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In Hollywood, screenwriters are a curse to be borne, and beating up on them is an industry blood sport. But in this ferociously funny and accurate account of life on the Hollywood food chain, it's a screenwriter who gets the last murderous laugh. That may be because the writer is John Gregory Dunne, who has written screenplays, along with novels and non-fiction, for thirty years. In 1988 Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, were asked to write a screenplay about the dark and complicated life of the late TV anchorwoman Jessica Savitch. Eight years and twenty-seven drafts later, this script was made into the fairy tale "Up Close and Personal" starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Detailing the meetings, rewrites, fights, firings, and distractions attendant to the making of a single picture, Monster illuminates the process with sagacity and raucous wit.
"The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunne's] grotesqueries aren't drug-induced, they're very real. His is the genuine Vegas." (Esquire) "In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada." So begins John Gregory Dunne's neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage. Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife, Joan Didion, and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. His plan: to write a book about the city he describes...
Investigating the 1940s Los Angeles murder of an unidentified victim whose case has been sensationalized by the media, homicide detective Tom Spellacy and his priest brother, Des, find their loyalties tested, in a new edition of a popular novel that became the basis of a Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro movie. Reprint.
“Dunne’s bravura plotting asserts an exhilarating mastery.” —The New York Times Book Review. In John Gregory Dunne’s celebrated third novel, Los Angeles-based criminal defense attorney Dutch Shea, Jr. struggles to keep from falling apart after an act of terrorist violence strikes his family, the loss pushing him towards a confrontation with his past and into a mystery involving the death of his father, a felon who died in prison. Set in L.A. and Dunne’s hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, the novel follows Shea into a labyrinth of deception, corruption, and criminal malice. Fighting to keep a host of disturbing memories tamped down, Shea plunges into his legal work, one embedding ...
A critically acclaimed best-seller set in the glamorous, gangster-dominated Hollywood of the 1940s tells the story of Blue Tyler, a child star who disappears from Hollywood and becomes a bag lady in New York City.
“Dunne has a wicked eye for the telling details, an uncanny ear for the revealing phrase.”—The New York Times. Quintana & Friends gathers thirty-three brilliant essays written by a pioneer of New Journalism between 1963 and 1978. John Gregory Dunne's gifts for keen reportage, subtle storytelling, and articulate opinion on full display, he covers topics ranging from the Hollywood machine to America’s last fight club to departure day for young soldiers shipping out to Viet Nam. In a celebrated baseball essay, he follows San Francisco Giant outfielder Willie Mays as the slugger seeks to break the National League career home-run record, his portrait capturing a prickly veteran not shy, i...
“Crackling dialogue, gritty characters, a fierce, unblinking stare at acts of brutality.”—Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review. A brilliantly panoramic novel spanning a quarter-century of American life, John Gregory Dunne’s The Red White and Blue tells the story of California's high-profile Broderick family, a tale beginning in the tumult of the 1960s. The clan includes a billionaire San Francisco patriarch, his sons the celebrity priest and Hollywood screenwriter, and his daughter, wife to the brother of the American president. Rounding out the front-line cast is Leah Kaye, a politically radical lawyer once married to the screenwriter Jack Broderick, an ex-newspaperman and the...
A collection of key nonfiction works includes the writer's frank observations on the film industry, politics, sports, and other topics; his reflections on raising an adopted daughter; and depictions of Las Vegas and a Hollywood film studio. Original.
From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.
"In September 1965, Filipino and Mexican American farm workers went on strike against grape growers in and around Delano, California. More than a labor dispute, the strike became a movement for social justice that helped redefine Latino and American politics. The strike also catapulted its leader, Cesar Chavez, into prominence as one of the most celebrated American political figures of the twentieth century. More than forty years after its original publication, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike, based on compelling first-hand reportage and interviews, retains both its freshness and its urgency in illuminating a moment of unusually significant social ferment." -- Book cover.