Up Close and Personal : MONSTER: Living Off the Big Screen.<i> By John Gregory Dunne</i> .<i> Random House: 206 pp., $26</i>

“Monster” is John Gregory Dunne’s nonfiction account of the eight years that he and his wife, Joan Didion, worked as writers on the film “Up Close and Personal,” released in 1996. The book is a remarkable narrative--part memoir, part diary, part confessional--that tells more about the experience of writing for Hollywood than any other book ever written. It is also a very funny horror story.

I should say at once that I work in that same business and that I have known “the Didion-Dunnes” (as they’re short-handed in town) for 25 years. But any writer in Hollywood knows why it is so difficult to write an insider’s account such as this. Either you feel obliged to bend to the politics of collaboration, and therefore to praise enemies--or you can say what you really think, and burn your bridges forever. (When William Goldman wrote a candid memoir some years back, his book was widely taken to mean he no longer wanted to work in Hollywood.)

Dunne’s narrative avoids both pitfalls--largely because of the way the author presents himself and his material. “Monster” employs the cool reportorial tone Dunne used so effectively in his 1970 nonfiction book, “The Studio.” In his new book, he describes what happened during the making of “Up Close and Personal” without ad hominem comment. This restraint, the emphasis on the actual flow of events, gives the book a peculiar strength. Although he names names--Katzenberg, Hoberman, DeLine, Rudin, Simpson, Bruckheimer, Avnet, Pfeiffer and Redford all appear in these pages--I doubt that any of them will feel they’ve been treated unfairly. The book isn’t gossipy in the way Hollywood books usually are, even though gossip and scandals are mentioned in passing. Dunne is really interested in the process of filmmaking, and he trusts the power of accumulated detail to make clear what “script development” in Hollywood really implies. Many of the episodes he reports are funny and ghastly, such as the telling incident from which the book takes its title. (It’s too good to summarize here.) But Dunne finds it most useful simply to say what happened, without assigning credit or blame.

And throughout the narrative, Dunne acknowledges he is an active, even enthusiastic, participant in the lunatic goings-on he details. This is a rather unusual position for a writer to take. Historically, writers in Hollywood have portrayed themselves as victims--tender artistic souls colliding with the unspeakable, horny heathens of the West Coast. (This self-portrait was never true: William Faulkner may have gone home to Oxford to write, but he also went hunting with his friend Howard Hawks.)

Dunne has no patience with such posturing. He presents himself in these pages as a seasoned professional doing a good job for a good fee and thoroughly enjoying himself--he’s using the system at least as much as the system is using him. Plunged into a Byzantine world of intrigue and maneuvering, he’s perfectly able to take care of himself. When he’s lied to or fired, he’s never surprised. He’s been around long enough to know how the game is played. He’s playing it, too. He enjoys the money, the celebrity, the famous friends. As he says more than once, “We had a lot of fun.”

This sense of gleeful pleasure--a pleasure equal to the pain, which is also considerable but never discussed--is an undercurrent in the story Dunne tells. The book is a bracing antidote to the “They Killed My Baby” tradition of writerly whining. Dunne knows the deal going in, and he never pretends otherwise.

In fact, “Monster” is one of the few books about “The Business” that accurately reports the way the business really works--both in detail, and in tone. This blow-by-blow case history of a single film conveys more of the daily experience of writing for movies than other books have done. Dunne places work into the perspective of larger life: Screenwriting occurs against an ever-changing background of illnesses and accidents, marriages and funerals. And the work itself is reported in great detail: One has a clear sense of the nagging phone calls, the pressure, the memos back and forth, the rumors and the tension while you wait to hear how your draft is received. Dunne also captures the grinding exhaustion of movie work, the rehashing and restructuring of scenes and characters, in draft after draft. And his detached view of personal foibles accurately reflects an industry where one is obliged to work with many idiosyncratic and out-sized talents: One takes them as they come. Shock and petty moralizing are the mark of an outsider; insiders are too busy and can’t be bothered.

Indeed, like most experienced writers, Dunne finds it easier to work with “difficult” producers, the ones with bad habits or bad reputations. The bad boys say what they think; you know where you stand with them and they’re stimulating to be around. Dunne praises Frank Yablans, Don Simpson and Scott Rudin. He is less enamored of what he calls “the smoothies,” the flattering courtiers and underlings who never take a stand. We’re reminded of the old adage that in Hollywood a friend is someone who stabs you in the front.

The book is full of solid professional advice: how best to turn down a job (praise the project but plead commitment to your own work), how to deal with the author of a book you’re adapting (avoid a meeting at all costs), how to deal with lavish praise (expect to be fired soon), and proper behavior on the set (don’t go unless invited by the director and don’t speak to the stars unless spoken to first).

And Dunne shows how to deal with the painful moments of the screenwriter’s life: how to behave when the studio doesn’t like your script, how to respond when your work has been bad-mouthed at Morton’s, how to deal with idiotic memos from creative executives fresh out of college, how to act when a new producer wants to go back to the first draft after you’ve done eight subsequent versions, how to proceed when the director wants changes the producer disapproves of, how many free rewrites to give and when to draw the line, how to thread your way through the tangle of conflicting notes from studio director and stars, how to stay on the job despite extreme provocation and how to withdraw honorably when that time inevitably comes.

Indeed “Monster” is so dead-on accurate that one is reminded, reading it, how rare such accounts are. Given the astonishing degree of interest in Hollywood and the array of publications that write about its doings, it is surprising so few accounts ever manage to convey anything about the way movies actually are made. Most of what journalists write about Hollywood is either pure fantasy or after-the-fact score-settling by participants in a collaborative process. The truth, as Dunne tells it, is more difficult and more complicated.

Although Dunne avoids any judgments about his experience, readers may be inclined to draw conclusions of their own. Quentin Tarantino has been quoted as saying, “Development doesn’t work.” Arguably, Dunne’s narrative confirms that view. Although the final film of “Up Close and Personal” was a commercial success, one cannot help wondering whether the eight years it took were really necessary--and whether the movie that was finally made was the best movie of all the drafts that were written. On that question, Dunne, the consummate professional, is properly mute. The picture is what it is; it’s the outcome of a process. It got made, no mean feat these days. How it turned out is the way it turned out.

Milos Forman once said, “If you tell the truth, you are always criticized.” In “Monster,” John Gregory Dunne has told the truth about the way the modern screenwriter works in the movies and he may take some flak for it, particularly from wide-eyed cinema aesthetes and journalistic hangers-on. Contradicting these purveyors of fantasy, he gives us a detailed example about how the business really works. It’s a cheerful, human, funny and very informative account.

And it’s a lot of fun.