Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

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.