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John Gregory Dunne, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (Random House, 1997) Published in paperback by Vintage in 1998 Dunne recounts the lengthy transformation of he and his wife Joan Didion's screenplay about the life of scheming, coked-up TV anchor Jessica Savitch into a redeeming, uplifting morality tale called Up Close & Personal (1996), starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford. Working from Golden Girl, a biography of Savitch, the couple was initially intrigued by her story because it was a "perfect cautionary gloss on the perils of the counterculture – a small-town girl with more ambition than brains, an overactive libido, a sexual ambivalence, a tenuous hold on the truth, a taste for controlled substances ..." and the list goes on. After some eight years, five contracts, two other writers on the screenplay, and 27 of their own drafts, Up Close & Personal began shooting. Disney expressed interest in the story early on, and fresh off the huge grosses that Pretty Woman brought in, its executives were stridently confident that they possessed a sure-fire method for ensuring commercial success. Disney's suggestions for rewriting the first draft of the script included making the Savitch character less ambitious and more sympathetic and the initially Svenglai-like Redford character more "accessible" (originally, the screewriters had decided that the character would "drink too much, smoke rock cocaine" and be a "full-time philanderer"). Some reviewers took Dunne to task for the grousing nature of the book, but it seems hard to quibble with his tone given that in Hollywood, screenwriters, as Jack Warner once quipped, are "schmucks with Underwoods." Not much has changed: as Dunne points out, now screenwriters are perceived as schmucks with laptops. MORE: Screenwriters Utopia has interviews with noted screenwriters Interview with Dunne by George Plimpton, from the Spring 1996 issue of The Paris Review 1994 profile of Dunne from the Chicago Tribune, published after Dunne’s Hollywood novel “Playland” had been published March 2, 1987 profile from the Houston Chronicle by Elizabeth Venant of Didion and Dunne |
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