Read Which Lie Did I Tell? Online
Authors: William Goldman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Film & Video, #Nonfiction, #Performing Arts, #Retail
Which Lie Did I Tell? (28 page)
And in that week, the decorator promised, everything would be made right. Their home would be exactly as they wanted it to be.
Back they come after the shoot. Together, suitcases in hand, they go to their Dream House. They unlock the front door and, very nervous now, enter. They peek into their living room.
As in their dreams.
The dining room.
Yes again.
The kitchen.
Ideal.
Now slowly, up the stairs they go to their bedroom. They put their suitcases down in silence. It’s beyond belief perfect.
Like schoolchildren they sit on the end of their bed, turn on the TV and the
instant
they do, what they see is Jean Dixon saying these words: “
Jeane Dixon predicts:
Penny and Rob will split
.”
See, life can imitate art. (The marriage did not last.)
Enough. Did you think about the ten things? Fine. Then tell me the one crucial thing about them all—
—I’m waiting.—
—Want a hint?—
—Forget hints, here’s the answer:
They’re all the same.
They’re all about what the camera does.
They’re all about speed.
To show you what I mean, I’ll talk about the first couple. Here’s numero uno—
1. It is always possible to park opposite the building you are visiting.
Well, we’ve all sure seen that baby. (Or its corollary: the star raises his hand in New York and a cab stops
instantly.
) Here’s how you might write it:
Maybe the entire enterprise takes, what, twenty seconds at the outside? Fine. Now let’s try it another way. Same set-up.
to maneuver her car into the spot. Clearly she’ll never be able to make it fit. MEL pulls up, stops, waits.
No Space
.
he will never find a parking space
.
2. When paying for a taxi, don’t look at your wallet as you take out a bill—just grab one at random and hand it over, it will always be the exact fare.
That takes even less time than finding a parking space did. Terrific. Mel is on his way inside
to where the real scene is about to begin.
In other words, just as the earlier sequence was more than likely not a movie about Mel Gibson finding a
parking space, this one is not about Mel Gibson getting out of a cab. But let’s try it again.
?
hand it over
.
You want to go to jail
?
Let’s leave Mel pondering that question. And pardon my riff about Mel’s not being able to look at his wallet—I was in a
Last Action Hero
mode,
and this scene would have worked there.
Because that movie was about an action hero in a movie who didn’t know he was in a movie, he thought he existed in our world.
All the ten clichés in the list are about trying to save time. Because the alternatives are too gruesome for the moviegoer: sitting there with nothing happening that relates to the story.
Get on with it
—that is what the camera demands, and when we write movies, we have no choice but to obey.
Here’s a shot that’s a favorite of mine—it’s when I can
tell a movie is in trouble. When a car drives up to a house and you see the whole long drive, you just know the movie is going to suck. Because there is only
one reason
to show the drive.
There better be a monster in the house …
by
Robert Towne and
Fargo
by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
I’m not sure, really, why I linked these two great
Oscar-winning screenplays. I could fake you out with a lot of reasons. They both form the basis for among the best detective movies ever made, both are funny and savage and filled with shocks and surprises, both are literate and surprisingly witty.
Both have wondrous detectives at their core. Gittes (
Jack Nicholson), armed with his juvenile cynicism, thinks he know everything but is totally unprepared when he meets a man (Noah Cross, played by John Huston) who is
really
willing to do anything.
Marge (
Frances McDormand), the pregnant police chief, is a lot smarter than Gittes but amazingly unprepared for the strange and terrible things people do to one another.
Both movies are dazzlingly complicated until you know their truths, and then they are clear and inevitable, as all wonderful storytelling must eventually be.
I think what links them in my mind is the placement of their two great scenes. The
Fargo
detecting scene starts half an hour in, the
Chinatown
confrontation begins twenty-five minutes before the end. (I have gone to Bergman for an example of a beginning, and, modestly, said he, I am going to use
Butch Cassidy
as an example of an ending.)
These two scenes both have the same effect on their respective movies. When you read them you know this:
the work is done.
A magician’s phrase for that part of a trick—it can come close to the start or near to the end—when the magician’s crucial work is finished. All that remains is the unfolding of the inevitable.
In both movies, after these two scenes, the remainder, for me, is inevitable. The writers have us in their power, at their mercy; they can do with us what they will.
The Coens drive me nuts a lot of the time.
Example: I cannot explain too often how crucial it is for you to know your story before you start. For me, if I don’t know how a story is going to end, I don’t know how to enter each individual scene preceding. I am not saying you must know each cut, obviously, but it is essential that you know the story you are trying to tell. I asked them how they know they are ready to start a screenplay.
any
outline. The rule is, we type scene A without knowing what scene B is going to be-- or for that matter, we type scene R without knowing what scene S is going to be.
beginning, then get very slow, then speed up once we really have to confront the structure.
In other words, everything I feel you must do, they don’t. Obviously, there is no correct way to work. I think the one thing writers are all interested in is how others do it. (Maybe looking for, at last, the right way—who knows?)
I have a theory as to why it works for the Coens. Peter and Bobby Farrelly have equally bizarre ways of getting things done. Listen to this madness:
And what do they do in that “week or a few days or a month even”?
Okay, my theory as to why it works for them is simplicity itself:
numbers.
Not because they are brother writing teams, although that doesn’t hurt. They certainly know each other so well, and can deal with each other’s idiosyncracies. But it’s because there are two of them. I can’t do it that way—if I get into a dark place, I can’t say to my writing partner, “Here, fix the fucker.” There’s only me, trapped helpless in my pit, no way out.
Another example of why the Coens drive me nuts:
The Big Lebowski.
This nutball mélange of a flick takes place a lot of the time in a bowling alley, where
John Goodman, who is nuts, is taunted by another bowler named Jesus (
John Turturro). A tournament is mentioned several times.