The structure of "Adventures In the Screen Trade" is very odd. Chapters start with one topic, then go off into tangents in sections that are highlighted in grey. Why grey? I still don't know. Also, Goldman's short-hand got on my nerves after a while. He'd say "Mr. Warner" instead of Warner Bros. At times he uses one-name monikers as opposed to full names.

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

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.” Abstracts: No one knows the writer's Hollywood more intimately than William Goldman. Two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter and the bestselling author of Marathon Man, Tinsel, Boys and Girls Together, and other novels, Goldman now takes you into Hollywood's inner sanctums...on and behind the scenes for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, and other films...into the plush offices of Hollywood producers...into the working lives of acting greats such as Redford, Olivier, Newman, and Hoffman...and into his own professional experiences and creative thought processes in the crafting of screenplays. You get a firsthand look at why and how films get made and what elements make a good screenplay. You may even consider it predictable, but that’s a subjective view that you can only have AFTER READING THE SCRIPT. And you can always rewrite it to change it. urn:oclc:872749814 Republisher_date 20120811094050 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120810170353 Scanner scribe13.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source

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I was intrigued by this book, as a novelist with an interest in writing screenplays, and as a huge fan of the movie The Princess Bride (which Goldman wrote). Overall, I thought it was interesting, entertaining at times, informative at times, and a altogether a decent 'insider's view' of 'the biz'. In the middle section, Goldman gets a little personal, sharing stories about his life in the biz, working with larger-than-life names like Laurence Olivia, Robert Redford, and Dustin Hoffman. He also digs into why he believes some of his films failed. Goldman does not buy auteur theory and in fact finds it ridiculous to attribute the success of a film to one person when the editor and cinematographer, for example, do so much. It seems to me that auteur theory is more powerful now than in the early 1980s. This is definitely one of them. Fascinating stories about ups, downs, hits and flops, and how it affected him as a person.

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Is the second-rateness of the world right now going to drag us storytellers down? The answer is, I don’t know; but I do know we have to try harder. It’s easier, as the audience dumbs down and expects less, to be satisfied with less than our best work.” Amen. 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. Whether you're interested in specific films, an insider's look at Hollywood, or simply care about engagingly told anecdotes, you'll find something interesting here. I particularly recommend it for new writers--not just of screenplays, but any type of writing--who may need encouragement or just a sense of fellow-feeling, because Goldman failed at his college writing classes and sent out hundreds of queries before selling his first novel and felt about as much of a failure as it's possible to be. While I wouldn't want to take his path, his experience reveals the commonalities all writers share.Addendum: Since this original post has been published, the great William Goldman has passed away. O n Thursday, November 15th, 2018 Mr. Goldman said his final goodbyes at 87 years old. Our friends at The Script Lab compiled some of the most profound social posts from Hollywood screenwriters to honor his life. Read: Hollywood Screenwriters Remember William Goldman Part One: Hollywood Realities—Goldman's scathing take on the stars, studio executives, directors, agents, and producers of Hollywood. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-06-25 13:01:15 Boxid IA40150812 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier It’s amazingly raw but also helpful because you’re reading him go through the pain as ‘practice’ for you going through the same pain! Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-10-12 05:05:03 Boxid IA40258220 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Adventures In The Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood

Now I’m at the point where I like this book so much I have to deliberately slow myself down reading it cause I want it to last longer. 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.) According to Goldman, the single most important fact in the movie industry is that "Nobody Knows Anything".

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What’s wonderful about reading these critiques and learning from them is that this is what you are going to get! Both barrels! And while some of it is right, some of it is also wrong, so the critics aren’t giving you help so much as telling you, YOU’VE GOT EVEN MORE WORK TO DO! It’s what REALLY happens in a writer’s mind - I want this image and this image and I know there’s got to be this scene - but it’s all as vague and unstructured as it is in real life. Part Three: Da Vinci—A screenwriting workshop that takes one of Goldman's early short stories, adapts it into a screen treatment, and then runs it by colleagues on their thoughts on taking the script to production. Part Three features a screenplay adaptation of a short story Goldman wrote long ago named Da Vinci, followed by comments by various colleagues on how they would approach production of the short film. It's an interesting tutorial on the craft of screenwriting, but I'm not sure it belongs in this book. I'd rather Goldman dished more about the movies he worked on.

Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood

What is wonderful about this example is that it is set up as if there is a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer in how the script should continue, but it’s made very clear is that it could go ANYWAY! In two books now, Goldman has claimed that GUNGA DIN is the greatest movie ever made and "only an idiot (or critic) would argue that point." Yet he never explains what's so great about it, nor does he ever discuss the screenplay for GUNGA DIN. I recently watched GUNGA DIN, and hated it...leaving me completely baffled by Goldman's remarks.For reasons beyond me, Goldman brings up the tragic 1999 Columbine murders (which he annoyingly refers to as "Littleton"...the less-common reference to the town where the tragedy took place). The first three-fourths of this book is a funny and engaging behind-the-scenes look at being a Hollywood screenplay writer. Goldman wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and both the book and screenplay to A Princess Bride. It was fun for me to read about how he floundered with The Princess Bride until he came up with the idea of having the grandfather read “just the good parts,” which enabled him to jump around. And the grand experiment of the last part of the book, where Goldman wrote a new script for the sake of publishing it in this book and having famous screenwriters critique it. The script, "The Big A", about a PI and his relationship with his ex-wife and his kids who want in on the family business, is pretty flat in its writing. It's not perfect, but not problematic enough to derail the enjoyment. Some of the anecdotes about movies Goldman wrote are a little meh. "The Princess Bride", arguably his best known novel and script to modern audiences, seems a little passive in its insights, fawning over the pleasurable experience (I guess bad experiences can be more interesting).