Time-capsule document from the mid-sixties, years where the studios found themselves in long slow eclipse. Donne amiably taps the bones and kicks at the ashes of the mastodons, as the concept of "big movie studio" morphs in the background. Seems like Donne was lucky in the sense that 2oth Century Fox chose to green-light some super losers in the year that the book covers. In the later part of the sixties it just seems incredible that studio heads would bankroll flatliner vehicles like Star!, Hello Dolly, or the genuinely insipid Dr. Doolittle, but they did, and did so merrily, with conviction. And they follow it up with all the old wisecracking wisdom of the previous era ... This was still the time in the Movies where studio bosses could change the adorable Daughter character to a Chimp, and move locale from Western to Noir -- all the while congratulating themselves on their 'feel' for the market. High-jinks ensue, bottom line protected, box office continues to shrink mysteriously. By 67-68, the years of the book, huge inflated movies had crashed and burned : The Longest Day and Cleopatra were large scale disaster movies for the studios, and somehow or other, nobody in Hollywood saw 67's Summer Of Love as any kind of indicator. Keenly oblivious to actual youth culture, Fox mounted The Sound Of Music to please the 'family' market and scored big. Their success with that film pointed the way to some really bad choices, and this is where Donne arrives. Near-total disregard for the intelligence of the audience and a tone-deaf misunderstanding of the times and the changes happening in cinema... are the plot of the book. Curiously, Mr Donne indulges in no critical appraisal of the events, saving for the end a glimmer of understanding. At the premiere of Doolittle, celebrities and power brokers alike declare, with astonishing, breathless consensus, that the "movie is just wonderful". Seems that Donne is willing to risk a little in showing the echo-chamber happy-talk strategies of the PR machine, but curiously again, there is no consideration given that most of the movies worked up during the course of the book are overblown fiascos even before publicity began. Likely that Donne just wanted to be able to still get his table at Chasen's, and do lunch in Olde Hollywood style, after the book was published. Good introduction to a kind of ancient civilization, a once and never-again land where the choice of Pastrami versus Corned Beef may be as critical as Julie Andrews versus Barbra Streisand. Majors pull no boffo returns on warblers, but a quick read & a couple-o-yucks.
There is an episode here (the book is mainly episodes, not chapters, altho the stories about the Boston Strangler and Dr Doolittle pictures are throughlines) detailing Henry Zoster pitching a story to Richard Zanuck ("Will our conductor use the youth symphony, or will he use his own orchestra...") which is one of the funniest things I have ever read. But to call it funny, yuk-yuk-yuk, or even satiric, is to do a real disservice to Dunne, because it's great straight reportage, and he just gets out of the way and reports it. This kind of trick looks easy until you try to do it yourself and find it's nearly fucking impossible, like those piano runs in Mozart sonatas. This isn't as hilarious as Monster, but Dunne sets it alongside Ross's Picture and Salomon's Devil's Candy in his twenty-years-on introduction, and he's right to do so -- only his book is so much better-written than both those, that's insulting too. Dunne is one of the most terribly neglected American writers I can think of. (One hilarious moment in the recent squishy memoir of Didion -- putting in all the sentiment Didion so methodically cuts out -- is when a reporter gets Dunne on the phone (("He always answered the phone")) and gushes to him about his wife, only to awkwardly say, "Oh, I like your stuff, too....") Maybe he didn't mind it. He seemed okay with it. When you can write like this, I bet you're okay with a lot of things. He saw it clearly, and he got it down right. That was what mattered to him.ETA I also think it might be modeled a little on the Last Tycoon, but not slavishly. I'd have to check.
Do You like book The Studio (1998)?
Really a 3.5, because he is an amusing writer, but in general the book fails because when you're constructing something by presenting snippets of events, written down as they happened with no overt editorial commentary and very minimal surreptitious commentary (you know, pointed word choices and all that) to really make something special you need to construct them so that the reader is guided somewhere, to some feeling or idea. That just didn't happen for me with The Studio. I enjoyed all the little pieces but never saw them build to something.
—Alex
