William Goldman “The complete package”
…all I ever wanted to be, was a storyteller. — William Goldman
William Goldman has had a long and varied career as a novelist, playwright, and highly regarded two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter. He is probably best known for his two Oscar winning scripts Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and All the Presidents Men (1976), and the oft-used quote about Hollywood “Nobody knows anything”. He is also well regarded for his script-doctoring work, and in adapting other people’s stories for the screen; such as Stephen King’s Misery (1990), Hearts In Atlantis (2004), and Dreamcatcher (2003). He has also adapted some of his own best selling novels like Marathon Man (1976), Magic (1978), Heat (1986), and The Princess Bride (1987).
Goldman grew up in the affluent Highland Park suburb of Chicago. Suitably for a sports nut like Goldman, Highland Park has become popular with professional athletes because the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Bears practice facilities are nearby in Deerfield and Lake Forest respectively. Highland Park is also closely associated with the work of John Hughes, who used the area for location shots in several of his movies such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Weird Science (1985), Sixteen Candles (1984), Uncle Buck (1989), and Home Alone (1990).
Goldman’s father Maurice had been a successful businessman but due to his severe depression and alcoholism his business ventures suffered. Goldman called his father a distant figure in his life, and when William was fifteen his father killed himself. Goldman was the one to find the body.
Goldman’s mother Marion was a difficult woman who blamed him for causing her deafness. She revealed on her death bed that it was actually his older brother, and his mother’s favourite, James’ birth that caused her deafness.
Goldman’s brother James would go on to become a playwright, his most successful work being A Lion In Winter (1966), which he would adapt for the film of the same name (1968).
Goldman’s Norwegian maid Tomine ‘Minnie’ Barstad would provide the love and warmth both his parents withheld from him. In Sean Egan’s study of Goldman’s work Goldman is quoted as saying that Minnie was “probably the most important person in my life”. (7)
Goldman was and still is a sports nut. As a youth Goldman pored over the sports pages and decided he wanted to become a newspaper columnist. Over time this idea was replaced with the thought of becoming a fiction writer and telling his own stories. Goldman is a great admirer of Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren (1934), and the works of William Faulkner, Graham Greene and most importantly Irwin Shaw. He has credited Shaw’s celebrated short story collection Mixed Company (1950) as life changing because it proved that literature could be about subjects which Goldman cared about (8) Egan, namely sports. Shaw’s The Eighty Yard Run, first published in Esquire magazine, and was included in the short story collection Mixed Company, it tells the story of a marriage being broken apart because the husband reached his peak during college and the wife has steadily grown as a person and has now outgrown him both culturally and intellectually.
Goldman received his bachelor of arts degree from Oberlin college in 1952. While at Oberlin he was one of the editors of its literary magazine. He continuously submitted his short stories anonymously and the other editors always voted not to print them. Goldman also consistently received the lowest grades in his writing class.
After Oberlin Goldman went into the army where he worked as a clerk at the Pentagon because of the typing skills he picked up at college.
After his service Goldman enrolled at Columbia university where he earned his masters with a thesis on the comedy of manners in America.
Goldman then moved to New York city where he lived with his brother James and John Kander. Kander is the composer behind the highly successful stage musicals Cabaret (1966), and Chicago (1976).
On the 25th of June 1956, the then twenty-four year old, Goldman started writing his first novel, and in less than three weeks churned out The Temple of Gold. Goldman later had this to say about its accelerated creation:
I was so panicked that I would end my life as a copywriter in an ad agency in Chicago that I wrote the “Temple of Gold” in less than three weeks. I had no idea what I was doing, but I remember when I got to page 75 I wondered “where is this?” I had never written that much before. (CNN)
To everyone’s surprise, Temple of Gold got published and launched the literary career Goldman had always hoped for, but had increasingly worried would never take off. It’s success also paradoxically triggered Goldman’s inferiority complex, because he felt guilty and a fraud for being published while his friends and classmates who he, and his lecturers, thought were much more talented remained unpublished. Temple of Gold sold well but its quality is questionable, as Egan observes:
The quality of The Temple of Gold’s dialogue is, as it will always be with Goldman, mixed. Already, he is demonstrating a penchant for unrealistic but entertaining repartee that would become one of his trademarks, a type of dialogue in fact which-perhaps significantly-is far more common in screenwriting than prose work. (Egan, 14)
Goldman has never treasured much of his own writing saying “I don’t like my writing. It’s the best I can do, but it’s not something that fills me with awe and splendor.” (Brady, 86) Goldman’s prudent assessment of his own work is not just simple self deprecation, its an honest, and accurate appraisal of his work. Goldman also tellingly reveals that “In my head I am a novelist who happens to write screenplays.” (Brady,109) Goldman’s reluctance to accept that he’s a far more successful screenwriter than he was a novelist probably has its roots in the low respectability movies had when he was growing up:
“When I was a kid, novels were important, theater was important, movies were our secret pleasure. Now, movies are the center of our culture.” (230) Goldman Big Picture
The career move from working on something “important” to “a secret pleasure” seems to sit uneasily with Goldman and only adds to the guilt he’s carried since his career got a head start. After his first novel Goldman was promoted to be a rising American talent. But Goldman was known for spending months researching a novel and then writing it in weeks. This rapid rate, added to Goldman’s abhorrence of rewriting, meant most of the novels written this way are sloppy and of inconsistent quality. But as Egan has noted Goldman has always shown a flair for writing entertaining banter. Goldman is not a great literary talent like William Faulkner, or F. Scott Fitzgerald (whom he shared an agent with) but what literary talent he does have better suits the fast paced, pared down, and highly visual style more common to screenwriting than novel writing. Goldman’s screenplays would achieve the type of critical success his novels never would. But as with his novels the quality of his work varies greatly. We will be looking at his most well known works, particularly the original screenplays and not the many adaptations he has done over his career.
Goldman is one of the most accessible screenwriters to study because he has written two autobiographical works, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), and Which Lie did I tell? (2000), about his career as a screenwriter and the process of writing his most famous screenplays. He has also written a novel about Hollywood called Tinsel (1979), and a book of musings on the state of the film industry called The Big Picture (2000). These books are great at revealing the origin of Goldman’s stories but he also speaks candidly about the process of getting the script to the screen, and all the sacrifices and alterations which are required to placate mercurial producers, narcissistic directors, unsure studios, and ego driven stars. In Which Lie Did I tell? he offers a first draft of a new script, The Big A, for the reader and several well respected writers to evaluate, this is an invaluable look at professional level screenwriters, critiquing the work of an Oscar winning screenwriter. Goldman’s openness and frankness has taken a lot of the guess work out of unravelling his writing style, which spans multiple genres which includes: film noir, the western, war, thriller, horror, and fantasy. Like Tarantino, Goldman tends to hop from one genre to another. Here he explains this tendency:
For me Mr. Horn was my last western. When I think of myself as a movie writer, it is as a genre writer. I tend to do one of each. I doubt that I’ll ever write another war movie. I doubt that I’ll ever write another spy movie. I wrote my caper picture — Hot Rock. I want to do other things. I am very anxious to write a musical. And I want to write a romantic-comedy-thriller type. I want to write those kinds of movies for which I had great affection as a child, and for which I have great affection now. I want to try and write one of them and then try something else. Since A Bridge Too Far, I am getting offered a lot of big war movies. Well, the last thing in the world I want to do is write a big war movie. I’ve done that. I think it would be extremely dull to try it again. (Brady, 113)
But the television movie, Mr. Horn (1979), was not Goldman’s last western in 1994 he wrote the script to the movie version of the popular comedy western television show Maverick (1957–62). The smooth talking gambler Maverick, played by Mel Gibson in the movie, was a suitable choice for Goldman to return to the western with.
But Goldman isn’t just writing in different genres he is revising genres as he goes, as Eva Alfonso and Marta Frago note:
His screenplays, more than twenty in all, are characterized by honoring and sometimes ironically revising popular film genres, such as film noir (Harper, Jack Smight, 1966), war films (A Bridge Too Far, Richard Attenborough, 1977), thrillers (Marathon Man, John Schlesinger, 1976), horror films (Misery, Rob Reiner, 1990) or westerns (Maverick, Richard Donner, 1994) (Alfonso, 1)
As an experienced craftsman, in multiple disciplines and genres, Goldman uses every trick in the storytelling arsenal to hook the reader, which at Goldman’s industry level includes a-list actors, high powered agents, and producers, and sell the project to them. So he writes to entice them to undertake the project. The collective devices Goldman uses to both tell and sell a story generate a screenplay form which I am calling ‘The Package’.
The Package
The average screenplay, as you know, is very short. Rule of thumb: a page a minute. The ideal length for a screenplay is a hundred and thirty to a hundred and thirty-five pages because that lets everybody be creative when they get it. That means that the producer will be able to say, “Well, we must cut fifteen pages out of this.” No matter what you give them, ultimately you end up with a hundred and fifteen pages, because that is how long the movie is. But if you gave somebody a first draft of a hundred and fifteen pages, they would say, “What’s this, television?” So you have to give them a little extra to work with. (Brady, 89)
The packaged script Goldman creates is similar to the package deals which talent agencies present to studios. Goldman’s packaged script contains all the elements designed to interest a studio and make the project as desirable as possible. It’s the attractive characters designed to hook a-list actors, the breathless action scenes, and it’s the hype that tells producers this the best script ever. This varies from the average screenplay which focuses on story, character, theme etc., and lets the script sell itself its own merits. Goldman’s screenplays not only tell a story, but also tells the reader exactly why it should be made into a movie, and makes it as simple as possible for this to happen. The advertising copy is built into the D.N.A of the script.
Goldman’s understanding, and foregrounding, of the screenplay as a commercial text has made him focus his writing towards these commercial concerns. However, the harder he has tried to make the text commercial the more it has suffered. Since the critical and commercial failure of The Great Waldo Pepper Goldman does not, or cannot, invest enough artistry in his screenwriting to make it anything but a commercial product. The scripts are formally very safe and by the numbers and lack the ingenuity of the pre-Pepper work. This safeness is also an element in the Goldman packaged screenplay. A producer reading something like The Ghost and the Darkness would not find anything formally objectionable. The script is written just to be entertaining, and it is in places, it is also completely forgettable because it was written too much to be a run-of-the-mill Hollywood movie. And that is the main problem with Goldman’s packaged scripts they are trying too hard to be mediocre.
The King of Tone
The more gifted and talkative one’s characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. -Vladimir Nabokov
Goldman has been called “The King of Tone” (Which lie did I tell 447) for his ability to craft unique attitudes in heavily trod genres. Tone is the overall mood of the script. And as the screenwriter William Martell points out “Tone also influences what is acceptable in the story”. Take for instance Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Goldman creates a story which constantly shifts from the humorous, to the bleak, and back again in a tonal Ouroboros. This shift in tone is difficult, Goldman creates this flexible tone by subtle foreshadowing, and having the characters remain consistently inconsistent. As Martell also notes “It’s not the story that creates the tone, it’s the way the story is told” and Goldman tells his story so these shifts are not jarring but part of the entertaining storytelling experience.
But even the “King of tone” makes mistakes. Goldman’s 2003 draft of an unproduced script for Shazam has major tonal problems. As Carson Reeves’ online review of the script notes:
This script starts out pretty dark, with a prison warden trying to choke a prisoner who’s already dead. We then cut to little boy Billy, who’s farting and burping at his potential parents. I was a little confused for awhile by this sharp contrast, until I finally realized this was a straight kids movie. We’re talking Spy Kids level. Which is fine. But I was frustrated that it took me so long to figure this out, and I believe that’s the writer’s fault.
As Reeve’s mentions an unbalanced tine can be frustrating to the reader because they do not know what to expect or how to interpret a scene.
The tonal problems Shazam suffers from are partly due to Goldman trying to make the script darker to match that trend in superhero movies. But the backstory in Shazam involving wizards, and the corny villains do not lend themselves to being updated as they are. The writers who took over the project after Goldman Alec Sokolow & Joel Cohen, Bryan Goluboff, and John August also had trouble with the material. John August left the project after the producers wanted him to make the script darker to match the tone of The Dark Knight (2008), because it had done phenomenal box office, and the more family friendly Speed Racer (2008) did poorly.
The structure of the script is also to blame. Shazam starts off tonally quite darkly with the warden of a prison rushing down increasing revolting corridors to a cell which looks like a dungeon which Goldman describes as “the most desolate place on earth” (3), where “The deadest man you ever saw.” is inside (3). A cockroach crawls out of the dead mans mouth in a shot Goldman says “…we will never be able to forget it” P4 The warden then attacks the corpse because he believes the dead man is only faking having no pulse. We then cut to the gormless Billy Batson doing his belching routine to two nice potential adoptive parents. The tonal shift doesn’t work because it is too drastic, and comes after too much time. The first scene is seven pages, it has already set the tone, and then it is just jarring to see Billy Batson playing the nimrod so he can stay in the orphanage with his friend Jenny who Goldman tritely introduces as:
JENNY’S just fifteen, and when we see her from a distance we think several things. We think she is clearly a tomboy, and, from the skillful way she handles the ball, also a jock. And more than likely, smarter than most.
CAMERA MOVES IN
And pay attention, please, because if BILLY is our guy, JENNY is our girl. Her figure she keeps hidden with baggy shirts, but it’s just about perfect — — the face though is what you can’t forget. She is simply the most gorgeous young teenager you ever saw. The hearts that are going to break over this one — numberless. (10)
The tonal shift between the opening scene and the rest of the script is too large to overcome and fails because of it.
The tonal shifting of Butch works a lot better because it's structured a lot better. The shift in scenes and tone are short enough apart that a tone isn’t too fixed before it is undercut. Here Goldman explains how important structure is:
I’ve done a lot of thinking myself about what a screenplay is, and I’ve come up with nothing except that it’s carpentry, it’s basically putting down some kind of structural form that they can then mess around with. And as long as they keep the structural form, whatever I have written is relatively valid; a scene will hold, regardless of the dialogue. It’s the thrust of the scene that’s kept pure. (Brady 116)
Goldman’s wise-acre tone in Butch allows him to challenge a lot of the conventions of the western. It successfully marries aspects of the well trodden western genre with the then new attitudes of the American New Wave. His heroes are not the strong silent type like John Wayne, or Gary Cooper, that the reader would expect. Butch and Sundance are both talkative, traditionally unheroic, and their personalities reflect the anti-authoritarian counterculture of the 60s. These character traits aid the overall tone by setting up situations that solidify the tone. Here Goldman explains why Butch was different:
A lot of things about Butch are very different and unusual for a western, none of which were intended by me. There is not a confrontation scene. There is very little violence. It is very chatty, a very talky movie. Not a lot happens. One of the panicky things in doing the film was, I felt there wasn’t enough action for it to be an action film, and it wasn’t funny enough to be a comedy; and if we didn’t like those two guys, we were all in trouble. And so I felt that we had to like those two people, they had to be affable or that was it. The humor was Jack Benny-like, slow and amiable — you had to like the guy; not Bob Hope-ish, with punchline after punchline. (Brady 103)
An early example of how affable Butch is comes when he is casing the bank and notices how secure it now is, and leads to this exchange between Butch and the bank guard:
BUTCH
What was the matter with the old bank this town used to have? It was beautiful.
GUARD
People kept robbing it.
BUTCH
(yelling back to the guard)
That’s a small price to pay for beauty. (2–3)
In a very short space of time Goldman manages to set the tone of the piece. Butch is casing the bank which suggests there will be action, but Butch’s flip sense of humour implies there will also be verbal comedy.
This scene is quickly followed by the blackjack scene where Macon accuses Sundance of cheating at cards. And anyone who has seen a western knows that if someone gets accused of cheating at cards it’s going to lead to a shootout. But Goldman handles this tense situation differently. It’s not just a scene between the accused and the accuser, it also has Butch a third party, so a trialogue ensues with Sundance and Macon threatening each other and Butch trying to talk Sundance out of the showdown. Butch’s demeanour and dialogue becomes humorous once we find out that the moustached man is not just any dusty cowpoke, he’s the feared gunslinger The Sundance Kid. Here is the scene:
BUTCH
we look a little short of brotherly love around here
CUT TO:
MACON
standing there, his hands by his guns.
MACON
You with this garbage, get yourselves out of here —
CUT TO:
BUTCH AND THE MUSTACHED MAN
Butch is pulling at the Mustached Man, who does not budge. As he pulls, he talks to Macon — BUTCH
Yessir, thank you sir, we were just on our way and — Urgently now — to the Mustached Man, who will not move —
BUTCH
Will you come on? —
CUT TO:
BUTCH dropping down now beside the Mustached Man. This next [line] is whispered and fast —
MUSTACHED MAN
— I wasn’t cheating —
BUTCH (trying to budge the other man)
— move —
MUSTACHED MAN
— I wasn’t cheating —
CUT TO:
MACON
getting a little impatient now –
MACON
You can die — no one’s immune — you can both die —
CUT TO:
BUTCH AND THE MUSTACHED MAN
Lower and faster even than before — BUTCH — you hear that? — now you got him mad at me — MUSTACHED MAN
— if he invites us to stay, then we’ll go —
BUTCH
we were gonna leave anyway
MUSTACHED MAN
— he’s gotta invite us to stick around! —
CUT TO:
CLOSEUP -
THE MUSTACHED MAN
And here there will be a series of quick cuts, as his eyes take in everything around him. This will be not dissimilar in style to the moment with Butch casing the bank. While the cuts are going on, the following dialogue will continue overlapping and low between Butch and the Mustached Man. The cuts will include the following:
A. MACON’S HANDS.
B. A WINDOW AND SUN STREAMING IN and does it hit anybody’s eyes.
C. THE AREA BEHIND THE MUSTACHED MAN and is there anyone dangerous there.
D. MACON’S EYES.
E. THE AREA TO THE SIDE OF THE MUSTACHED MAN and is there room to move.
To repeat: while these quick cuts take place (and if we don’t know what they’re for, again, that’s all right), camera returns constantly to the Mustached Man in closeup, with Butch beside him, moving in and out, both of them talking fast.
BUTCH — he’ll draw on you — he’s ready now and you don’t know how fast he is —
MUSTACHED MAN — that’s just what I want to hear —
BUTCH — face it — he don’t look like he intends to lose —
MUSTACHED MAN — you’re really building up my confidence –
BUTCH — well I’m over the hill — it can happen to you — every day you get older — that’s a law — The Mustached Man is clearly not leaving and as Butch realizes this —
CUT TO:
BUTCH
rising, moving to Macon,
BUTCH
What would you think about maybe inviting us to stick around?
MACON
What?
BUTCH
— you don’t have to mean it or anything — but if you’d just please invite us to stick around I promise you we’ll go and —
Macon gestures sharply for Butch to get the hell back out of the way and —
BUTCH
CUT TO:
BUTCH
He hesitates a moment, glancing down at the Mustached Man who still sits slumped in his chair. Butch shakes his head, then moves back out of the way.
BUTCH
(softly)
Can’t help you, Sundance.
CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON MACON as the last word echoes. It registers, that word, and now Macon has a secret he tries desperately to keep behind his eyes: the man is terrified
CUT TO:
THE SUNDANCE KID
for that is the name of the Mustached Man. He sits slumped a moment more, his head down. Then he slowly raises his head. His eyes dazzle. He looks dead into Macon’s eyes. Still staring, he stands. He too wears guns.
CUT TO:
MACON
A brave man doing his best, he stands still and does not look away.
CUT TO:
SUNDANCE
He says nothing.
CUT TO:
MACON
and now the panic is slowly starting to seep out.
MACON
I didn’t know you were the Sundance Kid when I said you were cheating. (6–10)
Macon is rightfully petrified by Sundance’s reputation as a skilled gunman, a skill which is as closely tied into classical western tropes as ten gallon hats or horsemanship. Goldman has Butch and Sundance toy with Macon, they both know that Sundance could easily shoot Macon dead before the synapses in his brain fired and told his trigger finger to make a move, but Butch lets the scene play out and has fun with it. It’s also introducing us to Butch’s sense of humour which we got a brief glimpse at in the bank. It works better than the belching scene in Shazam because it has a proper payoff, we learn Sundance is a feared gunfighter. Billy Batson’s childishly deceptive behaviour only reveals he wants to stay in the orphanage with Jenny. Butch and Sundance’s playful nature already sets them apart from most Western heroes who are often stoic loners. They more closely resemble the anti heroes of The Wild Bunch (1969) in how they laugh in the face of danger and the money they get from pulling heists comes secondary to the thrill they get pulling them off, and being freewheeling outlaws.
In their article on the adventure screenplay in Goldman’s work, Marta Frago and Eva Alfonso argue that Butch and Sundance’s deceptive, and playful natures mean they fall into the classic conman archetype:
The characteristic spontaneity of Butch and Sundance, their moral ambiguity, their ability to survive on their own resources and their sense of invulnerability, are traits that remind us of picaresque literature. The conman archetype, embodied by the XVIth century Spanish literary character of Lazarillo de Tormes, is a patently individualistic character, still in his early years, immersed in continuous flight, uprooted from his family and avoiding direct confrontation. Instead, he decides that cunningness and improvisation are the best ways to achieve his usually lucrative goals, as shown in XIXth century English characters of Dickens’ Oliver Twist or Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. This type of child character who tends to evade social, psychological and moral problems, is also recurrent in English literature during the XXth century, as in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
Following this kind of characterization, Butch and Sundance are adventurers who live for fun and play. They are not virtuous, but hedonists. Uprooted from their community, their ambitions have no public commitments, such as the hero’s sense of social responsibility, whose goal is to “protect and serve” a community of people or someone in particular. Instead, these conmen´s projects are designed for personal gain only and are of a playful nature: the conmen aspire to lead comfortable lives, even behaving as outlaws if necessary. Thus, Butch and Sundance are certainly a far cry from the courageous film character who abides by a set of moral principles and bravely faces his opponents, and they are ultimately complete opposites to the heroic archetype, which is normally found in classic westerns. When Goldman includes a heroic character in his scripts, he does so ironically. A good example of this is the scene where a concerned marshal tries to organize a posse composed of local citizens to capture Butch and Sundance, only to discover that a bicycle salesman has easily “stolen” the attention of his audience. (9–10)
Butch and Sundance’s unheroic nature is shown when they run away from the superposse. An action which led one studio head to say he’d only buy the script if Goldman changed it, because “…John Wayne don’t run away”.
Another attack on the idea of a heroic western figure comes after the cards scene when Butch and Sundance return to Hole-In-the-Wall. Butch’s leadership is challenged by Harvey Logan and the ensuing fight scene completely goes against the ethics set forth by classic westerns like Shane (1953), and High Noon (1952):
BUTCH
moving through the gang toward Logan, He is unarmed and a knife is offered him by one of the gang.
BUTCH
Not yet, (moving up to Logan now) Not til Harvey and me get all the rules straight.
LOGAN
Rules? In a knife fight? No rules.
As he finishes speaking Butch delivers the most aesthetically exquiste [sic] kick in the balls in the history of the modem American cinema.
CUT TO:
LOGAN
For a moment he just stands there. Then he makes an absolutely indescribable sound and, as the look on his face moves from disbelief to displeasure, he sinks slowly to his knees.
CUT TO:
BUTCH
He goes on as if nothing whatsoever had happened.
BUTCH
Well, If there, aren’t going to be any rules, I guess we might as well get this fight started.Somebody say ‘one-two-three-go,’
CUT TO:
SUNDANCE
(like a shot)
One-two-three-go.
CUT TO:
LOGAN
He is green now, and still on his knees. Butch approaches, nods, locks his hands together and, as if swinging a baseball bat, delivers a stunning blow to Logan’s jaw. Logan falls and lies there. (26)
Butch kicking Logan in the balls demonstrates he doesn’t play by the rules. This scene also bolsters the idea that Butch is not your average western hero, and further establishes the unconventional rules and tone of the script.
The scene is memorable because it goes against genre conventions and the dialogue is witty, unexpected, but also natural. The wise-acre dialogue matches the unconventional action and the script is one of the best examples of Goldman’s flair with this type of heightened, artificial, dialogue. Unfortunately, when Goldman tries to write more natural sounding dialogue it can feel very artificial. Goldman’s dialogue can veer between the wonderfully epigrammatic, precociously eloquent (Shazam), and the barely functional (Stepford Wives).
PROTECTING THE STAR
…stars are essentially worthless-and absolutely essential. -Goldman (Adventures in the Screen Trade 4)
Goldman is not after any old actor to play his characters he wants to hook A-list stars because they would greatly increase the chances of the script going into production, and from his years of working in the business he knows what they want to portray in their roles, and he explains it in his book Which Lie Did I:
Stars do not-repeat- do not play heroes-
-stars play gods.
And your job as a screenwriter is to genuflect, if you are lucky enough to have them glance in your direction. Because they may destroy your work, will destroy it more often than not-
-but you will have a career. (83)
Goldman’s first act of genuflection is to formally announce, like a marshal at a ball, that the star has arrived. Like this example from his unproduced draft of Shooter, based on the novel of Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter:
BOB LEE SWAGGER is the hero of this piece. Around twenty, there isn’t an ounce of fat. Taciturn, he has a good mind but not academically educated one — he turned down a college scholarship to enlist in the Marines.
And he just might be the greatest long distance shooter in the world. (1)
After reading the description that he is young, lean, intelligent, and action orientated, and also the best sniper in the world, the reader should be able to guess that he’s the hero of the piece without Goldman announcing it. Goldman’s script also suffers because he says Swagger is “around twenty” in the 1968 opening scene and then after the opening scene it cuts to 1998, so Swagger would have to be played by two actors, thus diluting the part and the potential interest of an a-list actor who’d have to share the role either with and hot up-and-coming actor or someone with more experience than them.
Shooter was eventually made in 2007 with a script by Jonathan Lemkin and starring Mark Wahlberg. Lemkin’s script updates the story and moves away from Goldman’s Vietnam set opening scene and moves it to Eritrea on the Horn of Africa. Lemkin’s script doesn’t even describe Swagger. He has a voice over detailing the difficulty of long range shooting and then this is his introduction:
Grey and tan rock. 5000 meters out. Pushing in. 2000,1000, 100, 50, 10… and into a low cave in the rock. Marine scout/sniper team. Packs, webbing, even their weapons have been camoed. No sign until we’re on them.
Behind the eyepiece of a M40A3 rifle. Gunnery Sergeant BOB LEE SWAGGER, 27. Resting, eyes closed, Lance Corporal DONNIE FENN, 23. (2)
After this brief introduction there’s an action packed scene where Swagger demonstrates his highly developed skill set. Lemkin’s approach is to let Swagger’s actions show us what kind of person he is.
In Goldman’s script the reader could have easily worked out that Swagger was the protagonist because he is in nearly every scene. Announcing the protagonist like this serves little purpose, but may comfort the star by knowing that the role they are reading is that of the “hero”. But Goldman feels this type of description is needed to hook a star as he explains to John Brady discussing the dynamics behind the Bernstein and Woodward characters in All the President’s Men and the multiple star roles in A Bridge Too Far:
I was very much aware when I wrote that screenplay that the Bernstein part had to not just be good. It had to be good enough to try and nail a major star. And since major stars get offered hernia-producing tons of material weekly, it had to be a very, very special role if we could make it such, because not only was he going to be acting against Bob Redford — Bob Redford was also the producer. And when you act against Barbra Streisand and she’s the producer, you disappear. So the part had to be as bulletproof as one could make it. That was my feeling, along with the hope that the picture would go forward. But my principal craft job in the screenplay of President’s Men was to make the Bernstein part appealing enough to nail Dustin or Al Pacino.
In A Bridge Too Far I knew going in I had to write a dozen parts that would attract stars — so you had to come on very, very big when I introduced each of those guys. And you bullshit, you know, when you introduce a character in the script. The opening sentence describing Major Julian Cook, which is the Redford part, goes something like: “If this man had been an actor, he would have been a star.’’ Well, a star reads that, and he says, “Ah, this is a star role.’’ In other words, that’s all there very consciously. (141)
Beginning a story with a fully formed hero, with exceptional skills, and having them succeed is less impressive than having someone work hard towards the ultimate goal. But as Goldman says, stars do not want to be heroes, they want to be gods.
Seeing the role they’ve been offered immediately described as a hero also means the actor is more likely to continue reading. It’s all very calculated ass-kissing, with the goal of hooking a star who wants to play the conventional hero. A star who wants to please their fans and bank manager.
Goldman also has Swagger save a deer from a hunter, an overtly altruistic act which has come to be called the “save the cat” moment, after Blake Snyder’s popular series of screenwriting books which highlights this plot point. This overused scene is supposed to quickly get the audience sympathising with the hero. This sympathy is further increased after Swagger’s faithful dog is killed. Already we can see how Goldman is calculatedly giving the star all the tools he needs to win over the audience. Similarly, Bret Maverick is described as:
MAVERICK’s 30, give or take. Enormously appealing. Whether that’s because of his considerable physical skills or his sunny personality, who knows. It might be his quiet wit. (2)
And Zane Cooper from Maverick:
JUST AN INCREDIBLE-LOOKING MAN
— we’ll find out soon enough his name is ZANE COOPER. He is raw-boned, blue-eyed, muscle and sinew; rugged as they come. There is also something about him we don’t know yet but we will: Coop is so good, so fucking honorable, he seems like someone out of another era —
— which in point of fact, he is. Coop is the western hero who dominated movies for most of this century. In other words, we are looking at John Wayne or Gary Cooper. (30)
But sometimes for purposes of audience identification the story calls for the main character to be normal to show how much they change, such as in Shazam. Goldman’s description of Billy Batson, the ordinary boy who turns into the superhero Captain Marvel is a good example:
BILLY BATSON — and this is our guy folks. We don’t know what’s going to happen to him and he sure doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him.
But right now, what we see is plenty good enough.
We are looking at an eleven year old boy. Is he the handsomest kid you ever saw? No, but if you were his parents, you wouldn’t find a lot of things wrong.
Is he the smartest kid on the block? No, again, but he’s never been accused of being dumb.
Good athlete, sure, popular, sure, decent, kind, all that. (8)
Goldman is obviously aware he has more leeway in terms of star demands when writing a child character, and can get away with describing them so typically. Billy Batson needs to be typical because the whole story is based on wish fulfilment, it’s every kids dream to become Superman and Billy Batson lives out that dream. Billy’s ordinariness also allows the intended audience to project themselves onto him. The problem with Goldman’s Billy Batson is that Goldman has never been good at writing child characters. Billy Batson comes off more annoying than he does relatable. This is the dialogue Billy says to the rich couple who are thinking of adopting him:
BILLY I’m the greatest belcher in the world. (and on those words)
CUT TO
THE RICH HUSBAND AND THE FANCY WIFE and they are stunned, yes, but more than that, they don’t like it and
CUT TO
BILLY, so upset that he’s upset them, and the words just tumble out now —
BILLY I know, I know, you think I must be the most conceited kid ever born and that’s why I hate talking about it but it’s true, it is, I really am great just listen. (and now, from BILLY, a mighty belch indeed — and the HUSBAND AND WIFE are appalled but BILLY, he’s humiliated) — oh that was horrible, that was a nothing belch, try this one — (and he sucks in some air, belches again — much louder) — even that wasn’t close to what I can do when I’m not under pressure like I am now, because well, you guys are so great and I really wanted to impress the shit out of you — (8)
Billy acts like this so he can stay in the orphanage and be with his friend Jenny but it just sets him up to be self-centred. The rich couple have said and done nothing to Billy but potentially offer him a comfortable life and he just belches in their faces. He’ an ungrateful punk who is then given this gift of becoming Captain Marvel. Billy’s ploy isn’t as ingenious, or his dialogue, as ironically hip as Butch’s to make the scene work, again it’s a tonal problem inherent in the script.
Billy using the word “conceited” is classic Goldman, his children often sound like adults who just happen to be short and like fart jokes.
In contrast, here is Goldman’s description of an older character, Paul Sheldon from Misery:
PAUL SHELDON…
He’s the hero of what follows. Forty-two, he’s got a good face, one with certain mileage to it. We are not, in other words, looking at a virgin. He’s been a novelist for eighteen years and for half that time, the most recent half, a remarkably successful one. (1)
He was Paul Sheldon, who wrote novels of two kinds, good ones and best-sellers. He had been married and divorced twice. He smoked too much (or had before all this, whatever ‘all this’ was). Stephen King Misery
Yet again Goldman announces the arrival of the hero and simply states “he’s got a good face”. He does not go into negatives about his weight, or wrinkles. In Adventures in the Screen Trade Goldman states: “If you can, make your star descriptions like stretch socks-one size fits all”. (132) He wisely omits anything that could put the potential star off the character. In Which Lie did I tell? Goldman talks about how difficult Misery was to cast because none of the first choice actors wanted to play a weak character terrorised by a woman for nearly the entire script (42). These are the actors who turned down the Paul Sheldon role: William Hurt (twice), Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman and Robert Redford. In the script Goldman sneakily calls Sheldon “the hero of what follows”, but Sheldon is not a hero in the classical literary, or modern cinematic sense. He is a victim who survives. His journey is not the hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. There is no call to adventure, there is no mentor. It seems evident the use of the word “hero” here is purely to make the part more appealing to a doubtful actor.
The importance of stars for getting scripts greenlit, and their reluctance in taking on these tougher roles necessitates this kind of, unflawed, heroic character description. The Paul Sheldon description is also useful because it shows another aspect of Goldman’s character building. In his book Which Lie Did I tell? Goldman said “Hollywood heroes must have mystery”. (87) Paul Sheldon’s description allows the reader to fill in their own blank as to what events led up to his face having that “mileage”. Goldman believes when the audience knows too much about a hero the heroic persona starts to crumble. But Goldman uses the crumbling of heroic personas to great effect in Butch.
Sundance’s unheroic flaw is exposed during the famous cliff jump scene when they’re cornered by the superposse:
BUTCH
We’ll Jump!
CUT TO:
THE STREAM BELOW
It is fifty feet down and going very fast.
CUT TO:
BUTCH AND SUNDANCE
SUNDANCE
Like hell we will.
Butch is really excited now — all this next is overlapping and goes like a shot.
BUTCH
No, no, it’s gonna be okay — Just so it’s deep enough we don’t get squished to death — they’ll never follow us —
SUNDANCE
— how do you know? —
BUTCH
— would you make that jump if you didn’t have to? —
SUNDANCE
— I have to and I’m not gonna —
BUTCH
— it’s the only way. Otherwise we’re dead. They’ll have to go all the way back down the way we came. Come on —
SUNDANCE
(looking up the mountain)
— just a couple decent shots — that’s all I want —
BUTCH — come on —
SUNDANCE
— — no —
BUTCH
— we got to —
SUNDANCE
— no —
BUTCH
— yes —
SUNDANCE
— get away from me —
BUTCH
— why? —
SUNDANCE
— I wanna fight ’em — .
BUTCH
— they’ll kill us —
SUNDANCE
— maybe –
BUTCH
— you wanna die? —
SUNDANCE
— don’t you?
BUTCH
— I’ll jump first —
SUNDANCE
— no —
BUTCH
— okay, you jump first —
SUNDANCE
— no I said —
BUTCH
(big) What’sa matter with you?
SUNDANCE
(bigger)
I can’t swim!
Blind mad, wildly embarrassed, he just stands there -
CUT TO:
BUTCH starting to roar.
CUT TO
SUNDANCE, anger building.
CUT TO:
BUTCH
You stupid fool, the fall’ll probably kill you.
CUT TO:
SUNDANCE
starting to laugh now and —
CUT TO:
THE TWO OF THEM
Butch whips off his gun belt, takes hold of one end, holds the other out. Sundance takes it, wraps it once tight around his hand. They move to the edge of the path and step off. (107–110)
Sundance’s inability to swim and the fact that he relies on Butch to keep hold of the belt and save him from drowning goes against the classic western hero who is self sufficient. The scene is reminiscent of the part of The Guns of Navarone (1961, writ. Carl Foreman) where Mallory (David Niven) and Miller (Gregory Peck) are just after planting the explosions in the guns and need to escape. They need to abseil down the cliff and the jump, but like Sundance David Niven’s character can’t swim and pleadingly asks Peck’s character “You won’t let me drown will you?” Peck’s character just gives him a stern look and jumps off the cliff. The Navarone scene is less memorable because it doesn’t have the build up and payoff that the Butch scene has. But it is useful to compare the different attitudes of each scene.
Tellingly in Butch the flaw was given to Sundance, who was played by the then unknown Robert Redford, leaving Paul Newman play the briefly less flawed part. In Adventures in the Screen Trade Goldman states:
Here is one of the basic lessons a screenwriter must learn and live with: Stars will not play weak and they will not play blemished, and you better know that now. (37)
But these flaws are what makes the characters more round and Goldman should have fought harder to make his later characters flawed and less godlike. But Goldman could be hampered by the growing power wielded by a-list actors, as he says in Adventures: “There is no single more important commercial element in screenplay writing than the star part”. (129) And because the star part is such an important element Goldman goes out of his way, and hobbles the material, in order to cater to what stars want. But this type of writing-to-order results in dull and lifeless material, and Goldman’s stack of unproduced screenplays attest that it also isn’t wholly effective. This commercial mind-set is something Goldman seems to have learned from working in the industry, and working with some of its biggest stars. He saw how on Marathon Man Dustin Hoffman argued with its director, John Schlesinger, for hours about if Hoffman’s character would reach for a torch or not. And Goldman had terrible trouble with Robert Redford on All the Presidents Men because not only was Redford the star, he was also the producer, and constantly tampering with the script and undermining Goldman. Redford would go on to claim that he and the movies director Alan J. Pakula rewrote much of Goldman’s script, this statement was proved absolutely false by Richard Stayton in an article about adaptation in the April/May 2011 issue of Written By.
THE BEST MOVIE YET
…you get paid on principal photography… so one of the reasons why there are so many bad movies is that people get paid not on the success of the movie but on the existence of it. -Goldman (Brady 90)
Goldman lives in New York and calls Hollywood “Out there”. He’s not interested in the Hollywood lifestyle, with its constant meetings and Machiavellian business manoeuvring. Goldman happily keeps Hollywood at a distance, he does his assignments and moves on. He says: “I’m basically a gun for hire. Someone hires me, and I do the best I can for as long as they want me. And then I’m gone.” (Brady 90) This strictly professional attitude seeps into the screenplay and Goldman makes a remarkable effort to write the script so that it will get produced. It’s the backbone of the textual package he aims to create out of the screenplay.
Goldman is a great salesman and uses internal advertising in his script to sell to the potential producer, studio, or actor. He’s like a inquisitive sideshow carnival barker whose forceful spiel can’t possibly live up to what he has to offer. And like the carnival audience who pays their dollar to look behind the curtain the reader feels gypped when the Tahitian “mermaid” turns out to be a tawdry papier mâché construction.
When the producers were shopping The Princess Bride the then head of Columbia said to one of its producers, Andy Sheinman, “You’ve got to be careful with William Goldman scripts. He tricks you with good writing.” (Elwes 19) This is a pertinent quote because Goldman does try to trick producers with his writing. His writing is designed to manipulate like an advertisers copy is.
This internal advertising consists of telling the reader how great it will play (which equates to box office success), and drawing attention to memorable scenes. Take this example from The Princess Bride:
And what we are starting now is one of the two greatest sword fights in modern movies (the other one happens later on) and right from the beginning it looks different. (29)
A description like this allows the producer to tell people that the script has “the greatest sword fight in modern movies”. It makes it easy for the producer to sell because his pitch is already there in the script. It also gives the potential director the challenge to shoot the “greatest sword fight in modern movies”. And has the actor thinking they are going to be the next Errol Flynn. In a draft of All the Presidents Men Goldman wrote a note on its cover “This picture is written to go like a strike”. Here he explains to Brady why he wrote it:
was an intention to indicate whoooosh — to tell the reader that this thing is going to rocket along. It was to try to indicate to the people at Warner Bros., “Hey wait a minute. This could be a commercial entity. Make the movie.” In other words, that’s me selling. (154)
The pitch for All the President’s Men would be a hard sell to make to most producers. The Watergate scandal wasn’t the most cinematic scandal to adapt into a movie. It didn’t have any honeytraps, or shootouts, it just had the slow revelation of a crime and the ensuing conspiracy to cover it up. Goldman’s note reassures the producers that his script, and the subsequent film, would be fast moving, not boring, and have some commercial appeal.
The problem with this style of writing is that it leaves itself open to argument. Take these descriptions as examples:
THE CROWD, and my God, you never saw so many people. (The Princess Bride 7)
THE BIGGEST SPLASH ever recorded. (Butch Cassidy 110).
How does mister Goldman know how many people the reader has personally seen either in real life or on screen? Or is the splash that Butch and Sundance create bigger than that of the killer whale in Free Willy (1993)? The intention is to hype the scene, but it just opens up Goldman’s statement for argument. There also seems to be something grating about being told what you have, or have not seen. Carson Reeves in his review of Shazam also finds this style irksome:
As awesome as Goldman’s writing is, there are a number of times in the script where he says something like, “We are about to see something so much worse we will never be able to forget it.” I don’t agree with this kind of writing. Just WRITE THE THING we’ll never be able to forget. We’ll decide if it’s unforgettable. Especially because, in this specific case, it was something I’d already seen before (a cockroach crawling out of a dead man’s mouth). Therefore, it wasn’t that unforgettable at all, which made me sort of mad at the author for telling me I was about to see something amazing, only for that not to be the case.
In Marathon Man Goldman goes as far as stating what the recurring image of the movie will be: “THE SHOPS on First Avenue and here is the first indication of one of the central images that will keep recurring, and it’s this: cities in crisis. (4) This explanation is redundant because the script is littered with examples which provide these images. The only reason to state the recurring image like this is to give the reader the words or phrase which they can then use themselves to explain what the recurring image is. This type of spoon feeding producers sound bites has the clear aim of helping the script towards getting produced. But it’s also lazy storytelling relying on the reader to fill in the missing pieces.
While these tactics might read as obvious their function directly relates to the ecology of Hollywood where there are so many screenplays vying for attention any help the writer can give the producer to sell the product is a bonus. Goldman seems aware he needs to give the producer something to sell so he goes to pains to tell the potential producer what is unique about this script. However, he goes too far and his tactic is akin to advertisements which are twice as loud as the television shows they accompany. Look at these examples from Goldman’s unused draft of The Right Stuff:
In the darkness, credits and music.
The credits should be plain, quick, without frills of any kind.
The music on the other hand, is John Williams at his most symphonic. Huge, booming sound, building and building as the credits roll on.
What this music seems to be saying is: hold on to your popcorn, kids, this is going to be something. Something big. Something important. Something never before seen by the eyes of man. And now, as the credits come to an end and the music climaxes — (1)
Something entirely different from anything any of us have ever seen before — and what should be the single most exhilarating sequence in the entire movie. There should be music with it, because there is nothing spoken for the next minute — Vivaldi maybe; The Four Seasons. Or a Mozart theme when he was really happy. (54)
And now we’re into the longest single shot of the movie — (76)
THE BIGGEST, the most impressive shot of the picture thus far… (88)
And in his script for Hearts in Atlantis he states the blatantly obvious: “And now the last shot in the movie.” (116) The sentence is just a waste of ink, it serves no purpose whatsoever other than to take up space and add to the word count. When you are holding the script you can tell it’s the last shot because there are no more pages. And right after this sentence Goldman describes the most overused ending shot in movies: the god shot. A shot with the camera pulling up higher and higher until the protagonist is just a dot, and then FADE OUT. In Which Lie Goldman says “Well, all those beats are written in there for a purpose. To thrill you. And also so the asshole director will get it.” (406) But there is nothing thrilling about being told the obvious, or setting up the obvious. Here are some more examples of redundant storytelling that seems designed to prod somnambulant directors:
SOMETHING NOBODY EVER SAW BEFORE as holy shit, BLACKBEARD’S SHIP roars right into an unseen sand bar and immediately starts to tilt the hell over… (The Sea Kings 102)
— and this is a huge moment, folks, because even in her baggy clothing, we know we are looking at one of the great looking creatures on earth — … (Shazam 35)
A SHOT UNLIKE ANYTHING WE’VE SEEN —
— it’s as if we are looking at something tiny though a very long telescope — (Shazam 110)
Goldman is clearly writing too heavily with the experience, and knowledge, of what stars, directors, agents, producers, and studios want. Great screenwriters can balance the knife edge of art and commerce, but Goldman seems to have fallen over the edge into the, art-by-committee, commercial realm of screenwriting. The last great artistic risk he took was in 1992 with his original screenplay The Year of the Comet a romantic comedy about an expensive bottle of wine. In Goldman’s words it failed because “the audience didn’t know enough about red wine, and didn’t like feeling stupid” (93) But as Sideways (2004) proved audiences don’t mind movies about wine. Audiences didn’t avoid Year of the Comet because it was about wine, they didn’t go and see it because the story was utterly ridiculous while still being predictable. The male protagonist, Oliver who is a “beer guy”, and female lead, Margaret who is a wine taster, spar on first meeting then fall in love with each other as they’re being chased by three other people who have their own reasons to want the rare bottle of wine, with Oliver turning out to be a millionaire scientist-adventurer.
Comet focuses on the chase for the bottle of wine, while Sideways focuses on the relationships. Sideways also had the great characters of Miles and Jack. Miles being the knowledgeable one, and Jack, who doesn’t know his Rioja from his Pinot, acting as the proxy audience member learning about wine. Jack and the audience actually learn about wine from watching the movie, but they learn little, if anything, from Comet.
And while the readability of his screenplays might suffer because he is trying to tell a story and hook actors and a director, compared to a neophyte screenwriter who only focuses on the feared “gatekeeper” its completeness, as a package, no doubt helps in the ultimate aim of selling it.
But it is interesting to look at how Goldman’s two most heavily “packaged” scripts, The Sea Kings, and Shazam, remain unproduced. The Sea Kings being Goldman’s homage to all the great swashbuckling movies of his youth. No studio would produce The Sea Kings because they felt swashbucklers were dead until Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) proved they could still do blockbuster business, but even after the success of Pirates producers are still hesitant to risk 100 million-plus on a swashbuckler seeing them as non-recurring phenomenon’s. Which is a shame because The Sea Kings as flawed as it is would still make an entertaining movie, with interesting characters, great action scenes, and witty dialogue.
Goldman’s drafts of Shooter and The Right Stuff were also passed over in favour of scripts which focus more on the story than they do on selling themselves. The Right Stuff (1983) was eventually written by Philip Kaufman whose script doesn’t have any of Goldman’s distracting directorial nudges, probably because Kaufman was also its director.
Let’s compare the first page The Right Stuff by each screenwriter to see how they handle the same material differently. Kaufman’s December 1981 draft:
TRIUMPHANT MUSIC SWELLS
A VERY SMALL SCREEN IN BLACK AND WHITE. A CAMERA SWINGS AROUND, POINTS RIGHT AT US. WHY, IT’S THE EYES AND EARS OF THE WORLD, THE OLD NEWSREEL. AND THAT VOICE, IT’S EVER-OPTIMISTIC LOWELL THOMAS (or its Alexander Scourby), and it’s EXCITING, and it’s positive, and WE WON, WE WON…
1945, 46, 47, the golden years of boom, of wackiness, great sports, unlimited destiny…,
BOBBY SOXERS MOB SINATRA. Hysteria is on the loose, sexual idolatry is unleashed, an adoring crowd surrounds its Hero (more on this later), and…
CLOSE SHOT. THE PRESS. They are there covering the event, and they have “cameras with the most protuberant lenses, and they had a way of squatting and crawling at the same time, like the hunkered down beggars you see all over the Far East… advancing toward us, elbowing and hipping one another out of the way… their cameras screwed into their eye sockets, like a swarm of root weevils…” (We fake this group into the old newsreels, but with wardrobe changes, this becomes our Permanent Press Corps, known to Tom Wolfe as The Animal, the Victorian Gent, etc.)
Also in the NEWSREEL:
1945. The German rocket experts give themselves up to American “Brain hunters” at Pennemunde. Von Braun has his broken arm. There’s a wonderful shot of him arriving in the U.S. with his aim in a sling and a cigarette dangling from his lip.
Some amusing post-war experiments with flying (flying cars, etc.) and the following:
LOWELL THOMAS
Sky Streak — Ace airplane of blinding speed with its power of jet propulsion. In California at Muroc Dry Lake, Major Carl of the Marines takes off to fly a one- mile measured course to try to break the record set by a Navy Pilot…Flashing over the course: the speed of a jet in sight and sound! …The landing, after approaching the 750 miles an hour speed of sound…A new exploit for Major Carl who was an ace fighter pilot in the war…HERE HE IS WITH A PREVIOUS RECORD HOLDER. AND THERE’S A COMRADESHIP OF SPEED……The next great plateau will be the speed of sound, Mach One, though many say this is a barrier through which no man shall ever pass… But if they do, it will be here, in the high desert of California where the greatest test pilots in the world are gathered… (1)
And Goldman’s first page:
In the darkness, credits and music.
The credits should be plain, quick, without frills of any kind.
The music, on the other hand, is John Williams at his most symphonic. Huge, booming sound, building and building as the credits roll on.
What this music seems to be saying is: hold on to your popcorn, kids, this is going to be something. Something big. Something important. Something never before seen by the eyes of man. And now, as the credits come to an end and the music climaxes —
FADE IN ON
The first shot of the movie and it’s a tiny circle in the center of the screen, and visible in that circle panting and adorable, is as cute a little black and white terrier as anyone’s likely to come across. The terrier just stands there, sort of idly looking around — a complete contrast to the music we’ve just finished listening to. Now —
CIRCLE WIDENS TO INCLUDE
A GUY. Nothing special about him. He picks up the terrier, pats it a few times, and then does a surprising thing: he begins attaching wires to the dog, and as the wiring goes on —
CUT TO
ANOTHER GUY. Nothing special about him either. He’s standing in a place we’ve come to know: a blockhouse, a control center. And he’s staring out a small window. It’s dark out, but he keeps on staring and we at last begin to make out a vague shape out there, and we can’t quite tell what it is exactly, but it sure isn’t small, and now this second guy speaks a few words in a steady rhythm — ‘Three — Two — One —
That’s the meaning of the words anyway, but the words themselves are spoken in Russian and as he says one final word — ‘Lift off’ in his native tongue —
CUT TO
OUTSIDE THE WINDOW and where it was dark before there are now great sheets of flame, and that vague shape we saw, it was a giant rocket, and now, as it rises through the flames up and out of sight (1)
Just comparing these two pages you can see that Goldman is a lot more prescriptive in his writing than Kaufman, who is more suggestive. Goldman is continually directing on the page; he’s making decisions on the title sequence, and the music, he’s basically holding the director by the hand and showing them what they should be doing. The script for Maverick is Goldman’s most heavily directed on the page screenplay, with descriptions like these littered throughout:
We are in a Sergio Leone TIGHT CLOSEUP of just a hideous looking man. One eye looks straight ahead. The other wanders. (1)
Maverick rides his mule along dusty trail; as we PAN WITH him a wagon train travels in opposite direction; kids play poker in the f.g. — one smokes a corn cob pipe; we CONTINUE PAN WITH Maverick and REVEAL the town of Crystal River, a ferry coming across the river in the b.g. (5)
The director will bring his own vision to the project so this type of creative coddling is pointless and intrusive. His use of “CUT TO” may as well be editing cues. In his effort to make a complete package of the script his rigid writing cuts off suggestive prompts his potential collaborators could elaborate on. And the script suffers because what he does describe is not that interesting, plain credits, John William’s music, a dog with wires, and a rocket taking off, it’s not exactly “Something never before seen by the eyes of man” and that’s the problem with all of Goldman’s post Presidents Men scripts, excluding The Princess Bride, they’re all sizzle and no steak.
CONCLUSION
William Goldman never set out to be a screenwriter. Telling Brady:
I have a theory. In the early years of my career I used to write a lot of short stories, and I was not very good at it. Finally, in the late fifties or early sixties, I wrote a decent short story — but it was never published. Everybody turned it down. I think I got seventy-eight rejections on it. I thought, ‘‘They don’t want me.” I finally did something that was as good as I thought I could do, and nobody wanted it. There was no point in continuing. I had a certain skill and facility for screenwriting, and since my career has clearly gone so well as a screenwriter, I think I keep doing it because they want me. Does that make any sense? (118)
Because he was a novelist people presumed he could use those same skills to write screenplays, and unusually they were right. Goldman’s writing style suits the pared down style of screenwriting unlike novelists like William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who both failed during their Hollywood sojourn to write cinematically.
Goldman has always wanted to write the great American novel, and be a great literary novelist like Faulkner, but Goldman’s literary works were always poor to middling. The Princess Bride novel has become a modern classic partly due to the success of the movie which introduces new generations to the work, but his other novels are fading into obscurity. Goldman is a popular author, not a great one. He’s had moments of greatness when all the elements came together perfectly and gave us Butch, and The Princess Bride.
We have looked at how Goldman packages his screenplays to be as easy to read, and direct, and as commercial as possible. But we have also seen how the internal advertising is like any other advertising, it quickly becomes annoying and a distraction. We have also looked at how important tone is, and how skilful Goldman can be at crafting suitable tones. But most importantly we have looked at how Goldman creates a script whose elements, for better or worse, are designed to be sold. This foregrounding of the business side of movie making is not necessarily a bad thing, it is only bad when it interrupts and interferes with the storytelling, which naively as it sounds should be strong enough to sell itself. The screenplay for Butch didn’t sell for the then record sum of $400,000 because it had the “biggest splash ever recorded”, it sold because the characters, and the story were interesting.
Recently Goldman has been writing for what he thinks actors want, not what they actually need and consequently the quality of the work has greatly suffered.
Endings are just a bitch.
(104, Which Lie Did I tell)
Bibliography:
Alfonso, Eva, and Marta Frago. “The adventure screenplay in William Goldman: the playful and the ironic in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride”. Communication & Society 27(4), 1–16, (2014).
Brady, John. The Craft of the Screenwriter. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.
“William Goldman” CNN Chatpage, 01 December 2001, http://edition.cnn.com/COMMUNITY/transcripts/william_goldman_chat.html. Accessed on 22 August 2016:
Egan, Sean. William Goldman: The Reluctant Storyteller. Albany: Bear Manor Media, 2014.
Elwes, Cary. As You Wish. London: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Goldman, William. Adventures in the Screen Trade. London: Abacus, 2006.
Absolute Power, May 1996
All The President’s Men, May 10th 1975
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, July 15th 1968
Dreamcatcher, January 10th 2001
Harper, June 9th 1965
Hearts in Atlantis, April 2000,
Heat, July 2nd 2012
Magic, December 1977
Marathon Man, undated
Maverick, Final Draft, August 18th 1993
Misery, November 17th 1989
Princess Bride, final revised draft, May 3rd 1986
Shazam, September 15 2003
Shooter, second draft, April 16 1998
The Ghost and the Darkness, 5th Draft, August 1995
The Right Stuff, first draft, May 1980
The Sea Kings, fourth draft, August 1995
The Stepford Wives, March 27 1974
Which Lie Did I Tell? London: Bloomsbury, 2001.
Kael. Pauline. Reeling. Boston: Little, Brown a Company, 1976.
Lemkin, Jonathan. Shooter. SECOND DRAFT THIRD REVISION, November 14, 2005
Martell, William. Maintaining Tone. http://www.scriptsecrets.net/tips/tip53.htm accessed 01/09/2014
Reeves, Carson. ‘Shazam Review’. Script Shadow, 29 April 2013, http://scriptshadow.net/screenplay-review-shazam/. Accessed on 01/09/2014
Scriptology
2003, Dreamcatcher with Lawrence Kasdan
2001, Hearts in Atlantis
1999, The General’s Daughter with Christopher Bertolini
1997, Absolute Power
1997, Fierce Creatures (uncredited)
1996, The Ghost and the Darkness
1996, The Chamber with Chris Reese
1994, Maverick
1992, Chaplin with William Boyd and Bryan Forbes
1992, Year of the Comet
1992, Memoirs of an Invisible Man with Robert Collector & Dana Olsen
1990, Misery
1987, The Princess Bride
1986, Heat
1979, Mr. Horn (TV Movie)
1978, Magic
1977, A Bridge Too Far
1976, Marathon Man
1976, All the President’s Men
1975, The Great Waldo Pepper
1975, The Stepford Wives
1973 Papillon (contributing writer — uncredited) with Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple Jr.
1972, The Hot Rock (screenplay)
1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1966, Harper
1965, Masquerade
This chapter is taken from the book “Cramped Style”:
