Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

By then our coffee had arrived, we poured and sipped and then we were into bullshitting about this and that. I was gone in half an hour.

  I have followed this procedure in every creative meeting since. If you begin, they can counterpunch. Try never to give them the chance.

  Allan Burns, a writer friend, recently emerged from a creative meeting in which the studio head had only this comment to make: "The script's got to be twenty-five percent funnier."

  A few weeks later, the guy asked after the rewrites. Allan, who co-created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and can be funnier than most people, replied, "Well, I'm only eighteen percent funnier so far, which means I've got to be thirty-one percent funnier the rest of the way."

  And the studio head didn't know it was a joke: What he said was, after some thought, "Sounds about right."

  Usually, before you have a creative meeting, you are stroked. Quite rightly, I think, since most of us are so insecure. It's counterproductive from the producer's point of view to say over the phone, "Get out here, this script sucks." Because when the face-to-face confrontation begins, guns have already been fired across the water.

  I recently submitted a script to a producer who read it and called me and said, "It's everything I hoped it would be, why don't you come on out here and we'll talk about details."

  I flew to California, met with him, we ordered coffee, I got out my notebook, readied my pen, and said, "Tell me everything you want to say."

  Did he ever. He told me "I think the script is downbeat and depressing and I hate the main character and it's all got to be done over completely."

  I remembered those words very clearly--no need to write them down. But unpleasant as that meeting may have been, note two things: Nothing specific was mentioned, and nothing fatal was done to the structure. The rewrite I did required a lot of brute work, but that's the nature of the beast, we expect that. Since the structure could stay, my job became one of making the new script the same only different.

  Most people in the business, being nonwriters, haven't the least notion about what's hard.

  A friend of mine is struggling now with an adaptation of a novel in which he was instructed to keep everything just the way it was, except for one small change--make the main character, who is sixty-six in the book, forty years old. (Perfectly logical from a producer's point of view; not only logical but sound business practice. There are no bankable stars who are sixty-six; there are a bunch who can play forty.)

  A change like that is agony. Because you can't really keep anything in the book. The problems and tensions of the novel shift epically when you lop a quarter century from the hero's age. The guy doing this job lives across town from me.

  If the wind is in the right direction, I can hear his screams....

  Gareth Wigan, one of the powers at The Ladd Company, is the best I've met at dealing with script. The first odd thing about Wigan is that he's perfectly willing to spend hours in a meeting, going over your work shot by shot.

  Wigan is English, so everything is couched with great gentility. And he will say things (often without referring to the screenplay) like this: "I think perhaps we lose the thread of the narrative near the top of page thirty-seven and don't get back on track till the middle of forty-two."

  Frequently, that's the section where you were scrambling and hoped to skill your way past the problem. But when he says something like that, you're so grateful that you can talk as you would to another writer that you often answer, "I got lost there."

  And then he will make suggestions. Can we cut the sequence? Can we bring a different character in to bolster things? Can we shift scenes around to aid the structure?

  The reason I single out Wigan is not because he's any genius--though he's pretty damn smart--but because, at least in my experience, he is always totally prepared. He's done his homework.

  You have no idea how often I've had creative meetings about a script, only to realize half an hour in that the producer or executive hasn't read my script at all.

  Usually this happens when you're discussing a rewrite, and they make a remark about a scene that was in the first draft but is gone now. Except they don't know it's gone.

  I don't know how frequently this happens in other industries, but it sure happens in movies. It's always a shock and impossible to handle. Because you can't say, "Hey, putz, that's not in the script anymore."

  I had one meeting with the late Steve McQueen, involving a Western I'd written that, he told me over the phone, he liked a lot, and could we meet?

  We met, and the then director of the project, Don Siegel, was also present. And this is about how it went.

  McQUEEN

  I want a campfire scene where the two guys get drunk and talk about the old days.

  SIEGEL

  He's got that--I think it's fine.

  McQUEEN

  I don't mean that kind of campfire scene. I mean a campfire scene.

  We met like that for several hours and I still don't know why. But it was madness. Here I was, closeted with these two men whose work I've admired for years, and McQueen kept going on and on about things that he wanted in the script that were already in the script, and Siegel tried to do his best. I just sat there, nodded, took notes, prayed for it all to end. I wasn't surprised, a few weeks later, to learn that Siegel had walked the picture.

  Not much more to say about meetings. Except that if we land Eastwood, there's a real shot that The Little Engine That Could just might work....

  Auteurs

  I remember the moment I was first told about the existence of the auteur theory. I listened and listened as the explanation went on, and all I could think was this: "What's the punch line?"

  (Briefly, the auteur theory came out of France, where a bunch of young, then would-be directors--Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, etc.--promulgated the notion that the director was the author of the film. Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice is the leading spokesman for the auteurist view in America.)

  Maybe it's true in other places. Maybe Truffaut designs his own sets and possibly Fellini operates his own camera and conceivably Kurosawa edits every inch of the films he directs. They are all wonderfully talented men, and where the limits of their talents lie I have no way of knowing. In point of fact, I don't know anything about foreign filmmaking; nothing in this book is meant to cover their method of operation.

  But I do know this: It sure as shit isn't true in Hollywood.

  I have never met another fellow technician, not a single cinematographer or producer or editor, who believes it.

  I haven't even met a director who believes it.

  Godard, in a recent interview, said that the whole thing was patent bullshit from the beginning, an idea devised by the then young scufflers to draw some attention to themselves.

  Well, then, if it's so untrue, why is the idea still around? Answer: the media. Every time a piece of criticism or interview refers to a movie as "Francis Coppola's One from the Heart" or "Martin Scorsese's New York, New York," the auteur notion is prolonged. And I suspect it's going to be with us for a while longer.

  The word author has been defined as follows: "The person who originates or gives existence to anything."

  The word auteur has come to mean this: It is the director who creates the film. (None of any of this is meant in any way to denigrate directors, by the way. They serve an important function in the making of a film, and the best of them do it well.)

  But creator?

  Look at it logically. Studio executives are not stupid, and they are, believe it or not, aware of costs. If the director creates the film, why does a studio pay three thousand dollars a week for a top editor? Or four thousand for an equivalent production designer. Or ten thousand plus a percentage of the profits to the finest cinematographers?

  It's not because they're cute.

  And it's not because they want to. They have to. Because that's how crucial top technicians are. Crucial and creative.

  One example now, not because it's famous but
because it's absolutely typical: This is the way things are. Peter Benchley reads an article in a newspaper about a fisherman who captures a forty-five-hundred-pound shark off the coast of Long Island and he thinks, "What if the shark became territorial, what if it wouldn't go away?" And eventually he writes a novel on that notion and Zanuck-Brown buy the movie rights, and Benchley and Carl Gottlieb write a screenplay, and Bill Butler is hired to shoot the movie, and Joseph Alves, Jr., designs it, and Verna Fields is brought in to edit, and, maybe most importantly of all, Bob Mattey is brought out of retirement to make the monster. And John Williams composes perhaps his most memorable score.

  How in the world is Steven Spielberg the "author" of that? Why is it often referred to today as "Steven Spielberg's Jaws"? Am I ever not knocking Spielberg: He did, for me, a world-class job of directing that wonderful shocker.

  But there's no author to that movie that I can see.

  If I haven't mentioned Dreyfuss and Scheider and Shaw, it's not because they weren't crucial too. But there is a theory put forward by some (Gore Vidal for one) that the true influence of the director died with the coming of sound. In the silent days, Griffith could stand there and, with his actor's voice, he could talk to Lillian Gish or whoever and literally mold the performance with long, heated verbal instructions while the camera was rolling.

  Not anymore. Now the director must stand helpless alongside the crew and watch the actors work at their craft. Sure, he can do retakes, he can talk to them before, but once the shooting starts, he can't move up and verbally be Svengali.

  So why does much of the media continue with the notion that the maker of the film is the director? Among lots of reasons, here are a few.

  It's convenient. If you want to talk about Jaws, you can't mention all the technicians I named earlier. So shorthand is one reason.

  Another is that most people who write about movies don't know much about the actual problems of making one. (No reason they should. Our job is to make movies, their job is to write or talk about them.)

  Still another is that even if you're involved with the making of a film, it's damn near impossible to say who is responsible for what.

  And don't forget publicity--they don't send production designers out on hype tours. It's the star or the director. So when the star says "I made up my part" or the director explains that he had this vision and voila, it's now up there on the screen for you all to see and admire, that's what gets reported.

  As I've said before--and please believe me, it's true (and if you don't believe me, ask anybody in the business for verification)--movies are a group endeavor. Basically, there are seven of us who are crucial to a film, and we all seven have to be at our best if the movie's going to have a shot at quality. Listed alphabetically:

  the actor

  the cameraman

  the director

  the editor

  the producer

  the production designer

  the writer.

  In addition, there are times (Chariots of Fire) when the composer is as important as any element. But that varies. I think what made The Exorcist work was the remarkable makeup that Dick Smith created for the girl. Truly dazzling special effects are not easy to bring off, and sometimes that department makes the movie wonderful.

  To elevate any single element in a film is simply silly and wrong. We all contribute, we are all at each other's mercy. To say that anyone is the "author" of a film is demeaning to the rest of us.

  Besides it's being false, that's another of my chief quibbles with the auteur theory: It's demeaning.

  I also think that it's dangerous.

  Dangerous to whom?

  To the director.

  I believe that the auteur theory was responsible, just to take one example, for the collapse of the career of one of my favorite directors: Alfred Hitchcock. (You may not have known that there was a collapse, not from his reviews. But after Psycho, in 1960, oh, what a fall was there.) Let me spend the next few pages trying to explain what I mean.

  As noted, the notion began in France around '54, and for a while it attracted all the seriousness of the annual meeting of the Flat Earth Society. But Truffaut and his peers were bright and gifted and energetic; they kept plugging away.

  One of the things they had to do, since they were advancing a new theory, was to come up with new heroes--heretofore critically ignored directors who had, in their minds, "a personal vision."

  Hitchcock, from '54 to '60, was on a truly wondrous streak: glorious entertainments. Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Psycho, among others.

  Because of his skill and his tv program and his wizardry at personal publicity, Hitchcock became, along with Cecil B. De Mille, one of the two most famous directors in the business. In other words, a star.

  But not taken very seriously.

  He won some Oscar nominations, but never the Best Director award. He was a great molder of sophisticated thrillers. But not Important.

  Just what the auteurists were looking for. Famous but ignored critically. With a personal vision. Perfect.

  What they did in their writings was to elevate him. Let's say he was Ian Fleming before they began. Well, they didn't say he was John le Carre, they made him Graham Greene.

  Ernest Lehman has been quoted in a recent interview on the subject of Family Plot, a 1974 film he made with Hitchcock.

  By mistake a propman had two pieces of wood set up so that they looked vaguely like a cross, and the car goes downhill and crashes through a field, goes through a fence and knocks over the cross. Some learned New York critic commented: There's Alfred Hitchcock's anti-Catholicism coming out again. When I was at the Cannes Film Festival with Family Plot, Karen Black, Bruce Dern and I attended a press conference, and some French journalist had the symbolism in the license plate all worked out: 885 DJU. He had some elaborate explanation for those numbers. When he got through explaining it, I said "I hate to tell you this but the reason I used that license plate number was that it used to be my own, and I felt it would be legally safe to use." So much for symbolism.

  The sudden firestorm of serious criticism concerning Hitchcock continued, reaching these shores shortly after the release of Psycho. I suppose it continues to this day, although for me it peaked in the mid-sixties with the publication of one of the genuinely ego-ridden books of the postwar world, the Truffaut/Hitchcock interview. It purports to talk about directing, but on every page the subtext tells us: "Aren't you fortunate that we're around to tell you these things?"

  Anyway, Hitchcock was not unaffected by all this.

  My God, who could be? I know if somebody came up to me and said, "Do you know who you really are, you're a modern Dostoevski," I would send him straight to Bellevue. But if people kept coming and coming, bright and serious young critics, and they said, again and again, "Only you, Bill, only you and Fedor really understood the anguish of religious mysticism, look at the number of Christ figures in your novels, count the crosses referred to in Tinsel, the torture in Marathon Man is only a thinly disguised reference to the blood of Jesus and the torture He suffered--" pretty soon I'd start thinking, "Ah, well, who am I to argue against so many brilliant scholars? They're right. Of course they're right. It's me and Dostoevski all the way."

  Following Psycho, in '63, came The Birds. Some nice shock effects, period. And from then on it really got bad--Mamie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy--awful, awful films.

  But they got great reviews from the auteur critics.

  The reason is this: Once an auteurist surrenders himself to an idol, for reasons passing understanding, said auteurist flies in the face of one of life's basic truths: People can have good days, and people can have bad days.

  Any movie by Chaplin, even shit Chaplin, is terrific. (I wish them all a very long life on a desert island with nothing but The Countess From Hong Kong for company.) Any John Ford, another of their favorites. And, of course, any Hitchcock.

  I think the last two deca
des of Hitchcock's career were a great waste and sadness. He was technically as skillful as ever. But he had become encased in praise, inured to any criticism.

  Hitchcock himself had become The Man Who Knew Too Much.

  So yes, I think the auteur theory ruined him--or at least his belief in it. And I think that belief is dangerous to any director. I mentioned before that no director I ever met said out loud he believed in the auteur theory. But God knows what's silently eating away at them in the dark nights of their souls.

  Is there then no American auteur director? Perhaps there is one. One man who thinks up his own stories and produces his pictures and directs them too. And also serves as his own cinematographer. Not to mention he also does his own editing. All of this connected with an intensely personal and unique vision of the world. That man is Russ Meyer.

  I can't wait for Truffaut's book about him....

  Beginnings

  The first fifteen pages are the most important of any screenplay. (To which Paul Newman adds: "Yes. And the final fifteen minutes are the most important of any movie." Point well taken: When the end of a movie is the most exciting or emotionally involving part, then the audience troops happily out of the darkness, and that's how word of mouth is born.)

  But for now, we can leave such things as word of mouth to our daydreams. For now, we don't care if they like the movie or not; we want somebody to make it.

  And the beginning cannot be overemphasized enough. One obvious reason, of course, is statistical reality. Remember that a major star may read two hundred scripts a year, an executive twice that many.

  Remember that poor executive? He's been at meetings and screenings and lunches all week; he's probably spent three or more hours a day with the phone growing out of his ear. Now it's Friday night and what accompanies him home?

  Screenplays.

  Groan.

  A sludge pile of scripts. Heavy to carry, heavier to wade through. Maybe he puts it off on Friday. Maybe he even sneaks through Saturday. But he knows one thing: That pile isn't going to go away. So at some point he sinks into a chair, takes the first script, opens it. (He may--I know I would--peek at the last page, because if that page reads 180, he knows it's probably not a properly constructed piece of work, just as if it read 90--135 is about right.)