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The Studio
by
John Gregory Dunne
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | The Studio |
| Author: | John Gregory Dunne |
| Genre: | Non-fiction |
| Written: | 1969 |
| Length: | 207 pages |
| Availability: | The Studio - US |
| The Studio - UK | |
| The Studio - Canada | |
| El estudio - España | |
| from: Bookshop.org (US) |
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Our Assessment:
B : decent year-in-the-life account of a Hollywood studio in the late-1960s
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Review | . | 16/12/1969 | A.Croce |
| The New Republic | . | 10/5/1969 | Stanley Kauffmann |
| The NY Times | . | 7/5/1969 | C.Lehmann-Haupt |
| Time | . | 27/6/1969 | . |
From the Reviews:
- "Dunne's book has the built-in tedium, the moral vacancy, of a Maysles Bros. documentary. His picture people [...] walk through his pages like the grateful dead." - A.Croce, National Review
- "The chief trouble with the book is that, although it is new, we feel we've read most of it before. Only some nouns and figures have changed." - Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic
- "I was lulled by John Gregory Dunne's seeming innocence into a state of mind unprepared for what The Studio turns out to be. So apparently were the executives of 20th Century-Fox, for they welcomed him into their midst to witness the most awful scenes. All of us -- the executives and me -- come away the worse for Mr. Dunne's effects. For what follows is a series of carefully sketched scenes from nine months in the life of the dream distillery. They tell us with considerable precision how Hollywood operates, and they numb us with slow poison." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
- "Left to his own prose, Dunne is apt to "vicissitudes" when he means to say "troubles." But he is a good reporter who unobtrusively sets scene after scene, constructing his book out of quotes that show the moviemen to be innocent of cruelty or dirty dealing, but guilty (in an engagingly matter-of-fact way) of venality and grossness." - Time
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
In 1967, John Gregory Dunne was given what seems like very free access to recently revitalized movie studio Twentieth Century Fox Film. As he notes, in 1962 the studio was on the verge of bankruptcy, but with Darryl Zanuck taking over as president and son Richard taking over as production chief -- basically running the studio -- fortunes quickly changed for the better, and it was now flying high, not least on the success of The Sound of Music, and for Dunne:
In some ways Hollywood seemed a perfect example of a closed and inbred society, and the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, not long ago on the brink of ruin, now the most successful studio in Hollywood, itself shored up by all the basic tenets of the Industry, seemed the best place to observe it in action.The Studio chronicles nearly a year of studio life and activity -- culminating in the completion of and then first Los Angeles screening of Dr. Dolittle in December, 1967, Dunne recounting and summing up:
I went to the premiere, and I did not go back to the Studio after that, for the point of the Studio is the Product, and during the months I had spent there, the major Product, the $18 million Product, was Dr. Dolittle.The work on Dr. Dolittle -- the movie as well as the launch -- does come up frequently, but the studio is juggling a large number of projects at the same time -- TV shows as well as films -- and Dunne pays attention to these as well; it really is a kind of 'year-in-the-life' (of a studio) story. Still, the Dr. Dolittle details are fun, from Rex Harrison walking away from the movie -- and the studio hiring Christopher Plummer to replace him, and then having to pay him off when Harrison said he didn't really mean it and wanting to go ahead, to licensing arrangements, as: "There were approximately fifty licensees who would spend $12 million on consumer advertising featuring the picture". (Embarrassing reviewer reveal: my first elementary school lunchbox was a Dr.Dolittle-box .....)
Even though the examples come from the late 1960s, very large sums of money are involved, and much of the studio time is spent trying to figure out where budgets can be cut and things done more cheaply. Dunne goes into some of the accounting regarding, for example, the planning for Hello, Dolly ! -- bought for $2,100,000 and:
Based on the cost of other musicals, Zanuck estimated that Hello, Dolly ! would cost between $12 million and $15 million, but the preliminary estimate based on Lehman's first-draft screenplay placed the budget at $25 million.Among the details:
The biggest item was the exterior set of New York. It was originally planned to build the New York set at the Fox ranch in Malibu, but after months of surveys on costs and the arc of the sun (where would the sun be during the prime shooting hours if the set were constructed on a north-south axis ? on an east-west axis ?), the Malibu site was abandoned.There are also the projects that (we now know) go nowhere, such as: "a dramatization of Stephen Vincent Benét's poem, John Brown's Body", with producer Pandro S. Berman eagerly telling Richard Zanuck: "I think we have an Academy Award winning picture here". (Zanuck tossed them a bone -- "I wish all first drafts were this good" -- but we all know how things turned out (there was no movie).)
Much that one might think about Hollywood is, unsurprisingly, confirmed -- beginning with the admission: "Unfortunately, acting ability is not the primary requirement for pictures". And, as one agent sums up:
You fail upward here. A guy makes a ten-million-dollar bomb, the big thing is not that he's made a bomb, but that he put together a ten-million-dollar picture. Next time out, they give him a twelve-million-dollar picture. It's crazy, but that's how it works. The worst thing that can happen to you is to have a small success. You make a picture for seven-fifty, it's a nice picture, it makes a little money, but you're dead. They aren't interested in pictures that make a little money. Everybody's looking for the killing. So you bomb out at ten million. Well, you put together a big one, and the next time out, you might hit with one.But one can't disagree with all the film-makers' bottom-line reasoning: "Zanuck was less than sanguine about the box office possibilities of The Severed Head. He thought the property too intellectual for the budget involved". (It was eventually picked up by another studio, and made into a film starring Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, Ian Holm, and Claire Bloom, but does not seem to have had a great box office.)
There are fun background titbits sprinkled in, such as about the movie, The Boston Strangler, from Tony Curtis so eager to get the part ("He went out and got himself made up like the Strangler and had pictures taken") to them settling on him:
It was a piece of offbeat casting. Curtis' career was in trouble. He had gone through a number of agents and appeared in a string of frivolous formula comedies that had flopped at the box office. The good picture offers were not coming in and he was seriously considering a bid to host a television series about detectives, in which he would also appear in a given number of episodes. Curtis was desperate to change his career image from the mindless comedy parts he had done for so many years.There are also the studio's concerns -- "People might think the picture is just another Tony Curtis comedy" -- and, when he had the part:
Though Tony Curtis' wardrobe in The Boston Strangler consisted almost entirely of work clothes, he insisted that everything be custom tailored. [...] He's such a perfectionist. But I guess it's a very serious picture and the clothes couldn't be handled by just buying a green zipper jacket . We wanted to get as slender a look as possible, so the pants were dropped to the hipbone and made with fewer pockets. Then the work shirts were made to measure so there wouldn't be a lot of bulk to push down into the pants. Then everything was put in the washing machine and mangled so that they'd have character. Oddly enough, the changes we made in the clothes aren't noticeable.One difficulty with there being so many on-going projects -- the annual report mentioned at the start tallies: "over thirty other feature films in various stages of production, and the television department had ten shows totaling nine hours of prime-time viewing on the network airwaves" --, so Dunne has to spread himself pretty thin. Even the semi-deeper dives, on a few of the productions, don't go very far. Still, there's lots of name-dropping and it's interesting to see, more than fifty years on, what made something of a mark and what has been forgotten (or, indeed, never got made at all).
It all adds up to a fine, broad look at film-production and marketing at the time (though it seems stunning that the studio would let itself be so easily influenced by small preview-audience reactions).
Late in the book Dunne quotes assistant director Reggie Callow:
"Oh, I tell you," Callow said, "the true story of Hollywood's never been written. There's so many funny things happen, you wish you had written them down."Dunne tries to do that -- but, like the anecdote Callow tells leading up to this, much is as much expected as revealing (i.e. there are no dark and dirty surprises about how Hollywood really *works*; except for all the accounting (both weirdly penny-pinching while also often crazy fantasy-number spending) it's pretty much exactly what you thought) -- and the things aren't really that funny.
The Studio is obviously of basic-documentary interest, and Dunne -- nicely keeping himself out of it for almost the entire book -- is a decent and not (obviously) judgmental guide. A modestly entertaining slice of Hollywood history and life, but otherwise pretty unexceptional.
- M.A.Orthofer, 6 August 2026
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American author John Gregory Dunne lived 1932 to 2003.
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© 2026 the complete review
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