Monster: Living Off the Big Screen [Paperback]

John Gregory Dunne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This is a story of a screenplay, how it was initially conceived, "developed" by a number of studio heads and producers, and finally transformed into a movie even its writers admit is mediocre. In 1988, John Gregory Dunne and his wife Joan Didion began work on a film script based on the tragic life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch. Over the next eight years, studio executives coaxed them to transform it into Up Close and Personal, a toothless star vehicle for Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. In his account of the script's metamorphosis, Dunne also mentions other potential masterpieces of excess that he and Didion worked on, including Dharma Blue, an aborted Jerry Bruckheimer-Don Simpson movie about UFOs and Ultimatum, a nuclear thriller that was abandoned after its studio spent $3 million on script development! Dunne makes no bones about being in show biz for the money--his film work financed his heart surgery, legal costs, and vacations in Honolulu. Still, this account of a screenplay's devolution unmasks an industry spoiled rotten by wealth and power. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist (Playland) and journalist Dunne makes much of his living by writing screenplays, and this journal covers the eight years it took between the time he and his wife, Joan Didion, were approached to write a screenplay based on Golden Girl, a biography of newswoman Jessica Savitch, and the 1996 appearance of Up Close and Personal, a rather different movie that made no mention of Savitch. The "monster," this veteran of Hollywood knows, is the producers' money, which always takes precedence over creative ego. This account-written while Dunne had much other work but also money worries-is often digressive and undigested, as if it were written to satisfy Dunne's own money monster. Even so, Dunne can be a deft and amusing reporter both of the tricks of the screenwriting trade and of the foibles of the "industry," as Hollywood is known. He explains why studio execs like screenplays with explanatory exposition while good actors don't, and he uncovers the dynamic of a script reading, in which stars need less dialogue than others to establish their characters. He tells of the youthful "creative executives" who give screenwriters critiques laden with peculiar jargon, and he reports on working with a series of charismatic executives-first producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, then producer Scott Rudin and director Jon Avnet. In the end, the film made a nice profit and Dunne not only had a good time but wrung a book out of the experience.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (March 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037575024X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375750243
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,008,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Arrogant, sloppy, and I can't put it down, March 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (Paperback)

John Gregory Dunne is an arrogant, name-dropping monster, himself. So much of the book is poisoned by his self-congratulatory tone. While he was a full participant in all of the events he recounts, he drips superiority as if he were floating (sneeringly) above the action rather than right down in it. The book is so lazily written. Abrupt, disjointed sections; his pacing and sense of time only confuse the reader. He indulges great detail on boring scenes that show himself off while he quickly glances over the scenes that would interest the reader the most. We have absolutely no sense of his wife, Joan Didion. We learn nothing about how he actually writes a script. Nevertheless, I couldn't put the darn thing down. I read it in a few hours and was captivated. It doesn't give nearly enough detail, the analysis is slight, the conclusions absent. But, somehow, I whipped through it and was glad I did. The subject matter is so fascinating that--while he forces us to peer at it through the haze of his ego--I still enjoyed looking. Perhaps more than anything, I enjoyed luxuriating in my hatred of the author.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Monster is the Studios Money..., July 17, 2006

By 

Marc Flanagan "Reading Through Lunch" (Santa Monica, Ca.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (Paperback)

At a lunch with a studio executive,screenwriter John Dunne was insisting on a story point in the script that he had written with his wife,Joan Didion, the excutive mimed reaching under the table and bringing out,"The Monster",their money, to win the argument. Seven or eight years they toiled on the script that became ,"Up Close and Personal",this is the chronicle of their experiences. Fascinating and sobering, when you realize how things can dissolve and then reappear in a completly different form. It is very well told and forshadows his health problems that cost him his life in 2003, that his wife wrote so exquisitly about in "The Year of Magical Thinking". If how movies get made is of any interest to you this and his other film making tale, "The Studio" will fascinate you.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars excellent insider's account, November 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (Paperback)

An excellent account of screenwriting and movie making, told in a very sardonic manner. If you liked Memo from David O. Selznick or William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade, or Dunne's own The Studio, you'll probably enjoy this as well.