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

by William Goldman

  Does me no good, Lehman said.

  Okay--this: in Alaska, two men who hate each other, sworn enemies, walk toward each other across a frozen lake where a hole has been cut. They walk slowly, closer and closer, and when they get close, they fall into each other's arms and hug.

  Wonderful bits, sure, but no more than that.

  One day Hitchcock says, "I've always wanted to do a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore."

  That was the start of everything.

  Hitchcock had also always wanted to do a sequence at the United Nations where somebody's addressing the General Assembly and he stops and says, "I will not continue until the delegate from Peru wakes up." The page taps the delegate from Peru on the shoulder--and he's dead.

  By now, Hitchcock has to leave to shoot Vertigo--for me, the most overrated movie of all time--but Lehman is aware that whatever the story is, it's moving in a northerly direction.

  As well as being famously pessimistic, Lehman is also not the fastest writer around. He constantly criticizes himself, ditches stuff, but eventually sixty pages are shipped off to Hitchcock, who sends Lehman a rave four-page handwritten letter of approval, and they meet again.

  With both Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart anxious to come aboard.

  (Can you imagine what that must have been like--two of the very greatest stars ever panting to join the team. Personally, I cannot. I don't believe we have stars like that anymore. Probably we know too much about them now. Anyway, I haven't spotted a lot of them in the movies I've seen lately.)

  Lehman is writing this with no knowledge of what comes next but he's got Cary Grant on the train where he meets Eva Marie Saint. He and Hitchcock are spitballing again.

  Hitchcock muses: Do you know what I've always wanted to shoot?

  What?

  I always wanted to shoot a scene where a man is alone. Totally alone. No matter where you shoot, all 360 degrees, nothing.

  Lehman listens.

  And then the villains try and kill him.

  How? asks Lehman.

  With a tornado, Hitchcock says then.

  And Lehman is dying, he's got half a sensational script, and he says, Hitch, how do they get a tornado to kill him at that moment?

  Hitchcock grumbles, goes silent.

  Lehman too.

  More silence.

  They were used to it. They would sit through these incredibly long silences, staring at the walls.

  Then Lehman says these words: maybe a plane. A crop-duster plane.

  And suddenly they were both jabbering away, and then they were both acting out the scene, and then Lehman went home and wrote the scene faster than he ever wrote anything before.

  Remember that--Lehman wrote it. It is an Ernie Lehman scene, filmed exactly as he wrote it. Hitchcock shot it--and not that well. Look at the shot when the plane hits the truck. Awful.

  Lehman gets insufficient credit for it now and, I suspect, will get less in the future. It feels like such a great Hitchcock scene. And it is. And that is a great tribute to Lehman.

  We all have limitations. We all have confidence with stuff that's in our wheelhouse. When I work with a director for the first time, here's what I do: look at every movie he's ever made. So I can have a sense of what he does well, where he is helpless. And I will never willingly write a scene I know he can't shoot.

  Hitchcock, elevated to God these days (though I have my doubts), was terrific with funny/scary. He could deal with a few people in a room. Period. But you could not give him size.

  David Lean, yes, you could give him size. But I doubt Lean would have been happy shooting North by Northwest. I think he would have found it uninteresting. As Hitchcock might have snoozed through Bolt's great script for Lawrence.

  Did Lehman "create" the crop-dusting scene? Yeah, for the most part. He wrote the shit out of it. He handed what you read to Hitchcock. And the next time some failed professor's learned book comes out detailing Hitchcock's Symbolic Use of Catholicism in the Crop-Dusting Scene, of course don't buy it. But you might check the index. I'll bet Ernie Lehman's name isn't there.

  Action-adventure and comedy are brutal to make work. And the easiest to make badly. As the saying goes, "Dying is easy, comedy is hard," but action-adventure runs right alongside.

  I think because you are placing the character into situations where mere mortals never tread. And that can become ludicrous so easily. Great ones, like Errol Flynn as Robin Hood or North by Northwest, are diamond-rare.

  These days, we are happy (I am, anyway) with two-thirds of a terrific action-adventure flick. The Fugitive--saw it twice, but please forget the last part, when you're at the doctor's convention. Men in Black--loved it, even if Act III was in very deep shit indeed. Critics rarely honor these two genres. "Oh," they might say, "The Fugitive will certainly pass a pleasant evening for you." But that's as far as they go.

  I think if someone could figure out a way to make a medicinal action-adventure flick, one the critics could say was "important," they would own the world.

  One of the amazing things about the crop-dusting scene is that it ran eight minutes on film. Not possible today. I once read a quote from David Lean who had just been shown a fresh print of Lawrence of Arabia and was asked what he thought. Lean said he was surprised at how brave he was, holding so many shots for so long.

  If you've seen that greatest of epics, you know immediately what he means. And no one would shoot that way today.

  I think, because of MTV.

  I think movies changed--not the storytelling but the manner of it--not with the coming of MTV but with the talent in the room at the time.

  Meaning this--if MTV had come along in the thirties, when the great music stars could actually, gasp, perform, what you would have seen was Fred Astaire doing, say, "Dancing in the Dark," and it might have been done in one take, or more likely, a few. And you would have seen both his head and his feet in the same shot, something he insisted on as often as possible.

  Well, what the fuck can you do with Elton John? Fat and funny-looking and totally without performing instinct. Here's what you do--you hide him.

  How?

  By cutting so fast no one will realize he is a studio creation. By roaring in for close-ups of glasses, or feet working the pedals, of his face mouthing words, or his hands on the keyboard, or dancing girls behind him, or God knows what--

  --but the relentlessness of the cutting pattern keeps us from seeing that John, a wonderful piano player, and a decent enough singer, can't move.

  Michael Jackson can move, but I'm not sure for how long, because what you see are snippets of him in action, five seconds here, fifteen there. And then all the filler shots to hide the star.

  MTV was meant clearly for teens, and teens go to the movies, and what happened was this: they got bored with longer shots, no matter how logical or helpful they may have been.

  Movies today are too often a blizzard of cuts--just another reason why the '90s are the worst decade. Sad, because I think there are occasions when fast cutting is terrific. But there are many many other occasions when pre-MTV styling would help the story much more.

  And I think the crop-dusting scene, if you could write something as exciting and see it up there today, would still knock your socks off.

  And look all fresh and shining and young and original. And thrill us all anew ...

  * * *

  Adaptations

  When I am offered an adaptation, the initial two questions are always the same. And I take them seriously because we are talking about six of the ever-declining number of months I have left. It will take me that long from the time I say yes till the first draft is done.

  The writing itself takes maybe a month.

  The thinking, figuring out the story, will take twice that (research fits into this period).

  The remaining half is simply a matter of building up my confidence.

  This is always the first and foremost question:

  Do I love it?

  Fo
llowed hard upon by this:

  Can I make it play?

  I have turned down three great hits, and I would make the same decisions today, even though I liked the resulting movies a lot.

  The Godfather, for moral reasons. (Only time ever for that.) This is still mystifying to me. The reason I turned it down was I did not want to glorify the Mafia. Even though Butch glorifies outlaws, I know. I loved the book so--it's still the great novel read for me of the last few decades (Tommy Thompson's Blood and Money is of the same quality in nonfiction). I wanted to do the Puzo. In the end, could not. The movie sure did okay without me.

  The Graduate, because I just didn't get the book.

  Superman, I was most anxious to do.

  I was a comic-book nut when I was a kid, and a huge collector. This was during the Golden Age, 1937-43. I mean, I had the first Superman, the first Batman, the first Robin the Boy Wonder, the first Captain Marvel. No way of remembering how many, hundreds, obviously. I remember, growing up, I had a washing machine container in my bedroom and it was filled with my comics.

  Mint condition, you understand.

  I still see the me of then, this miserable fucked-up kid, and when schoolwork was done, I would go to my treasure trove and kneel down and go through and take my time deciding which glorious adventure land did I want to visit then. I needed places to get to just to get through those years. Books? Sure, I was a compulsive reader. Movies? Absolutely, when I was allowed to walk up to the Alcyon. But these adventures were in my room with me.

  Jesus Christ, I still know what "Shazam" stands for.

  Superman was to be one of those European money deals. They had the rights, we talked. I had no idea which story I would tell from so many. The Krypton stuff, the early years, first day on the job--who knew? But I knew I could make it work. A villain would be a problem, sure, I mean a legitimate one, Supe being all-powerful. But lead me to it.

  And in the meeting this came out: they needed a star.

  As Superman.

  Because of their financial needs, they had this one requirement.

  Dead I was.

  They talked of Eastwood's interest.

  Dead.

  They spoke of Jimmy Caan.

  Still and forever dead.

  Because I knew this: no star would play the part. (I really knew it.) No star would wear the costume. No star would risk looking that stupid. Years later I spoke with Warren Beatty, very smart, about when his turn came to be offered the title role. He had been given the costume, had taken it home, had put it on, had run around his swimming pool, as I remember, had looked at himself for a very short moment before taking it off.

  Eventually, they did what they had to do to get the movie made: went for a wonderful unknown and surrounded Chris Reeve with stars. I would have written that. Never had the chance.

  Okay, you want me to adapt something and you have given me something to read--book, article, whatever. Guess what I do? I read it. As a traveler, as someone who might be on a trip and has just picked up something he hopes he loves--not as a screenwriter (that comes later).

  I'm pretty fast in my decision making, I think I always have been. I almost always know before I'm done. And if I can answer the two crucial questions in the affirmative--do I love it, can I make it play?--you pretty much own the next six months of my life.

  Then lawyers and agents fire guns across the water.

  Once that is past--and it doesn't take long, or shouldn't with men of goodwill--there may be meetings. Usually only with the producer. (In my experience, we are always the first wave in the battle; that is the blood of screenwriters splattered all over Omaha Beach.)

  Usually the producer has shit to say. My favorite is when someone says, "We can have a lotta fun with this." Then he takes his tan and his smile and goes. And then you are alone with you, the screenwriter.

  Here is one of the main rules of adaptation: you cannot be literally faithful to the source material.

  Here's another that critics never get: you should not be literally faithful to the source material. It is in a different form, a form that does not have the camera.

  Here is the most important rule of adaptation: you must be totally faithful to the intention of the source material.

  In All the President's Men, we got great credit for our faithfulness to the Woodward-Bernstein book.

  Total horseshit: the movie ended halfway through the book. What we were faithful to was their story of a terri-ble hinge in American history. In other words, we didn't Hollywood-it-up.

  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.

  In the later stages of movie making, when I am working with producers or directors or stars, and they put in for their needs, fine, that's that process. Lose those wars if you must, not crucial.

  But if they begin to encroach on your emotional core, if you let them take that ground, you lose everything.

  Here is how I adapt and it's very simple: I read the text again. And I read it this time with a pen in my hand--let's pick a color, blue. Armed with that, I go back to the book, slower this time than when I was a traveler. And as I go through the book word by word, page by page, every time I hit anything I think might be useful--dialogue line, sequence, description--I make a mark in the margin.

  A blue one.

  I put the book away, fiddle, panic, if there's research to be done, I start in on it.

  Then maybe two weeks later, I read the book a third time, this time with a different color pen.

  Let's go with a red one.

  And I repeat the same marking process--a line in the margin for anything I think might make the screenplay.

  Then more research, more thoughts, and maybe--but only maybe--a few notes. I am doing two things, of course, during these months--

  --building up my confidence for the actual writing--

  --desperately trying to find the spine of the flick.

  Now another reading of the text.

  A brown pen, maybe.

  I hope you see why I have to care for the source material. Because I am going to live with it. If I had to reread and reread something I didn't like, I would more than likely have gone out the window long ago.

  What follows now is this page-this page of my copy of Stephen King's wonderful Misery. It's the scene where Kathy Bates saws through Jimmy Caan's ankles (breaks them in the movie; check out the Misery essay). It's pretty obvious that whatever the spine of the piece was, I knew from the start it had to pass through this sequence.

  What follows after that are two more pages from the same book, a blink further on (this page-this page). It's after the violence, Paul is writing and the "t" has just fallen out of his typewriter (the "n" had already fallen out). One line is circled--King has bees buzzing and I wrote the word "sound" in the margin. One line is underlined--it's the first day of summer.

  In other words, I did not think the typewriter breaking would make the movie, whatever that movie might turn out to be.

  When I am done with all my various color-marked readings--five or six of them--I should have the spine. I should know where the story starts, where it ends. The people should be in my head by now.

  So I make a list and tape it to the wall in front of my Mac. On my wall I put these five words for the start of Misery--

  1. finishing

  2. leaving

  3. driving

  4. storm

  5. crash

  Hopefully, the whole movie, the entire story would be thirty shorthanded words. They could tell me about something as short as a single cut. Or a ten-or twelve-page sequence. Which I hope is in my head. Then, always checking out the list, all I have to do is write the movie.

 
; * * *

  The Seventh Seal

  by Ingmar Bergman

  * * *

  I know, or have interviewed, the other screenwriters in this section. And when I began thinking about just what this section might be, I thought I would try and meet Bergman, even went as far as to contact a representative of his in America. I sort of envisioned it like this: casual, you know, have something set up that would fit his plans, fly over, say, from London, when I was there, go to whatever island he is presently inhabiting, talk for a few minutes.

  I think Bergman is the greatest screenwriter. I think a hundred years ago he would have been a great novelist, Balzac maybe. And the more I thought about our meeting, the more I realized something: I was nuts to contemplate such a thing. And why? Because I did meet my great writing hero, the man who changed my life, Irwin Shaw.

  I was in my teens once, wanting to write, not really knowing what it meant, if I could, not dating, certainly not dating the girls I dreamed of, a shitty student, C average, used to be tops in school but then all kinds of family madness came crashing down and I was in trouble, and I think I probably knew that.

  Which was when a cousin of mine, who did not read much, out of some mystic blue, gave me a copy of Mixed Company, a collection of Shaw's stories.

  I didn't know his stuff, picked up the book, glanced at the first story, "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," read it, then on to the next, "The Eighty-Yard Run," then "Act of Faith," and that day spun into tomorrow and probably it was the tomorrow after that before I'd finished "Sailor off the Bremen" and "Welcome to the City" and "The Dry Rock" and all the others and I don't think I knew it at the moment of putting the book down--

  --but my life was never the same--

  --because I had read these wondrous things, these vignettes and tables, told with such ease and style--for me, Shaw and Fitzgerald are the great American stylists--and I knew this: I could do that.

  Okay, it's decades later, and my publisher at Delacorte is Ross Claiborne, wonderful Ross, and he knows of my feelings for Shaw and one day he says this: "Irwin's going to be in town, would you like to meet him?"