Tag Archives: Hollywood

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

Posted on by

William Goldman is a novelist who became a successful screenwriter in the 1960s. His best-known screenplays include Harper (the Paul Newman detective movie), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, All the President’s Men,  A Bridge Too Far and The Princess Bride. He wrote this book in 1982, partly as a memoir and partly as a guide to screenwriting. It’s a bit dated now, but it’s still a wonderful book for anyone who’s interested in how movies get made (and how many movies don’t). 

Goldman lists two key lessons for the novice screenwriter (the Roman numerals and capital letters are his):

I. NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING (i.e. nobody in the movie business knows for sure what will work and what won’t)

II. SCREENWRITING IS STRUCTURE (i.e. there’s more to screenwriting than telling your story in the right sequence, but you’ll never write a good one if you don’t get the story’s structure right).

The biggest lesson I took away from the book, however, is that screenwriting is extremely frustrating. You can make a whole lot of money at it, if you’re very talented and/or very lucky, but you’ll spend most of your time writing scripts that never get made into movies, and when one of your scripts does get filmed, you won’t have any control over what the director, producers, actors, et al. do with it. Film making is a collaborative medium, but the screenwriter is rarely invited to collaborate after filming starts. It’s unlikely you’ll even be invited to a sneak preview.

Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal

Posted on by

Gore Vidal’s novel was quite scandalous when it was published in 1968. It’s the story of a man (Myron) who became a woman (Myra). She’s working in Hollywood now and has dedicated herself to something like reformulating the American concept of masculinity. She thinks she’ll accomplish this by having her way with an attractive young man who wants to be a movie star. Along the way, she falls in love with the young man’s girlfriend and schemes to take control of movie cowboy Buck Loner’s Acting Academy for Aspiring Young Actors and Actresses. As one would expect, her mission isn’t a complete success. 

It’s a satirical novel, so there are some larger-than-life characters, including Myra. She has an extraordinarily high opinion of herself, but eventually concludes that she “certainly went through a pretentious phase”. It’s worth reading, partly because Vidal was a talented writer with a gift for wry commentary. But it’s not terribly funny and nowhere near as shocking as it was in 1968.  

Breaking the Chain

Posted on by

Once upon a time, before blogs ruled the earth, somebody invented the Liebster Award. It was probably a German, because “liebster” is German for “beloved” or “favorite”.

The idea is that you nominate a blog for the award if you think it deserves more readers. In this latest round of nominations, the cutoff for getting the award is having fewer than 200 followers. This humble blog currently has 181 followers, so it qualifies with respect to the numbers. Whether WOCS deserves to have more readers is a more difficult question (it’s possible it should have fewer).

Anyway, a fellow blogger nominated WOCS for the Liebster today, after being nominated himself. So, to accept the award, I’m supposed to answer 10 questions sent to me by the other blogger, and also nominate other supposedly underappreciated blogs.

However, although I’m pleased to have been nominated – as anyone would be – I’ve decided not to “accept” the award by fulfilling the requirements above. Instead, I’m merely going to mention some blogs I follow and which you might enjoy too (one of which has many more than 200 followers).

Fortunately, the nomination doesn’t come with a threat, unlike a standard chain letter. If I’d been told that failure to continue this process would result in some catastrophe or other (locusts? none of my favorite cereal at A&P?), I definitely would have complied. You can’t be too careful about these things (well, actually, you can).

Now for those blogs I recommend:

First, there is SelfAwarePatterns. The author of this very interesting blog writes about science and philosophy, among other things, and gets a lot of intelligent comments. Also, I agree with him more often than not (he’s obviously a very bright guy).

Another philosophical blog I recommend is ausomeawestin. The author argues vigorously for moral realism, the idea that judgments like “Susan is a good person” or “Sam did the right thing” are true or false just as much as statements like “Copper conducts electricity”. In other words, we can have knowledge about ethics. I tend to disagree, but I’m not sure why, and I’ve greatly enjoyed discussing the issue with ausomeawestin’s proprietor.

Lastly, on a very different note, there is Beguiling Hollywood, operated by Vickie Lester (presumably a pseudonym, since “Vicki Lester” is the character played by Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland in their respective versions of A Star Is Born). Ms. Lester mostly writes about old Hollywood and also has a wonderful supply of related photographs, which she shares on a daily basis, like this one of Frederic March and Janet Gaynor from that famous old movie:

fredric-march-janet-gaynor-a-star-is-born

Ok, my part of the chain is now broken, but do consider taking a look at these deserving blogs. They’re fun and educational too!

Whatever You Do, Please Don’t Watch This Movie

Posted on by

It was Friday night and I was open to some mindless cinematic entertainment. That’s my excuse. But having wasted almost two hours of my life watching Olympus Has Fallen, the only thing I can do to partly redeem myself is to warn anyone who might be open to some mindless entertainment not to make the same mistake I did.

If only my curiosity about how they would end this thing hadn’t gotten the best of me.

The premise is that a bunch of well-armed, oddly-motivated Koreans take over the White House with the help of an ex-Secret Service agent who has “lost his way” (that’s an understatement). Their goal is to somehow reunite North and South Korea while destroying the United States. Lots of people are killed in the attack. Furthermore, the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – the three people who know the passwords that will blow up all of America’s nuclear missiles – happen to be at the White House and end up as hostages in the presidential bunker. There’s only one intrepid Secret Service agent left standing. Not only does he kill every bad guy he meets, he rescues the President and the President’s son, after which he stops the countdown to nuclear catastrophe with only seconds to spare.

It’s stupid, exceedingly violent, poorly-written and cliche-ridden, but it’s only a big-budget action movie. What bothered me was the idea that some people’s lives and suffering are much more important than everyone else’s. The President gives up secret codes, jeopardizing the whole country, in order to protect two people. The Speaker of the House (the Vice President is a hostage too) orders the Army and Navy to withdraw from South Korea, accepting the idea that he’s probably starting a war, in order to save the President’s life. Bodies are strewn all around the White House and the District of Columbia, but the President and his Secret Service pal crack jokes as they walk outside. The brain trust in the Pentagon’s command center is so happy when the President is rescued that they all stand and applaud, despite the fact that they’ve presided over the worst breach of security in the nation’s history, during which scores of innocent people were maimed and killed and the lives of millions of others were unnecessarily put at risk.

Really, if you’re a senior official who’s taken hostage, consider yourself expendable. You can be replaced.

By the way, Netflix claims that 900,000 people have given this epic an average rating of 4.2 out of 5, meaning the average viewer really liked it. Some people loved it. From the comments, some people even took it seriously. I’d tell you to judge for yourself, but that would be wrong. 

The Battle of Brazil by Jack Mathews

Posted on by

The Battle of Brazil tells the story of Terry Gilliam’s great movie Brazil, in particular the fight between Gilliam and Universal Pictures over the version of the movie that would be released. Executives at Universal, who hadn’t been working at Universal when the movie was in the planning stages, thought that Brazil was too dark, too confusing and too long. So they tried to re-edit it. Gilliam and his producer strongly objected and started a campaign to get the movie released in its original version. The director and producer won the battle. (Although Universal got the last word by doing a poor job marketing the movie.) 

This is an interesting story about how Hollywood worked in the 80s. Not much seems to have changed since then. Hollywood executives are still trying to maximize profits and still don’t know which movies will be successful, even though they claim to. They also probably continue to offer incredibly self-serving explanations of their behavior.

Having recently watched Brazil again, I think some of it could easily have been trimmed. Some scenes went on too long and interrupted the story. It also bothered me that the same actress was used in the initial fantasy sequences and the “real world” story. The “real world” actress could have been put in the fantasy sequences after the main character met her. I wouldn’t have given the movie the happy ending that the studio wanted, however. The bleak surprise ending is terrific.

I suppose if I ever run a movie studio, I’ll want to interfere with what gets released too. (4/6/12)