The Studio.

In 1967, John Gregory Dunne asked for unlimited access to the inner workings of Twentieth Century Fox. Miraculously, he got it. For one year Dunne went everywhere there was to go and talked to everyone worth talking to within the studio. He tracked every step of the creation of pictures like "Dr. Dolittle," "Planet of the Apes," and "The Boston Strangler." The result is a work of reportage that, thirty years later, may still be our most minutely observed and therefore most uproariously funny portrait of the motion picture business. Whether he is recounting a showdown between Fox's studio head and two suave shark-like agents, watching a producer's girlfriend steal a silver plate from a restaurant, or shielding his eyes against the glare of a Hollywood premiere where the guests include a chimp in a white tie and tails, Dunne captures his subject in all its showmanship, savvy, vulgarity, and hype. Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West has anyone done Hollywood better. "Reads as racily as a novel...(Dunne) has a novelist's ear for speech and eye for revealing detail...Anyone who has tiptoed along those corridors of power is bound to say that Dunne's impressionism rings true.",Los Angeles Times.

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.

David Futrelle

Monster is intended to answer a particularly baffling set of questions: how and why two of our country's most perceptive writers and cultural critics John Gregory Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion managed to lose eight years of their life to a movie, Up Close and Personal, that was by the time it saw the screen so over-the-top schmaltzy even Rex Reed found it hard to take.

The two embarked upon the script for Disney in 1988, in large part, Dunne notes, as a way of keeping themselves covered by the Writer's Guild health plan. (They hadn't worked on a script for some time.) In its original incarnation, the film was to be an adaptation of the life of troubled TV journalist Jessica Savitch. Many drafts later it became a contemporary love story about a journalist bearing only slight resemblance to Savitch. This is because Disney wanted a nice film, and it was clear that an uplifting story that would make an audience feel good about itself was not going to encompass any allusion either to Savitch's suicide attempts or to the lesbian episodes in her life, among other disturbing facts of a personal history that was anything but feel-good.

The tale Dunne tells how over 27 drafts of the script, Savitch's calamitous life became a kind of Pretty TV Reporter is a combination of melodrama and black comedy. Much of the comedy, alas, is inadvertent. Dunne describes several other abortive film projects the two embarked upon in these years from a Die-Hard-inspired action flick (pitting rogue Arab terrorists with a nuclear device against a heroic presidential aide) to an oil field thriller called 'North Slope,' based on an annual report from a now defunct oil drilling concern in which we owned a few shares.

Surely, you might think, the two realized the absurdity of these endeavors. After all, in the years they were writing and rewriting this monster of a script, the two managed to produce a number of novels and essays that showed they were still capable of much more than melodrama. Dunne does recognize the absurdity of their life up to a point. Monster makes clear how easily even the most talented writers can become caught up in the Hollywood machine, so enmeshed in the process of writing and rewriting, negotiating and renegotiating that they lose sight of how ludicrous it has all become. Instead of wondering if the world really needed another syrupy, star-driven love story, the two become obsessed with fixing the obdurate scene 158.

Monster is a book you may not wish to read, but you would do well to send copies of it to any aspiring screenwriters you might know: It may be able to scare one or two of them straight, thus saving them (and perhaps the rest of the movie-going public) from a considerable amount of pain. -- Salon

Monster is John Gregory Dunne's mordantly funny account of life on the Hollywood food chain. Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, have been working in the movies for over twenty-five years, and have written, rewritten, brainstormed, and developed two dozen scripts, seven of which have been produced. Monster is the candid chronicle of how one of those scripts finally got made into Up Close & Personal, starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. The Up Close screenplay started out as the story of Jessica Savitch, the television news anchorwoman whose history included drugs, opportunistic sex, and an early, violent death. Over the years it was refined into a story that would "make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something, and good about themselves," as one executive put it in an early script meeting. The tale of how this happened is a hilarious saga that Dunne relates with a wicked eye and perfect pitch for the absurdities and savage infighting of the film industry. Monster is John Gregory Dunne's mordant account of the eight years it took to get the 1996 Robert Redford/Michelle Pfeiffer film Up Close & Personal made. A bestselling novelist, Dunne has a cold eye, perfect pitch for the absurdities of Hollywood, and sharp elbows for the film industry's savage infighting. 192 pp. Author tour & national ads. 25,000 print. "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 Golden Girl, a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch." The author describes a year in which he followed the activities of actors, writers, directors, and administrators at Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation