Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting

Product Information

Perhaps the best Hollywood story in the book concerns the courtroom drama The Verdict, a movie that Goldman didn’t work on but one that perfectly illustrates the perils of working in Hollywood. I'm really fond of Philip Kaufman's script and direction of The Right Stuff, which is faithful to Tom Wolfe's book, so it's probably fortuitous that Goldman was fired, particularly since he had no interest in Chuck Yeager, the most compelling character from Wolfe's book. Goldman died in New York City on November 16, 2018, due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia.

Screenwriting is not an easy profession because it's filled with all kinds of frustrations and set-backs. The last section of the book is a particularly helpful exercise where he takes one of his short stories, wrestles it into a screenplay, and then interviews a cinematographer, a production designer, an editor, a composer and a director about what they would do with his finished product. I live in Los Angeles, in the heart of the filmmaking industry, and it seems all I ever hear about is how that industry is going down the toilet. Some of Goldman's answers were edited into a magazine piece for Esquire; this was read by an editor at a publishing house who contacted him about writing a book on screenwriting. In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood (in one of these he famously remarked that "Nobody knows anything").Written almost forty years ago, so many of the trials and tribulations Goldman describes, as well as his larger concerns about the where the business is heading, feel like they could have been written yesterday. He devotes a section to subtext but doesn't seem to have a clear idea of the difference between subtext and basic cinematic storytelling techniques.

But if you're interested in the movie industry and are willing to weed through 600 pages (and twice as many ellipses), it's sometimes fun to watch the spray of Goldman's vindictive bloodletting. Goldman ably discusses his own methodology for writing and digs into the nuts and bolts of the movie business - going so far as to include a short story and subsequent adaption - with notes and comments from other's in the industry about how they would handle specific problems or complications presented in the word-to-screen transition. It's a creepy, well-acted psychological thriller, so I'm curious why Goldman doesn't even mention it.His first novel, The Temple of Gold (1957), was followed by the script for the Broadway army comedy Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole (1961). He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriting. We mostly shouldn't, but I nevertheless decided to read William Goldman’s 1983 memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade because it's so often mentioned on the Rewatchables podcast. If your passion and enthusiasm are unfazed after wading through Goldman's horror stories and cautionary tales, it might just be for you. If survival in the Hollywood film industry is possible, then there is no better "survival guide" than this book, because Goldman tells it like it is.

The other movie, an improbable musical remake of Grand Hotel shot at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, never got made. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. His most famous axiom, that “nobody knows anything” is one of those things that grow truer with time and experience. After detailing the vast amount of work it takes to bring a script all the way to the big screen, it's no wonder Goldman gets so angry at the Auteur theory.His other notable works include his thriller novel Marathon Man (first published 1974) and comedy-fantasy novel, The Princess Bride (first published 1973), both of which Goldman adapted for film. They give fascinating and practical insights into what they think of this screenplay and what makes a movie work in general, sometimes contradicting one another. Part Three features a screenplay adaptation of a short story Goldman wrote long ago named Da Vinci, followed by comments by various colleagues on how they would approach production of the short film. Well, in this book Goldman also laments how the industry is going down the toilet, how they are making fewer and fewer movies, and so on. The only thing that would make this book better, in my opinion, is if he'd written it five years later--so he could discuss The Princess Bride.