Inside Hollywood: the Screenwriter's Tale

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


Do they teach this book in film school? It's so readable, so gossipy and interesting you might think not because it's too much fun.

But it's also so practical, so illuminating about the craft and, especially, about the complex web of human relationships involved in film-making, you might think film schools would be crazy not to insist that every student read, learn and inwardly digest it.

William Goldman's account of his working life can't help but include stories about colleagues like Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Clint Eastwood and others. He talks about disastrous films. And great films that were counted as disasters. And about the many kinds of hell he was put through as a writer on projects that lasted months or years and then never happened.

So the book is part tutorial - what a scriptwriter actually does - and part autobiography. And the joy of the latter is that he gives himself no airs, despite having written, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and All the President's Men (1976), A Bridge too Far (1977), Marathon Man (1976), Misery (1990) and many others.

At the end of the book, there's a very specific treat: the chance to see how he adapts a short short (his own) into a script, and then has other professionals (a designer, cinematographer, editor and composer) critique it, as if they were preparing to be part of its production. The reader gets a chance to see exactly what kind of detailed issues would arise.

The highlight of that section is the comments of the director George Roy Hill (he of Butch Cassidy, Slaugherhouse Five, The Sting and The World According to Garp), who is unrestrained in his rudeness about Goldman's script:

“What you've done here is take a story that works pretty well on paper, but you really make some fundamental errors in your screenplay -and since you are very glib and very clever and very able, you have covered up those errors and masked them so that most people would not see them. But I would I think be inclined to unmask you.”

What follows is a scathing analysis, which you'd think would make any writer either give up on the whole idea of the film, or abandon the idea of working with Hill. But Goldman takes it on the chin, and lets us witness his humiliation - in his own book.

"Pretty withering," Goldman comments when Hill has finished, "but pretty helpful too". He's a brave man. He says he disagrees with what Hill says but adds - three times - "he may be right".

What comes out of the book is that screenwriting may be lonely work - just you and pages to fill. But it is equally a role that required deft handling of people. And not just ordinarily awkward people, but Hollywood people, people with huge egos, huge wealth and ambition who didn't get where they are by trying to make everyone happy. And they are people under pressure: to get decisions, to avoid wasting millions or blowing their own professional reputations, and all that against deadlines.

In the end, Goldman's message is that for all his experience and professionalism, in Hollywood "nobody knows anything". The public can just as easily ignore a film that Hollywood insiders think is brilliant and love one that Hollywood has written off as a dud. If it was easy, I suppose they wouldn't get paid what they do.


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Cockney or Aristocrat? The Case that Captivated Victorian Britain

The Fraud by Zadie Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Zadie Smith became fascinated by a couple of enormous legal cases in Victorian London which tested the claims of a man from Australia who said he was the rightful heir to an aristocratic estate in Hampshire.

‘The Tichborne Claimant’, as he was known, was at the centre of much more than an epic legal battle (which he lost). He became a rallying point for radical political movements, and - strangely - a symbol of the dominance of a Catholic elite in British society.

Smith has cleverly interlocked this history with that of the once-successful novelist W.H.Ainsworth, whose popularity was overtaken by Dickens, and with the enslavement at a younger age, of the Claimant’s supporter and a former faithful family servant, Andrew Bogle. She takes a few admitted liberties with timelines, but the key points of her story match the history.

It’s quite a long novel, but not as long as the book looks because it is made up of many chapters which are mostly no more than about two pages long, which means there is an almost blank page every page or so.

I came to the novel having read a long book on the subject - The Tichborne Claimant by Douglas Woodruff (1957) - which goes into more detail than Smith, who has a broader panorama to fill. So I already knew many of the characters and legal complications. I wonder if readers coming to it fresh would be able to figure out what was going on.

Woodruff is, if anything, somewhat sympathetic to the Claimant - at least, he does not take it for granted that the court decisions dismissing his claim were correct. Smith calls her book The Fraud, so there's not much doubt about where she stands on that question. Which makes it a bit less interesting.

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Trollope: a genius, and much more

Trollope by Victoria Glendinning
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trollope: a genius, and much more

Victoria Glendinning’s comprehensive account of the life of Anthony Trollope manages to be both humane and scholarly. His was a life of such stress, such achievement, such tragedy and strain, physically, mentally and emotionally, that it is hard to believe he even survived to the 67 years he managed.

His energy and prolific output in the face of impossible odds mirrored that of his mother, Fanny Trollope, who raised herself up the social ladder through sheer determination; and his insecurities and suffering – including rejections in both his official Post Office work and often in his writing – was the story of his hopeless, unpopular barrister father.

Glendinning illustrates Trollope’s emotional life and illuminates many interesting aspects not covered by his letters or other archives by finding relevant passages in his fiction, always so fitting that her reader cannot question their contribution to our understanding of the man.

Trollope lived in at least four worlds: his family, his career at the Post Office, his imagination, always churning away with more output, his social life, with his love of hunting and hearty sociability at London clubs, and his business world, in which he juggled contracts, commissions, property moves and constant handouts to needy family members or distant relatives.

It is an exhausting story but Glendinning keeps it fresh and interesting at every turn – through the constant travelling, around Ireland, Britain, Europe, the West Indies, America (twice), South Africa and Australia (twice). Even with today’s streamlined transportation it would be a lot but how he did it in Victorian conditions and churning out his daily quota of words too is hard to fathom.

 In his late fifties, to carry out his commission for a travel book on Australia, for instance, he “rode up to sixty miles a day through endless forests of gum trees, with the necessities strapped to his saddle”. This large, famous, bearded figure caused offence at dinners given in his honour on such trips because he could only appear in his travelling clothes. And apart from that he was always a loud, boisterous character, not at all what his readers had imagined.

Trollope had a long and apparently successful marriage, to Rose Heseltine – a woman who seems to have been notable more by the absence of defining characteristics than by anything that allows us to bring her into focus. It is an acknowledged area of mystery in the portrait, mainly illuminated by a persuasive selection of marital situations from the novels which one cannot help thinking had their inspiration in the writer’s own private life.

My only wish for more would be about how Trollope actually wrote his novels and managed to be so extraordinarily prolific - 47 novels (compared to Dickens’ 15, for instance). We learn that he was not much of a planner, often deciding key plot points on a whim and not knowing how the story would end. And that his lonely childhood gave him a facility for day-dreaming, which, on long journeys for the Post Office turned to imagining stories.

But still, how did he keep so many richly imagined worlds in play in his brain and how was he always able to continue writing, limited only by time and never by his ideas or difficulties with what he had started?

I suppose the answer is simply that the man was a genius – and as Glendinning shows us – an unlikely one, whose gift was easy to miss among the other many extraordinary circumstances of his life.

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