Back Draft

NEW YORK —  He is not the most tractable subject for an interview. He has a keen eye, he misses nothing, and if he does not want to answer a question, he wanders amiably to another subject and all attempts to tug him back will be futile.

We’ve been friends for 26 years and journalists for longer than that, and as we talk, John Gregory Dunne watches me watch him. “There go those journalist’s eyes,” he says as I scan the books on the coffee table. Then he laughs--a deep, full-bodied laugh of delight at the caught detail, the juicy observation.

We are meeting in the apartment on East 71st Street where he lives with his wife, Joan Didion. The rooms are large and airy, painted a pale, almost subliminal shade. Green? Yellow? Didion, who walks in later, says it’s “an underwater color. It’s very restful.”

Dunne is 64, with white hair and blue eyes. Before we start, he takes several pills for his heart. In 1991, he had his aortic valve replaced with a plastic device, and the phrase “Life is too short” runs through his conversation like a basso continuo.

His book “Monster,” about the making of the film “Up Close and Personal,” has just been published and has quickly become a bestseller. “[Random House] thought it was a little book about Hollywood that would have a modest sale,” Dunne says. But it seems there is more than a little interest in what he calls “the business of show business.” More significantly, there is interest in Dunne’s story, for he has done what few have dared and lived to work again: tell the truth and name names.

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Question: Were you worried about biting the hand that feeds you?

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Answer: No. Joan and I have been writing about Hollywood for 28 years. I’ve always found that people in Hollywood do not really care what is said by people who work there, as long as you get it right.

Q: What’s been the reaction from people in the industry?

A: Off-the-charts positive. We’re doing another picture with Scott Rudin and another with Jon Avnet. We had an offer from Disney--you’d think Disney would want to chop us off at the legs.

Q: I still don’t get it. How did you pull this off?

A: I write well, and I’m funny. I don’t do any cheap score settling, and I don’t tell tales--if somebody’s cheating on a spouse.

Q: Still, people one writes about usually find something that offends them.

A: As Joan once wrote, “Writers are always selling someone out.” What she meant--she’s been explaining this for 30 years--is that your view of someone seldom corresponds to someone’s view of him or herself. I’ve been written about, I’ve been blasted, and I never complain. Let me get you something. [He goes into his office and returns with a quotation from Samuel Johnson, which he reads aloud.] “It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.”

That’s what it’s all about. You never complain.

Q: In “Monster,” you make it clear you write movies for the money.

A: For the money, for the health insurance and because it’s fun. We were never dewy-eyed about it. We knew early on we did not want to be directors. I was 36 when I wrote my first movie [“The Todd Dossier,” never produced]--a bit late to be a director. I’d published two or three books and with a book, I was the director, producer, cinematographer and editor.

Also, writing movies allowed us to do things like go to Nebraska five times, which I did when I wanted to write a piece about the white underclass for the New Yorker. I spent $9,000 on those trips and never charged the magazine because I didn’t know what I would write. The movie business allowed me to go there and think things through, instead of having to do a piece against a deadline.

Q: Is it difficult for you to write to someone else’s vision, to a committee’s vision?

A: I worked for Time magazine. Writing for Hollywood is not that different than writing for Time. You just get paid more. What ultimately keeps you going is the sheer professionalism. I did a number of crash covers at Time. That’s when they change the cover on Friday afternoon and you have to get a new cover story reported, written, edited, photographed, laid out and locked in by Saturday night. It’s tough but you get it done. And there’s that same professionalism in Hollywood. You’re rewriting a scene that shoots tomorrow and you don’t like the changes they’re asking for but they’re the ones who’re paying you. Once you accept that bargain, you try to make it work the best you can.

At Time, I did the stuff on Vietnam, for God’s sake. Time thought the Vietnam War was winnable. That’s what ultimately made me quit, and yet, I don’t begrudge one second of my five years there. It taught me to be a professional.

Q: Does the studio system foster mediocrity--with the development process and multiple drafts that don’t necessarily get better?

A: The drafts don’t get better. The first draft is always the best. [Author and screenwriter] Josh Greenfeld has a theory that the odd-numbered drafts are better than the even-numbered ones. The second draft has their notes, so it stinks. In the third draft, you try to overcome their notes. In the fourth draft, you get more notes, and so on. [Laughs]

Q: In “Monster,” the two people you were hardest on were women--a business affairs lawyer and a producer. Do you find women in Hollywood more troublesome than the men?

A: Those two women did the dumbest things and I would have written the same thing if they’d been men. The lawyer tried to not pay us for work the studio was contracted to pay us for. The producer sent notes on our script not to us but to our agent.

I don’t think the women in the business are any dumber than the men, and the smart ones are as smart as the men. I know the one person in all of Hollywood whom Joan will not speak to is a woman. She’s a top studio executive. Joan would walk out of the room if she was there.

Q: Why?

A: She felt this no-talent woman patronized her. A lot of times women feel they have to [act like men]. Because Hollywood is a boys’ club. The boys get paid more. The women are second-class citizens, now and forever.

Q: What was the impetus for writing “Monster”?

A: I wanted to do something about the process of making pictures. People have asked, how did you happen to keep all those faxes? I keep everything. I never throw anything out except old clothes.

Q: I bet you regret that.

A: Yes! Except when the clothes no longer fit. [Laughs] On my computer, I have a calendar where I put down every meeting, payment and telephone call, and then I have notes on the meetings. I printed out all that stuff and I had the chronology. The book was fairly easy to write. I started it in August 1995. Joan had made a couple abortive stabs at her novel, “The Last Thing He Wanted.” She said, I want to finish it by Christmas or I’ll abandon it. I said, OK, I want to finish by Christmas too.

I finished on Dec. 18 and Joan finished on Dec. 26, but we knew it would be disastrous if we published in the same season--someone would have the bright idea of reviewing the books together. So we decided Joan would go first. I waited 13 months before “Monster” came out.

Q: How do you handle being married to another writer, whose work may or may not be going better than yours?

A: We’ve never had problems about that. We help each other, we read each other, but we don’t collaborate on anything except movies. Jann Wenner once wanted us to cover a Rolling Stones tour for Rolling Stone, and within 15 minutes, we were fighting about how to do it.

Q: You used to be an angry guy.

A: I still am. I never considered myself an angry guy, I just lost my temper a lot. [Laughs] I would like to think that’s changed, but I’m not sure it has.

Q: Did having heart surgery change the way you view your life?

A: I used to get into rages about things like the books not being in stores. But I’ve stopped. Publishing is publishing. Life is too short.

One of the things that’s happened is I lost my fear of dying, around the time I first had angioplasty. You’re watching your heart on some monitor, Mozart is playing and you see your heart going . . . poof poof, poof poof [demonstrates with his fingers pressing together and puffing out]. You realize you’re being kept alive by a machine. You’re seeing your own mortality on this screen. [Pauses] You put things in perspective. Joan and I spend a lot more time alone.

Q: What movies have you most admired?

A: Before we start a picture, we always look at “The Third Man.” The MacGuffin is told in a montage with a zither playing in the background. You watch it and think, “God almighty, that’s how movies ought to be made.” I love “Chinatown.” And here’s one that will surprise you--”The Parallax View.” One likes “Citizen Kane,” of course, but it’s not useful when you’re starting a picture that will not be “Citizen Kane.”

Q: Your two commercial hits, “A Star Is Born” and “Up Close and Personal,” have been criticized as schmaltzy love stories. But your sensibility in life and your literary work is the opposite of schmaltzy.

A: In life, we don’t do 27 drafts. On “A Star Is Born,” there were 13 writers. And we were the only writers involved in that picture who were still speaking to everyone at the end of it.

Q: Why is that?

A: Life is too short. What’s that line about the Irish--they forget everything except a grudge? I don’t keep grudges. Life . . . you know--you go on. I mean, we took the money.