She also got her scriptPortrait Of The Artist As A Young Slutoptioned.
Joan and John got rich being unsuccessful screenwriters, Anolik tells Deadline.
As her sister Mirandi says in the book, Eve was the one who was rock n roll.
Eve Babitz (Getty)
My God, nobody was less rock n roll than Joan.
And the movie business was small-time compared to it.
Babitz did, however, try and combine the two artforms, occasionally.
Anolik has been largely responsible for the growing interest in Babitz over the last few years.
She penned afeature about her for Vanity Fairin 2014 before publishingHollywoods Evein 2019.
This led to public proclamations from celebrities such as Emma Roberts.
I just think it was something fundamental to who she was, the author tells Deadline.
She didnt want to think of herself as a professional.
Theres something anti-art for her.
That would be unbearable for her.
This is despite the fact that Babitz was a pure Hollywood creation.
Like all good Hollywood denizens, Babitz was repped.
Spellman-Silverman, who is now at Trident Media Group, still looks after Babitzs work.
The agent was responsible for selling her film and TV rights.
It did not, however, get picked up.
There are no plots.
The books are totally internal so I dont know how you would ever make a television show.
Youd have to fully dramatize it and make it about Eve, she says.
The milieu and the time-period is so glamorous but its tricky, her work is like tone poems.
Joan Didion: In Hollywood
Joan Didion, on the other hand, regularly took Hollywoods loot.
Didion and her husband wrote a lot of screenplays and developed even more.
The thing thats so interesting about Joan and John is that they had such a hustle going.
Hollywood was always paranoid about being vulgar and Im sure just wanted them for a touch of class.
Wakefield says much of this took place after the couple moved to Malibu in 1971.
Barbara Streisand would introduce them to her pet lion.
Many of the projects that they worked on never made it past development hell.
Reader, this is a long list, so like bear with me.
That gets a little messy.
Rudin also discussed them doingTheFirmand wanted the pair to write a movie about Barry Diller.
They also had top reps including Jeff Berg, who ran ICM, and Patty Detroit.
Dunne, inMonster, highlighted that Jack Warner used to call screenwriters Schmucks with Underwoods.
That writers find the time is evidence of their inferior position on the food chain.
I never did that atTime.
The pair also both had health issues so insurance from the Writers Guild of America was helpful.
Anolik knew that shed have to dive even deeper into the Babitz story.
When I got into the letters, they fundamentally changed my understanding of Eve.
Its also harder for stars to tear around town like they used to.
Michelle Phillips said that LA was so small.
You could go anywhere, you could do anything, and nobody was monitoring you.
But that could never happen now, which is such a shame, Anolik says.
But there is a phalanx of stars that are fascinated with Babitz and Didion.
Just dont expect the same chaos that reigned at Ports or Ma Maison back in the 70s.
As Babitz writes, Los Angeles isnt a city.
Its a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio.
Everything is off the record.
