Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

There are three kinds of movies— (1) movies that aspire to quality and succeed (2) movies that aspire to quality and don’t succeed (3) movies that never meant to be any good at all. The third group, alas, comprises the majority of commercial films. It’s hard to define this kind of film, but try this: movies for which the original pulse was either totally or primarily financial. Rip-offs, spinoffs, sequels, etc. This is the sort of film that we want to avoid, but few of us are so lucky. And in this third group, subtext is not a word much bandied about. You don’t fret a whole lot about subtext if you’re writing Halloween VI or Conan the Barbarian. But if you, as a writer, aspire to quality, it must be alive under every page you’ve done. Look at what you’ve written: If all that’s going on in your scenes is what’s going on in your scenes, think about it a long time. Then repack your snowball….

DESCRIBING THE STAR If any part of your screenplay requires skillful writing, it’s this. Because you’ve got to indicate a lot with a little. The reader must know the vehicle role has just appeared on the page. But you can’t go overboard in loading on attributes. Plus, you’ve got to be, if at all possible, vague. Here is an example of a damaging description: CUT TO CHALK BROCKTON IN CLOSE UP. CHALK stands silent, a dead cheroot between his lips. Fifty years old, six foot four, you get the feeling there’s not a lot his blue eyes haven’t seen. Nothing nowadays surprises him anymore, and nothing ever has made him feel fear. What’s so terrible about that?

Here’s another star description that has the same flaw—this time the female lead. CUT TO DAHLIA GRACE IN CLOSE UP. DAHLIA stands in the doorway a moment before joining the party. She is simply beautiful, but there is no ego about her. She has, instinctively, a model’s grace. Seventeen years old, blonde, very tall, she is the most beautiful girl in any room she’s ever entered. Dahlia’s obviously some cutie. And she hasn’t let it go to her head. (We like her for that.) Maybe she’s even going to turn out to be perfect. (Remember, all stars are always perfect.) The problem with both descriptions is this: They’re too specific. Chalk can only be Eastwood; Dahlia, Brooke Shields.

Do you know what a studio executive might do if he had some interest in the Chalk Brockton script. He would try and get a reading from Eastwood’s agent or, if he could, from the man himself. And if the answer came back in the negative, your script would suddenly develop all kinds of heretofore hidden but fatal flaws. Which is why you must be vague.

This is a less damaging description for the man— CUT TO CHALK BROCKTON IN CLOSE UP. CHALK stands silent, but he doesn’t ever have to say much; the man has presence. He’s long since been a kid, but he moves with the grace of a young athlete. And he sure isn’t old, but there’s not a lot he hasn’t seen.

But a lot of the time, there’s no excitement under the exposition. It’s just something you have to get past. Cary Grant was famous in his films for trying to get other people in the scene to do the expository talking. Grant was a brilliant listener, and often scenes would be shifted to suit him. He was no fool. If you can give the exposition to a secondary character, do it. It’s just another way of protecting the star.

Recently a major star said the following, and it sums up this point (and a lot more about their needs) as well as anything: I don’t want to be the man who learns—I want to be the man who knows.

But every movie—from a Robert Flaherty documentary to Raiders of the Lost Ark—sets it’s own special reality. And once those limits are established, they may not be broken without the risk of fragmenting the entire picture.

Truth is terrific, reality is even better, but believability is best of all.

De Niro versus Walken at Russian roulette. If you looked at the billing of the picture on your way in, did you ever doubt who was going to win? Zap—De Niro is unscathed but Walken dies—with a touch of the heroic smile on his lips. All this was exciting, and I enjoyed it every bit as I used to be enthralled by Batman having it out with the Penguin— —and precisely on that level. What Deer Hunter told me was what I already knew and believed in: No matter how horrid the notion of war, Robert De Niro would end up staring soulfully at the beautiful, long-suffering Meryl Streep. So I say in spite of its skill and the seriousness of its subject matter, we have here a well-disguised comic-book movie. Nothing shook my world.

Bambi. If the shower scene in Psycho was the shocker of the sixties, and for me, it sure was, then its equivalent in the entire decade of the forties was when Bambi’s mother dies. And what about that line of dialog: “Man has entered the forest”? And the fire and the incredibly strong antiviolence implications. (The National Rifle Association would probably picket the movie today.) I know it was a cartoon, I know Thumper had one of the great scene-stealing roles, I know there was a lot of cuteness. But I left that movie changed. It had, and has, a terrifying sense of life to it, and not life as we like it to be. You may think I’m crazy and you may be right, but Bambi still reverberates inside me.

These are bright people, never forget that. They don’t personally enjoy the movies they’re okaying. Do you think they’re happy going home and saying to their families, “Hey, guess what, a great thing happened today, we decided to make Megaforce.” The ecology can only shift when these people decide that there’s got to be more to life than a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. When they suck it up and decide to find material like Ordinary People and Cuckoo’s Nest. But this summer’s three big pictures so far are E. T., Rocky III, and Star Trek II. So, for the present, I think we may as well prepare ourselves for seven more Star Wars sequels and half a dozen quests involving Indiana Jones. By the end of the decade, we may well be seeing E. T. Meets Luke Skywalker.

Paul Newman is the least starlike superstar I’ve ever worked with. He’s an educated man and a trained actor and he never wants more close-ups. What he wants is the best possible script and character he can have. And he loves to be surrounded by the finest actors available, because he believes the better they are, the better the picture’s apt to be, the better he’ll come out. Many stars, maybe even most, don’t want that competition.

Butch and Sundance did what Gatsby only dreamed of doing: They repeated the past. As famous as they were in the states, they were bigger legends in South America: bandidos Yanquis. And probably that fact—recapturing their past—is what I found so moving about the narrative. We all wish for it; they made it happen.

As a writer I believe that all the basic human truths are known. And what we try to do as best we can is come at those truths from our own unique angle, to reilluminate those truths in a hopefully different way.

Faulkner’s that goes something like this: “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” The scene with the governor was certainly a darling of mine, but eventually I realized I had to kill it. Because, probably not consciously, I was approaching what I believe to be the single most important lesson to be learned about writing for films and this is it: SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE. As I said earlier, there are two Roman numeral I’s to this book—the first being that nobody knows anything. Well, this is the other, in well-deserved caps: SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE.

to executing a piece of carpentry. If you take some wood and nails and glue and make a bookcase, only to find when you’re done that it topples over when you try and stand it upright, you may have created something, but it won’t work as a bookcase.

As I’ve said, the most important minutes of any screenplay are the first fifteen and what I’d like to do now is talk about the structure of the first quarter hour of the screenplay, the first four scenes. SCENE ONE: BUTCH CASING THE BANK. Very short scene. A guy walks up to a bank that is very modern-looking and ugly and heavily barred. (The guy is Butch and he’s an outlaw, but we don’t know that yet.) He looks at the bank sourly, then talks with a guard. BUTCH What was the matter with the old bank this town used to have? It was beautiful. GUARD People kept robbing it. BUTCH (walking off) That’s a small price to pay for beauty. Not much unusual here. What it really is is a statement of theme: Times are changing and you have to change with them—if you want to survive.

The first little scene is crucial for theme statement—something that gets repeated again and again as the story moves on. SCENE TWO: SUNDANCE PLAYING CARDS. Now I think we’re starting to move into strange terrain. But it doesn’t look like it at first. It looks like the standard cornball card game we’ve seen a zillion times.

The period after completion of shooting—the postproduction work—is the most technical of all. It takes months to cut and dub and loop and score and whatever else they do. I don’t know what they do, but whatever it is, it’s brutally hard and totally important.

As a screenwriter, I test very high on paranoia. I’m always convinced of any number of things: that my work is incompetent, that I’m about to get fired, that I’ve already been fired but don’t know yet that half a dozen closet writers are typing away in their offices, that I should be fired because I’ve failed, on and on. But all those nightmares—and on occasion they’ve all happened—are within the studio system. The producer goes to the executive and says, “Goldman can’t cut it, let’s get Bob Towne.” And then the executive calls Towne’s agent and a deal is struck and money changes hands and the first I hear about it is when my phone doesn’t ring when it’s supposed to.

Redford said, “We all want the best screenplay possible, so why don’t you look it over, we’re all on the same side, we all want to make as good a movie as we can.” I said I couldn’t look at a word of it until I had been told I could by lawyers. And I left as soon as I could. I can make a case for my producer’s behavior. After all, this was now a famous book, Woodward and Bernstein were the media darlings of the moment, and we needed all the help we could get from the Washington Post. A pitched battle with Bernstein wouldn’t have been an aid to moving the project forward. I could go on longer and make a better case. Redford was in a bind, no question. But I still think it was a gutless betrayal, and you know what else? I think I’m right.

One important positive moment came out of that, a moment so meaningful to me I’ve separated it here. When I next met Woodward to talk about the movie, he said the following, word for word: “I don’t know what the six worst things I’ve ever done in my life are, but letting that happen, letting them write that, is one of them.” I was and am grateful.

Olivier turned to me, then. “Bill,” he said, “could I suggest an alteration in the line? Would it be all right if I changed it so that the line went, ‘I know that you’re going to go to the bank sooner or later?’ You see, then I could register the word bank while he was saying ‘sooner or later’ and I wouldn’t need the pause.” Obviously it was fine with me and the line was altered and we went on without the pause. And probably this two minutes of rehearsal explained at length doesn’t seem like much put down in black and white. But that moment—when the actor of the century asked me would I mind if he switched six words around—is the most memorable incident of my movie career. Olivier. Calling me “Bill.” Olivier. Asking me would I mind. That’s high cotton.…

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. If you’re trying a screenplay, you know it’s never going to be Bergman. If it’s a novel, well, what kind of a novelist can you hope to be when Dostoevski was there before you. And Dickens and Cervantes and all the other masters that led you to the prison of your desk. But if you’re a writer, that’s what you must do, and in order to accomplish anything at all, at the rock bottom of it all is your confidence.

In a screenplay you always attack your story as late as possible. You enter each scene as close as you can to the end (movie scenes are, for the most part, terribly short compared to scenes in novels or even short stories). You also enter your story as late as you can.

That was the light bulb at last going on. Because I realized, for all its size and complexity, Bridge was a cavalry-to-the-rescue story—one in which the cavalry fails to arrive, ending, sadly, one mile short. That was my spine, and everything that wouldn’t cling I couldn’t use. All five Victoria Cross stories fell out of the picture. Super material went by the boards. But it had to. The first draft was done by November and was well received. Shortly thereafter, Levine began one of the most remarkable weeks in his long, remarkable career.…

Before We Begin Writing In any adaptation—in any screenplay, really—the make or break work is done before the writing actually begins. The writing is never what takes the most time. It’s trying to figure what you’re going to put down that fills the days. With anger at your own ineptitude, with frustration that nothing is happening inside your head, with panic that maybe nothing will ever happen inside your head, with blessed little moments that somehow knit together so that you can begin to visualize a scene. Normally, to fill those terrible preparatory days, I tend to do a lot of research. Now, in the case of “Da Vinci,” there isn’t a whole lot of research I can do. But I’ve read and reread the story. (I haven’t written the screenplay yet; as you read this, for all intents and purposes, I’m not really sure how it will begin or end. Or how long it will be; if I had to guess, it would be between thirty and forty pages, but if it comes out longer or shorter, it won’t surprise me much.)

WHAT MUST WE CLING TO? In an adaptation, you have to make changes. In any adaptation. You simply must. If a novel is four hundred pages long and a screenplay runs a hundred and thirty-five, how can you remain literally faithful? Obviously, you can’t.

Which changes, though? While you are altering, you must also remain faithful to two things: the author’s intention and the emotional core of the original work as it affected you. So we’ve got to make changes with “Da Vinci.” Which changes, though? What do we change?— —and what must we cling to? The fate of any adaptation hinges on how the screenwriter answers that question.