FILM FOLLIES

By R.Z. Sheppard

If you are going to feed a writer, expect to get your hand bitten. It is the nature of the beast, as demonstrated with appropriate relish by John Gregory Dunne in Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (Random House; 203 pages; $21). Dunne is a journalist and novelist who, with his wife Joan Didion, another producer of stinging reportage and fiction, pays the family bills by writing movie scripts. Among those that made it to the cineplexes in one version or another are the Barbra Streisand remake of A Star Is Born and the Robert Redford-Michelle Pfeiffer showcase, Up Close and Personal, the subject of Dunne's new book.

Originally the film was to be based on a biography of Jessica Savitch, the television reporter who died with her boyfriend in 1983 when their car accidentally rolled into the Delaware Canal near Philadelphia. But the details of Savitch's personal life proved too lurid for the glamorous project Disney executives had in mind. Only after 27 rewrites was the script deemed suitably uplifted and dumbed down for filming. At one point an exasperated Dunne asks a producer what he thinks the picture is really about. "It's about two movie stars," he answers.

Monster is loaded with payback and toxic anecdotes: Walt Disney Studios under the hard hand of then chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg was known as Mouschwitz or Duckau. When Dunne describes his open-heart surgery, Walt Disney Co. chairman Michael Eisner responds, "Of course, mine was more serious." Dunne's account sometimes reads like a nonfiction sequel to his satiric 1994 Hollywood novel, Playland. But without fiction's remove and craft this chronicle often seems like a hasty downloading of shoptalk and tele-shmoozing. It may be too much to expect 27 rewrites, but one more scroll through the laptop might have tightened things up. Beyond this quibble, however, Monster contains more than enough cautionary experience to be a required text for anyone thinking about leaving his day job to write the great American screenplay.

--By R.Z. Sheppard