Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade
William Goldman
Bloomsbury, £16.99, 384pp
Buy it at BOL
A Hollywood film script, when all is said and done, is just a set of instructions for assembly - with pitfalls and humiliations, some of which have already been documented by screenwriter William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983). Now he has produced a sequel, something he berates as the pits of the Hollywood system, without acknowledging that this book is exactly that: a repeat of a proven formula, part gossip, part master class, part autobiography (interestingly ghastly), with a recycling of choice Goldman scenes and analysis of favourites by others.
Writers exist in Hollywood to be bullied, to be fired and not to get thanked. Belonging to the cheapest end of the process, they have no place to hide. Agents can trick up their jobs with the martial strategies of oriental warlords, but writers, like ideas, are there to be kicked around, and however good their efforts they invariably end up being abused by executives. Any script getting made depends less on quality than chance alignments of agents and stars, grace and favour, the marketplace or any other number of random factors. As Goldman points out, it is a business in which in the end nobody knows anything.
Scriptwriting may be assembly, but it is also involves endless speculative configurations. This explains the industry's conservative and repetitive nature, which translates into the primary Hollywood states of fear and waiting. By the most reverent, the art of screenwriting is regarded as somewhere between alchemy and surgery, with the highest praise reserved for the legendary script doctors who command fabulous sums to fix broken scripts (often just amounting to a late application of common sense).
A multimillion-dollar analysis industry has grown up over the last 20 years, dedicated to showing how a script works through a jargon of plot points, character arcs, backstories, hooks and the twiddly bits that make a film light up in an audience's heads. One of this book's better jokes has Goldman being asked by a keen student, "Do you always begin your second theme by page 17?"
Goldman takes a writer's standard thin-skinned view of Hollywood, mainly by doing what Faulkner did, which was not to live there. His two most famous scripts were for films very much of their time, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a cutesy alternative to Peckinpah's West, and All the President's Men (1976), both of which won him Oscars. There was a cooling period around Adventures in the Screen Trade, possibly related to the book, for then as now Goldman hit out at obvious targets: the rudeness, stupidity and vanities of Hollywood. When treated with straightforward professional courtesy (by Clint Eastwood), he practically slobbers with gratitude.
After four decades, Goldman, contrary to his own dictum, does know a thing or two about the screen trade, especially about nuts and bolts problems. The big problem here is the prose, which raises the question, can the man write and not annoy? After the open white spaces of his screenplays, his bunched-up writing is not a pretty sight, being neurotic, skittery and too dependent on expletives. When not being assailed by the podium delivery he favours, the reader is ambushed by a dreadful faux-mateyness, described by Elmore Leonard in his puff as Goldman's "over-lunch" voice - suggesting that lunch may best be skipped.
