Word: script
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BOOKS . . . MONSTER: LIVING OFF THE BIG SCREEN: John Gregory Dunne is a journalist and novelist who, with his wife Joan Didion, another producer of stinging reportage and fiction, pays the family bills by writing movie scripts. One of those, the Robert Redford?Michelle Pfeiffer showcase, 'Up Close and Personal,' is the subject of Dunne?s new book (Random House; 203 pages; $21). Originally the film was to be based on a biography of Jessica Savitch, the television reporter who died with her boyfriend in 1983 when their car accidentally rolled into the Delaware Canal near Philadelphia. But the details...
...years with the sci-fi heroes who thrilled a generation, and then some, of American youths from the 1930s onwards. Lucas worked hard on "Star Wars"; his first film since the 1974 hit "American Graffiti," the 33-year-old director spent the better part of three years writing the script (during which time he drew up four different versions) before he commenced shooting in March 1976. A lot of care and effort went into the movie, and the viewer must keep a grain of salt handy as he takes in Lucas' very deliberate use of tried-and-true cliches--phrases...
...example: in real life Eva Peron actually spoke most of her lines). "Dramatizing Larry Flynt was walking a tightrope--include too many contemptible events, and the audience turns off," concede the film's screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, in an introduction to the published version of their script. Its climax revolves around the libel suit filed against Flynt by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, which led to the famous 1988 Supreme Court decision saying it's O.K. to poke fun at public figures, even to say--as Hustler did of Falwell--that they have sex with their mothers in outhouses...
...comic premises go, this is not exactly a world-beater. But soon enough, the keepers--gentle souls all--are funnily up in arms defending their pets. A wandering tarantula motivates a genteel striptease, and the mean mogul gets his comeuppance. The script, by Cleese and Iain Johnstone, lacks Wanda's mean and giddy inventiveness, and the directors, Robert Young and Fred Schepisi, don't wind their material very tightly. Still, this good-natured movie is very much in the spirit of those ancient comedies from Ealing Film Studios in which nice, silly people defend some enclave of old-fashioned sanity...
...young man had one simple question for Al Franken '73, the former "Saturday Night Live" script writer and author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot: "How should I do it without becoming violently...