Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

What follows, generically speaking, is a book about Hollywood. It may not come as a total shock to you if I say this is not the first attempt to mine that subject. All I can provide that is different is my point of attack: I have been, for close to twenty years now, a screenwriter. I have seen a lot, learned more than a little—most of it, alas, too late. In terms of authority, screenwriters rank somewhere between the man who guards the studio gate and the man who runs the studio (this week). And there is a whole world to which we are not privy. And I thought it may be helpful to know at least something about just what is taking place Out There. With that in mind, I’ve interviewed a number of people who work the other side of the street: studio executives, producers, directors, and stars. By the time we’re done, it’s my hope that you’ll understand a good deal more about why you see what you see on the screen.

All the major studios paid a fee to Thomas Edison for the right to make movies: The motion picture was his invention and he had to be reimbursed for each and every film. But there was such a need for material that pirate companies, which did not pay the fee, sprang up. The major studios hired detectives to stop this practice, driving many of the pirates as far from the New York area as possible. Sure, Hollywood had all that great shooting weather. But more than that, being three thousand miles west made it easier to steal.

If Albert Finney had agreed to play the title role in Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O’Toole wouldn’t have happened. If Kirk Douglas had played Cat Ballou, forget about Lee Marvin. Montgomery Clift deserves special mention. (Clift, for me, is the most overlooked of the great stars. His was a talent that ranked right up with Brando’s. I once met Burt Lancaster, and he told me a story of his first days with Clift on From Here to Eternity. One thing you should know about Lancaster: The man exudes physical power. Even today, if he went in the ring against André the Giant, I’d bet Lancaster. He told me, “The only time I was ever really afraid as an actor was that first scene with Clift. It was my scene, understand: I was the sergeant, I gave the orders, he was just a private under me. Well, when we started, I couldn’t stop my knees from shaking. I thought they might have to stop because my trembling would show. But I’d never worked with an actor with Clift’s power before; I was afraid he was going to blow me right off the screen.”) A recent biography of Clift reports that he turned down, in one short stretch, four roles: the William Holden part in Sunset Boulevard, the James Dean part in East of Eden, the Paul Newman part in Somebody Up There Likes Me, and the Brando part in On the Waterfront. These were all crucial roles in their careers—would these wonderful actors have become stars if Clift had given the thumbs-up sign? Hard to say for sure.

It’s easy to say, though, that without the aid and assistance of George Raft, there is no Humphrey Bogart. I know that’s hard to believe today, since Bogart has become such a revered cult figure. But he scuffled for a decade or more in second-rate stuff. High Sierra began the turnaround, a part that Raft rejected. Then came The Maltese Falcon. Raft didn’t want to play Sam Spade because he didn’t trust the first-time-out director, John Huston. Finally, Casablanca. Would you have enjoyed that great entertainment as much with George Raft and Hedy Lamarr? Or Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan? They were all approached for the parts.

I don’t mean to imply that Gable dined on gruel during his glory years. He was well paid, obviously; all the great pre-1950 stars were. But they didn’t share in profits of films. They were contract players: They did what they were told, not only because of the legal agreement, but because they needed the bread. Sure, they lived well, but today’s stars have retirement money. Bend of the River changed everything. In many ways, this little-remembered 1952 Jimmy Stewart Western is as important as any film ever in its effect on the industry. Stewart’s agent then was the remarkable Lew Wasserman, today the head of MCA-Universal. Stewart was already a major star. The studios were losing (or had lost) their contractual autonomy. And what Wasserman did was arrange for Stewart to take less than his usual salary in exchange for a percentage of the film’s potential profits. It was a gamble that worked: Bend of the River was the number-two box-office film of its year, and Stewart cleaned up. Nothing has been the same since.

Anyway, Pacino was making Author! Author! and the company was shooting an exterior scene in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In the winter. The windchill factor was way below. The whole crew was ready for the shot. Ready and waiting. Pacino stayed in his trailer for over an hour. When he finally emerged, he walked into the setup and decided he didn’t like the lighting. Something about it reminded him of the lighting from an earlier film of his, Cruising. He wanted the lighting changed. Arthur Hiller, as gentlemanly a director as any now operating, exploded. He told Pacino he was thoughtless and that a hundred people had been waiting in subfreezing weather. He said all this strongly. Pacino responded strongly in kind, told Hiller off, gathered up his entourage, then plunged into his limousine and was gone. (He returned hours later, when it was no longer possible to do the shot.) Now, I have no idea what this action cost the film. Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. I would think at least fifty. Whatever it set the picture back, you can bank that the money was not made up for out of Al Pacino’s multimillion-dollar salary.

Paul Newman, in discussing the careers of European versus American stars, put it this way: “One of the difficult things is that American filmgoers seem less able and willing to accept actors or actresses in a wide variety of roles—they get something they hook on to and they like, and that’s what they want to see.” In the case of Stallone, they could care less about him as a labor leader or a soccer goalie. But let him be Rocky Balboa, the pug, and they’ll stand happily in line for hours.

And though Stallone may be an extreme example, the same kind of point can be made about our two biggest stars. Eastwood has to beat up on people. When he doesn’t, as in The Beguiled or the more recent and very sweet Bronco Billy, a film that he also directed, the audience is considerably smaller. Bronco Billy, for example, attracted less than a third of the audience than the Eastwood film that preceded it, Any Which Way You Can. Clint Eastwood is really only Clint Eastwood when he’s the toughest guy on the block. And Reynolds, in the four years he’s been at the top, is only Reynolds when he can get his hands on the wheel of a car and have extraordinary adventures. When he acts an ordinary guy (Starting Over) or Cary Grant (Rough Cut, Paternity), forget it.

Here is one of the basic lessons a screenwriter must learn and live with: Stars will not play weak and they will not play blemished, and you better know that now. Sure, Brando and Pacino will play Mafia chieftains in The Godfather. But those are cute Mafia chieftains. They’re only warring on bad Mafia guys and crooked cops; they’re only trying to hold the family business together. Try asking a major star to play a real Mafia head, a man who makes his living off whores and child pornography, heroin and blood; sorry folks, those parts go to the character actors, or the has-beens. Or actors on the come who haven’t yet achieved star status.

Lawrence Kasdan, Hollywood’s hottest (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and I think best (Body Heat) young screenwriter, had some wonderfully penetrating things to say in a recent interview: If I thought that was all I could ever do and that I would constantly be turning over these works of love to other people and having them changed, I don’t know how long I could do it…. … The movie comes out and there’s the pain that your movie never got made; there’s this other movie instead. But everyone says you wrote it, and they blame you for it anyway. So you’re getting it from both sides, from inside and outside.

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. In the old days of the great studios, this situation didn’t exist. The Harry Cohns and the Louis Mayers fully expected to be in their traces till they dropped. Their modern counterparts are under a totally different system: They must get results—now—or they’re gone. There is perhaps more executive shuffling in any single year now than existed in the entirety of the nineteen thirties or forties. 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.

So we’ve got an ex-agent running our studio. What can we say about him? A lot of good things. He’s hardworking. He’s shrewd as hell. He’s got a lot of contacts in the business. He understands a great deal about how the business operates. What he doesn’t understand, generally speaking, is passion. Just as in the old days, when he didn’t care about the film as much as the deal, the same holds true now. He never, most likely, has worked on a film, never written one or produced one, most certainly never directed one. People are coming at him day and night with projects—“I must make this. You must give me my chance.” The agent, being unused to working this side of the street, seeks help from two sources: (1) stars, because he understands them from his earlier life, and (2) the business end of the studio, the people who handle the selling of films. Because they never cared about passion, and because they, at least in theory, know what will sell and what won’t. (We know that’s not true, and the business people do, too, but obviously if they admit it, they get drummed from the corps; my God, what are business people for if they don’t know.)

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. But they got booked in theatres. Which is the name of the game for the business people at the studios. Should we be surprised at the theatre owners grabbing those movies?

If you have a slate of films that are low budget and successful, as Frank Price had recently at Columbia, you’re obviously in great shape. But if you have a slate of low-budget films that stiff, you’re not just a failure, you’re a double disaster: Not only did your pictures die, you couldn’t even attract “elements.” Well, you can’t have that. Which is why the cry of every studio executive on the way to the guillotine has been the same: “You can’t do this to me, I got you a Charles Bronson picture. I was the one who signed Stallone. Ryan O’Neal only did our movie because we have a strong personal relationship. Kris Kristofferson thinks I’m creative. Jimmy Caan told me personally he wants to work for me again. And so did Donald Sutherland. And Chuck Heston. Liza and Ali and I are buddies. And Lee Marvin and I have dinner together. And… and—” —and the blade always falls. One fact of movie life must always be faced: Stars are kept in orbit by studio executives who are trying to save their own jobs….

So why did the studio guy say Fonda made On Golden Pond? Because he was desperate to come up with something, anything, that wouldn’t shake the foundations of what he knew to be true—what kind of film to make. There’s a whole world of subject matter that will never be touched by the major studios. Because the executives know the sort of film that may work. Just like the bright boys in Detroit knew, a while back, that what the American public really wanted was a great big glossy gas-guzzling car. And all that interest that was starting in Japanese cars? Just another nonrecurring phenomenon….

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.)

Dear Mr. Goldman: I am a young Australian writer—a newcomer both to New York and to the craft of screenwriting. In the past year and a half I have written three screenplays (more accurately, two and a half—the first was a one hour thing commissioned by an Australian director who had seen a short story of mine.) I also wrote a feature-length script of Troilus and Cressida, knowing full well that costume dramas are not a hot ticket with the studios. I was right, however, in thinking that the executives would be more likely to show interest in work from an unknown, if they recognized the subject. Thus I’ve been able to get Troilus read by production v.p.’s at Fox, Paramount and MGM. They were positive about the quality of my work, but the consistent refrain is that it would be too expensive to produce. My other screenplay is a better prospect, commercially, being a spy thriller dealing with a paranoid who comes into possession of some important government documents. I sent it to MGM last week. So you see, I am neither an absolute beginner, nor totally naive about the business aspects of screenwriting. Since I am without an agent, however, I do have a lot of questions about how to proceed from here. If you could spare an hour or so to talk to me, I would appreciate it. I promise not to ask for introductions to anybody or beg you to read my work. There may be no great profit in such a meeting for you, but perhaps it would not be entirely disagreeable. I am not a fool nor (despi...

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 score. How in the world is Steven Spielberg the “author” of that? Why is it often referred to today as “Steven Spielberg’s Jaws”? Am I ever not knocking Spielberg: He did, for me, a world-class job of directing that wonderful shocker.

But there is a theory put forward by some (Gore Vidal for one) that the true influence of the director died with the coming of sound. In the silent days, Griffith could stand there and, with his actor’s voice, he could talk to Lillian Gish or whoever and literally mold the performance with long, heated verbal instructions while the camera was rolling. Not anymore. Now the director must stand helpless alongside the crew and watch the actors work at their craft. Sure, he can do retakes, he can talk to them before, but once the shooting starts, he can’t move up and verbally be Svengali.

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.

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.

I first read about Butch and Sundance in the late 1950’s, and the story of the two outlaws fascinated me. I began researching them in a haphazard way; there weren’t many books about them then, but there were articles and I would seek them out and read them. The more I read, the deeper my fascination became. In 1963 I met a movie producer, Lawrence Turman (The Graduate), and talked to him about the material. He was tremendously helpful in trying to figure out a story line. Because as colorful as the material was, it had inherent problems. It covered a number of years, it moved from continent to continent. Terribly sprawling. Now, if you’re writing an epic, you can sprawl to your heart’s content, but this was no epic; rather, I thought it was a personal story of these two unusual outlaws. Eventually, I’d done all the research I could bear, I hoped I had a story that would prove coherent, so I sat down and wrote the first draft in 1966. It took four weeks. When someone asks how long it takes to write a screenplay, I’m never sure what to answer. Because I don’t think four weeks is what it took to do Butch. For me, eight years is closer to the truth. 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….

The only prime-time entertainment series that is not a comic-book program is M*A*S*H. Not because of its outstanding quality, but because every scene in M*A*S*H, no matter how wildly farcical, is grounded in the madness of death.

Jaws began the present cycle: It did business far beyond what anyone dreamed possible. Then Star Wars shattered all the records set by Jaws. And now every executive in Hollywood is trying to figure out how the hell to topple Star Wars. Which, of course, is only right and proper: It’s their job. But in their quest, they have altered the tradition of ploughing back profits in pursuit of an entire range of different sorts of films. Right now—today—comic-book pictures are only breeding more comic-book pictures, something that has never happened to this extent before.

(Note to fledgling writers: Never never write for Broadway. Nothing is as wracking as a show that stiffs in New York. Because of the immediacy. When a novel dies, or a movie, it’s usually at least a year between when your work is over and disaster overtakes you. But in the theatre, you’ve just finished that week and you have no defenses. If you ever have an urge to write for Broadway, be kind to yourself and write a long novel instead.)

I tore down to Times Square, where there was an all-night bookstore. There aren’t shelves full of books on screenwriting even now, but back then, what we have today seems like a gusher. I nervously asked the clerk did he have any books on what a screenplay looked like and he sort of nervously waved me back in the general direction of the rear of the place. Everyone was nervous in Times Square at two in the morning, then and now, in bookstores or on the streets. The other few customers eyed me strangely and I suppose I gave as good as I got. God knows what they were doing there, pushing, dozing, maybe bookworms with insomnia or other budding screenwriters; they went their way, I mine. I don’t know how long I took, but there was one copy of one book with the word screenwriting in the title so I grabbed it, blew away (truly) the dust, clocked the contents table, flicked through until I finally got to the pages that showed what a screenplay looked like. More madness.

In a detective story of this type—The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep—all you really have going for you is your main man: You see everything, the whole world, through his eyes, he keeps you company every step of the way. And if you don’t like being with Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, not all the plot skill in the world is going to make it a happy journey. If you are turned off by your host, forget it, it’s over. And what the coffee moment really turned out to be was an invitation that the audience gladly accepted: They liked Lew Harper. From that moment forward, the script was on rails.

Wagner said a moment like that had never happened to him before. And he also added one more thing: It was the first time in his experience that a major star had actually stayed around and stood there off camera, reading the lines with him, acting along, as it were. Usually, when the star is done with his shot, it’s off to the dressing room, and the remaining performer gets to act with the script girl reading the star’s lines. Script girls are very important on the set, they work like hell—but they are also noted for a certain woodenness when it comes to reciting dialog. No question that Newman’s presence helped Wagner fill the moment.

Butch is pretty well documented. A good Mormon boy, he was born Robert Leroy Parker in Utah in 1866. (He took the alias of Cassidy after his boyhood idol, Mike Cassidy, who first got him interested in robbery.) By the 1890’s, Butch was the head of the largest, the most successful, and the last great outlaw gang—The Wild Bunch, the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The remarkable thing about this was that Butch was no gunman at all: He never killed a man until late in life, when he was serving as a payroll guard in South America. He was neither particularly big nor strong, never much of a fighter. Nor was he the brains of the outfit; they had a resident intellectual, Elza Lay, who did as much of their planning as anyone. Now, The Wild Bunch consisted of some of the most murderous figures in Western history. Arrogant, brutal men. And yet, here running things was Cassidy. Why? The answer is incredible but true: People just liked him. Everybody liked Butch. Sometimes (and I could never figure out how to get this into the narrative) when he was being followed, he would ride up to a farm and say, more or less, “Look, I’m Butch Cassidy, there are some people after me, I’d really appreciate it a lot if you’d hide me for a while.” And they would. There have been only two American outlaws who were outsized legends during their careers: Butch was one, Jesse James the second. But people liked Butch before he was famous.

The period in our history we have glamorized as the “Wild West” was actually very short—it began with the end of the Civil War, died with the turn of the century. A total of approximately thirty-five years. Butch pulled his last job in this country in the fall of 1901. One of the organizations he had picked on more than once was the Union Pacific Railroad, owned by E. H. Harriman. Harriman got fed up and, at great expense, formed the Superposse. He put them in a special train, outfitted them with whatever they needed, and paid them well. In real life, the instant Butch heard about the existence of this new enemy—the half-dozen finest lawmen together and out to get him—he took off immediately for South America. The Superposse never actually chased him, since he and Sundance and Etta were long gone. The trio spent some days in New York in 1902—we have wonderful photographs documenting their visit. One of Butch’s weaknesses was he loved having his picture taken. Butch and Sundance died seven years later, and in that time they led a remarkably varied life, robbing, rustling, ranching, taking various aliases as their needs dictated. My image of them during this time was as if Willie Mays, instead of retiring, had gone to Japan to play baseball and become home-run champion again.

Attenborough’s feeling the tension, too, more than any of the rest of us. But he can’t show it. (A crew on location is wildly mercurial—they can go from happy efficiency to sullen plodding in a wink. Attenborough has a marvelous relationship with his crew because he’s genuinely good with people. And he also always helps—if there’s any kind of move to make from one kind of shot to another, he’s always grabbing heavy equipment, lugging it along, and when the crew sees that—the director hustling that way—there’s not much they can do but join him. A director on location is very much like a military leader and he has to behave in like manner so the men won’t mutiny. There was a moment earlier in the shooting when Anthony Hopkins, who portrayed Colonel Frost, the hero of Arnhem, was playing a scene where he had to run from his building to the rest of his troops, headquartered across the street, and the street was in control of the Germans; there was constant sniper fire. It was not a safe place, that street, and Hopkins did the scene, running rapidly while the Germans fired at him. The real Frost happened to be on the set that day, and after the first take, while they were getting ready to try it again, the real Frost said to Hopkins, “Ah, you’re running too fast,” and Hopkins said, somewhat stunned, “Too fast?” and Frost answered, “Yes, you would never run that fast. You have to show the Germans and your own men your contempt for danger.”)

(Producers often acquire material for crazy reasons. They like a character, or they think if you tuck in a part for Bo Derek, it can be a blockbuster. There was one producer in the not so long ago who bought three books purely for their locations—he had never been to New Zealand, so that was one purchase. He wanted to go around the world at the studio’s expense.)

All I have, when I start an adaptation (and I don’t think this can be repeated too often, which is why I’m going to repeat it too often), is my emotional connection with the source material. If I had been offered James Kirkwood’s novel Some Kind of Hero with the proviso that, oh, yes, we’re going to keep it just as it is with one teeny-weeny change—we’re going to make the main character black so we can nab Richard Pryor—I couldn’t have done it. Kirkwood is a fine writer and Pryor is a dazzling talent, but when commercial matters dictate a total subversion of the source material, we are in, as the French say, deep shit.

Bimbaum is a sour pickle of a man. The minute we turn him into Cuddles Zacall, he diminishes. Dickens can make Scrooge cute and we love it. That’s a Christmas story about a tight financier. But Bimbaum is an artist! He is strange. He has and must always have mystery. He appears out of nowhere on the first day of marble season, disappears two haircuts later. Strange things happen when he works on you: Time vanishes, wonderful sounds and thoughts fill your brain. How does he do it? That’s the mystery we must protect. And the minute we find out anything about his past, anything at all, we are ripping at the heart of our material, changing it, ruining it forever.

In Murder on the Orient Express, a level of believable reality is not what we were after; it was a contrived, fluffy affair, and we wanted the people to have a movie-movie feeling. So the costumes were not broken down to look real or worn. And the sets permitted a certain kind of glamorization. People can talk about the train and how lucky we were to be able to shoot on the real Orient Express, but actually it was entirely made in the studio, using some key “museum pieces” from the actual train. People who had traveled on the real train said, “Oh, how nice to see it again,” but actually it was an almost absurd glamorization of what the real thing was. If we had done the real thing accurately, it would probably have looked just a hair tacky.

The principle job of a director is to first get his script and get it right and get it playable and get it almost foolproof. Then his job is to cast it as perfectly as he can. If he does those two things, he can phone in the direction, because it doesn’t make any difference, his work is eighty percent done. The fact is that no director with a poor script that is badly cast can make it work through his direction. On the other hand, if he gets the script right and the actors right, then he can invent, then the rest of it is fun—I don’t mean it’s all fun, it’s partly a pain in the ass, but I mean, then you have a solid basis on which you can create.