Monster by John Gregory Dunne

Author:John Gregory Dunne [Dunne, John Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307817648
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

The rest of the memo was a paraphrase of the notes we had received from Disney fourteen months earlier, in March of 1992, even to invoking Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. We had our agents inform Touchstone that this was not a core dilemma with which we were prepared to grapple.

It was at this precise moment that Scott Rudin came into the picture.

Mephistopheles

How do you describe Scott Rudin? Overweight, overbearing, with a black beard and a huge, booming laugh, the bully boy’s bully boy, both impossibly demanding, even cruel, to subordinates (to equals and superiors, too, if he thinks he can get away with it, and even when he knows he can’t), and impossibly funny, a jovial Mephistopheles. The telephone seems permanently attached to his ear; on transcontinental trips, Rudin is the passenger who takes the airphone and keeps it for the length of the flight, hiding it when he is not using it.

“So you’re the one,” I said when I saw him finish a call and casually place the phone under his pillow on a flight from Los Angeles to New York.

“I never do this,” he said, “if someone has the other phone.”

One attribute Scott shared with John Foreman: John always thought if you did not know he was devious, you had no business being in show business. In his mid-thirties, Rudin was not so much a producer, in that spring of 1993, as a ministudio, as driven as anyone I have ever met in the movie business, always working, his work his life. Other producers made development deals, Rudin made pictures, almost as an act of will, three, four, and sometimes five a year, most of them under the umbrella of Paramount, where he had a nonexclusive deal in which Paramount had a first look, first refusal on all his projects. The Firm would come out that summer, a Tom Cruise blockbuster, and in the fall Addams Family Values and Sister Act 2, sequels to two of his earlier hits; Searching for Bobby Fischer, another summer picture, by first-time director Steve Zaillian, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay of Schindler’s List, would be a classy box-office flop. Nobody’s Fool, with Paul Newman, written and directed by three-time, Oscar winner Robert Benton, was ready to shoot; in preparation were Marvin’s Room and a remake of Sabrina, starring Harrison Ford and directed by Sydney Pollack, who had done The Firm. And now he was interested in Up Close & Personal, would we meet with him to talk it over?

We had known Rudin slightly when we were still living in Los Angeles. Several years earlier, via our agents and layers of intermediaries, Rudin had sounded us out about doing The Firm, but we had not thought that John Grisham’s novel could be made into a movie. There was no one to root for, we reported to Patty Detroit; Tom Cruise had never occurred to us, as he had to Rudin. I had even officially met Rudin once, at

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