‘Blue Pages’ by Eleanor Perry    (1979) – 271 pages

In the 1960s, the husband and wife team of Frank and Eleanor Perry made several acclaimed movies. Eleanor was the scriptwriter, and Frank was the director. The movies they made together include “David and Lisa”, “The Swimmer”, and “Diary of a Mad Housewife”. However as such things go in Hollywood, they were divorced in the early 1970s and went their separate ways.

‘Blue Pages’ is Eleanor Perry’s thinly disguised roman a clef of her married partnership with Frank Perry and her screenwriting days. As a couple, the Perry’s went against the trend in Hollywood as Eleanor was 12 years older than Frank. In this novel, their names are Lucia and Vincent Wade. Both are nominated for Oscars for their first collaboration on a movie that was made on a shoestring budget.

The wife’s experiences have left her quite bitter, There are two reasons for her bitterness:

1. The shabby way scriptwriters are treated in Hollywood.
2. The shabby way women are treated in Hollywood.

Being both a woman and a writer, she had double reason to complain. She was “only the writer”, the lowly woman at the bottom of the Hollywood totem pole.

“We were writers, despised menials.”

‘Blue Pages’ is about what goes on behind the scenes between the director, the producers, the stars, and the scriptwriters. The fact that it is a woman who wrote the original script makes it all the more subject to criticism by everyone else, even the actresses. The script is vulnerable.

“It suffers from being filtered through a – feminine sensibility. Or should I say a feminist sensibility.”

The star of the movie is rewriting the script to make himself even more of a hero. The director is cutting out key scenes of character development.

Along the way, the author captures a Hollywood party at the time where even the old men and women at the party try to look and act like young hippies. When they find out that Lucia’s husband is a director, all the aspiring young actresses immediately surround him.

Eleanor Perry casts a wearily skeptical eye on all the outrageous doings at this typical Hollywood party. It is all quite droll and amusing.

Toward the end of the Sixties, Vincent comes up with a young girlfriend, and Lucia questions their relationship.

“I should leave him, she thought. She’d thought it before – every time he cut her down, wiped out her confidence, drew blood when she was most undefended.”

This is an insider’s view of Hollywood, where every director, producer, and actor thinks they can re-write a better script than the scriptwriters.

Grade:   B+