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Playland
While researching a story in Detroit, screenwriter Jack Broderick meets 1940s-child-star-turned-bag-lady Blue Tyler, whose life had taken a precipitous turn when she fell in love with underworld killer Jacob King. 50,000 first printing. Tour.
494 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
About the author
John Gregory Dunne
20 books142 followersJohn Gregory Dunne was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic.
He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by observing others. He graduated from Princeton University in 1954 and worked as a journalist for Time magazine. He married novelist Joan Didion on 30 January 1964, and they became collaborators on a series of screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976) and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of his own novel. He is the author of two non-fiction books about Hollywood, The Studio and Monster.
As a literary critic and essayist, he was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends and Crooning.
He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr.
He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through the cultural landscape of Los Angeles.
He died in Manhattan of a heart attack, in December 2003. His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.
He was father to Quintana Roo Dunne, who died in 2005 after a series of illnesses, and uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist).
His wife, Joan Didion, published The Year of Magical Thinking in October 2005 to great critical acclaim, a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was seriously ill. It won the National Book Award.
He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by observing others. He graduated from Princeton University in 1954 and worked as a journalist for Time magazine. He married novelist Joan Didion on 30 January 1964, and they became collaborators on a series of screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976) and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of his own novel. He is the author of two non-fiction books about Hollywood, The Studio and Monster.
As a literary critic and essayist, he was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends and Crooning.
He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr.
He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through the cultural landscape of Los Angeles.
He died in Manhattan of a heart attack, in December 2003. His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.
He was father to Quintana Roo Dunne, who died in 2005 after a series of illnesses, and uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist).
His wife, Joan Didion, published The Year of Magical Thinking in October 2005 to great critical acclaim, a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was seriously ill. It won the National Book Award.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 25, 2014
Intellectual, colorful, and loaded with detail. But in the end I am disappointed. There is a jerky, disjointed pace to the book. The ending just drifted into place. The 512 pages were about 200 too many. And as the storyline progressed, I had a vision of the movie Bugsy -- and I didn't like the comparison because I wanted so much more for this book. The story of Meta Dierdorf could have led to something dramatic and powerfully explosive, and even unifying to the plot line. Yet she ended up being a distraction and a nuisance. However, John Gregory Dunne is still on my 'to-read list,' for the simple reason he employs a rich vocabulary and delivers a product with a higher than average Lexile score.
June 5, 2011
I reread Joan Didion's "A Year of Magical Thinking" and she talks so much about her husband's writing that I had to pick it up and see what kind of man was married to such a wonderful, talented woman. About "Playland:" I wasn't really drawn in. It's a story about a woman who was a child movie star and disappears, the narrator is the one who goes to find her, and how he gets sucked in to the connected web of her story, mobsters, gamblers, death, trailer parks, and his own personal mess where his wife died in a crash before they were going to get divorced. It was tough for me to power through, but I wouldn't say Don't Read It. B-
August 2, 2014
I absolutely loved this book.
John Gregory Dunne is an unfairly overloooked master, way better a novelist than Norman Mailer in my opinion. PLAYLAND is a wicked collision between an amoral Fifties starlet -- kind of Shirley Temple all grown up -- and a Bugsy Siegel gangster. The scene where the gangster arrives at Los Angeles train station to be met by the LAPD is tuning-fork pitch perfect fiction writing. The book reads like grown-up James Ellroy. Highly recommended.
John Gregory Dunne is an unfairly overloooked master, way better a novelist than Norman Mailer in my opinion. PLAYLAND is a wicked collision between an amoral Fifties starlet -- kind of Shirley Temple all grown up -- and a Bugsy Siegel gangster. The scene where the gangster arrives at Los Angeles train station to be met by the LAPD is tuning-fork pitch perfect fiction writing. The book reads like grown-up James Ellroy. Highly recommended.
March 22, 2010
This was a really fun read, especially being from California. Good summer book.
August 28, 2013
Just didn't grab me.
March 1, 2026
I found it unreadable, a meandering sluice of prose that tries very hard to sound cool. It's as if a clever fifth former had read a lot of Chandler and had the idea of applying a worldly-wise narrator's voice to a shaggy dog story. I found the text hard to parse, with sentences like: "Nice legs, sensible pointy tits, and I would wager the barbered rectangular trim that had become, now that I was back, however hesitantly, in circulation, my new benchmark for measuring erogenous indulgence." Those multiple sub-clauses nested in commas don't help, never mind the off-putting would-be snappy narration, the endless supposedly smart digressions, and the sense that Dunne doesn't know how to write for the eye.
Another example: "Anyway. Melba's father (if he was). Among other names he was known as Herman Toolate or Herbert Tulahti ("Too-late" and "Too-lah-tee" being the two conflicting pronunciations of the name she abandoned when she became, or was reborn as, Blue Tyler), or (this from those French cinéastes who kept..."
Oh, enough of this bibble. And by the way do we need "conflicting" in that sentence? Was Dunne being paid by the word? Or was he just on drugs? After forty pages I abandoned the book and turned instead, as it happens, to Dickens, who was writing 150 years earlier but whose prose is far easier to read.
Another example: "Anyway. Melba's father (if he was). Among other names he was known as Herman Toolate or Herbert Tulahti ("Too-late" and "Too-lah-tee" being the two conflicting pronunciations of the name she abandoned when she became, or was reborn as, Blue Tyler), or (this from those French cinéastes who kept..."
Oh, enough of this bibble. And by the way do we need "conflicting" in that sentence? Was Dunne being paid by the word? Or was he just on drugs? After forty pages I abandoned the book and turned instead, as it happens, to Dickens, who was writing 150 years earlier but whose prose is far easier to read.
September 1, 2020
This was slow starting for me, but then I could not wait to finish it to discover what happened to Blue and her friends. I though the characters were interesting.
October 25, 2021
She never became a bag lady In New York. Did whoever wrote the above blurb actually read the book?
September 2, 2011
Screenwriter Jack Broderick gets caught up in a search for former child star Blue Tyler. The portrayal of retro Hollywood is colorful and maybe too detailed. Sometimes I found myself wondering, "Who cares?" The book did hold my interest enough to finish it, but not to re-read.
Want to Read
August 12, 20111st edition, signed by author; leather binding
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews