Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

Decline and fall can’t ever be easy, but for a star it’s torment. Because, when they are on top, they are so adored. Movie stars, as has been stated elsewhere ad nauseam, are perhaps as close as we come to royalty. So the distance of the drop is much greater than the rest of us may (or will) experience.

Studio executives are intelligent, brutally overworked men and women who share one thing in common with baseball managers: They wake up every morning of the world with the knowledge that sooner or later they’re going to get fired.

And with this pressure always on them, always mounting, each “go” decision they make becomes excruciating—one of the reasons why, right now, no one in Hollywood wants to make movies. (As of June, 1982, film starts were down exactly fifty percent from a year ago.) The “go” decision is the ultimate importance of the studio executive. They are responsible for what gets up there on the silver screen. Compounding their problem of no job security in the decision-making process is the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.

They don’t know when the movie is starting to shoot either. David Brown, Zanuck’s partner, has said, “We didn’t know whether Jaws would work, but we didn’t have any doubts about The Island. It had to be a smash. Everything worked. The screenplay worked. Every actor we sent it to said yes. I didn’t know until a few days after we opened and I was in a bookstore and I ran into Lew Wasserman and said ‘How’re we doing?’ and he said, ‘David, they don’t want to see the picture.’ ” They don’t want to see the picture—maybe the most chilling phrase in the industry. Now, if the best people around don’t know at sneaks, and they don’t know during shooting, you better believe that executives don’t know when they’re trying to give a thumbs-up or-down; they’re trying to predict public taste three years ahead and it’s just not possible.

did you know that Raiders of the Lost Ark was offered to every single studio in town— —and they all turned it down? All except Paramount. Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything.

David Picker, a fine studio executive for many years, once said something to this effect: “If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down, and no to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same.”

This past holiday season, UA had four pictures out in the marketplace. (A different UA group, by the by, than the people who bought the Talese book—who’d come and quickly gone.) It was a tremendous lineup and quickly describable: “We’ve got Peter Falk in a raunchy comedy, Richard Dreyfuss in a Broadway smash, Lemmon and Matthau together again with Billy Wilder, and Steve Martin in a musical.” It’s no wonder with product like that, they were able to get fabulous bookings in the best theatres all around the country. And with those fabulous bookings what did they achieve? The four films—All the Marbles, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Buddy, Buddy, and Pennies from Heaven—probably lost a minimum of fifty million dollars, maybe as much as seventy-five.

Studio executives, as we have observed, are totally responsible for what we see on the screen. I’m sure even the biggest stars have some pet subject or another they can’t get off the ground—Jane Fonda has been trying for years to make a movie about industrial cancer, for example. We’ve also noted that they, like the rest of us, don’t know what will work. But there is one thing they absolutely do know, and that is what has worked. Which is why it is safe to say that movies are always a search for past magic.

When I saw On Golden Pond I heard something so wonderful, something I hadn’t heard in a movie theatre in years—the sound of middle-aged laughter. Well, you’re not going to hear much of that in the future. Do you realize how many copies of American Graffiti the studios have churned out in the last years? Or Halloween? Or Rocky? The stomach turns. Well, On Golden Pond may be bigger than any of them. And I’m sure they’ll never rip it off. Because it would mean a total opening up of what constitutes a commercial film. And that’s scary—so much more comforting to make Death Wish XXIII.

There are “executive producers,” “associate producers.” There are “executives in charge of production.” One recent film had two “executive producers,” two “associate producers,” and one “executive in charge of production.” Now, you may well ask, what in the world do all these terms mean? I can answer in total honesty: I haven’t the foggiest. Some producers are simply money men. They arrange for, or come up with, the cash, and they take some kind of billing (and fee) for their efforts. Others are packagers. They option a piece of material, interest an “element,” make a deal with a studio, and head for points west. They literally will have nothing more to do with the picture than that. Others are in that oldest of Hollywood traditions, the “son-in-law” business.

On Butch Cassidy, for example, the original material was purchased by Fox for Paul Monash. Monash was the producer of the film. Then, when Paul Newman was signed, along came John Foreman. Foreman had been Newman’s agent for years, had left the agency to become his business partner. In order to get Newman, guess what happened? Foreman became the “producer” and Monash suddenly was “executive producer.” And what was their contribution to the film? I still haven’t the foggiest, because Butch was directed by George Roy Hill, and on a George Roy Hill film, George is the giant ape.

None of this is meant to denigrate Monash or Foreman, who, I suspect, were terribly important to the finished product. What I’m saying is this: Screenwriters don’t—at least this is true for me—deal all that much with producers. They hire us, we have meetings, they make suggestions, I go off and rewrite—that kind of thing. I have worked for some famous producers—Joseph E. Levine, Robert Evans—but the crucial aspect of their work does not often come in contact with mine.

And there are quality producers. If they are very smart, they are flexible enough to realize that their specific duties vary with the particular film. Sometimes they’re on the floor constantly; at other times, if a production is running smoothly and on schedule, they’ll stay away. But if their individual requirements alter more from one job to another than, for example, the cinematographer’s, there are certain definites— —their job is to get the picture made— —and more often than not, they are the first ones on a project, and years later, after the selling has been done, they are the last ones off.

It’s at this point in a production—with or without any star interest—that a producer faces what is often the make or break decision: selecting who is going to write the script, who is going to direct. This is also the last time that a producer has total control. Whatever their vision may be, it is now bound to alter. From here on, it’s no longer “their” movie, it’s “ours.”

Hiller wanted Mamet. Zanuck-Brown wanted Mamet. Mamet was hired. And that’s when the waiting begins for the producer. All producers (Sam Spiegel may be the exception) try and have a bunch of projects moving forward concurrently. Because once a writer starts to write or a script is sent to a star, there’s not a goddam thing to do but wait for the phone to ring. You can’t constantly call someone who’s doing a screenplay for you and beat around the bush before coming out with the biggie: When will you be done, when can we have it? When I do a job, I know the producer’s going mad, I feel that pressure, and it’s death when they call. All the up-front bullshitting about how the Knicks are doing or did you see Dream Girls is agony. And even though they say, “Oh, by the way, not important or anything, but how’s it coming?”—of course they don’t mean “How’s it coming?”—you’re bound to say, “Terrific, better than I’d hoped,” because if you said, “Horribly, I’m fucking it up beyond repair,” everyone would have cardiac arrest. When’s it coming? is the subject not under discussion. All a phone call like that does is increase your insecurity and slow everything down. Which is why good producers don’t call. In the case of The Verdict, the wait was not agonizing: Mamet delivered promptly and skillfully.

Because of his childhood, because he was privy to the inner workings of studios in the Golden Era, waiting may be more frustrating for Zanuck than for any other producer. He says, “I remember as a kid, under my father’s desk, under the glass on the top of his desk, was a big chart. And it had everybody that was under contract there. All the producers, and the directors, and the writers and actors and actresses. And it was so simple. I used to sit in on casting meetings, which would take all of about ten minutes. Not only casting, but putting the whole picture together. He would say, ‘Well, we’ve got Julian Blaustein as producer, he’s available next week. Put him with Henry Hathaway, he’ll direct. And we’ve got Tyrone Power, he’s going to finish his picture, give him a week off. And Betty Grable.’ And that was the end of it. Nobody said, ‘Can we make a deal with him?’ They already had a deal. I’m not asking for a return to the old days. But some goddamned good pictures were made with that system.”

The selling of a film is so important that there are some bright industry figures who feel that a movie should be divided into two equal parts: the making of it and the marketing of it. I am not equipped to detail the latter. And the audience doesn’t, and shouldn’t, give a damn about it: A flick comes to your local, you go or you don’t, that’s it. But the selling is often more essential to the fate of the film than the quality of the film itself.

But what if you’ve got an art film—say, Chariots of Fire. Your job there is to spend as little as possible up front and pray that word of mouth will build. So you make maybe two prints, open behind Bloomingdale’s and in Westwood, and pray. Gradually, if the movie begins to work, you add a few more cities. If the movie doesn’t work, it disappears, and you haven’t spent a lot of money.

Warren Beatty, a brilliant producer, had, as his first film, the famous Bonnie and Clyde. Only it didn’t get famous its first time out. Controversial it was, but successful it wasn’t. But Beatty—cajoling, kicking, screaming, God knows how—convinced the studio to give the film a major re-release soon after its original time at bat. The movie became a gigantic success, but had it not been for Beatty’s unique skill, it might have been just another unknown cult film today.)

I remember an early Sam Peckinpah film—still for me his best—called Ride the High Country. It opened in New York as the bottom half of a double bill with a European Mongol-type picture. It got some sensational notices, and when I saw it, I couldn’t believe the way it was handled. I eventually tracked down an executive at the studio and asked why it had been dumped. He explained: “Sure we previewed it. And the preview cards were sensational. But we decided to send it out the way we did because that way we were sure to pick up a little money. We didn’t believe those preview cards. The movie didn’t cost enough money to be that good.” (Italics mine.)

And the money needed to mount a movie continues to escalate: The average cost of a major studio film today is over ten million dollars, a four-hundred-percent leap from just ten years ago. Everywhere you hear the cry: “We’ve got to do something to bring down the cost of pictures.” I don’t see it happening. Two examples from pictures I’ve worked on. Stepford Wives was probably released badly as far as the people involved in the making of that movie are concerned. It has some exploitable elements, but it wasn’t Halloween. The best way to release it would have been slowly, praying for favorable word of mouth. The studio threw it on the market in hundreds of theatres immediately. Why? Because the studio’s needs are not the same as the needs of the individual pictures, and right then Columbia needed cash flow badly—dollars, and now. Stepford got them some dollars. It was gone in a month, but it served the studio well. The other picture I can’t name for legal reasons that will shortly come clear. But in this second instance, the studio purposely set out to destroy its own product. Madness? Not at all. (And not at all that unusual either.)

By the end of the eighties, it wouldn’t surprise me if we weren’t all looking back on the good old days of a decade before, when Heaven’s Gate was a cheapie….

Well, screenwriting is shitwork. Brief example: Waldo Pepper. Waldo was basically an original screenplay of mine, I say “basically” because the pulse of the movie came from George Hill, the director, and we worked for ten days on a story. So Waldo wasn’t as “original” as Butch, but it was a hell of a lot more mine than any adaptation I’ve ever done. Okay, we open in New York and three daily papers are split—two terrific, one pan. In neither of the laudatory reviews was my name even mentioned. But you better believe I got top billing in the pan. I had screwed up George Hill’s movie. Nothing unusual at all about that—it’s SOP for the screenwriter. That is simply the way of the world. You do not, except in rare, rare exceptions, get critical recognition. But you do get paid. And as you get hotter, you get paid more. (Now we’re into the danger zone.) You don’t get banished to Siberia at Chasen’s. And you get flattered in meetings. And at first you sit there thinking, “Can you believe this asshole, bullshitting me like that?” But the flattery continues as the heat rises. And at first, again, you remind yourself that none of the heat has to do with literary quality, it’s because people lined up to see your last picture. But eventually, inevitably, you say to yourself, “Since so many people tell me I’m a terrific writer, what’s my voice against the multitudes? Forget my voice—they’re right. I am; check my box-office receipts if you don’t believe it—terrific.” And you’re finished ...

agent. (1) You better have something written that’s as good as you can do. A screenplay, in proper form and—don’t laugh—legible. If you have more than one screenplay, better yet. Not that you’re going to show the agent two, not at the beginning. But if he reads one and is at least intrigued, he’s liable to ask for another sample of your work. (2) Find out who and where the agents are. How? Easy. Contact the Writers Guild of America, either the East Coast branch in New York or the West Coast branch in Los Angeles, and acquire their list of accredited agents. I am looking at such a list now. It is dated July 1981 and it is nine pages long and lists, I would guess, the names, addresses, and phone numbers of at least two hundred agents. (3) Study the list. Really go over it and over it. Bewildering, but keep at it. On the first page, for example, there are only five entries. “Agency for Artists”—forget about them for now; and the same, again for now, with AAG—Artists Agent Group. But “Adams, Limited, Bret”—that may be of value. Bret Adams is a name. And that’s what we’re tracking down now—names. Because any point of contact, no matter how distant, is infinitely preferable to no contact at all.

But you can find out who the successful agents are. Being an agent is really about signing clients. So find out who handles important clients. If you’d want to know who Lawrence Kasdan’s or Alvin Sargent’s agents are, all you have to do is call up the aforementioned Writers Guild and ask. You don’t have to be a member. Just pick up the phone and dial. They’ll tell you. It’s a service they willingly perform. There is a lot of information that is available to you. But Dan Rather isn’t going to tell it on the nightly news. You have to think and act and, most of all, hustle.

The salespeople work their magic and eventually they might decide it was worth a shot. So they meet again with the executives and give their findings, and finally the first executive will have a second meeting with the producer, at which they discuss the parameters of the development deal. Including how much they’ll pay for the writer of the first-draft screenplay. Which is where we come in. What this chapter is really about is this: behavior in meetings. There are really two kinds of meetings involved here: (1) the audition meeting, when they’re thinking of hiring you, and (2) the creative meeting, when the script is done and everybody wants changes.

(1) THE AUDITION MEETING The proper note to strike in the audition meeting is a mixture of shy, self-deprecating intelligence and wild, barely controllable enthusiasm.

most importantly, if you need the job. If you do, if you actually need it, that fact must go with you to your grave, because they sense things Out There and they will never hire you if you are desperate. Because they then know you don’t care about their project; you would take anything they offered.

During this sizing-up time, the executive is trying to answer one question: “Who is this asshole?” He knows you’re not Mario Puzo because Puzo wouldn’t be there talking about taking twenty-five thou for an iffy project like this. The executive undoubtedly has read something of yours—a treatment, a story maybe, an earlier unmade screenplay. And he’s talked with the producer who has probably glanced at the same material. But are you the one?

Do not say “I think it’s my favorite book and will make the greatest movie since The Battleship Potemkin.” Something like this is much better: “Well, of course as you know I’m kind of new at this, I’ll probably never know as much as you guys, but of course I’ve read the book and I wrote my senior thesis on Movement in Contemporary Juvenile Fiction, and this will probably sound stupid, but when the train gets the toys across the mountain, I cried—I don’t mean buckets, but there were tears. I guess probably as literature it isn’t Alice in Wonderland, and this isn’t to knock Alice, but, well, it never moved me.” Are you the one? You won’t know till your phone rings….

(2) THE CREATIVE MEETING There is one crucial rule that must be followed in all creative meetings: Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up.

Because of his “Save all day” warning, I bought a notebook. (Never enter a creative meeting without a notebook.) And I opened it and took out a pen and got ready to face the firing squad. I said, though I didn’t know it, the magic words. “Tell me everything you have in mind,” I said, and I took the top off the pen and prepared to write. I didn’t know it then, either, but the meeting was over. Because suddenly, he was unarmed and I had this weapon with dread stopping power: my notebook. I was going to take down everything. All his wisdom. Record it then and there. And, like most producers and executives, he had nothing specific to say. They are generally not equipped to deal with the intricacies of a script—any more than I could deal with the problems they face. What he offered was something like this: “I think we have to watch out in case there are any sags,” he said. I repeated “Watch sags” and wrote the words. “Gotta keep the pace up.” “Pace mustn’t flag,” I said, and wrote that down. “And our main guy has gotta always be sympathetic.” “Sympathy for hero.” By then our coffee had arrived, we poured and sipped and then we were into bullshitting about this and that. I was gone in half an hour. I have followed this procedure in every creative meeting since. If you begin, they can counterpunch. Try never to give them the chance.

I had one meeting with the late Steve McQueen, involving a Western I’d written that, he told me over the phone, he liked a lot, and could we meet? We met, and the then director of the project, Don Siegel, was also present. And this is about how it went. McQUEEN I want a campfire scene where the two guys get drunk and talk about the old days. SIEGEL He’s got that—I think it’s fine. McQUEEN I don’t mean that kind of campfire scene. I mean a campfire scene. We met like that for several hours and I still don’t know why. But it was madness. Here I was, closeted with these two men whose work I’ve admired for years, and McQueen kept going on and on about things that he wanted in the script that were already in the script, and Siegel tried to do his best. I just sat there, nodded, took notes, prayed for it all to end. I wasn’t surprised, a few weeks later, to learn that Siegel had walked the picture.

The word auteur has come to mean this: It is the director who creates the film. (None of any of this is meant in any way to denigrate directors, by the way. They serve an important function in the making of a film, and the best of them do it well.) But creator? Look at it logically. Studio executives are not stupid, and they are, believe it or not, aware of costs. If the director creates the film, why does a studio pay three thousand dollars a week for a top editor? Or four thousand for an equivalent production designer. Or ten thousand plus a percentage of the profits to the finest cinematographers? It’s not because they’re cute. And it’s not because they want to. They have to. Because that’s how crucial top technicians are. Crucial and creative. One example now, not because it’s famous but because it’s absolutely typical: This is the way things are. Peter Benchley reads an article in a newspaper about a fisherman who captures a forty-five-hundred-pound shark off the coast of Long Island and he thinks, “What if the shark became territorial, what if it wouldn’t go away?” And eventually he writes a novel on that notion and Zanuck-Brown buy the movie rights, and Benchley and Carl Gottlieb write a screenplay, and Bill Butler is hired to shoot the movie, and Joseph Alves, Jr., designs it, and Verna Fields is brought in to edit, and, maybe most importantly of all, Bob Mattey is brought out of retirement to make the monster. And John Williams composes perhaps his most memorable ...

As I’ve said before—and please believe me, it’s true (and if you don’t believe me, ask anybody in the business for verification)—movies are a group endeavor. Basically, there are seven of us who are crucial to a film, and we all seven have to be at our best if the movie’s going to have a shot at quality. Listed alphabetically: the actor the cameraman the director the editor the producer the production designer the writer. In addition, there are times (Chariots of Fire) when the composer is as important as any element. But that varies. I think what made The Exorcist work was the remarkable makeup that Dick Smith created for the girl. Truly dazzling special effects are not easy to bring off, and sometimes that department makes the movie wonderful.

Ernest Lehman has been quoted in a recent interview on the subject of Family Plot, a 1974 film he made with Hitchcock. By mistake a propman had two pieces of wood set up so that they looked vaguely like a cross, and the car goes downhill and crashes through a field, goes through a fence and knocks over the cross. Some learned New York critic commented: There’s Alfred Hitchcock’s anti-Catholicism coming out again. When I was at the Cannes Film Festival with Family Plot, Karen Black, Bruce Dern and I attended a press conference, and some French journalist had the symbolism in the license plate all worked out: 885 DJU. He had some elaborate explanation for those numbers. When he got through explaining it, I said “I hate to tell you this but the reason I used that license plate number was that it used to be my own, and I felt it would be legally safe to use.” So much for symbolism.

Some screenplays are like Marley—dead to begin with. Westerns. Or disaster films. Or a movie about two octogenarians tending each other through their final days of leprosy. But maybe only five percent of screenplays fall into the Marley category. But a much larger percentage than that are dead by page 15. Because by then an experienced reader will either be hooked or bored. And if he’s bored, he may skip to page 50, read a few more pages, then on to the end, a cursory glance— —and the ball game’s over.

But in a movie, and only at the beginning of a movie, we have time. Not a lot, but some. Time to set up our people. Time to set up our situation. Time, if you will, to set up our particular world.

As I sit here I can only think of one first-class modern novel, movie, or play that begins at full speed, and that’s Malraux’s Man’s Fate. Clearly there must be others, but not all that many, which perhaps underscores the point: In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.

This was the start of The Great Waldo Pepper. (Waldo, remember, was the story of these daredevil flyers in the twenties, grown-up children who wanted to impress girls and be heroes and fly.) FADE IN ON THIS KID. Maybe he’s ten, freckled and bright-eyed. Very American-looking. And we’re in CLOSE UP, so we don’t know where we are or when, but that doesn’t matter; what matters is that the KID is concentrating on something just as hard as he can. He’s staring off and biting his lip and CUT TO A TEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL. CLOSE UP. And there are a lot of boys who are going to lose a lot of sleep over this one when she gets a little older. She’s looking up at something just now, we don’t know what yet, but she’s so excited you can feel the pounding of her heart. Now— CUT TO THE BOY. Not quite so close up this time. He takes half a step forward, then hesitates, stops, and begins kind of to rock back and forth, nervously back and forth as we CUT TO THE TEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL, AND NOW ANOTHER GIRL THE SAME AGE JOINS HER. This one is pretty, too, and she, too, stares up at the same angle, and she’s just as excited as her friend, and they stand there, side by pretty side, watching and waiting, watching and waiting. CUT TO THE BOY. He takes a deep breath, slowly starts running forward, and as he does CUT TO THE TWO PRETTY GIRLS, and whatever’s going on, it’s just too exciting, they simply can’t stand it and, keeping their eyes on the running BOY, they reach for each other’s hands, find them, clutc...

In a sense, a screenplay, whether a romance or a detective story, is a series of surprises. We detonate these as we go along. But for a surprise to be valid, we must first set the ground rules, indicate expectations.

Landau walks over to Grant and, instead of bending down and aiding him, puts his foot on Grant’s fingers and begins pressing down. He grinds his shoe down as hard as he can. That’s the pickle. Now, between that moment and the end of this superb Ernest Lehman–Alfred Hitchcock collaboration, the following occurs. (a) Landau is made to cease and desist. (b) Grant saves himself. (c) Grant also saves Eva Marie Saint. (d) The two of them get married. (e) The microfilm is saved for America. (f) James Mason, the chief villain, is captured and handed over to the authorities. (g) Grant and Saint take a train ride back east. That’s a lot of narrative to be successfully tied up. And I would like you to guess how long it takes in terms of screen time for it to be accomplished. Got your guess? Here’s the answer— —forty-three seconds. Here’s how they do it, from the moment where Landau is crunching Grant’s hand. The camera’s in close up on the shoe and the fingers. A shot rings out. The shoe begins to slide away from the fingers. Next a cut of the statuette falling safely to the ground and cracking, revealing the microfilm inside. Now Landau falls to his death off Mount Rushmore. Now another part of Mount Rushmore, where Leo G. Carroll, a good guy, thanks a police officer who is holding a rifle. Behind Carroll is Mason, flanked by more officers. Now back to Grant and Eva Marie, him saying you can do it, her saying I can’t, back and forth, quick cuts between them, and then a really brilli...

shelf of open cans of peas.” I am not suggesting that you have to go like a streak when you’re running for curtain. In Butch Cassidy, for instance, after they are shot and the Bolivian cavalry arrives, getting the cavalry into position takes sixty seconds. It could have been done in one: You could have seen the officer giving instructions (as you do) and then, instead of shot after shot of armed soldiers running up stairs, you could have just gone to the final shot when they’re all in position; the same information would have been given. But not the emotion.

Endings, frankly, are a bitch. A proper ending for a film is one in which an expectation is fulfilled for the audience. But once they get a sense of it coming, often they’re ahead of you. You don’t have to rush. But you must never waste even a single shot—because I think the ending requires the most delicate and thoughtful writing of any part of a movie.

Screen time is a most mysterious thing: The same scene must be written differently depending upon where it comes in the narrative, beginning or middle or end. Because the more information an audience has, the less additional information it requires. And the ladling out of when and where something is necessary is one of the requisite components to skillful storytelling.

Speed I think screenplays should be written with as much speed as possible—and with even more deliberation. By “as much speed as possible” I don’t mean to suggest you should throw a bag over its head and do it for Old Glory. But I do believe that you should push yourself hard and continually.

In any case, before you begin, you must have everything clear in your head and you must be comfortable with the story you’re trying to tell. Once you start writing, go like hell— —but don’t fire till you’re ready….

Three examples, the first from Raymond Chandler, in describing correctly, I think, decent movie writing. A man and his wife are riding silently upward in an elevator. They are silent, the woman carries her purse, the man has his hat on. The elevator stops at an intermediate floor. A pretty girl gets on. The man takes off his hat. This is not a scene about manners. It’s about a marriage in trouble.

The World According to Garp. More specifically, the scene where we first meet Robin Williams as the grown-up hero. Mary Beth Hurt is sitting on the grandstand of the college athletic field, studying. In front of the grandstand is the running track. Robin Williams appears on the right-hand side of the frame, runs to the left out of the frame. Pause. Now he reappears, running backward. Then he leaves the track and begins running up and down the bleachers, right next to where she’s studying, and he says something like I hope I’m not bothering you, and she says something like no, not at all, and he keeps on going up and down as they get into what it is she’s studying. This is a scene about neither athletics nor academics, it’s about making love.