Didion & Babitz: How Two Of LA’s Finest Writers Handled Hollywood

Eve Babitz, the “dowager groupie” who wrote Slow Days, Fast Company and was known for her relationships with the likes of The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison and Steve Martin, and Joan Didion, the author of Play It As It Lays and The White Album, who wrote Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s A Star Is Born, are unquestionably two of Los Angeles’ most-revered writers.

A new book – Didion & Babitz written by Lili Anolik – highlights the relationship between the pair, helped by the author unearthing scores of previously unseen letters.

The book, which published today by Simon & Schuster’s Scribner, also explores their contrasting relationship with Hollywood (the town) and Hollywood (the industry).

Didion wrote a slew of screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, including the aforementioned A Star Is Born, 1971’s The Panic In Needle Park, which starred Al Pacino, 1981’s True Confessions, which starred Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, 1996’s Up Close & Person, which starred Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer and a remake of her own Play It As It Lays. The pair also worked on dozens of other projects (more below).

Babitz, meanwhile, only dabbled in the screenplay world, selling a script with her friend Michael Elias, who went on to created sitcom Head of the Class, called Evoyez Les Violons (Send In The Violins) and getting her script Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Slut optioned.

“Eve was Hollywood to the core but had no interest in going into the business unless she needed a way to get cash quick. Joan and John got rich being unsuccessful screenwriters,” Anolik tells Deadline.

Babitz, despite having eight books published, was more attracted to the music scene of 1970s LA, preferring to hang out, take drugs and sleep with musicians and record company presidents, rather than take general meetings with producers and feature film development executives. The woman, who first became known for appearing nude in Julian Wasser’s iconic photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess, was also an artist herself, beginning her career making album covers for bands including The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield.

As her sister Mirandi says in the book, “Eve was the one who was rock ‘n’ roll. My God, nobody was less rock ‘n’ roll than Joan.”

Anolik tells Deadline that Babitz thought the movie business was “really square” and she had “contempt” for “its middle-classnik, nine-to-five quality, its inability to accommodate truly wild or wicked behavior, its tendency, in brief, to emphasize business over movie”.

As Babitz’s friend Dan Wakefield, an author whose best-seller Going All The Way was turned into a movie starring Ben Affleck and Rachel Weisz, says in the book, “Eve’s world was the rock ‘n’ roll world. And the movie business was small-time compared to it. You don’t do too many drugs if you’re working on a movie because there’s a lot at stake and you have to be up early.”

Babitz did, however, try and combine the two artforms, occasionally. She wrote a screenplay for The Eagles, adapted from a Rolling Stone article that she wrote about The Troubadour scene, that was optioned by their manager Irving Azoff. “What The Eagles wanted was a screenplay about the rise of The Eagles but she wrote it about a groupie, she wrote about herself, of course, so it didn’t work but she got paid for that,” Anolik tells Deadline.

Anolik has been largely responsible for the growing interest in Babitz over the last few years. She penned a feature about her for Vanity Fair in 2014 before publishing Hollywood’s Eve in 2019. This led to public proclamations from celebrities such as Emma Roberts.

Babitz’s reluctance may have had to do with her own self-confidence, using a phrase that her former lover and Atlantic Records exec Earl McGrath once said to her about her art.

“I once expressed curiosity as to why she’d never gone into the local business – movies – and written scripts in more than a half-assed, quick-buck way. Her reply: ‘Because you show a Hollywood person your screenplay and the person asks, ‘Is that the blue you’re using?’,” Anolik writes.

“I just think it was something fundamental to who she was,” the author tells Deadline. “She didn’t want to think of herself as a professional. There’s something anti-art for her. Even though she loved movie stars, there’s something about [the fact that] scripts are often written by committee, you get rewritten by somebody else or the actors or directors change their lines. That would be unbearable for her.”

This is despite the fact that Babitz was a pure Hollywood creation. She put Steve Martin in that white suit, worked for Timothy Leary, was busted by Watergate wiretapper G. Gordon Liddy and connected Frank Zappa with Salvador Dali. She may have even helped Carrie Fisher get the role of Princess Leia in Stars Wars thanks to her relationship with casting director Fred Roos and she appeared in The Godfather, Part II alongside Al Pacino and Robert Duvall in the Senate hearing scene. Later on, she effectively became the den mother of a new set of stars including The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus and Beastie Boys’ Adam Horowitz and played parlor games with Ashley Judd and Matthew McConaughey.

Like all good Hollywood denizens, Babitz was repped. Her agent was Erica Spellman-Silverman, who began her career at ICM representing the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Cameron Crowe, before moving to William Morris, where she also repped the likes of Brett Ratner. Spellman-Silverman, who is now at Trident Media Group, still looks after Babitz’s work.

The agent was responsible for selling her film and TV rights. Months after being fired from Sony, it emerged that Amy Pascal and Charlie’s Angels producer Elizabeth Cantillon had acquired the rights to four of Babitz’s books – Eve’s Hollywood, Sex & Rage, LA Woman and Slow Days, Fast Company – with plans to turn them into a TV series.

Two years later, Hulu signed on to develop a comedy series with the pair and Little Fires Everywhere showrunner Liz Tigelaar based on Babitz’s work. It did not, however, get picked up.

Anolik wasn’t surprised. “There are no plots. The books are totally internal so I don’t know how you would ever make a television show. You’d have to fully dramatize it and make it about Eve,” she says. “The milieu and the time-period is so glamorous but it’s tricky, her work is like tone poems.”

Joan Didion: In Hollywood

Joan Didion, on the other hand, regularly took Hollywood’s loot. After spending seven years at Vogue, she wrote her first novel Run, River, published in 1963, before moving to LA and having a run that included Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer and The White Album.

Didion and her husband wrote a lot of screenplays and developed even more. In addition to the movies mentioned above, they wrote a draft of Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends, a film for HBO’s Women & Men: Stories of Seduction starring Melanie Griffiths and James that was adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants and 1995’s Broken Trust starring Tom Selleck.

“The thing that’s so interesting about Joan and John is that they had such a hustle going. They were clearly not good screenwriters and yet they were probably some of the highest paid screenwriters at that time,” Anolik says. “Hollywood was always paranoid about being vulgar and I’m sure just wanted them for a touch of class. If you had those two writers on your project, it was a classy project, and that’s probably what they were getting paid for, more than anything.”

Wakefield says much of this took place after the couple moved to Malibu in 1971. “Joan and Dunne would be asked to write a script for, variously, a remake of Rebel Without A Cause, a sequel to The Graduate, a Western version of Serpico. They’d take meetings with Shirley MacLaine, Julie Andrews, Faye Dunaway, Paul Newman would invite them over for dinner. Barbara Streisand would introduce them to her pet lion. And Charlie Sheen, a local kid with a few uncredited appearances in his dad’s movies, would become [their daughter] Quintana’s first boyfriend,” he says.

Many of the projects that they worked on never made it past development hell. Reader, this is a long list, so please bear with me.

Projects included: The Verbal Structures of a Woman’s Life, an original script by Joyce Carol Oates about a blue-collar interracial love affair in Detroit and Cleveland for actresses including Vanessa Redgrave, Faye Dunaway, Natalie Wood, Julie Andrews and Shirley MacLaine; railway western Hundredth Meridian; a reworking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night; oil field thriller North Slope; California water wars western Water; Gale Force, a hurricane bank robbery thriller for Sylvester Stallone; The Gold Coast, an adaptation of Nelson De Mille’s best-selling novel for Columbia Pictures; Ultimatum, a terrorism thriller about nuclear weapons; Room At The Top, a remake of the Simone Signoret-led 1958 pic; Court of Honor, an adaptation of William Wood’s novel; The Old Gringo, an adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’ novel; Dharma Blue, a UFO project for Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer; The Deer Park, an adaptation of Normal Mailer’s book for Sidney Lumet; a rewrite of Primal Fear for Paramount; Ice Queen, based on a Working Woman story about an undercover DEA agent and a money laundering sting against the Cali cartel developed with Michelle Pffeifer’s Via Rosa Productions; remakes of The Day The Earth Caught Fire, Letter to Three Wipes, The Bad and the Beautiful and Two for the Road as well as adaptations of Dunne’s books Dutch Shea Jr. and Vegas.

They worked with many of Hollywood’s top stars, directors and producers including Jane Fonda, former Paramount President Frank Yablans, The Sting producer Julia Phillips and Paul Schrader.

The Taxi Driver and Raging Bull writer worked with them on an adaptation of Dunne’s book Vegas, who said of the pair, “They wanted to be successful screenwriters first and they wanted to be serious novelists first. That gets a little messy.”

They also worked with Scott Rudin, the potato-throwing producer who was accused of abusing his staff, on projects such as a remake of State of the Union, the Frank Capra-directed film that starred Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and an adaptation of Caleb Carr’s book The Alienist, which later became a series for TNT.

Rudin also discussed them doing The Firm and wanted the pair to write a movie about Barry Diller.

In Monster: Living Off The Big Screen, Dunne’s 1997 book about the process of making Up Close & Personal, the writer called Rudin “overweight” and “overbearing”. “The bully’s boy bully boy, both impossibly demanding, even cruel to subordinates and impossibly funny, a jovial Mephistopheles,” he writes.

Didion and Dunne viewed their work in Hollywood as a way to get paid, and their work in fiction and non-fiction as a way to get credibility. They also had top reps including Jeff Berg, who ran ICM, and Patty Detroit.

Dunne, in Monster, 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. In the Industry, they are regarded as chronic malcontents, overpaid and undertalented, the Hollywood version of Hessians, measuring their worth in dollars, since ownership of their words belong to those who hire and fire them,” he wrote.

Their screenplay of A Star Is Born was widely criticized, but does it matter if the 1976 film grossed $80M in North America on a $6M budget? “The single redeeming feature of our version of Star is that it was such a huge hit that we may well be the last people in Hollywood to have seen money on net points,” Dunne writes.

In a 1975 interview with The Atlantic, he admitted, “We write for movies because the money was good, because doing a screenplay is like doing a combination jigsaw and crossword puzzle – it’s not writing, but it can be fun – and because the other night, after a screening, we went out to a party with Mike Nichols and Candice Bergen and Warren Beatty and Barbara Streisand. I never did that at Time.”

The pair also both had health issues so insurance from the Writers Guild of America was helpful.

Didion got in on the act too, writing an essay titled In Hollywood, that was later included in The White Album. “The responsibility for every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing,” she writes.

Hollywood’s Eve

Babitz died on December 17, 2021, followed days later by Didion, who died on December 23. At times, the pair were close, Didion edited Eve’s Hollywood and they spent plenty of time together at 7406 Franklin Avenue, sharing much of the same circle of friends.

After Babitz’s death, coming two years after Anolik published Hollywood’s Eve, her sister Mirandi, who was also a figure on the scene, told the author about a stack of boxes in Babitz’s run-down apartment.

Anolik knew that she’d have to dive even deeper into the Babitz story. But what she didn’t realize until she read the letters was that she would get to the bottom of Joan and Eve’s relationship. Anolik jokes that she wrote this book “against her will”, believing initially that she would just update her previous book and maybe pen a feature for Vanity Fair on the letters.

“When I got into the letters, they fundamentally changed my understanding of Eve. Then I realized I was writing a shadow book about Joan Didion and it became its own thing,” she says.

Central to this was a note from Babitz to Didion that read, “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?”

Didion & Babitz also delves into Babitz’s relationship with her own family, tragic moments in her childhood and how she flitted through these LA scenes. She also solves certain mysteries around Didion, her relationship with Noel Permental Jr., a leading figure in New York political journalism, who she dedicated Run, River to, as well as delving into her marriage to Dunne (who may or may not have had the hots for Babitz or may or may not have had the hots for men).

LA is crying out for writers like Babitz and Didion right now, although a city bereft of such scenes makes it harder. It’s 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. She used to be able to go out as Jack Nicholson’s date or Dennis Hopper’s date and end up sitting on Dean Martin’s lap. 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. Emma Roberts is hosting Anolik’s LA book party with help from Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Elizabeth Olsen, Janicza Bravo and Nicole Richie, while Justin Theroux and Sofia Coppola helped her toast the tome in New York. Just don’t expect the same chaos that reigned at Ports or Ma Maison back in the ‘70s.

As Babitz writes, “Los Angeles isn’t a city. It’s a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio. Everything is off the record.”