'Grace of Monaco' screenwriter live-tweet's film's Lifetime debut

On Monday night, screenwriter Arash Amel gave Twitter a look inside something Hollywood rarely likes to talk about: what it feels like to be part of a disaster.

Amel wrote the screenplay for the ill-fated Grace Kelly biopic Grace of Monaco. Those in the know already feel bad for Amel after reading that sentence. For those not: Grace of Monaco, starring Nicole Kidman and directed by La Vie en Rose's Olivier Dahan, was scheduled for release in fall 2013 and meant for Oscar glory but didn't debut until the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it was booed.

The film, set in 1962, focuses on Kelly's decision to stay in Monaco with her husband, Prince Rainier III (Tim Roth), rather than head back to Hollywood to star in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie. Alas, her Philadelphia roots were not discussed.

The movie was publicly condemned by the Grimaldi family (who originally approved the script, according to Amel, only to decry it before they saw it), became the source of a very public fight between director Dahan and producer Harvey Weinstein (they had very different visions of what the end product should look like), and, finally, didn't even it make it to U.S. theaters, instead debuting this week on Lifetime. (It shows again Saturday at noon and is available June 8 on Netflix.)

Rather than stay quiet, Amel took to his Twitter account (@arashamel) Monday night to live-tweet commentary in which he praised Kidman ("I think Nicole looks stunning in some of these shots. She was amazing to work with and a real trooper against great odds"), defended Weinstein, and repeated over and over (and over) again just how much he hated the music. (He really hated the music.)

Hollywood tends to be like the Kremlin when it comes to train wrecks on the scale of Grace, with everyone toeing the company line to avoid the "You'll never eat lunch in this town again!" cliché. But with no one to protect his film, Amel, who also served as producer, went all out.

"The purpose of this live tweet is to correct the record, an explanation, an apology, and most of all, a bit of lighthearted fun," he tweeted to explain why he would publicly trash the script he took a year to research and write.

Before it was filmed, Amel's script earned high praise - a spot on the Black List, a compendium of the best unproduced screenplays floating around Hollywood in any given year.

But getting Grace made was not pleasant, he said, noting, "I wrote a Peter Morgan-type biopic that became a Douglas Sirk melodrama. That's your lot as a writer. All your dreams, right there."In sum, "#GraceofMonaco was my filmmaking Vietnam. I survived it, but I'll never be the same."

Though the Grace narrative is that it is an unmitigated disaster, according to Amel, it was "huge" in Japan. He said the version shown on Lifetime was the third edit, and he praised Lifetime's cut as "actually better than the version that played Cannes . . . tighter, better edited."

In addition to Christopher Gunning's score, Amel hated the constant references to Hitchcock's Vertigo. True, Kelly was one of Hitchcock's many muses, but she did not star in Vertigo - Kim Novak did.

But Amel didn't spill it all. "Kept it tame tonight. I'll keep people storming off set, 3-hour shooting days, and missing sets for my memoirs," Amel said.

A Twitter tell-all is one thing, but a memoir? Bring it on, Amel.

215-854-5909 @mollyeichel