posted 05-05-2001 12:18 PM               

Writing screenplays can be a thankless task; producers, directors, and actors all have their own agendas and many are quite willing to sack the writer at the earliest opportunity in order to further those agendas. The salary can be nice, for sure, but you have to wonder sometimes why writers put up with it. (Hopefully, the new contract the Writer's Guild just signed with Hollywood producers will improve the situation somewhat.) Adventures in the Screen Trade will certainly have you asking that question more than once, but it also helps you get inside a writer's head and understand the rewards.

William Goldman wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride (both the book and the screenplay), All the President's Men and a ton of other books and screenplays. It may surprise fans of the first two films that Goldman doesn't think he's funny, which only proves the point of how utterly unconvinced of their own talents many writers can be. There's plenty of humor in Adventures, although not of the absurd type found in Princess Bride; it's more of a light-hearted, can-you-believe-this tone that you'd expect to hear from someone who is supposed to give a lecture but decides he wants to drop the pretense and have an informal conversation with the audience. (A quick example: "I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting.") And you'll definitely laugh at some of the Hollywood horror stories, such as the critics who savaged the screenplay for A Bridge Too Far as "unbelievable" - when the events in question were drawn directly from history.

The book opens with Goldman's analysis of the various elements of the film industry. Much of what he says is full of basic and fairly timeless truths, but it's also worth noting that the book was written in 1982, when the box office was ruled by an almost-entirely-different set of stars and films. In that sense, the book is something of a time capsule of the days when an expensive movie might cost twenty to thirty million dollars to produce, and it's fun to see which predictions panned out and which did not. The heart of the book, which is far more timeless, is probably the middle two sections. Goldman discusses his own adventures in the trade, and devotes at least a chapter to most of the films on which he worked from 1965 to 1979. He talks about the problems he encountered trying to find the "spine" of the stories, the structure that would let him transform an idea into a blueprint for a movie. ("Screenplays are structure" is one of the two most important concepts in the book. The other? "Nobody knows anything." You'll believe both after you read this.) He discusses the negotiations that tried to navigate through all those agendas - and sometimes succeeded; what connected with an audience and what didn't; and the small thrills that can be a part of the moviemaking process, like Sir Lawrence Olivier asking him if it was OK to rearrange a few words of dialogue in Marathon Man. There is some fairly juicy behind-the-scenes gossip here, but Goldman doesn't come off as vindictive; he's often just as critical of himself as he is of anyone else, and he seems to understand how people with the best of intentions can still wind up making each other's lives difficult.

He also dissects the screenplay to Butch Cassidy - reprinted here in its entirety - in great detail. Both the dissection and the screenplay itself are tremendously useful to anyone who really wants to understand the screenwriting process, even though I'm fairly certain these days that very few people use quite the format that Goldman does. The final section of the book is another boon to those interested in the guts of screenwriting. Goldman takes one of his old short stories, transforms it into a short screenplay, and then gets feedback on the script from top Hollywood professionals in a number of disciplines - director George Roy Hill, cinematographer Gordon Willis, and more. The discussion is not exactly brainstorming, but it is fascinating to read Goldman go through his own thought process step by step and then see both the response to his work and his response to the feedback. It gives an added perspective to the look behind the curtain of filmmaking and balances the memoir elements of the book quite well.