Man, William Goldman makes himself out to be a real asshole. He's so irritating, in fact, that after a two-week break away from Adventures in the Screen Trade I cashed in with over 100 pages left, because I couldn't stand the thought of going back to have him bitch at me like my worst film school instructors used to, bitter that a lack of work forced them into talking about their job instead of doing it.

Goldman launches his first fart rocket within the opening 20 pages, tattling four anecdotes to illustrate that movie stars are bad people. He mentions that, out of courtesy, he's only naming two of the actors in question because some of them have recently died. But then he goes on to redact the identities of the deadies, while going right ahead and smearing the two performers who still have careers left to ruin.

That strange blend of bitterness and false modesty permeates the rest of this farrago of a -- what is it, a memoir? A handbook? A two-inch thick advance check? Whatever it is, it's macramed into a few dozen short sections seemingly based on the order of the manuscript pages after a passing bus blew them across Goldman's parquet floor. Each of those section manages to take a swipe at individuals, groups, or imagined coteries of robed gnomes William perceives of having wronged him, the targeted loogies flying from behind a shield forged of "Oh well, what do I know? I'm just a regular guy who fell into a wacky business full of crazy Hollywood types [that also made me rich and famous and got me a book deal to write all about it, but trust me I'm just like you]."

BIll's such a regular guy that, when he came to LA for his first movie biz meeting, he couldn't stand the thought of being picked up at the airport by a chauffeur-driven car and insisted on riding up in front with driver, because that's what regular guys like him and me and you do. I assume that Goldman, so proud of his New York City heritage, had never been in a cab before. Nor realized that lots of regular guys dream of being in a position where rich people send expensive cars to drive them around. But Will shares that story and others like it throughout the book to casually note what a humble, normal person he is, despite the fact that humble, normal people avoid constantly pointing out how humble they are in their books published by Time Warner.

Anyway, Goldman goes on to cheerfully disparage studio execs, actors, directors, actors, audiences, and also actors. 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. 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. Dustin Hoffman refused a scene in Marathon Man that required his character to keep a flashlight in his nightstand, Goldman insists, because Dustin thought it would make him look weak on screen, and every male movie star, deep down, will never allow himself to look weak on screen. 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.

Between all the self-aggrandizing and payback that Willy skillfully disguises as friendly banter, he throws in some screenwriting advice. As a screenwriter myself, I can say that some of it's quite good, while some is just objectively crappy. He devotes a section to subtext but doesn't seem to have a clear idea of the difference between subtext and basic cinematic storytelling techniques. He writes a lousy four-page movie opening to demonstrate how to write a lousy movie opening and then, of all the scene's lousy features, pinpoints as lousy the only reasonably acceptable one.

Luckily I doubt many writers ever end up taking much advice from Adventures in the Screen Trade, because the book isn't written for them. Actually, I have no idea who it's written for. I can't imagine that the same readers who want mouthfuls of dirt about starlets having affairs with directors or a prison guard's testimony that his wife would crawl on her knees just for a chance to fuck Robert Redford also want to read a glossary of screenplay slug lines or the entire script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But if you're interested in the movie industry and are willing to weed through 600 pages (and twice as many ellipses), it's sometimes fun to watch the spray of Goldman's vindictive bloodletting. Too bad he leaves you to clean up the mess.