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March 2, 1997
A Beginning, a Muddle and an End By LARRY GELBART
A screenwriter's view of the making of a movie script, eight years and 27 drafts later
More on John Gregory Dunne from The New York Times Archives
MONSTER
Living Off the Big Screen.
By John Gregory Dunne.
203 pp. New York:
Random House. $21.
he movie mogul Jack Warner's favorite appellation for writers, John Gregory Dunne informs us in ''Monster: Living Off the Big Screen,'' was ''schmucks with Underwoods.'' Writers were the fools the Warner Bro thers (and nephews, cousins and indigent in-laws) had to suffer until they handed in their scripts, which scripts would then be passed among any number of other fools to pound away at on their Underwood typewriters, so that eventually a studio executive r eading through all the many versions of a screenplay was apt to find his lips raw and bleeding.
The monster in Mr. Dunne's title refers not to studio bigwigs, however, but to that which stokes them and the industry over which they rule: money. Money is the monster that must be fed in order to generate ever and ever more money. It is the monster tha t makes studios play it safe, play it again via remakes and sequels, and finally play dead when questioned about why no one else gets a fair share of the take.
After years of being molested by the movies -- not in darkened theaters but in brightly lighted executive suites -- I have decided to swear off moaning about how tough it is to be a screenwriter in Hollywood. I, for one, am no longer interested in collab orating in my own unhappiness, in helping to compromise myself and then yelling rape.
Make no mistake. John Gregory Dunne is not one of the crybabies. You will never spot Mr. Dunne standing in the deposit line with tears running down his face. ''Monster'' is an account of just one of the many campaigns in the movie theater of war that hav e turned him and his writing partner and wife, Joan Didion, into battle-hardened veterans. (Mr. Dunne reminds us that before the team's version of ''A Star Is Born'' went before the cameras, a total of 13 writers worked on the screenplay, including such e minent authors as Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters.)
In the spring of 1988 Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne took on the task of writing a film script based on a biography of the network correspondent Jessica Savitch entitled ''Golden Girl.'' In the spring of 1996, when the finished film was released, starring Robe rt Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer and bankrolled by the Walt Disney Company, it was called "Up Close and Personal."
Far more than the title had changed in the journey from word processor to cineplex. Jessica Savitch in real life died in an auto accident. Jessica Savitch in the screenplay would not. She would not die because the monster minders did not want her to die. Death was only one of Savitch's many problems. There were also her abortions; her drug abuse; her two marriages, the second to a gay gynecologist who, less than a year after they were married, hanged himself in their home; and her own suicide attempts, a s well as her lesbian episodes. While her life was all that a platoon of screenwriters, if not Ms. Savitch herself, could have hoped for, it was a bit much for the Magic Kingdom crowd, even though they intended to distribute the film through their Touchst one division, which was created to handle such un-Disneyesque fare. (It was Touchstone that released the Cinderella-as-hooker film ''Pretty Woman,'' to protect Mickey from becoming known as the mouse that whored.)
But all's well that's changed to end well. In the Dunnes' completed screenplay, Jessica Savitch is not Jessica Savitch at all. She has been transformed into a totally fictional being. Jessica Savitch, the middle-class Jewish girl from Kennett Square, Pa. , has become Tally Atwater, ''trailer trash from Stateline, Nev.'' And it is Tally's husband, no longer a suicidal gynecologist but rather a fallen reporter who mentors her career as a journalist, who is to die. ''Golden Girl'' has become ''A Brenda Starr is Born.''
In the eight years that ''Up Close'' intermittently absorbed their attention, the Dunnes ''separately wrote two novels (one each) and six nonfiction books.'' They also worked on seven other screenplays and wrote numerous magazine pieces, the time span al lowing Joan to cover two different Presidential campaigns. Meanwhile, John reported at length about Rodney King and the subsequent riots, then turned out an hourlong PBS documentary on Los Angeles, a city with no apparent limits, either geographic or in m atters of bizarre behavior, and which seems to be in constant competition with the movie business to turn out one overheated drama after another.
Costing $60 million to produce, ''Up Close and Personal'' took only seven months to enter the charmed circle of films whose domestic and worldwide box-office gross passes the $100 million mark. With video sales, cable, mainstream television and all other ancillary markets computed into the revenues, the picture will have made Disney ''a small profit.''
The minefield the Dunnes had to cross was not small at all; it was the sort that members of the Writers Guild tiptoe through on a daily basis, dealing with the never-ending notes they find coming at them from everyone connected with the enterprise, wheth er by fax or by phone, to their faces or behind their backs. At a time when almost as many people are taking screenwriting courses as there are actors reciting tonight's dinner specialties, ''Monster'' offers a crash course in getting a script through the hazards of the present-day studio system.
A sampling of the notes the Dunnes received as they submitted ever-different versions of the script:
''Keep it light. Keep the fun level up.'' ''Deliver the moment.'' ''Better, but not good enough. Don't let it go dreary. Better line to the same point. Lose or improve.'' ''Too hostile. Modulate. Redo. Lose.'' ''Deliver the moment. Cut. Change. Heat up. New line.'' ''Punch up. Bring down. Rework. Identify.'' ''Make this scene more of an event. Clarify or change. Deliver the moment. More beats. Deliver the moment. ''
It was Scott Rudin, the movie's once and future ex-producer, who offered the writers the soundest possible advice about the kinds of suggestions that can improve a script right into the ground: ''You do what you want to do, ignore the rest, they can't ev en remember them. . . . Forget their solutions, look for problems and come up with our own solutions.''
When the increasingly note-weary John Dunne asked Mr. Rudin what the picture was really all about, Mr. Rudin's reply hit the nail right on the head. It's ''about two movie stars,'' he said. Precisely. In the beginning was the Word. However, that applied merely to all of Creation. The first line in the Hollywood bible states: In the beginning was the Face. The face of the star. From Pickford to Pfeiffer, from Keaton to Cruise, it has been the stars, that select group of former mortals, who are responsible for drawing the masses into the movie houses. Their faces and physiques, and not for one moment any of the words they say. The stars are blessed, according to Robert Towne, with having ''features that are ruthlessly efficient,'' with being able to convey a staggering amount of information without ever opening their mouths.
Stars are the monster's best friend. Stars are the money. Content, cogency, cohesion are secondary to the monster, and so are the scripts that take forever to do and redo (writing costs on a feature now exceed entire motion picture budgets of only a few years ago), fashioned only to serve as the fuel for star-driven vehicles. Such scripts tend to be filled with any number of plot holes, individual scenes that work while the whole of the picture doesn't, all too often leaving the audience as much in the d ark as the theater it's sitting in. Increasingly, to court and to please the stars, the monster is turning out pictures that have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Happily, throughout their ordeal, the Dunnes had a secret weapon. They had each other. What a comfort to have your wife and best friend, who happen to be one and the same, present to witness the inanities and indignities of ''creative'' meetings, to have someone to throw a look to, to suppress a smile with. When such a get-together is a true disaster, Mr. Dunne will turn to Ms. Didion, or vice versa, and say, ''White Christmas'' -- the song played over the Armed Forces Radio Network in April 1975 as a si gnal to the few Americans left in Vietnam that the war was over, and that they were to bail out. For the Dunnes, it meant the exactly the same thing: Let's cut our losses and split.
The writers alternately split and stuck with the project through 27 different drafts of the screenplay; two other writers; four new contracts with the studio; Mr. Dunne's heart valve surgery and other cardiac episodes; the death of John Foreman, the Dunn es' original producer and close personal friend; other deaths, births, marriages, divorces and ''whole life cycles.'' In the end, ''Up Close'' finally reached the screen and Mr. Dunne and Ms. Didion were free to go elsewhere to do a few more choruses of ' 'White Christmas.'' Pros that they are, they will always hang in. Although some pros have been known to split -- permanently.
In his essay ''A Qualified Farewell,'' Raymond Chandler explained why he was giving up trying to be a screenwriter. ''I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and the balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when th at which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to b e mine.''
What was true in Chandler's time and before, and is true with a vengeance even now, is that in Hollywood the play is not the thing at all. It is the rewrite of the rewrite of the play that is the thing. Which would, no doubt, have been news to Shakespear e. (You remember Shakespeare. He was that schmuck with a quill.)
Larry Gelbart's most recent screenplay, ''Weapons of Mass Distraction,'' will be seen on HBO this spring.
From the Archives of The New York Times
Review of "Dutch Shea, Jr.," 1982 "The Red, White and Blue," reviewed by Anne Tyler, 1987 Review of "Harp," 1989 Review of "Playland," 1994
How John Gregory Dunne Puts Himself into His Books, 1982 Didion and Dunne: The Rewards of a Literary Marriage, 1987 At Lunch With: John Gregory Dunne, 1994
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