Word: didions
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Dunne and his wife, writer Joan Didion, have moved to Manhattan, but they lived in Southern California for years, wrote screenplays off and on and knew everyone in the movie business. The list of acknowledgments at the end of Playland names Otto Preminger, Natalie Wood, Billy Wilder and a cast of thousands. This explains part of the problem. What is supposed to be a novel is really the author's Hollywood valedictory, and he has included every good show-biz anecdote he ever heard. Unfortunately, the glut of marvelous gossip has stopped his story cold...
...blunt manner, he underscored every bottom line with outbursts of temper. When Martin Davis took over Paramount (then Gulf & Western) 10 years ago, the two dictatorial bosses began a festering, not quite open feud. Snyder is a buccaneer, better suited to being an entrepreneur than an employee. Says Joan Didion: "This is the game he wanted to play; he played it for 30 years, and he lost this round...
...blows westward, from Utah to the sea. The winds superheat in the Mojave Desert. Then, in hundreds of canyons leading coastward from the mountains, they can accelerate up to 75 m.p.h. If California is lucky, the Santa Anas, as they are called, merely annoy, ushering in what author Joan Didion has called "the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread . . ." If the state is unlucky, a spark, man-made or natural, will strike the canyon vegetation, thick and green in the damp months but now dried to tinder. The spiky brown chaparral brush will ignite like old Christmas trees...
...Joan Didion turns her deadly gaze on the 1980s...
That was the time of the "new journalism," but Tom Wolfe, presiding over the movement, did not notice that Ephron was writing some of the best reportorial prose of the era (he predictably singled out, in his anthology of new journalism, Joan Didion). It was a period of burgeoning feminism, but some feminists closed ranks against a woman who admitted, as Ephron did, that she still had fantasies of being raped. Yet everything valid in The Beauty Myth was said in Ephron's famous essays on breast size and vaginal perfumes, and male oppression is nowhere better described than...