About the Book:

John Gregory Dunne – journalist, novelist, and screenwriter – gives you an intimate, accurate account of Hollywood, offering a riveting expose of what goes on in executive boardrooms and work on set in The Studio.

More than forty years ago, John Gregory Dunne asked for complete on-the-record access to the studios of Twentieth Century Fox. Miraculously, he got the permission and cooperation of the studio's head of production. For a full year Dunne went everywhere there was to go and talked to everyone worth talking to in the Fox organization. Sitting in on marketing and production meetings, hanging out in the commissary, watching dailies, Dunne tracked every step of the creation of pictures movies such as Dr. Dolittle and Planet of the Apes, noting down every petty fight and squabble along the way. The result is The Studio, a work of Hollywood reportage that is still considered a classic. It is regarded as one of the most detailed and accurate reports on the workings of a major film studio ever written.

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. As Dunne writes in his foreword, "If I got the access, I knew I had the book." Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West has anyone done Hollywood better.

What people say:

"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

"Extraordinary ... a portrait of the Hollywood ethos, that Gothic mix of greed, hypocrisy, shrewd calculation, mad hoopla, and boundless optimism." — Newsweek

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.