Monster: Living Off the Big Screen.

• Author: Kurtz, Steve

Forget everything you know about Hollywood and think of it as a black box. In one end goes the talent, out the other come hundreds of movies that add up to one of America's most successful products, dominating competition worldwide. Hollywood must have a phenomenal system to do this - and to do it so well for so long.

Or does it? John Gregory Dunne's Monster rips open the black box, recounting in detail the eight years he and his wife, Joan Didion, worked on Up Close & Personal, a 1996 drama starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.

After reading of the production's tortuous history, and the 27 drafts of the script they completed, one might be excused for wondering how any films get made at all. The business seems to be full of pitfalls where a potential production can fall apart at any second (as most eventually do), where demands on writers are hopelessly vague and even contradictory, where petty recriminations abound, and where you never get fired, you just stop getting calls.

Dunne has written an entertaining and insightful book, though perhaps not up to the 1983 classic of the genre, the wider-ranging Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman. Monster is a quick, fun read - at 203 pages, 33 lines of text a page, it moves. But it isn't simply another recasting of the long-standing conceit of the Lowly Writer being treated cruelly by Hollywood philistines. The scales fell from Dunne's eyes a long time ago, and he narrates with equanimity, even a sense of detached amusement.

Dunne can well afford such an attitude. The pecking order of screenwriters runs something like this: There's a charmed circle of a few hundred people who are in demand and are handsomely rewarded for their efforts (some making six figures a week for important rewrites). The next group - about five to 10 times larger - consists of writers who may be struggling, but are making a living. Finally come the vast horde of scribes having little or no success, fighting to break in (or in some cases return) to showbiz.

Dunne and Didion are members of the charmed circle. What's more, they are successful writers of fiction and nonfiction and celebrated members of the New York intelligentsia. They don't need Hollywood. Throughout the book (when not jetting off to Tuscany or St. Tropez), they're working on or turning down other projects, both in print and film. Indeed, Dunne apparently had no more commitment to the project, at first, than the desire to protect his...