A screenwriter had Hollywood’s number 40 years ago

Nearly every time there is movie news, I connect it back to the great William Goldman.

After a decade of being one of the most in-demand writers in town, Goldman peeled back the curtain with an autobiographical tell-all called Adventures in the Screen Trade.

By that time Goldman had written Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Marathon Man. Both of those were original works. And he wrote Butch and Sundance as a screenplay because if he wrote it as a novel he would have to write about horses and he didn’t know anything about the critters. Which is, if you think about it, a legendary reason to write an Oscar-winning screenplay.

Then he wrote the screenplays for The Stepford Wives, All the President’s Men, and A Bridge Too Far. He also wrote the book and the screenplay for my favorite piece of fiction of all time The Princess Bride.

But Screen Trade, and I’m doing this from memory cause I can’t find my copy of the book, offers several insights that I often ponder when checking out what’s coming out of Hollywood.

1. Nobody Knows Anything

The people with the power to greenlight movies like to believe they know what is and what will not be a hit. But, in fact, nobody knows anything. Consider Avatar 2. Would you give James Cameron an essentially unlimited check to do a sequel to a movie about aliens and space marines? Maybe. But many folks online certainly thought they knew there was no way the movie would make what it needed to, reportedly $2 Billion, to make it a hit.

And then, $2 billion later, everyone has to bow down. Avatar 2 may not be for you, but it was a money machine.

Babylon is another perfect example of this. Writer-Director Damien Chazelle has three previous hit movies including La La Land, a movie about how great Hollywood is, and he nabs two big stars to be in his fourth outing. Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and a movie about Hollywood in the 1930s.

‘How can this miss!’ the poor soon-to-be-fired executive must have thought.

And while I think it was one of the most creatively interesting and well-made movies of the last year it was also an undeniable box office bomb.

I think there is far too much emphasis on the box office but I don’t create the world I just live in it. Forget it, Jake, The Shawshank Redemption was a bomb too.

2. The new regime cancels all projects

To be fair I don’t think before Batgirl that the new regime ever canceled quite as aggressively as David Zaslav at Warner Bros. Discovery. But Goldman wrote that one of the things that made making movies so hard was that every project greenlit by the previous studio head would be canceled when that guy, inevitably, was fired.

Why?

Well, if the project is a failure the new regime is still on the hook for the lost revenue. If the movie is a huge hit the studio head will have everyone in the business making fun of him because they will know it wasn’t his project. He’s not the genius behind it.

James Gunn, as the head of DC Studios, did exactly what a good executive should do. He cancelled everything he could and he’s doing his best to separate what will be his DC from anything he doesn’t have the authority to eliminate.

He’s going to be on the hook for all of it, he might as well make sure what does go forward is something he believes in.

3. Dealing with Producers

Goldman was actually blackballed after the first book came out. It was a little too truthful and he wasn’t afraid to smack around his collaborators who he felt behaved badly. Dustin Hoffman allegedly made an ailing Laurence Olivier walk around multiple times on swelling ankles during a rehearsal for Marathon Man. Hoffman and others were also connected to his withering critique that movie stars will always refuse to play weak.

One of the main characters in Babylon pisses himself and begs for his life near the end of the movie. I don’t think I’m giving too much away by telling you it is not Brad Pitt.

But sooner or later someone with clout will need a good writer for a project and they will turn to someone like Goldman because they know he’s got the goods.

The second book opens with Goldman in a producer’s office. The producer is on the phone for some time while Goldman waits. Then, suddenly, he stops, puts his hand on the receiver (which is how we used to mute the analog things) turns to Goldman, and says, “Which Lie Did I Tell.”

I thought about that a lot while watching The Offer. The Offer was a prestige show about the making of The Godfather. It was based on the memories of the movie’s producer, Albert S. Ruddy.

Would you be surprised to find that Ruddy was a stand-up guy who bluffed and outsmarted the mob, the studio bosses, and the creatives to get the movie made? Some of the show comes straight from the on-the-record remembrances of Director Francis Ford Coppola, writer Mario Puzo, and Studio Head Robert Evans.¹

Those parts I mostly believed. The Ruddy stuff? I liked it, but I didn’t buy a word of it.

1 Also, go watch the amazing Robert Evans documentary, The Kid Stays in the Picture.