Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman Read Free Book Online Page B

they will not play blemished, and you better know that now.
    Sure, Brando and Pacino will play Mafia chieftains in The Godfather. But those are cute Mafia chieftains. They're only war- ring on bad Mafia guys and crooked cops; they're only trying to hold the family business together. Try asking a major star to play a real Mafia head, a man who makes his living off whores and child pornography, heroin and blood; sorry folks, those parts go to the character actors, or the has-beens. Or actors on the come who haven't yet achieved star status.
    Of course De Niro will play a psychopath in Taxi Driver. Some psychopath-he risks his life trying to save the virtue of your everyday ordinary-looking child prostitute, Jodie Foster.
    Lawrence Kasdan, Hollywood's hottest (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and I think best (Body Heat) young screenwriter, had some wonderfully penetrating things to say in a recent interview:
    If I thought that was all I could ever do and that I would constantly be turning over these works of love to other people and having them changed, I don't know how long I could do it. . . .
    . . . The movie comes out and there's the pain that your movie never got made; there's this other movie instead. But everyone says you wrote it, and they blame you for it anyway. So you're getting it from both sides, from inside and outside.
    Clearly, that's true, but perhaps it doesn't go far enough. Look, we are wonders, those of us still left walking on the earth. We can create leaders ranging from Churchill to Attila, singers
    from Caruso to Florence Foster Jenkins, writers from Shakespeare to Beverly Aadland's mother.
    In the world of the screenplay, not only are you terribly limit- ed as to what subject matter is viable; your treatment of that sub- ject matter is infinitely more restricted by the power of the star.
    Which is why I truly believe that if all you do with your life is write screenplays, it ultimately has to denigrate the soul. You may get lucky and get rich, but you sure won't get happy. Because you will spend your always-decreasing days doing the following; writing Perfect Parts for Perfect People.
    And there's got to be more to the human condition than that....
    Studio Executives
    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.
    In the old days of the great studios, this situation didn't exist. The Harry Cohns and the Louis Mayors fully expected to be in their traces till they dropped. Their modern counterparts are under a totally different system: They must get results-now- or they're gone. There is perhaps more executive shuffling in any single year now than existed in the entirety of the nineteen thirties or forties.
    And with this pressure always on them, always mounting, each "go" decision they make becomes excruciating-one of the reasons why, right now, no one in Hollywood wants to make movies. (As of June, 1982, film starts were down exactly fifty percent from a year ago.)
    The "go" decision is the ultimate importance of the studio executive. They are responsible for what gets up there on the silver screen. Compounding their problem of no job security in the decision-making process is the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry;
    - NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.-
    If there is a Roman numeral/to this book, that's it. (Actually, there are two Roman numeral /'s to this book, but I won't get to the second until the chapter on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) Again, for emphasis-
    - NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.-
    Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's g6ing to work. Every time out it's a guess- and, if you're lucky, an educated one.
    They don't know when the movie is finished: B. J. Thomas's people, after the first sneak ofButch, were upsel about their client's