In her new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine (out March 11 from Liveright), film critic Alissa Wilkinson floats an idea: To truly understand Didion, one must look “through the lens of American mythmaking in Hollywood,” which played a good-size role in her life. There was Didion’s youthful John Wayne infatuation (she later wrote about him), her jobs writing film criticism for not only Vogue, but also National Review (Wilkinson reproduces some deep cuts), and of course her sideline writing screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, to make money. (It’s right there in the subtitle of Dunne’s autobiographical quasi-exposé of 1997: Monster: Living Off the Big Screen.) They even moved to Los Angeles in 1964 in order to more easily break into the screenwriting biz.
Wilkinson’s book got me curious enough about Didion and Dunne’s collaborations to visit or revisit all seven of their produced scripts—five feature films and two teleplays—and as I watched, a question kept niggling at me: How much did Didion and Dunne, each a literary powerhouse, care about how their scripted work went over critically? The couple’s transparency about their financial motive seemed to signal a lack of egotism—a kind of, We don’t care if you don’t like our movies. We’re making bank, not art. Or was that just a preemptive defense against anyone who might set out to criticize those efforts, for which it’s fair to say Didion and Dunne weren’t heralded?
As I boned up on the couple’s wildly eclectic scripted output—their projects are all over the map in terms of tone, scale, quality, prestige, and ambition—I was also reading former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s new memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines (out March 25 from Penguin Press). In it, Carter recalls how, when he and his team at VF were putting together their first Hollywood issue, which ran in 1995, they set out to create “a group shot of all the greatest screenwriters alive at the time”—Julius Epstein (Casablanca), Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), and Robert Towne (Chinatown) among them.
“When the issue came out, word reached me that John was livid that he and Joan were not included,” Carter writes. “In truth, their names never even came up when I met with the staff to compile our long list of candidates for the shoot. They were both successful in print, but their screenwriting credits were for films that even by then were mostly forgotten or lamentable, including The Panic in Needle Park and the remake of A Star Is Born.”
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