Adventures In The Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood

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Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. The quality of writing—which is crucial in almost every other form of literature—is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn’t anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don’t want to begin with “Once upon a time,” because the audience gets antsy.”

Adventures In The Screen Trade: A Personal View [PDF] [EPUB] Adventures In The Screen Trade: A Personal View

Should we want to know how the sausage is made? 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. Thankfully, I came away mostly unscathed because the book is almost as old as I am. And the critiques from the Farrelly Brothers, Callie Khouri, and other fellow screenwriters felt very flat and redundant. And oddly truncated. William Goldman had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. Several of his novels he later used as the foundation for his screenplays. I’m starting to see a pattern. If I really like a book, I don’t bother writing notes about it cause I just like to read it. Goldman has a gift for writing amiable anecdotes about Hollywood. They read very conversational and fun to read, and are aided by Goldman's insight into historically significant figures from film and stuff. It's so interesting to see insights into Michael Douglas' skills as a producer, or Clint Eastwood's stiff cool as a director, and numerous other examples.

Adventures in the screen trade

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.” And then of course, while you are stewing, he kills it. He writes the scenes that work, that play well and are the most logical next steps in the movie. It may not be Oscar-bait, but it’s a film you’ll like AND YOU WILL KNOW WHY ITS WRITTEN THAT WAY. Over the years I have met and worked with a dozen prize-winning American directors, and there is not one whose “philosophy” or “worldview” remotely interests me. The total amount of what they have to “say” cannot cover the bottom of even a small teacup.” Ha! The book is filled with that kind of thing. It's not mean, just honest. This is definitely one of them. Fascinating stories about ups, downs, hits and flops, and how it affected him as a person.

Adventures in the screen trade : William Goldman : Free Adventures in the screen trade : William Goldman : Free

I want to be friends with William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride and this awesome book! He has the most delightfully conversational style. This book gets pretty technical, but I like that. I don't know if a non-writer would enjoy it quite so much, but maybe if he or she just skipped over the advice in grey, it would be just a book full of dirt on a screenwriter's adventures in Hollywood (among other places.) Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting."

A glorious tour of the sausage factory with a guy who breeds champion hogs. That's the image that came to mind as I finished this funny, authentic look at the movie business by a celebrated screenwriter (and novelist). Bill Goldman is painfully frank about his struggles, his weaknesses, and the seamy underbelly of the business that has paid his bills for decades. Writing in the wake of the "Heaven's Gate" disaster which shook the confidence of almost everyone in Hollywood (1982), Goldman still manages to end the book on an upbeat and hopeful note. And it turns out he was mostly right about the future. Goldman is one of the best storytellers this country has produced, which may seem a bold claim to some, but it happens to be true. His most famous axiom, that “nobody knows anything” is one of those things that grow truer with time and experience. Goldman was referring to success in the movie business, the idea being that when something worked and was a hit, it just kind of worked and nobody really knew why, though everyone with a hand in the production would claim otherwise. I glanced inside the cover. I knew that there would be interesting tidbits about the writing of The Princess Bride , both the movies and the book. Also discussed is one of my favorite horror films of all time, "Misery." And there's that quality I associate with the name (yes, even "The Stepford Wives" I liked). This] is that big, sad, funny, incisive, revelatory, gossipy, perception-forming book about Hollywood that publishers have been promoting for years -- and now the real thing is finally here."― St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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Goldman, William (1989). Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting (reissue ed.). Grand Central Publishing. ISBN 0-446-39117-4. Goldman also wrote a series of memoirs about his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood. [The first of these was this book, "ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE".] Two big bonuses of this book: Goldman provides his entire screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and then analyzes what worked and what didn't. He also provides a short story of his that was not optioned by Hollywood. He translates it into a screenplay for this book and explains the choices he has to make along the way: what characters to keep, what scenes to focus on etc…There is also an expanded edition of the book, which includes the full screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, plus Goldman's analysis of the screenplay's strengths and weaknesses, as "Part Three", and moves the "Da Vinci" section to "Part Four". Apart from recounting his own experiences in Hollywood (or "Out There" as Goldman calls it) from 1985 until just prior to the book's publication in 2000, Goldman also analyzes key scenes from films like "Fargo" and "When Harry Met Sally," explaining what makes these scenes work from a filmmaker's point of view. He also introduces several story ideas, presents a potential synopsis that could lead to a "selling script" (the script that gets the studio to buy your work and make the movie), and then explains why or why not he personally would be interested in that script. Finally, he presents parts of an original screenplay ("The Big A") and gives the reader the responses of several fellow writers who looked it over to give often harsh but potentially helpful pieces of advice. Bottom line: Goldman knows his way around a screenplay, and this book is his behind-the-scenes look at his experience of the movie-making process.