About the Book:

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 Studio.

Thirty years ago, 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 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 like Dr. Dolittle, Planet of the Apes, and The Boston Strangler. The result is The Studio, 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. 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 wrote five novels, seven works of nonfiction, and two books that look at Hollywood, The Studio and Monster. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Princeton in 1954. He collaborated with his wife, the writer Joan Didion, on many screenplays. John Gregory Dunne died in December 2003.