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

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It would seem that Hollywood can always find something to worry about on the business side, no matter what era it's in. Billy also loves to explain other people's decisions and character traits he dislikes by ascribing thought processes to them, while managing to ignore the fact that he's making shit up out of boogers and ego.

Goldman won two Academy Awards: an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men. The recent sad news of the death of William Goldman reminded me of an episode (October 2017) of the wonderful Backlisted Podcast about his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. If your passion and enthusiasm are unfazed after wading through Goldman's horror stories and cautionary tales, it might just be for you. Screenwriting is not an easy profession because it's filled with all kinds of frustrations and set-backs.Perhaps the best Hollywood story in the book concerns the courtroom drama The Verdict, a movie that Goldman didn’t work on but one that perfectly illustrates the perils of working in Hollywood. For a long time, Sylvester Stallone could be Rocky or Rambo, but he succeeded in very few other roles. He mentions that, out of courtesy, he's only naming two of the actors in question because some of them have recently died. The point being that if a studio giant couldn’t guess the biggest star in his business, the territory is a bit murkier than most of us would imagine. I suppose some could find his tone curmudgeonly, but I like to think of it as old school and iconoclastic, he’s going to tell you how he sees things and not kiss anyone's ass along the way.

He has won two Academy Awards for his screenplays, first for the western _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_ (1969) and again for _All the President's Men_ (1976), about journalists who broke the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon. No one knows how to make a successful film, so the safe bets will always be to attract stars and make sequels.

In all of Goldman's movies, his humor—and his humanity—shines through, even in deadly serious movies such as All the President's Men. Each of those section manages to take a swipe at individuals, groups, or imagined coteries of robed gnomes William perceives of having wronged him, the targeted loogies flying from behind a shield forged of "Oh well, what do I know?