John Gregory Dunne

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John Gregory Dunne (* 25. May 1932 in West Hartford , Connecticut ; † thirtieth December 2003 in New York ) was an US -American writer , journalist , literary critic and screenwriter .

Life

John Gregory Dunne was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1932, one of six children to a wealthy surgeon with an Irish Catholic background. His parents were Dorothy Frances Dunne, née Burns, and Richard Edwin Dunne, chief physician at a clinic and well-known cardiologist. As a child, Dunne suffered from severe stuttering and chose the literary form to better express himself. Apparently, he learned to speak approximately normally by watching other interlocutors. The children grew up in the same social and spatial environment as the Kennedys . Dunne attended a private Catholic school, the Portsmouth Priory School in Rhode Island . In 1954, Dunne graduated from Princeton . He then served for two years in the US Army , where he marked a rare slip in his biography with the loss of his rifle. Dunne then wrote for the advertising industry before working as a journalist for Time Magazine for five years . He owed a lot to his mentor , the well-known political essay writer , Noel Parmental , over the years, as well as his acquaintance with his future wife Joan, who was writing for Vogue at the time , and whom he had met at dinner together.

Dunne married Joan Didion , the writer of various novels , on January 30, 1964. Subsequently, they worked closely on the creation of scripts for television productions , plays and films , such as: B. The Panic in Needle Park ( 1971 ), A Star Is Born ( 1976 ) and True Confessions ( 1981 ) as well as an adaptation of one of his own novels. In the industry, the two were considered to be the model couple who worked together. While her forte was research and essays, he was considered the better novelist and analyst of human behavior.

Dunne was also the author of two non-fictional works on the Hollywood media business : The Studio , in which he described his personal experiences with the 20th Century Fox production operations and his encounter with Richard D. Zanuck , and Monster. Living off the Big Screen (1997), in which Didion and Dunne looked back over eight years of tiring work on Up Close & Personal on the biopic of Jessica Savitch with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer . Dunne could not save himself the cynical swipe at his former employer Disney , that the company was also called "Mouschwitz" (corruption of Mickey Mouse , for: Auschwitz ) or "Duckau" (analogous to Donald Duck for: Dauchau ) behind his back . However, with the commercial failure of Vegas in 1974, Dunne had turned to writing more fictional works. Even Playland from 1994, based on the memory of a former child star, thematized the history of the American film industry since the 1930s in the form of a novel, when a film author, after a personal stroke of fate, found the former mysterious star, who had fallen since the McCarthy era, in the middle of a trailer park .

As a literary critic and essayist, he worked regularly for The New York Review of Books until his death . His essays have been compiled in two books; Quintana & Friends (1988) and Crooning (1990). As a former neighbor of OJ Simpson , he also accompanied OJ Simpson's process as a political commentator. In the course of this media event, he was the first to subtly notice the conspicuousness that the film companies were quickly launching the former sports star and actor's last film projects in order to make their profit.

John Gregory Dunne wrote several short stories, including his bestseller True Confessions , which was loosely based on the authentic case of the Black Dahlia murders involving victim Elizabeth Short , and Dutch Shea, Jr. , which portrayed a die-hard Irish-American criminal lawyer.

In the PBS TV documentary L.A. is It - with John Gregory Dunne ( 1990 ), he served as an author and storyteller by the audience through the cultural landscape of his hometown of Los Angeles led. In the TV documentary New York in the 50's (author: Dan Wakefield , director: Betsy Blankenbaker ), which, to a certain extent, shed light on bohemian artistic life in Greenwich Village of that era, he and his wife appeared alongside numerous other personalities, such as B. David Amram , William F. Buckley , Norman Mailer and Robert Redford as contemporary witnesses . Other interviews of contemporaries who have already died, such as James Baldwin , Allen Ginsberg , Charles Wright Mills or Jack Kerouac , were recorded as archive material.

As recently as 2001, with his work Pearl Harbor , he kept the gigantomania and misunderstanding of history of producer Jerry Bruckheimer in mind, the reality that the Hollywood business least liked by quoting a now forgotten admiral in the New Yorker : “The Japanese are only a lot older Hardware destroyed [...] You kind of did us a favor. "

John Gregory Dunne, who had heart problems for years and already had a pacemaker , died of a heart attack at the age of 71 in Manhattan , New York, on December 30, 2003, after the couple had just visited their terminally ill daughter. His last novella, Nothing Lost , was nearing completion at the time of his death and was published in 2004.

Joan Didion, at the Brooklyn Book Festival, 2008

He left behind his adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who died in 2005 after a series of illnesses, and his wife, Joan Didion, who processed her experiences of his death and their daughter's long illness after a flu-related septic shock in the book The Year of Magical Thinking .

Through his brother, the film producer, writer and journalist Dominick Dunne , who also produced some of his scripts, John Gregory Dunne was the uncle - and in Griffin's case also the godfather - the actors Griffin Dunne and Dominique Dunne .

Works

  • Delano. The Story of the California Grape Strike . Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York 1967.
  • The studio . Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York 1969.
  • Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season . Random House, New York 1972.
  • True Confessions . EP Dutton and Co, New York 1977 (German Shackles of Power )
  • The Red White and Blue . St Martin's Press, New York 1987, ISBN 978-0-312-90965-9 .
  • Quintana & Friends . Pocket 1988, ISBN 978-0-671-66025-3 .
  • Crooning: A Collection . Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-0-671-67236-2 .
  • Dutch Shea, Jr. New York Linden Press 1982, ISBN 978-0-671-46170-6 .
  • Monster. Living off the big screen . Random House, New York 1997.
  • Playland . Random House, New York 1994, ISBN 978-0-679-42427-7
  • Nothing Lost . Random House, New York 2004. ISBN 978-1-4000-3501-4
  • Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne . Random House, New York 2005.
in German translation

Script templates / film adaptations

  • 1965: Kraft Suspense Theater - # Kill Me on July 20th
  • 1970: The Panic in Needle Park
  • 1976: A Star Is Born
  • 1981: Shackles of Power
  • 1990: Seductive Stories ( Women & men: Stories of seduction )
  • 1995: Broken Trust
  • 1996: Up Close ( Up close and personal )

Guest appearances

  • 1997: Politically Incorrect
  • 2000: New York in the 50's

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/john-gregory-dunne-549253.html
  2. ↑ Joan Didion. In: Turner Classic Movies . Retrieved October 29, 2018 .
  3. ↑ http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2003-12-31-dunne-obit_x.htm
  4. ↑ DIED John Gregory Dunne In: Der Spiegel 2/2004
  5. ↑ http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/list/im/115im.php
  6. ↑ See James Ellroy : The Black Dahlia . German by Jürgen Behrens, with an afterword by James Ellroy, Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-550-06165-X .
  7. ↑ The FBI's Black Dahlia files ( Memento of February 7, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) FBI (Freedom of Information Act) page
  8. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0277185/
  9. ↑ Thomas Hüetlin: Top Gun in Pearl Harbor , in: Der Spiegel , May 28, 2001.
  10. ^ Rachel Donadio: Every Day Is All There Is . In: The New York Times , October 9, 2005
  11. ^ Susanne Weingarten: Mourning without consolation . In: Der Spiegel , September 26, 2006.
  12. ↑ http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9781400035014
  13. ^ Edward Lewine: Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne. Irish boarding school . In: New York Times , January 22, 2006.
personal data
SURNAME Dunne, John Gregory
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer, journalist and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH West Hartford
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 2003
Place of death New York City