FADE IN: EXT. MOJAVE DESERT – DAY
Silence. A thousand square miles of empty desert, picked up by a HIGH CAMERA, PANNING almost imperceptibly.
The CAMERA PICKS UP a road through the desert, and stops. An open car comes INTO FRAME, driven very fast along the desert road. The driver is MARIA. She is aiming a gun at a road sign as she drives.
So begins Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s screenplay for Play It As It Lays, based on Didion’s 1970 novel. It was her second novel and the couple’s second tag-teamed script, after The Panic in Needle Park. Other credited works to follow would include A Star Is Born, True Confessions, and Up Close & Personal. Play It As It Lays was directed by Frank Perry and coproduced by Dunne’s older brother Dominick Dunne. It may not be the most successful of the couple’s filmic endeavors, box office–wise, but the movie and its script have the tug of an archaeological find: a shard, the fragment of some lost culture.
Tuesday Weld; the other, , about a motorcycle gang. Her star did not continue its ascent.
