Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called..." (more)
Key Phrases: prison sequence, deliver the moment, production rewrite, New York, Los Angeles, Jessica Savitch (more...)

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.

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 203 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (February 11, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679455795
• ISBN-13: 978-0679455790
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,773,086 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pathetic, Pointless Defense of a Pathetic 8 Year Effort, March 5, 1998

By A Customer

"Living Off the Big Screen" is a surprisingly apt sub-title for this book, which comes across as an attempt by the screenwriter to ingratiate himself with those who had paid him so lucratively for the drivel put together for "Up Close & Personal", and who he'd certainly like to have hire (and pay so exorbitantly) him and his wife once again.

I give this book a rating of 2 simply because: 1 point for the fact that it's an easy enough read -- no getting tied up in interesting plot convultions or character development or descriptive imagery or poetic prose here, and 1 point for the fact that Hollywood is an intrinsically and perhaps perversely interesting subject to read about. Otherwise, this book makes the unfortunate spectacle of itself by making the screenwriter author seem to epitomize the whining, sniveling, uncreative, self-absorbed, self-important, stenographic, faux au courant high-brow aesthete, money bloated hack stereotype that the industry seems so willing to attach to screenwriters. The writer spends most of the book whining about his health, whining that moviemakers don't seem to find his efforts of staggering artistic worth and merit, name-dropping about hanging out with industry figures, and blathering about exotic locales in which to vacation in between brief stints in other exotic locales in which he and his wife actually "work" on screenplays! He breaks one of Hollywood's most holy conventions by not making himself a sympathetic protagonist.

The one thing that this book SHOULD have done, that would certainly have been of interest, would be to shed some light on how he and his wife engage in the creative process together. Most aspiring writers or screenwriters are keenly curious on how the magic comes together for other, established writers, and expounding on how Dunne and his wife crank out the pages would have been an interesting and perhaps valuable service to the writing community. But, lo and behold, Dunne is either too paranoically insecure to reveal his secrets or was to superficially involved in his own writing to realize that readers might enjoy his insight on the writing process rather than his insight on taking meeting notes from producers and spitting venom at studio lawyers. Oh well. Maybe he'll hit these points in Monster 2, the sequel. Can't wait.

2 of 2 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.