Status Updates From Adventures in the Screen Trade

I skimmed through the 40 page “Da Vinci” script he wrote so that I could get up to the section where Goldman interviews a bunch of Hollywood people about their roles on a film, and how they would personally attack this screenplay. The most interesting of them for me was with legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis. He’s one of the absolute GOATs, so it was great to read his unfiltered thoughts for a few pages.

After talking about some of the strengths and weaknesses of Butch and Sundance (an original screenplay), Goldman then says he wants to show how different it is to adapt a screenplay. So he includes a short story he wrote called Da Vinci (I always read it as Da Vinky now) and then explains his thought process on how to adapt it for film. It’s interesting and I wonder how many writers today work like Goldman did.

Well this kind of feels like cheating. I technically skipped ahead over 200 pages, but that’s because the entire screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is included in the book. I love that movie, but I’m not as interested in reading through the whole script from start to finish. I’m glad that it’s included though as a resource to refer to when I actually start writing my own stuff again.

This long chapter about A Bridge Too Far was great, and now I really want to watch this movie. Goldman tells a lot of stories about Joseph Levine, an independent producer I had never heard about but now I’m obsessed with. He also talks about how Richard Attenborough was an incredible person which makes me happy to hear. Up next is the long section all about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The chapter on Marathon Man was fun because it consisted entirely of Goldman telling stories about how incredible it was to work with Laurence Olivier, who he described as “The Actor of the Century”. The chapter on The Right Stuff was very different from the others, because it was the first time that Goldman stepped away from a film voluntarily due to creative differences. This book is incredible.