Quote of the Day (John Gregory Dunne, on the Screenwriter-Director Pecking Order)

“Once you accept the idea that says because you get paid $200,000 to write a script and the director gets $500,000 to direct it, he's $300,000 smarter than you are, then Hollywood becomes a very amusing place to work.”— Hollywood screenwriter/novelist John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003), “Tinsel,” in Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2006)

Bonus Quote of the Day (John Gregory Dunne, on the Trio at the Heart of the Simpson Case)

“A black ex-athlete growing older ungracefully, tenuously living a white life on the limited visa of his contract as a television pitchman; his beautiful battered ex-wife trying at age thirty-five to start over after half a lifetime on someone else’s tab; a waiter and unsuccessful male model uncertain whether to become a restaurateur or a paramedic, collecting business cards from the men on whose tables he waited in case one might decide to invest in his dream restaurant: these were characters of considerable and ambiguous particularity. With the events of June 12, however, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were found slashed and stabbed to death, and with the arrest of Orenthal James Simpson for killing them, all three lost whatever identity they had in the frantic search to find some larger meaning that would explain the crime. The story demanded a moral: youth wasted, promise denied, spousal abuse, domestic violence, the race card. Show me a hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald once jotted in his notebook, and I will write you a tragedy.”— John Gregory Dunne, “The Simpsons,” in Regards:The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2005)

In the summer of 1994, while up at the Stratford Festival in Canada, I chatted with a fellow playgoer during a performance of Othello. I couldn’t help noticing some similarities between the title character and O.J. Simpson, I told him. “Yes,” he answered. “The trouble is, everybody else is noticing it, too. It’s become a cliché.”

I understood perfectly what he meant. Still, with so many people following the events, the number of cultural comparisons already being drawn to what was shaping up as the Crime of the Nineties was already staggering.

In a prior post, I drew parallels to the 17^th century Italian murder case immortalized in Robert Browning’s narrative poem The Ring and the Book and the Simpson case. But today, on the 20^th anniversary of the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, other aspects of this cause celebre remain to be explored.

Older brother Dominick was the one who wrote more, in essays and fiction (Another City, Not My Own), about the Brentwood tragedy, largely fueled by his never-ending rage as a father whose own daughter had been murdered. 

But John Gregory Dunne also wrote incisively about this, whether including elements of it in his final novel, Nothing Lost, or in the piece quoted above, which appeared originally in The New York Review of Books three months after the killings and the infamous Bronco chase watched by 95 million Americans at one point or another.

Dunne had a particular vantage point on the principals in the case: he lived in Brentwood, just like the defendant, Los Angeles DA Gil Garcetti, Mayor Richard Riordan, and Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz. Thus, he knew about the aspirations and environment of the community examined with so little insight by the rest of the media. 

Before the case had even come to trial, Dunne was already jaundiced about certain aspects, notably the racial angle that Simpson’s defense team would exploit. (“So assiduously had he [Simpson] pursued racial neutrality that he had become estranged from prominent elements of Los Angeles’ black leadership.”)  

And, as the “Bonus Quote of the Day” indicates, he was especially attuned to the quiet desperation, the grasp for the last chance, that animated O.J., Nicole and Ron alike.

Twenty years later, Dunne’s essay still stands up well. He noticed, even then, how some commentators were striving “to find some larger meaning that would explain the crime.” 

Last month, in the same magazine where John Gregory Dunne’s brother vented his moral outrage about what was happening before his eyes, Lili Anolik sought for a similar overarching theme. Terming the case “TV’s first reality show,” Anolik accused Simpson, “regardless of whether the jury got it right or the jury got it wrong,” of murdering popular culture.

This is a way too cute formulation. Above all else is this: two people were murdered in the most brutal fashion that night. O.J.’s defense team, unable to find a plausible explanation for who might have murdered them besides the defendant, simply threw fairy dust in the eyes of the jury. 

Most outrageously, after the not guilty verdict, Simpson announced that he would immediately start searching for her killer—as if the answer couldn’t be found in his home mirror. In Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau  properly mocked this pretense, devoting an entire week’s worth of the strip to “O.J. Simpson, Detective.”

Bonus Quote of the Day (John Gregory Dunne, on the Premiere of ‘Dr. Dolittle’)

“ 'It’s really cute as hell,’ [publicist Perry] Lieber said. He has a boisterous, enthusiastic voice. ‘The animals are the star of the picture and they’ll be the hit of the evening. Sophie the Seal will arrive in a limo, and she’ll be wearing a rhinestone harness and walk right into the Paramount just like she was a star. And Chee-Chee the Chimp, we’ll have him dressed up in white-tie and tails and special patent-leather pumps.’ Lieber listened for a moment. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘All the animals will be wearing pants. They better be, or you’ll have some messed-up limos.”—John Gregory Dunne, The Studio (1968)

Forty-five years ago tomorrow, the premiere of the Rex Harrison musical Dr. Dolittle was held in Los Angeles, at the Paramount Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The event sounds like something out of a Hollywood that, its attendees would know in a few years, was dying. While it had a nice charity benefiting from the $125-per-ticket cost to attend (the Hollywood and Television Relief Fund), the premiere was marked by the kind of crass promotion epitomized in Perry Lieber’s statement above, not to mention a hucksterish Joey Bishop saying on camera, to every arriving celebrity, a line that, each time it was repeated, became even more patently false: “I hear this is a marvelous picture, a wonderful picture.”

Screenwriter-novelist John Gregory Dunne could come up with funny lines with the best of them, but in his account of a single year at The Studio—i.e., Twentieth-Century Fox—he knew to get out of the way of his characters—not just the creators of film, but the execs who make the decisions guiding the production and promotion of movies.

One of the latter was legendary mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, at this point president of Twentieth-Century Fox. Puffing on his cigar, he let Dunne in on his concern about his studio’s product, a couple of weeks before the premiere of one of its major prestige pictures: “We’ve got $50 million tied up in these three musicals, Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly!, and quite frankly, if we hadn’t made such an enormous success with The Sound of Music, I’d be petrified. You’re never sure of a hit in that category. You’re never sure of a hit any goddamn time, but when you’re talking $20 million, it’s a bigger gamble.”

Zanuck was right to be worried. All three pictures tanked, leaving the studio in such a financial hole that it released only one film in 1970. In the case of Dr. Dolittle, Fox pulled off one miracle of sorts—nine Oscar nominations, including an inexplicable one for Best Picture, and two wins (including for its song “Talk to the Animals”)—testimony to an effective promotional stunt: boffo dinners for members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But critics were not especially kind, and the public reception was even worse, as its $9 million gross represented only half of its expenditure.

The film bombed not because of a shift in popular taste, but a lurch in it. Only three years before, Harrison had won the Best Actor Oscar for My Fair Lady, which not only was a moneymaker but a success with Academy voters (eight Oscars in all) and critics. By the time Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly! came along, however, the kind of musical they represented—family-oriented, book- rather than dance-driven, opulent to the point of being overstuffed—had fallen out of favor. Studio heads didn’t realize it yet, but a new kind of movie musical was aborning, one epitomized within five years by Cabaret, where the songs spring organically from a performance rather than spontaneously--and the louche subject matter was definitely not one for the kiddies.

Yet, while studio heads did not immediately take to heart that particular lesson from Dr. Dolittle, they absorbed another one only too well. The film produced one of the greatest onslaughts of merchandise tie-ins ever to that point: not just the soundtrack album, but also puzzles, reprints of the Hugh Lofting books that inspired the movie, pet foods, even small toy figures in each package of "Shake-a-Pudding." Much of this did as abominably as the film itself. Thereafter, for a decade, film execs wouldn’t be caught dead even thinking about tie-ins.

Fast forward to the 1970s, when George Lucas shopped his idea for Star Wars around all the Hollywood studios. All but one passed on it: Twentieth-Century Fox, now headed not by Zanuck but by Alan Ladd Jr.

Ladd was correct in seeing box-office gold in the film. The movie would be such a mint for Fox, he figured, that giving Lucas the sequel, merchandising and soundtrack rights would be no problem, as sci-fi films of the time hadn’t been major hits, anyway.

Well, he was half right. Star Wars did make Fox a fortune—but this time, reversing the story of Dr. Dolittle, the merchandise flew off the shelves, too. That subsidiary revenue stream helped produce an entertainment empire for Lucas—and left the suits at Fox wistful about why they couldn’t see this coming.

Quote of the Day (John Gregory Dunne, on Sin and Crime)

“I am drawn to the Santa Monica Courthouse the way some people are drawn to church. It is only a five-minute drive from my house, five minutes through a time warp back into the concepts of sin and retribution that were the underpinnings of my Catholic childhood. There in that antiseptic institutional pile just a few hundred yards from the sand and the sea and the Bain de Soleil I am exposed to a tapestry of transgressions scarcely imaginable to those Sisters of Mercy who were the moral arbiters of my youth, a tableau of sex and money and controlled substances, a world of the snortable, sniffable, smokable, shootable, and swallowable.”—John Gregory Dunne, “To Live and Die in L.A.,” in Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2006)

John Gregory Dunne, who died seven years ago, was born in Hartford on this date in 1932. Calvin Trillin once remarked on his good friend’s “lace-curtain Irish” background. “Boarding school Irish,” the novelist-screenwriter corrected him.

Dunne’s response reflects a similarly acute class consciousness that permeated the work of a couple of other writers born in cities outside New York and Boston, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara. But as the “Quote of the Day” demonstrates, Dunne’s novels and nonfiction is harder and more unsentimental than these two literary forebears. He might have lapsed from Catholicism, but its tenets about original sin informed how he viewed the world. Even in sunlit California, the evidence of man’s dark impulses appears—especially on the crime blotter.

Dunne himself lived in a way all too weighted down by sin. Fans of himself and wife Joan Didion might have been dismayed by Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan’s recent description of their “regular discussions of divorce, kicked-down-door fights, sullen silences, nervous breakdowns, psychiatric treatment, psychotic episodes, heavy drinking, and amphetamine-taking,” but both frankly discussed in their work all of these episodes.

Yet as a writer—well, Dunne could be forgiven much of this. Screenwriting work with Didion furnished him with a frequent source of income, a month of Sundays regaling friends about crass Hollywood—and the raw material for gritty novels such as True Confessions, Dutch Shea Jr., Play Land, and Nothing Lost. In these, his instincts as a former journalist came to the fore, as well as a colloquial, funny, cynical voice best exemplified by this observation of his: “A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.  Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct.''

The title of his last novel, Nothing Lost, aptly described his own influences. Nothing was lost on Dunne—someone who would go through an old phone directory for local color, or suddenly find an ideal, Dickensian nickname while talking with a friend.

Fourteen years ago, I attended a joint reading by Dunne and Didion at New York's 92nd Street Y. He seemed to enjoy the occasion more than his famously reticent wife. I'm only sorry I didn't have an opportunity to hear him speak more often.Few in our time have surpassed him for chronicling the weavers of our enormous "tapestry of transgressions."