Volume 44, Number 4 · March 6, 1997
Hollywood: Money That Dreams Can't Buy
By Michael Wood
Monster: Living Off the Big Screen
by John Gregory Dunne
Random House, 203 pp., $21.00
'Another hour passed,' we read in Fitzgerald's Last Tycoon. 'Dreams hung in fragments at the far end of the room, suffered analysis, passed—to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded.' Hollywood, long thought of as the dream factory, has probably more often been the cemetery of dreams, the place where possibilities flicker for a moment and die before they reach the world. By the 1970s the creation of discardable (and discarded) dreams appears to have become a major activity of the movie industry, the way it kept itself going. You made a film now and then, but mainly you made deals, put packages together, ran with them for a bit, and then at some lunch or meeting or other you dropped your package and picked up another one. 'It had been a very creative deal,' Joan Didion wrote in The White Album of a movie that hadn't happened, 'and they had run with it as far as they could run and they had had some fun and now the fun was over, as it also would have been had they made the picture.'
Review, 2749 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |