I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE TOO [446]

To make your debut as a feature film director by declaring the death of the film industry is a trick that Jean-Luc Godard sadly missed.

For Jerry Seinfeld, the stand-up comedian whose eponymous sitcom didn’t set the UK on fire, this was a throwaway statement in an interview for “GQ” magazine promoting “Unfrosted”, a fictional retelling of the birth of Pop Tarts, depicting the clash between Kellogg’s and rival cereal makers Post like it was the Space Race.

Seinfeld talks about how, at age 69, directing a film was totally new: “I thought I had done some cool stuff, but it was nothing like the way these people work. They’re so dead serious! They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea.” Asked to elaborate, he confirmed he didn’t say this to his crew, but explained that film is no longer the pinnacle of culture: “When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.” Asked what has taken film’s place, Seinfeld said (italics as printed), “Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business. Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?”

My immediate thought upon reading this was “NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING”, the refrain from scriptwriter William Goldman’s 1983 book “Adventures in the Screen Trade”. Having repeated it for emphasis, the writer of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, and future writer of “The Princess Bride”, adds “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows [Goldman’s emphasis] for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess – and if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

Goldman begins his book by placing it in the aftermath of “Heaven’s Gate”, Michael Cimino’s ruinously expensive film that symbolically ended the “New Hollywood” period of greater artistic freedom, through greater directorial control and more daring subject matter, that followed the death of the old Classical Hollywood studio system at the end of the 1960s. This itself followed a number of experiments in luring audiences away from their suburban houses and television sets, from large “roadshow films” in the 1960s like “The Sound of Music”, “Doctor Doolittle” and “Hello Dolly”, and 1950s innovations like stereo sound, Cinemascope and 3D. It was easier for the Hollywood studios to present their films before the 1950s, just as when they installed sound equipment in their cinemas from the end of the 1920s, but with their having been separated from these theatre chains over anti-competitive practices, studios would have to deal with that loss of control, just as the nascent Hollywood studios set themselves up in the 1910s to escape attempts to control the film industry in New York.

Just as the perceived success and productivity of industry could be measured in peaks and troughs, the film industry had enough of these by the time Goldman’s book was published to make you wonder how anyone got anything done. The following year, 1984, saw the lowest recorded cinema attendance figures in the UK, just as the film industry was adapting to the concept of home video, now largely replaced by online streaming, the studios themselves going from exploiting new content delivery systems to being reconfigured as the content delivery system, both through streaming new films and exploiting intellectual property – why make a new sitcom when one from a generation ago, like “Seinfeld”, will suffice? 

I have only not mentioned Netflix because its role in disrupting the film industry, from production to exhibition to home video, could be interpreted as the main reason for it being declared as “over”, rather than just the latest reason - that Jerry Seinfeld’s “Unfrosted” was made for Netflix is purely coincidental.

AND I SAID I DIDN’T LIKE THE WAY HE GOT THINGS DONE [199]

“I personally do not believe that you can tell if a movie is ‘good’ or bad’ when it comes out. All you can be sure of is this: Does it ‘work’ or not? For audiences.”

When William Goldman, one of the greatest screenwriters ever seen in Hollywood, died in November 2018, the hard job for reporters was to pick which film made the headline: “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “All the President’s Men,” “Misery,” “The Stepford Wives,” “Marathon Man,” and “The Princess Bride.” The first two scripts won Academy Awards for Goldman, and the last two were adapted from his own novels – the mastery and wide range of his craft, both literary and cinematic, are not in question.

However, what was also mentioned, in practically every report, was the work I mostly know Goldman for writing: a book, part-memoir, part-diatribe, part-screenwriting manual, that both defined and hindered his career in Hollywood, and defined Hollywood itself forever more. “Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting” was published in 1983, by which point Goldman’s scripts were either made into bad films, like a musical version of “Grand Hotel,” or were not made at all, like a version of “The Right Stuff.” The New Hollywood era that was ushered in alongside “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” had also been killed off by the self-indulgent production of “Heaven’s Gate,” putting power back into the hands of producers.

“Adventures in the Screen Trade” lays bare Goldman’s cynicism about the Hollywood machine, through explaining how awards should be given for holding meetings, explaining the types of first pages that guarantee a script will never be read, and notably repeats a phrase used by production managers when calculating the cost of having a star in your film: “add one third for the shit.” However, the most enduring phrase from the book, a phrase Goldman later said he expected to be written on his gravestone, was “Nobody Knows Anything.” When it first appears, it is repeated for emphasis. The phrase refers to how nobody knows what film is going to be a success – the then-recently-released “Raiders of the Lost Ark” is mentioned, as every major studio passed on it except for Paramount, while the Julie Andrews musical “Star!” bombed when released, despite going over well in previews.

The middle section of the book recounts Goldman’s scripts one by one, success and failure. It is as valuable a passage to read as all the other scriptwriting manuals you can buy although, this time, the writer has a recognisable track record. The main lesson here is, also repeated for emphasis, “Screenplay is Structure,” regardless of having well-written scenes or dialogue – for example, “Back to the Future” is all structure, to the extent that the “Johnny B. Goode” performance scene was nearly cut by its writers for being technically superfluous. The last section of the book takes a detailed look at Goldman adapting “Da Vinci,” one of his own short stories. You are given the original story, and the finished script, which is then analysed by a production designer, an editor, a cinematographer, a composer, and a director, to give you a good idea of how your script is to be used – for all the creativity, a script is an instruction manual.

William Goldman would later write a sequel, titled “Which Lie Did I Tell?” in 2000, and titles his time around his writing of the first book as “The Leper”. “The Princess Bride” was still to come, a film that gained a cult following on home video, after doing less well in cinemas – in Hollywood, nobody knows anything. Crucially, his ex-wife had told him she realised the time alone was getting to him, and “the socialness of moviemaking” was what he missed. He ended the first book by wishing his readers, “...may all your scars be little ones...” He was right about his own.