Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting

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He finds page space to belittle the auteur theory and anyone who subscribes to it, insisting that all movies are a team effort, while still blaming his failed movies on everybody else that worked on them. The full text of "Da Vinci" and the subsequent screenplay that he wrote are included, followed by interviews with key movie industry figures, including director George Roy Hill, cinematographer Gordon Willis, and composer Dave Grusin.

I read it because one of my favorite authors read it when he had to do a screenplay of one of his novels. Goldman could almost have saved us the 400-pages of what is still one of the most insightful books about the movie-industry, and just printed his Law on a single page at the front. They give fascinating and practical insights into what they think of this screenplay and what makes a movie work in general, sometimes contradicting one another.He illustrates his advice by including the entire screenplay for Butch Cassidy, then analyzing its strengths and faults.

We've been listening to As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride and it got me thinking that I hadn't read this book in many years, though I loved it the first time. Oscar winner William Goldman, who wrote such classic films as HARPER, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, MARATHON MAN and ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN shares his unique, often difficult, experiences working with top directors, producers and stars like Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier. S., despite the collaborative nature of movie production, the auteur theory continues to have a powerful influence on movie criticism. He admits that those interviews were the first time in his career that he had spent more than five minutes alone speaking with any of those film professionals, with the exception of the director.Nor realized that lots of regular guys dream of being in a position where rich people send expensive cars to drive them around. Billy also loves to explain other people's decisions and character traits he dislikes by ascribing thought processes to them, while managing to ignore the fact that he's making shit up out of boogers and ego. In addition to movies for which Goldman earned screen credit, he includes chapters on two movies that were nightmares.

The last section of this book where he goes from a short story to a screenplay and then tears it to shreds, is brilliant. Example: Back in the late sixties, Life magazine, then a weekly, had a performer on its cover who they said was the biggest movie star in the world. We mostly shouldn't, but I nevertheless decided to read William Goldman’s 1983 memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade because it's so often mentioned on the Rewatchables podcast.

He mentions that, out of courtesy, he's only naming two of the actors in question because some of them have recently died. I'm curious as to what Goldman thought of Hoffman's Oscar-winning performance six years later as an almost helpless savant in Rain Man. Nothing is more entertaining than reading about Bill Goldman in the trenches, trying his best to ensure that a movie he's working on will actually get finished. But then we'd have missed a glorious roller-coaster ride through Tinseltown stuffed to the gills with anecdotes of such toe-curling detail that you believe every word.

It seems to me that some stars now take on character actor roles purposefully while others pursue indie roles to broaden their reach. You would have to, I mean really really really have to, just to put yourself through the torture of writing for them, because that's the message that comes out of this again and again - prepare to be shat on. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Two big bonuses of this book: Goldman provides his entire screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and then analyzes what worked and what didn't. His first novel, The Temple of Gold (1957), was followed by the script for the Broadway army comedy Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole (1961).Some of Goldman's answers were edited into a magazine piece for Esquire; this was read by an editor at a publishing house who contacted him about writing a book on screenwriting. I don't think I have much to say that hasn't been said repeatedly below but yes, this is an excellent behind-the-scenes look at the craft of screenwriting and yes, it's kind of crazy how well it holds up 30 years after it was written. His most famous axiom, that “nobody knows anything” is one of those things that grow truer with time and experience.