Joe's View

Dominick Dunne’s final novel — “Too Much Money” (Crown) — goes on sale today.

It pains me to report that the book is a dud Dunne clearly had trouble with in the final months of his life.

In place of the good storytelling and well-drawn characters in the writer’s best novels — “A Season in Purgatory” and “An Inconvenient Woman” — we get what appears to be hastily rewritten journal entries from the last few years of Dunne’s life.

When Dunne died last summer and Crown announced that he had completed “Too Much Money” the first question that came to my mind was: What happened to the novel he had been talking about for more than a decade, even so far as to give it the title, “A Solo Act”?

In interviews scattered over the late 1990s, the longtime Connecticut resident told me he was in the middle of writing a novel that would be the summation of his career, a Somerset Maugham-style epic that would be Dunne’s ultimate vision of the New York society scene he enjoyed so much.

The writer was interrupted by his journalistic pursuits on TV and in Vanity Fair, however, and “A Solo Act” moved onto a back burner.

When Dunne finally returned to fiction — and the book he owed his publisher — the writer was physically ailing and still out there covering trials for Vanity Fair.

“Too Much Money” feels like a rush job, with Dunne hastily fictionalizing what was going on in his life as he wrote it — the big slander suit he faced for speculating about the death of congressional aide Chandra Levy; his tense times with Vanity Fair when the magazine made it clear Dunne was more or less on his own for a suit stemming from a radio talk show appearance; and other odds and ends from the writer’s partygoing in the two years before he died.

The novel starts off very badly, with a convoluted four-page prologue taking back the terrible ending of Dunne’s 1997 novel “Another City, Not My Own,” in which his stand-in character, Gus Bailey, was murdered by Andrew Cunanan (the guy who killed Versace).

I thought at the time that the clumsy device was Dunne’s way of forcing himself to leave his own persona behind to focus on other people in “A Solo Act.”

Bailey’s resurrection allowed Dunne to follow the same format that led him into so much trouble in “Another City, Not My Own” — very light fictionalization of his own life.

“Too Much Money” is labeled “a novel” but it barely qualifies. Dunne must not have had much energy for invention when he sat down to write this book — he never bothers to disguise the identities of the real people he’s writing about (including himself).

He also displays a terrible tic of having his characters repeat the same anecdotes and bits of information over and over — as if the novel was written in pieces and Dunne never had the chance to edit out the repetitions.

Is there a half-finished manuscript for “A Solo Act” buried somewhere in the writer’s papers? Or, was the book a pipe dream akin to “Answered Prayers,” that never-discovered New York society novel Truman Capote kept talking about in the years before he died?

The brand new Yale Institute for Music Theatre has gotten off to a great start with the world premiere production of “Pop!” that’s on the boards at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven through Saturday.

The Institute was established by the Yale schools of drama and music to develop new work by composers and playwrights who have received an undergraduate or graduate degree within the last five years.

A public reading of “Pop!” last summer — after a two week workshop — was so well-received that Yale Rep artistic director James Bundy added the show to his 2009-2010 season — it’s the first new book musical to debut at the Rep in more than a decade.

The show about artist Andy Warhol and his strange symbiotic relationship with his gallery of misfit “superstars” has a few bumpy patches — this is its first full production, after all — but the spectacular cast and the fresh song score by Anna K. Jacobs (music) and Maggie-Kate Coleman (lyrics) are thrilling.

Coleman manages to pack an incredible amount of material about Warhol and his associates in her very tight book for the musical. The show starts with the artist’s near fatal shooting in 1968.

Although it was fairly obvious fairly quickly that Andy had been shot by the angry feminist writer Valerie Solanas, the show’s provocative premise is that many people around him had good reasons to hate the artist enough to pull the trigger.

As Warhol branched out from painting into filmmaking in the 1960s, he attracted a wide array of eccentrics and psychological misfits who gained notoriety from their involvement in the movies, but were left with little financial or emotional rewards for the ways in which they exposed themselves in front of Andy’s camera.

Warhol was a maddeningly passive figure who let nearly anyone into his huge studio — dubbed “The Factory” — but the variously disturbed people he attracted began to resent the money and fame that went to the artist rather than to his subjects.

Since this was all happening in the 1960s — and drugs were everywhere — the Factory scene got crazier and crazier to the point where few were surprised when Andy was attacked by one of his supposed followers.

“Pop!” uses a theatrical investigation into the shooting — led by the transvestite actress Candy Darling — as a means of exploring the tangled, tortured lives of the friends and hangers-on who came crashing down to earth after Andy got bored with them.

The musical has been staged with great flair by Mark Brokaw with excellent scenic and costume design by Valerie Therese Bart and Ying Song.

What really powers the show, however, is the extraordinary acting and singing by Randy Harrison as Andy, Leslie Kritzer as Valerie Solanas, Emily Swallow as Viva, Cristen Paige as Edie Sedgwick. Brian Charles Rooney as Candy, Doug Kreeger as Ondine and Danny Binstock as Gerard Malanga.

It is unlikely that you will see a stronger company of performers in New York City this season and I urge you to catch this new show before it closes  Saturday.

(For ticket information, go to www.yalerep.org)

The December GQ has honored actor/comedian Paul Rudd as one of its “men of the year” for his hit summer “bromance” with Jason Segel (above left) - “I Love You, Man.”

Rudd’s transition from a rather bland young romantic leading man in “Clueless” and “”The Objection of My Affection” into a full-out, ticket-selling comedian is worth noting. 

I’ve been off for the past few days, but will be back tomorrow with a report on the new musical “Pop!” at Yale Rep which I caught Friday night.

Also on the agenda this week is my review of the final Dominick Dunne novel, “Too Much Money,” which will be in stores on Tuesday.

Later in the week I’ll be writing about the fine new cast in the Broadway hit, “God of Carnage,” as well as “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” the classic Peter Weir movie I’ll be hosting at the Fairfield Library Wednesday night.

www.gq.com

The folks at Melville House Publishing in Brooklyn were nice enough this week to send me an early draft manuscript of a portion of Edward Jay Epstein’s forthcoming book, “The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies” which will be on sale Feb. 23.

The book should be much discussed in the run up to the Oscar telecast on March 7.

A few years ago, Epstein wrote one of the best books on modern Hollywood, “The Big Picture,” in which he explored the industry’s financial challenges and transitions at the turn of the century, as the growing global marketplace and the rise of the DVD and Internet downloads of movies started to completely transform the business.

Epstein is a veteran investigative reporter whose work has included books about the JFK assassination and several different aspects of the U.S. intelligence community.

With “The Big Picture” he trained his coolly analytical mind on the money end of the movie business, demonstrating that in many ways that is the only end that matters to the people who manufacture and distribute mass entertainment.

In the new book, Epstein shows us why most modern movies are so childish and why there is virtually no way the major studios will distribute challenging, adult pictures to the nation’s multiplexes.

Back in the glory days of the movie business — roughly the period from the late 1920s to the late 1950s — the industry had a huge dependable weekly audience so it was able to take some chances. The average American could be counted on to visit a theater regularly so there was no need for hard sell TV campaigns.

In 1948, Epstein points out, 65 percent of the population went to the movies every week.

By the late 1980s, television and other home entertainment options had walloped the movie business.

“The studios, realizing that they could no longer count on habitual moviegoers to fill theaters, devised a new strategy: creating audiences…for each movie via paid advertising…Audience-creation is a very expensive enterprise — in 2007 the studios’ average cost for advertising a film was $36.9 million.”

Most of those ad dollars are aimed at the one market segment eager to go out to a movie: teen males.

“Teens have…great advantages over adults for movie studios. First, they tend to be predictably clustered around the same TV programs on cable networks, such as MTV, which make them much less costly to reach than moviegoing adults who, if they watch TV at all, tend to be scattered among the most expensive programming in prime time. Second, once in multiplexes, teens tend to consume prodigious quantities of popcorn and soda, which is a powerful attraction to the theater chains that book movies for a wide opening.”

“…by 2005, studios had become so proficient at finding, activating and driving the teen herd into multiplexes that over 70 percent of the audience that went to their wide released movies were under twenty-one-years-old.”

Epstein examines several other facets of Hollywood’s bottom line in his book, including the crucial role that being insurable plays in any major star’s career.

Nicole Kidman went through a very rough patch nine years ago when a knee injury during the filming of “Moulin Rouge” (above) forced her to quit “Panic Room,” triggering a $7 million insurance pay-out to hire her replacement Jodie Foster.

Since the star had already cost an insurance company $3 million for the time that “Moulin Rouge” was shut down, Kidman was considered uninsurable when she was hired for “Cold Mountain.” The actress had to put $1 million of her own salary in an escrow account to get the insurance she needed to work on the $100 million film.

“The Hollywood Economist” will also include sections on Tom Cruise’s phenomenal contracts for the “Mission:Impossible” series as well as a breakdown of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s close to $30 million deal to make the third “Terminator” movie.

I can’t wait to read the finished book in two months. Epstein’s approach to moviemaking is refreshingly down-to-earth and tells us so much more than we will ever get in a glossy magazine cover story on the latest would-be blockbuster.

The smash-hit drama “A Steady Rain” closed on Broadway over the weekend after several months of SRO business, but stars Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig made more news yesterday.

The performers in the two-character police play broke the all-time Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fund-raising record (for the annual Gypsy of the Year Competition) by raising $1,549,952 in their post show pitches for the charity.

Jackman was already a beloved figure on Broadway for not missing performances, for giving a big boost to the Tony Awards telecast a few years back by agreeing to host it, and for making the effort to return to the stage twice since “X-Men” made him a major film commodity.

Yesterday, Jackman and Craig broke the record Jackman set seven years ago when he was in the musical “The Boy from Oz” and managed to add $632,998 to the charity’s coffers.

You hear some bad buzz around the New York theater community about film and TV stars who swoop in, snatch up plum stage roles, and then get out of town as quick as they can.

You won’t hear a bad word about Jackman, however, because unlike other film and TV folk he is famous for not missing shows (a financial disaster when a production is mounted based on the drawing power of a star) and he also puts himself out for theater charities way above and beyond the call of duty.

To give you an idea of the hard work Jackman and Craig put into auctioning off clothing, signed photos and other personal goodies (and services) after their performances, the next runner-up in the Gypsy of the Year fund drive was “The Phantom of the Opera” with $161,060 raised, and the top touring show fundraiser was “Rent” with $242,383.

Jackman and Craig demonstrated once again how eager theatergoers are to contribute to good causes when show people go the extra distance to encourage them.

All told the plays and musicals on and off Broadway and on tour raised $4,630,695 for BC/EFA. To do that in this economy, from people who have already spent quite a bit of money to see a show, is another tribute to the extraordinary power actors have over us.

There has been widespread amazement within the movie industry generated by the incredibly strong box office showing of the latest Sandra Bullock vehicle, “The Blind Side.”

Not only has the picture brought in close to $130 million since it opened Nov. 20, but last weekend it did something very few movies ever do — it moved up into the first place position in its third weekend in release.

The jump is a reflection of the weak competition provided by new releases such as “Everybody’s Fine” and “Brothers,” but it also indicates very strong word-of-mouth. Most movies these days are designed to open big on a huge wave of PR and then to peter out in the second and third weekends.

Adding fuel to Bullock’s fire is the fact that just four months ago the actress starred in another huge hit comedy, “The Proposal” (more than $200 million in this country alone).

Bullock is a fascinating figure in modern Hollywood — never particularly fashionable, never the queen of the tabloids for her off-screen life, but with a rock solid ticket-buying constituency that has been with her since “Speed” opened 15 years ago.

Most of the performer’s career appears to be founded on sheer, old-fashioned likeability — it’s usually fun to spend a few hours watching Bullock play ordinary/extraordinary women. While many of her movies tend to run together in your memory — who recalls much from the 2002 “Two Weeks Notice”? — Bullock’s warm and good-humored personality lingers.

Although she made hits on a regular basis throughout the 1990s, Bullock always worked in the shadows cast by romantic comedy queens Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan. And she was never in the running for the serious critical consideration afforded to such peers as Nicole Kidman (they co-starred in the 1998 supernatural comedy, “Practical Magic”).

Bullock’s one real shot at an Oscar — her fine work as Harper Lee in “Infamous” (2006) — was wrecked when another picture about Truman Capote (“Capote”) was produced simultaneously.

The producers of “Infamous” decided to hold their film for a year. “Capote” got a slew of nominations including one for Catherine Keener’s performance as Harper Lee; the “second” Capote movie barely registered in theaters 12 months later.

Bullock has made her share of missteps over the years. Her track record in drama is spotty, with such dogs as “Premonition” (2007) and “The Lake House” (2006) blighting the star’s resume.

In “The Proposal” (left) and “The Blind Side” (above), Bullock displays a new confidence in her ability to carry a movie and to surprise her fans with some darker shadings in the midst of light entertainment. Perhaps she regrouped and rethought some of her ideas about movies and acting in the two-year break between “Premonition” and “The Proposal.”

Bullock is riding so high right now that most of us have already forgotten the third 2009 release in which she starred — the execrable “All About Steve” which (mercifully) opened and closed so fast at the end of the summer that it barely registered on most people’s movie radar.

It will be very interesting to see how this recharged, 45-year-old star uses her new clout over the next few years.

The Broadway season so far has been the standard mix of star vehicles (the just-closed “A Steady Rain” with Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig) and prestige revivals from abroad (the transfer of a London production of “A Little Night Music” now in previews).

It is off-Broadway where producers and non-profit companies have been taking chances by thinking really big this year.

A few days ago I wrote in this space about the stirring two-part African-American epic, “The Brother/Sister Plays,” at the Public Theater on Astor Place.

A few dozen blocks uptown, the Signature Theatre has just launched an even more ambitious project, the three-night, nine-hour “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” made up of nine of the plays the late Horton Foote based on his own Texas family’s history in the early decades of the last century.

The project is a co-production with Hartford Stage — where artistic director Michael Wilson assembled his cast and design team for a two-month run earlier this fall.

Wilson was working on the final edits of the script with Foote when the playwright died in Hartford last March.

I missed the show in Hartford, but saw Part 1 — “The Story of a Childhood” — last week and cannot wait to see the next two parts of this incredibly moving family epic.

Foote often suffered from a perception that his plays were sentimental — compared with the work of such peers as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams — but “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” serves up one of the coolest assessments of family ties I’ve ever seen on stage.

We follow Horace Robedaux — the character based on Foote’s father — from the death of his father in 1902 through the boy’s abandonment by his widowed mother Corella after she marries a stern railroad worker named Pete Davenport who is only interested in Corella’s young daughter, Lily Dale.

There is nothing sentimental about the harsh life of Corella and Lily Dale under Davenport’s thumb in Houston where there are strong hints that the stepfather has much more than a paternal interest in the teenager.

In the second piece of Part 1 — “Convicts” — Harold is sent to work in a rural country store where a crazed Confederate veteran keeps refusing to pay the boy the money he was promised.

It is thrilling to see the company of 22 actors tackle multiple roles as Harold tries to find a job and a life that mean something to him and we get to see the effects of war and economic hard times on life in Texas 100 years ago.

Part 2 has just started performances and Part 3 will be on the boards next month. In February and March, Signature will be presenting a few marathon performances where theatergoers can experience the nine-hour epic in one day. My schedule didn’t permit attending a marathon but I must tell you that after I saw Part 1 on a recent Sunday afternoon I wished I could see the next part immediately.

The reviews have been terrific and the Signature Theatre is not very big, so tickets for “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” have been disappearing quickly. This is the sort of very rare personal and historical spectacle — ala “Angels in America” and “The Coast of Utopia” — that theatergoers will be talking about for many years to come.

(For ticket and performance information, visit www.signaturetheatre.org)

Lisa Scottoline has created a large gallery of wonderful female characters in the 16 novels she’s written since “Everywhere That Mary Went” launched her hugely successful writing career in 1993.

The lawyer-turned-novelist’s voice is so strong in these stories of law and crime and family in Philadelphia that I think most readers have come to assume that the lady pulling the strings behind the scenes must be a very smart and very funny person.

Anyone who has attended a Scottoline appearance at a bookstore or a writer’s conference knows that she is not your everyday novelist — Scottoline is a force of nature who turns readers into instant friends and who makes life very easy for the reporters and seminar moderators whose job it is to interview her.

Twice in her native Philadelphia, I had the pleasure of being asked to do public interviews with Scottoline in front of mystery fans. On both occasions, all I had to do was introduce Lisa and ask one or two questions before she spent the next hour charming and enlightening the hell out of everyone in the room.

Now, readers everywhere have been given the chance to meet the woman behind the novels in “Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog” (St. Martin’s Press), the just-published collection of some of Scottoline’s best Sunday “Chick Wit” columns for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Somehow, in between writing a terrific novel every year for the past 16 years, Scottoline has found the time to produce a weekly newspaper column that is hard to beat for humor, heart and down-to-earth wisdom. What could be a case of TMI in another writer’s hands becomes hilariously frank sharing in Scottoline’s columns.

Inquirer readers — and those who have read the column on the author’s website — quickly fell in love with the extended Scottoline clan. Mother Mary, who lives in South Beach with Brother Frank — who happens to be gay — and beloved daughter Francesca, whose separation from Mother Lisa to go off to college (and then on to her own life as a writer in New York City) has fueled many columns that manage to be touching and entertaining rather than self-indulgent.

Readers of Scottoline’s novels have come to relish her ability to shift gears from comedy to suspense to poignance with amazing dexterity and the same thing is true of the new non-fiction book.

You no sooner finish laughing at the writer’s exploration of movie candy fads — what was up with those Jujubes we used to love getting stuck in our teeth when we were kids? — than she hits you in the solar plexus with the next essay, a beautiful Father’s Day tribute to the late great Father Frank (“I Miss My Dad”).

At first glance, “Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog” appears to be a delightful detour in the career of one of our best novelists, but the links between this book and Scottoline’s fiction are very strong. How lucky for us that she decided to open a window into the sources of her storytelling.