Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

In L.A., truly, there is but one occupation, the movie business. In New York, the infinite city, we’re all invisible.

Now is as good a time as any to admit my fetish: I am hopelessly smitten with finding out the truth about how tall performers are. Especially male performers. Most especially male action performers.

(I don’t understand the creative process. Actually, I make more than a concerted effort not to understand it. I don’t know what it is or how it works but I am terrified that one green morning it will decide to not work anymore, so I have always given it as wide a bypass as possible.)

There is a story of Olivier after a particularly remarkable performance of Othello. Maggie Smith, his Desdemona, knocked on his dressing room door as she was on her way out of the theater and saw him staring at the wall, holding a tumbler of whiskey. She told him his work that night was magic. And he said, in, I suspect, tears and despair, “I know it was … and I don’t know how I did it.” This relates to me in but one way: The Princess Bride is the only novel of mine I really like. And I don’t know how I did it.

—and then I started to fly. For the only time, I was happy with what I was doing. You can’t know what that means if, most of your life, you haven’t been stuck in your pit, locked forever with your own limitations, unable to tap the wonderful stuff that lurks there in your head but flattens out whenever it comes near paper.

(There are no rules to writing, but if there were, caring would be up there. Or, as we intellectuals are fond of saying, you had better give a shit.)

was talking once to a famous critic’s darling director and he said this: “People talk about movies in three parts: preparing, shooting, and postproduction. That’s wrong. There are really only two parts: the making of the movie and the selling of the movie.” I’m not sure he isn’t right.

Beatty understands the workings of the town better than anyone. He has been a force for forty years, has been in an amazing number of flops, and whenever his career seems a tad shaky, he produces a wonderful movie or directs a wonderful movie and is safe for another half decade.

Here is the truth about Titanic: people wanted to see it. Here is the truth about The Postman: people didn’t want to see it. Everything else is mythology.

The great sleight-of-hand artist John Scarne did something that I read about once which almost cost him his life. Scarne, after thousands of hours of practice, had taught himself to cut to the ace of spades at will. He pretended it was a trick but all he did was riffle the cards, spot where the spade ace was, and instantly count how many cards into the deck it was and then cut to it. Just writing that seems amazing. Scarne almost got killed when he pissed off a major Prohibition-era gangster who saw him cut the ace and wanted to know the trick. He wanted to be able to do it too. And he thought Scarne was putting him on when he claimed he couldn’t. So he was going to kill Scarne. Fortunately for one and all, the gangster was finally convinced.

These three, I felt—they had to run a total of fifty pages at least—were so strong they would support the remainder of the screenplay, no matter how badly I might screw things up. Aside to young screenwriters: no, I am not bullshitting when I say this last. I am always terrified I am going to screw everything up. The most hideous advice—and at the same time the most releasing—was given to me by George Roy Hill, still and always the greatest director I ever worked with. I had just taken on the job of trying to make the famous Woodward-Bernstein Watergate book somehow translate to screen. Hill, a world-class sadist, looked at me, and these were his words: “All the President’s Men? Everybody’s going to be waiting for that one.” And here he smiled. “Don’t fuck it up.” At a Knicks game recently I ran into Ben Stiller, who has his own demons trying to figure out the glorious Budd Schulberg book What Makes Sammy Run? Naturally I was kind, told him this: “Don’t fuck it up.” He kind of smiled …

POETRY IS COMPRESSION. Long, short, doesn’t matter, rhyming, not, the same. All the rest, the same. Except if you can tell me everything a poem says more briefly than the poem does, then it isn’t much of a poem.

There is almost nothing better for me than when another writer, in agony of course, helpless of course, comes to me and we spitball. I tell you, I am sublime at such moments. Now, when I am the one in trouble, all sublimity goes out the window. For one of the sad truths about the act is that you may be a whiz when the problems belong to others; nevertheless, you are totally helpless when they are your own. That is true for all of us—we are trapped in our own skins.

Look—something moved you when you said, Yes, I want to try and adapt this. (If you didn’t feel that, then you are just another hooker and I will not weep as you go down.) And whatever it was that the original writer put down—whatever it was that made you, for a moment, say “omigod”—that feeling has got to be translated from the book to the script. And you must protect that to the death.

I sensed it was not going to be one of my good days and that only made me panic more, so I gushed and blubbered and embarrassed the man, and I could feel myself slipping down the iceberg and I couldn’t stop. This was the one day when I wanted to be wonderful and it was a fucking nightmare and when it was over I thought, well, thank God, I can’t be any worse— —and then I did it. We were walking along Park Avenue just before parting and I was talking about how he never made me stop reading, never used the wrong word, that great simplicity of the storytelling, and I heard myself saying these terrible words: It’s easy for you, isn’t it, the writing? I still see this sad look in his eyes as he turned to me. And I don’t know what he was thinking but I knew I had disappointed him so badly. I had trivialized the man, I had ignored his pain. “It wasn’t easy,” he said very softly. He went his way, I mine, and I guess that was the worst lunch of my life, because the one thing we have, everyone who writes or paints or composes, is our pain—pain that we deal with by huddling away in our pits and getting through it as best we can.

Both movies are dazzlingly complicated until you know their truths, and then they are clear and inevitable, as all wonderful storytelling must eventually be.

An original screenplay? Nothing to it, really. Just come up with a new and fresh and different story that builds logically to a satisfying and surprising conclusion (because Art, as we all know, needs to be both surprising and inevitable).

There are really two kinds of flicks—what we now call generic Hollywood movies, and what we now call Independent films. Hollywood films—and this is crucial to screenwriters—all have in common this: they want to tell us truths we already know or a falsehood we want to believe in. Hollywood films reinforce, reassure. Independent films, which used to be called “art” films, have a different agenda. They want to tell us things we don’t want to know. Independent films unsettle.

I wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade that there were two different versions of the screenplay, the selling version and the shooting version.

Whenever I am offered a movie job, I always view it with two very different hats—my artist’s hat and my hooker’s hat. My artist’s hat asks: Can I make it wonderful? The hooker wants to know only: Will it get made?

When I am offered a doctoring job, however, neither hat is necessary. Doctoring is about one thing only: craft. I am dealing with a maimed and dying beast and the only question is: Have I the skill to surgically repair it?

George Roy Hill once said that if you can’t tell your story in an hour fifty, you better be David Lean.

had no idea, when I started, that this story was going to fit into three acts. There is no proper number. A lot of mine seem to have five acts. (When I say “act” I mean a moment of power, a moment that in the theater would bring the curtain down to start an intermission.)

The point to be made here is you can write a Hollywood film with an idea at its basis: what is the true nature of evil, or whatever else you want along those lines. But if you do, if that is where your writing heart lies, then you must learn to be masters of deception, hiding your intellectual notions behind strong emotional moments, action stuff, whatever. Shaw could write plays that were essentially talk. You can get away with this kind of stuff in a novel, too. But guess what: movies need to move. Forget that at your peril.

We want, I think, the following things— —we want Shirley to live— —we want the family safe— —and we want them back together as a family, Shirley and Phoebes, Echo and her Climber. Think for a moment now—how do we do that? (I am smiling as I wrote that last sentence because you probably think I know how. And the truth is: not a clue.) Okay. I have had this next scene for a month now. Hope you like it. Go with God.

Okay, these thoughts are maybe three seconds old, so take them with the usual caveats. I should warn you, if I sound a bit fuckerish, it’s only because I’m overworked, underinspired and in a foul mood. The perfect headspace for critiquing a screenplay. Just know I’m probably talking more to myself than to you.

Here it is. I’m going to do this in a random, haphazard sort of way, so you will get the unfortunate experience of seeing how my mind works, and then you’ll understand why writing is almost impossible for me.

My great editor, Hiram Haydn, was a very busy man. He started or ran publishing houses, had a wife and a bunch of kids, was editor of The American Scholar. And wrote novels. He was my editor from Soldier in the Rain through The Princess Bride, was a wondrous father figure for me. Once we were talking about a novel of his, The Hands of Esau, that he was close to finishing, and I asked him how long since he began it and he said probably eight years. How do you stay the same person for that long, I wondered? You just do the best you can, he replied. You hope. When do you write? Sunday morning, he said. Every Sunday morning. That was the only time available to him. The rest of his life was kids and work and family and commuting and meetings and dealing with crazy writers; Sunday morning was all he could carve out, so he played it as it laid. You have to protect your writing time, he said then. That’s the best basic advice I can give to any writer. You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.

A good story is something with an interesting premise that builds logically to a satisfying and surprising conclusion. We get fed them in the cradle and forever on. Want to read a good story? Pick up The Little Engine That Could. Soppy and primitive, sure, but today just by chance I read it again and let me tell you, you are rooting with all your heart for that crummy two-bit nothing of a train to get those toys over the mountain. That’s all it is, this business of writing. Just get the fucking toys over the mountain.