food chain, it's a screenwriter who gets the last murderous laugh. That may be because the writer is John Gregory Dunne, who has written screenplays, along with novels and non-fiction, for thirty years. In 1988 Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, were asked to write a screenplay about the dark and complicated life of the late TV anchorwoman Jessica Savitch. Eight years and twenty-seven drafts later, this script was made into the fairy tale "Up Close and Personal" starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Detailing the meetings, rewrites, fights, firings, and distractions attendant to the making of a single picture, Monster illuminates the process with sagacity and raucous wit.
About the Author
John Gregory Dunne wrote six novels—Vegas; True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue; Playland; and Nothing Lost—and seven works of nonfiction, among which are the memoir-like Harp and two books that look at Hollywood, The Studio and Monster. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Princeton in 1954. He collaborated with his wife, the writer Joan Didion, on many screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park and True Confessions. John Gregory Dunne died in December 2003.
