Which Lie Did I Tell? (34 page)
Read Which Lie Did I Tell? Online
Authors: William Goldman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Film & Video, #Nonfiction, #Performing Arts, #Retail
Think for a second. Here he is, this young outlaw in prison. For God knows what reason, he is offered this:
freedom.
All he has to do is lie and say he’ll go straight. And he answers thus:
“I can’t do that.”
I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s as brilliant an introduction to one of your heroes as any I’ve ever come across.
But it gets better
—Butch tells the governor this: “I’ll make you a deal.” Think for a second on that baby, too. The
convict
is offering the
governor
a deal. And here it was: “If you let me out, I promise never to work in Colorado again.”
And the governor
takes
the deal.
And lets him out.
And Butch never worked in Colorado again.
Great great stuff. No wonder I was confident about the beginning.
Now, those of you who have seen the movie may be hard pressed to remember Paul Newman having any scenes with any governors. Because they were not there. Because I never wrote them. Because I could not figure how to get that great fucking scene into the story I was telling.
I tried, God knows. But my Butch was famous, he was not a kid, and in my story, the West was ending. And in order to get him out of jail, duh, I had to first get him
into
jail.
And there was no time for it.
It was wrong. Wrong at least for me. It would have screwed up my structure if I had put it in. I realized this while I was trying to get started with the screenplay. The one most confidence-building scene I had? Gone.
I had other reasons for feeling good about the start, stuff that did make the movie. The fact that Butch robbed two trains that had the same payroll guard, Woodcock, and blew him up twice. That happened. The fact that Butch put too much dynamite under a safe during another train robbery, and blew the safe apart so the money floated everywhere. Happened. Beautiful Etta Place, the Kid’s girl. Existed. Trying to enlist and fight in the Spanish-American War. They did try. The bicycle scene was made up but at that time, bicycles really were a phenomenon, like rap today.
So when I set to work, back in the Princeton of thirty-four years ago, I was a lot younger, with enough confidence to get started. And I also knew the ending would keep me above the waterline.
My terror was this: the middle section was the one that would kill me.
Since the mid-sixties, the elements that make up a good story have not changed. But what has is the audience’s knowledge. They are so much more experienced today. Cassettes have happened, cable has happened, the availability of flicks is so different from when I began.
My killer problem was that my guys had to do the unthinkable in a western:
run away.
It may not sound like much now, because
Butch
was such a hit, but then it was
the
block in my storytelling path.
Here is what happened in real life:
E. H. Harriman, the railroad king, got sick of Butch robbing him, so he financed something new to the Wild West—a Superposse. He paid for half a dozen of the great lawmen to come together from all over the country to kill Cassidy.
Here is what happened then in real life: Butch took off for South America with Sundance and Etta.
He knew he had zero chance against an all-star team like that, so he left for sunnier climes till Harriman got bored paying all those guys and they disbanded. In other words,
they never chased him.
He fled.
Not the stuff of drama.
I had no great solution—I don’t know that there is one—but here’s what I decided to do with this: somehow try and make the audience
want
Butch and Sundance to run away. I had to make the Superposse so all-powerful, so impregnable to defeat, that people sitting out there in the dark would say yes, for chrissakes,
go to Bolivia.
So what I did, hoping it would save me, was not invent the Superposse, but invent the Superposse
chase.
This
thing
had come from nowhere and was going to kill them and their world. This was my opening description:
The Superposse consist of perhaps a half-dozen men. Taken as a group, they look, act, and are, in any and all ways, formidable.
They appear approximately half an hour into the story, leave close to half an hour later. And all they do is track our heroes. Outthink them at every turn. Butch begins reacting to them early on, “Who are those guys?” and soon it becomes a litany. The posse tracks them, never losing a beat, coming closer, always closer, shrinking the playing field until finally Butch and Sundance are trapped on a mountain ledge. This is what happens then.
come on
--
no
--
no
--
no
I said--
?--
!
If you were in movie theaters back in those days, it was not hard to tell the scene worked—as Butch and Sundance jumped, as the cry of “Horseshiiiit” echoed. There were shouts of joy and surprise and laughter, and, yes, applause. Audiences loved the two guys so much now they would follow them anyplace. They wanted to know the crucial question from all audiences since we left the muck:
What happens next?
They never questioned South America. And guess what—the movie runs a little out of steam halfway through South America. Didn’t matter.
The people wanted to be there.
When that happens, and it happens rarely, at least for me, it’s very hard to screw up your movie. I believe it would have been easy to screw it up if that scene had not worked. People might have felt uneasy about the trip the guys were taking, or might have said, well, the first stuff was fun but the rest of it wasn’t as good. Might have said a million things.
But they didn’t. They wanted to be there.
The movie became a phenomenon, changed a lot of lives. Redford, so marvelous, became, soon after, the biggest star in the world. Newman, already the biggest star in the world, and a joy to work with, had a terrific time, began a relationship with George Roy Hill that later encompassed both
The Sting
and
Slap Shot.
Hill, for me the most underrated
director of the last thirty years, became one of the two Giant Apes in the world of moviemaking, along with
David Lean.
And I became, well, you fill in the blank. Doesn’t matter. All that does is: I’m still here …
An
original screenplay? Nothing to it, really.
Just come up with a new and fresh and different story that builds logically to a satisfying and surprising conclusion (because Art, as we all know, needs to be both surprising and inevitable).
Do you know how hard that is?
I’ve tried a bunch and I’ll talk about some of them briefly, but remember this—those two crucial questions that need answering for an adaptation? Well, they must both have already been answered positively by you before you embark. Yes, you love it and yes, you can make it play.
Butch
—what I loved was the fun and games, the sadness, taking the girl with them, all that—but mostly I loved the becoming legends again. Plus, of course, the confidence their dying gave me.
I researched it for eight years before I’d sucked up enough. Articles on the west, books, etc. Basically what enabled me to go after it was my love of westerns. From
Stagecoach
on. To be able to write the guy who really
really
was the fastest gun in all our history, well, how often does that happen?
The Great Waldo Pepper
—not something I would have written had George Roy Hill not loved old airplanes so much. It was his need that drove me, plus we had done
Butch.
I made up this guy—Waldo—who looked golden and
was
golden except really he was a failure. And finally gave him his shot at having a dream come true, even if it killed him.
The other confidence builder was that it fell logically into three acts. The barnstorming first act, the air-show second act, the Hollywood-stunts third act. That was what happened
to a lot of pilots in those days, and I followed along. I fucked up some and Hill and I had a huge falling-out for a year in the middle of the screenplay, but I can look at the movie now and feel glad that I went there.
The Year of the Comet
—if
Butch
had its basis in my love for westerns,
Comet
was my shot at
romantic comedy: Grant and Kate, Grant and Audrey, Grant and Roz, Fred and Ginger, dozens of others from the ’30s into the ’50s.
There aren’t so many these years. Cleese’s
Wanda,
Curtis’s
Four Weddings and a Funeral
and
Notting Hill,
I think Ramis’s
Groundhog Day.
Ephron’s
Harry and Sally,
Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s
Mary.
I think those are my main five for the last dozen years.
I love the form, I love red wine, I invented with plausibility what would logically be the most valuable bottle of wine in history. I had a decent-sounding mismatched pair of lovers, I set the chase in the most romantic places I know, London, the French Riviera, the Scottish Highlands.
I did everything right—and it all just lay there.
Conclusion? I did next to nothing right. That’s why it all just lay there.
I can be very tough with my own work since I don’t like it all that much—and I have thought a great deal about how I screwed this up. I cannot come up with a satisfactory answer.
I guess, to quote
Frank Gilroy’s great line from
The Gig,
where one character yearns to be a wonderful jazz musician but isn’t: Passion ain’t enough.
The Sea Kings
—my pirate flick. The audience has to love those, and I don’t think kids do today. Who could blame them? Errol’s dead.
So what made me write it was the genre, plus this: as great a kernel for a movie as any I’ve known (see the “Leper” chapter for a recap of my passion for the idea).
And the script, you will have to take on faith, is not so terrible. But it never got made.
After Joe Levine failed with it in the ’70s, Dick Donner took a run at it in the ’90s.
I don’t expect it to ever happen. Expensive as hell, and each time you think, well, just maybe, something like
Cutthroat
Island
comes along and you’re dead for another decade.
Mr. Horn.
If that title rings even a little bell, yes it was a four-hour miniseries starring
David Carradine and
Richard Widmark.
Hope it was good. Never saw it. Couldn’t bring myself to.
Tom Horn. Bounty hunter. (A rock under a dead man’s head was his signature.) Indian fighter. (Brought in
Geronimo.) Sentenced to death for a murder he never committed. (Escaped at the last minute; it was impossible but he did.) Gave himself up. Finally got hanged. (He lost so much weight in jail that he hung alive at the end of that rope for half an hour.)
Just some of the high spots.
In terms of the talents that were needed to survive in the Wild West, this was the most talented man who ever lived there. Redford (wrote it for him) was going to do it, didn’t.
This was one of my bad experiences. What I regret so terribly was that this great story never had its shot. I remember deciding that it would be the last original I’d ever work on. And I prayed I’d never come across anyone as blazing as Tom Horn again.
But it wasn’t the last original I ever worked on, because we are all slaves to material, and when I heard the story of the Tsavo lions, I was hooked again. You can read the chapter on
The Ghost and the Darkness
to find out what happened. I think of all six, I regret most that this story never found its proper audience. No, I regret most that Tom Horn is still unknown to most of America. No, I regret—
—when we write scripts and they don’t happen or happen less well than we want, we regret them all. And always will.
The last one really broke my heart.
Danny DeVito came to me and wondered if I wanted to do a basketball movie he could direct. I lucked out, wrote
Low Fives,
for Danny and
John Cleese. Danny was to play a down-and-out coach at the antithesis of an Ivy League school. (I think in Texas, but I remember it was somewhere hot.) Danny, on a recruiting trip in Africa, discovers an amazing basketball talent, enrolls him in his school.
John Cleese was to play the dean of this awful place, who was in deep agony there, and just as desperate to get out as Danny. A lot of nice stuff happened. We had a cast reading and
Barry Sonnenfeld, now a star director, then with just
Addams Family
behind him, was set to direct. I remember a fabulous actor, now dead,
J. T. Walsh, read the part of a racist basketball coach.
Was
Low Fives
perfect? Nope. Did it work? Bet your ass. One of my all-time movie afternoons, listening. Then Barry got offered a ton to do the
Addams
sequel, took it, Danny began to cool, it died.
I still have hope. Someone has to.
As I look back on these seven, I realize my age. If you are thirty or under, all you know about westerns might be
David Peoples’s glorious
Unforgiven.
(Aside: I remember reading the rave review given by
Roger Ebert in
Cinemania.
He talks about Eastwood and
Jack Green’s shooting, mentions Hackman and Harris and Freeman and Fisher and Wayne and Ford and even gets around to Godard. Never mentions Peoples, though. Why should he? All Peoples did was
make it up.
Jesus, Roger, it was an original screenplay. You know why that’s such a disgrace? Because you expect ignorance from most, but Ebert’s supposed to be one of the good ones.
There are no good ones.)
Back briefly to my age. I doubt any of you would be interested in the genres that hooked me into films. But the basic pulse still must be there: if you want to write
The Matrix
—and I liked
The Matrix
—go with God.
Just care.
There is a reason pitching comes right after original screenplays—people don’t usually pitch adaptations.
(But how would you like to have been in the room when Van Zant pitched his vomitous
Psycho
carbon?
You must remember that
—because if some asshole executive can say,
“Gee, what a fresh and great idea
that
is, wait’ll I get home tonight and tell the wife”—the point being that if
Psycho
got greenlighted, there’s hope for us all.)
Okay, what do I know about pitching? First thing, find a teacup. Then barely cover the bottom with water. No, that’s too much.
I know
nothing
about the subject. I have only, in a third of a century, pitched once—and this to friends—and I was so awful I quit halfway through.
But truth to tell, it doesn’t matter what
I
know because you are not going to be pitching to me.
I think I would accept every pitch made to me. Because I remember my panic when I tried to do it. But it is a definite part of Hollywood now. A writer has an idea and in the old days, he might have written it. Sometimes he still does. But more and more, the agent gets his client a meeting with a studio exec in which the idea is discussed, i.e., pitched.
Hollywood, as we know, has zero sense of history and there is a feeling pitching is relatively new. Total nonsense. If you’ve read any history at all, you know it was invented by Torquemada to make his days pass more happily during the Spanish Inquisition. He would tell imprisoned playwrights that if they could interest him in an idea, he would let them live long enough to write it. If they didn’t, he dropped the fellow into a large vat of boiling tar, which of course is where the term “pitch” comes from.
Ten Commandments of Pitching
1.
Never forget whom you are talking to.
The studio executive views you as an impediment to either his lunch or his tennis game. But some part of him also knows you might help his career. He doesn’t
want
to listen to you, he would rather he lived in a world where he didn’t
have
to listen to you. So do not bore him. Rule one is this:
Be brief.
2. Brief means this:
in and out in five minutes.
Unless the executive asks you to stay.
3. Remember you are not telling the story,
you are throwing out a hook.
3a.
Keep it simple.
3b.
Not a lot of detail.
3c.
One or two lines.
What you tell the executive is this: “Here’s the setup, boom.” If they buy the setup, there is a real chance they will buy the movie.
4.
Grab them.
You want them to think, “Yeah, I get that.”
5.
People are busy.
(Same as rule one but I thought you ought to be reminded.)
6.
Do not pitch more than one idea per meeting.
7. If you can,
leave an outline.
Executives love this. Not a detailed shot-by-shot deal, but a couple of pages where you start with what you hit them with and thicken it a bit, embellish it; if you have any glorious scenes in mind, put those in. (Likewise, if your ending sucks, leave it out.) Giving them something to read can only be a plus. It helps them fill out your pitch. It also makes them think you actually care about the piece of shit you are selling. (Piece of shit, as you should know, is the way executives refer to screenplays Out There.)
8.
Never read a pitch.
Some writers are more comfortable doing it that way, but the meeting is about your future, not your comfort.
Learn to tell your story.
Practice it by yourself or on friends until you are comfortable. Executives like eye contact.
9.
Pitch the same idea ten times in one day.
Obviously, keep that news to yourself. Do not say to Mr. Fox, “I would love to talk more but I’m late for my meeting with Mr. Time Warner.”
9a.
Be aware of the values of
multi-pitching.
It is good to get your idea out there. Especially if you are new, because more people will know of your existence.
9b.
Be aware of the risks of multi-pitching.
It is not good if your goal is to have a relationship with a particular studio, which you might actually want. There are no secrets in the movie business. Everybody knows somebody. Be aware that your multi-pitch day will get out. Never tell anyone you are giving them an exclusive if you aren’t. Your word actually has a certain value in Southern California. Even if theirs doesn’t.
10. Never forget that even if they buy your pitch,
most studios are planning on firing you as soon as you hand them your first draft.
Okay, let’s try something. I will attempt to pitch for you a couple of the originals I talked about a few minutes before. See what you think.
Butch:
“It’s a western, it’s about these two guys, one of them is the leader of this huge gang and the other is his sidekick who’s a great shot and this millionaire forms this posse to stop them from robbing his railroads and—”
I’m gasping already.
Try again. “It’s a western, kind of a modern-day Gable-Tracy adventure flick about these two guys who take off for South America with one of the girlfriends and—”
Worse. I’m dead now.
I don’t think
Butch
lends itself to pitching. Doesn’t mean it’s good or terrible, just that the story doesn’t compress easily.
The Sea Kings:
“It’s
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
on the high seas—these two great pirates who actually sailed together, one’s the most dangerous in history,
Blackbeard, and the other’s the only rich pirate ever, kind of as if Bill Gates decided he was done being a computer nerd and wanted a life of adventure.
“See, Blackbeard has had all the adventure in the world and what he wants is to retire rich, and Bonnet, the rich guy, what he wants is to have all the adventure in the world. And when they meet and sail together, what I want this to be is the story of these two amazing guys who are each other’s dream.”
What do you think? I don’t mind that so much. What I hope I did was
make you want to know more.
The Year of the Comet:
“A Cary Grant–Audrey Hepburn romantic comedy about this great couple who meet and just hate each other but they’re both chasing a ten-million-dollar bottle of wine across London and the French Riviera, where they have wild adventures. And no, they don’t hate each other at the end.”