About the Book:

An insider's book told from the screenwriter's perspective (supposedly the lowest position on Hollywood's creative food chain), Monster provides fascinating detail on the huge amount of money Hollywood is prepared to throw at an ordinary A-list film. John Gregory Dunne – journalist, novelist, and screenwriter – gives you an intimate, accurate account of Hollywood, offering a riveting expose of life and work in the movie industry.

In Hollywood, screenwriters are a curse to be borne, and beating up on them is an industry blood sport. But in this ferociously funny memoir of how some scripts end up 100 per cent removed from the version submitted by the writer whose name appears in the credits, it's a screenwriter who gets the last murderous laugh. The husband-and-wife writing team of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion had spent 30 years writing screenplays to supplement their novel-writing and journalism before they were recruited to script an adaptation of Golden Girl, Alanna Nash's biography of the dark and complicated life of a disturbed television anchorwoman named Jessica Savitch.

Monster: Living Off the Big Screen describes the eight years they spent writing 27 drafts for Disney Studios. During this time, the industrious couple also wrote other screenplays, one novel each, six non-fiction books and much magazine journalism, before Disney hired other writers to bring the project to completion. The script was made into the utterly forgettable Up Close and Personal, a "feel good" vehicle for Robert Redford – that bore little resemblance to the dark, amoral tale of psychological disintegration Dunne and Didion first developed. Dunne relates the saga of this transformation with a wicked eye and perfect pitch for the absurdities and savage infighting of the film business. Detailing the meetings, rewrites, fights, firings, and distractions attendant to the making of a single picture, Monster remains one of the best contemporary accounts of playing the Hollywood screenwriting game. It offers a revealing look at film-making – from the first script meetings to the finished products – illuminating the process with sagacity and raucous wit.

What people say:

"Monster offers a crash course in getting a script through the hazards of the present-day studio system." — New York Times Book Review

"Tells more of the experience of writing for Hollywood than any other book ever written." — Michael Crichton

"A savvy, acidly funny book that is must reading on the subject of consensus Hollywood movie making." — The New York Times

About the Author:

John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003) was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic. While not a prolific writer, he was successful in several very different kinds of work – screenplays, novels, non-fiction reportage, book reviews, and essays. He wrote six novels, seven works of nonfiction, and two books that look at Hollywood, The Studio and Monster. He collaborated with his wife, the acclaimed reporter, essayist, and literary icon Joan Didion, on many screenplays.