
DATE: Thursday, May 1, 1997                 TAG: 9705010038

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review 

SOURCE: BY BRITT RENO 

                                            LENGTH:   83 lines

DUNNE OUT-MONSTERS HOLLYWOOD IN BOOK

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE has written the cure to screenwriting fever. In ``Monster: Living Off the Big Screen,'' the well-respected, best-selling novelist recounts in agonizing detail the tribulations of writing for Hollywood.

But because he's a player in the game himself, Dunne doesn't quite pull off the ridicule he intends.

``Monster'' spans eight years of Dunne's impressive career as he and his wife, author Joan Didion, team up to tackle the script for the film ``Up Close and Personal.''

This is not the story of the making of ``Gone with the Wind.'' ``Up Close and Personal,'' albeit a financial success, was a forgettable Hollywood romance, schlocky and homogenized. Its greatest claim to fame was its cast: Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.

The script started out as a film adaptation of ``Golden Girl,'' a book about the late TV journalist Jessica Savitch. Disney Studios picked up the Dunne-Didion script, but wanted a story that would ``make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.'' Before too long all the spice and controversy had been squeezed out of it; it had been sanitized beyond recognition.

Dunne and Didion were really not that interested in the script to start with. They would have passed on it, had they not needed the coverage of the Writer's Guild health plan. (Dunne had heart problems.) In order to be covered by the union, they had to have a script in the works. They would end up cranking out an exhausting 27 drafts in all: ``. . . draft after endless draft in which the initial impulse that attracted (them) to the project would begin to dissipate.''

``Monster'' unfolds in diary-style chapters, taking us down the crazy, meandering road from book option to movie screen. Eight years on one script may well be a personal record for Dunne, but it's not that unusual. Many scripts are dropped, only to be picked up and produced later. Some never make it to film.

Writes Dunne: ``We had the sense of whole life cycles passing during the development of this one picture.''

Dear friends died. People married and divorced, and Dunne himself underwent open-heart surgery as feared. He also worked on seven other scripts, wrote five books (the best-selling ``Playland'') and numerous articles. Strangely though, there is no poignancy to any of these milestones. Year after year plods on, with names and dates running together. The death of Dunne's close friend Tony Richardson is given as much attention as the description of his favorite hotel in Honolulu.

There is also no drama on the ``Up Close and Personal'' front. Dunne and Didion don't struggle. Between them they have written seven produced movies and 21 books. They are in demand and can walk away from this project any time they choose, and do. (They quit twice. It is only by coercion and the need for health insurance that they return.)

Ultimately ``Monster'' is too insider. Dunne is a successful author who has worked in Hollywood for so long that he has become blase about its practices and excesses. ``Hollywood conversation is all context, shared references and coded knowledge of the private idiosyncrasies of very public people,'' he blithely writes.

Dunne winters in Hawaii, unwinds in the South of France, writes novels on the side and gets hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few weeks of work - but he seems to be unaware of his privileged status. He actually out-monsters the Hollywood ``monster.'' All of these phenomenal events are mentioned in passing like a boring meeting or a fax from Cleveland.

Too top-of-the-heap for the beginning screenwriter and too mundane (a cycle of notes and rewrites, meetings and faxes) for movie lovers, ``Monster'' seems to have been written to assuage Dunne's guilt for ``living off the big screen.'' We should all be so guilty. MEMO: Britt Reno is a photographer and film editor who lives in

Alexandria.

ILLUSTRATION: QUINTANA ROO DUNNE PHOTO

John Gregory Dunne wrote ``Monster: Living Off the Big Screen.''

Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``Monster: Living Off the Big Screen''

Author: John Gregory Dunne

Publisher: Random House. 203 pp.

Price: $21