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

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He's so irritating, in fact, that after a two-week break away from Adventures in the Screen Trade I cashed in with over 100 pages left, because I couldn't stand the thought of going back to have him bitch at me like my worst film school instructors used to, bitter that a lack of work forced them into talking about their job instead of doing it. S., despite the collaborative nature of movie production, the auteur theory continues to have a powerful influence on movie criticism.

I read it because one of my favorite authors read it when he had to do a screenplay of one of his novels. You would have to, I mean really really really have to, just to put yourself through the torture of writing for them, because that's the message that comes out of this again and again - prepare to be shat on. In "Part Three: Da Vinci", Goldman shows the reader how he would go about adapting his own short story "Da Vinci" into a screenplay. He worked on that script for eight years, and he won his first Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1970.

His first novel, The Temple of Gold (1957), was followed by the script for the Broadway army comedy Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole (1961). That Al Pacino scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is more or less an echo of what Goldman observes here. Screenwriting is not an easy profession because it's filled with all kinds of frustrations and set-backs. 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. I'm curious as to what Goldman thought of Hoffman's Oscar-winning performance six years later as an almost helpless savant in Rain Man.

Goldman never says that phrase exactly but his famous phrase, "nobody knows anything," says more than enough: all you can rely on is our own work, so try to make some good work and let the stuff you can't control take care of itself.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. He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriting. Not surprisingly, Goldman is not a fan of the auteur theory, a notion promulgated by young French new wave critics (including Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) in the Fifties asserting that the director is the author of the movie. Nothing is more entertaining than reading about Bill Goldman in the trenches, trying his best to ensure that a movie he's working on will actually get finished. He talks a lot about Hollywood and there are some darling little stories about particular stars and directors, then he shows you the actual screenplay for the movie with directions to the actors etc.