Deer Park, The. (Original screenplay from Norman Mailer's novel.)
Unproduced, original screenplay
Didion, Joan and John Gregory Dunne. “The Deer Park.” From the Novel by Norman Mailer. Ziegler Associates, 1984.
4to.; blue wrappers; bound with three gold brads; printed title label affixed to the upper panel; title written in marker on the spine. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
Didion’s second draft film treatment for an unproduced adaptation of Norman Mailer’s novel, The Deer Park (1955), written with her husband John Gregory Dunne; with a pencil annotation on title page, “2nd draft/do not send out.”
Mailer had long wanted to make his third novel, The Deer Park, into a film after it had been successfully adapted into an off-Broadway play in the mid-’60s. After negotiations fell through for the film to be produced in the ’80s by Sidney Lumet, the unrealized film version was one of the last projects Mailer was working on at the time of his death in 2007.
A collaboration between Didion and Mailer seems a natural one: the pair is often mentioned in the same sentence as purveyors of the “New Journalism” and “narrative nonfiction” genres. Each was a vocal admirer of the other’s work: Mailer called Didion’s prose style “the finest since Hemingway”; Didion called Mailer “a great and obsessed stylist.” In addition, they had a tendency to take on similar projects. For instance, the producer Lawrence Schiller originally intended to approach Didion for his planned collaboration on 1980’s The Executioner’s Song (1980). In the end, Mailer ended up writing the book. (Subsequently, Mailer sought out Didion as one of its first readers, where she made the suggestion—which Mailer accepted—to excise a long, fictional, introduction she felt was superfluous to the story). Despite these associations in their writing careers, the screenplay of “The Deer Park” screenplay was the only work containing both of their names.
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