Product Description
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.
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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.
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 The Monster is the Studios Money... ( flanks )
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.
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Insightful book on more of the business side of the process. ( bpvalentine )
Few times have I been so compelled to finish a book as I finished this one. Of course, I have had a long time fascination with the inner workings of H-wood, which is to so many of us something of a mystery (including, I am sure, some of those who make a living there). This book offers an undressed view at two established and respected writers (John Dunne and his more well known wife Joan Didion) who over a span of eight years accept a screenwriting project and alternately work on it to its long delayed completion. Over the eight years, we get a sense of the "industry" as projects come and go and status' rise and fall and financial needs rather than passion or interest motivate what projects are to be taken and when. This by no means an account of your garden variety H-wood screenwriter. John Dunne and Joan Didion are both along in years and have work in the literary and screenwriting field for some time. Neither are starving young artists; however, they rely on the financing of the entertainment industry to maintain their comfortable lifestyle. What this book does is give us an opportunistic window to a project that in one way itself became a monster, and in another way became a perfect structure to provide an account of the typical dealings in H-wood. It's up to the reader to decide if the author and his wife are "prima donnas." I did not get that sense. To keep from being taken advantage of, you must be tough, and maybe it rubs some people the wrong way. I do not understand how Dunne "name dropped" either. Many people he dealt with through the course of the book are names we recognize. Would it be preferred if he went the way of a gossip column by writing "a certain legendary so and so who..." and "a leggy blonde actress" type of lines? One of the things that interested me about this story is the dispassionate though dogged effort with which the writer and his wife pursued Up Close & Personal. Usually books are written about great or even just notable movies. Maybe I should save this for another review, but Up Close & Personal is, to me, neither great nor even notable except to say that an insightful book about H-wood was written because of it. Another thing. I do not fault MONSTER for it, but I wish with it had been included one of the early drafts of the script when still centered on Jessica Savitch. That is a movie that sounds like it would be worthwhile.
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 Dunne is sterile, pompus and a Herculean name-dropper. ( powerpuff70 )
The title "Monster" is unintentionally ironic, as Dunne, a priviledged WASP insider, suffers little, financially or at the hands of Hollywood. The only "Monster" in this story is his unquestioning ego, which dominates the narrative like a power-broker at a cocktail party. As a working screenwriter I've read the gamut of books on Hollywood. Some of the best, like "High Concept," and "The Gross," dish the dirt with a cold hand and are both gripping and informative; then there are first-person accounts like Max Adams' "The Screenwriter's Survival Guide," and the William Goldman books, which are self-mocking and full of personality as well as insight (although Goldman is a bit doddering). Dunne, however, plays his hand to his chest, disparages no one, most noticably HIMSELF or his wife (his writing partner/wife Joan Didion), and you learn little to nothing about the industry. Worse, Dunne drops more names than an usher retelling his evening at the Academy Awards. Futher running it out, Dunne often irrelevantly digresses into asides that serve only to pile on the list of the people he knows and places he's been. There are no real anecdotes, lessons or jokes involved with these mastubatory indulgences. Books like these thrive on the likability of the story teller, and if I saw Dunne at one of his many listed celebrity cocktail parties, I'd quickly turn the other way or leave. Truly the WORST and most dull of all the books I've read on the industry (other than Syd Field and his like). An utter waste of time. I returned it.
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 Prima Donna Writer Whines About Hollywood ( thealu )
I bought this book used for $2 and that's about all it was worth. Which isn't to say it doesn't tell an interesting story, but not quite in the way it intends. John Gregory Dunne and his wife Joan Didion are Hollywood screenwriters. In this book, Dunne writes the story of the travails of writing the script for the movie "Up Close and Personal" (a terrible movie, to be sure, despite the fact that it grossed over $100 million worldwide). It is clear that his intention with this book was to garner sympathy for screenwriters (principally himself) - the hell the industry puts them through while writing and rewriting (and rewriting) scripts and the industry's inappreciativeness for all of their hard work. The book backfires though, because the reader ends up with little sympathy for Dunne who comes off as an egotistical, difficult to work with, prima donna writer with very little talent, and even fewer good character traits. The interesting part of this story is not the travails of the writer nor the ins and outs of writing this script, but rather, the dynamic between the "studio" and "the writer" both of whom are difficult and both of whom have a very excessive view of their worth to the project (and neither of which any one of us would want to work with, not if we were in our right minds anyway.) Even more interesting is how Dunne is compulsive about showing the studio in the worst possible light, without realizing he himself comes off as badly as they do. True, this movie takes eight years to make, with hundreds of rewrites (literally) along the way. Dunne and his wife initiate the project (which was originally supposed to be the story of the news anchor Jessica Savitch,) then after several rewrites of the script they're fired. Several other writers are brought in and many new rewrites are undertaken. Then Dunne and his wife are rehired. The story keeps changing. They rewrite and rewrite. In the meanwhile, a director is hired who, apparently, is impossible to work with, and the producer quits. Then Dunne and his wife quit. Then there are new writers and more rewrites. Then, Dunne and his wife are rehired. Then they rewrite and rewrite. Then the movie is made. They continue to rewrite, scene after scene, all through the shooting of the film. Throughout this process, Dunne both grandstands and whines. And grandstands and whines. And whines. About how the studio is destroying their script by constantly asking them to change the characters and the story. About how the studio is too demanding. About how the studio is not paying them enough. About how difficult the studio is to get along with. About this and about that. Never mind that Dunne is equally as difficult and demanding. This book just about takes you to the limit of your patience with this man. And yet, it's compulsive reading. You're privy to a powerstruggle (for control of the script) of the Hollywood kind, and you leave this book with a renewed appreciation of the egos involved in Tinsletown and with a sort of amazement that movies, in general, ever actually get made at all, given the process and the players involved.
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Insufferable!
No need to repeat what other negative reviewers have accurately stated. As my sainted Irish mother would have said: "The man is too full of himself."
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