"Adventures in the Screen Trade" Book Review

Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this book was brilliant! It was insightful and told of a not unglamorous view of the perils of Hollywood, but more of a realistic take on the stars, directors, producers, and a vast number of technicians and artists that people the sets of the movies. This from the point of view of Mr. William Goldman, the man who wrote the screenplays to such classics as "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "A Bridge Too Far", and "All the President's Men".

There isn't a whole lot of gossip, which I am fine with, but there are a few tales that were intriguing and helped explain the relationships between screenwriters and directors, screenwriters and producers, producers and directors, directors and stars, directors and everyone else, and stars and stars.

The book was hopeful as well as depressing in that it gave many warnings about the pitfalls of being a screenwriter. Many people view screenwriters as a necessary evil because, as Mr. Goldman says, many screenwriters are not actually that good at screenwriting....BUT he also says that NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. Which means what it says: nobody knows how the movie is going to do until it has been sold to theaters and pushed in front of an audience. Because then it is most definitely out of their hands.

Of the whole book, while the first two sections of it detail Mr. Goldman's experiences, the last part may be the most inspiring to aspiring screenwriters, like myself. This last section discusses a short story that Mr. Goldman had written many eons ago, which he found again, which inspired him to write a short screenplay based on it. Then he goes into detail about how one goes about adapting a written story into a piece meant to be seen. He discusses different ways to go about doing certain characters and certain scenes and even certain sounds. The most important part of this exercise was when he showed the subsequent screenplay to an editor, cinematographer, director, and composer for their views on how it should be filmed. That was very interesting because even Mr. Goldman didn't know what was going to happen because this sort of dialogue doesn't happen in real life. The screenwriter writes the script, hands it to a producer or a director, and that's it. Sometimes he's asked to make some changes or edits, but they never discuss the intentions of each scene, which might be more helpful to the industry if they provided the time to do that.

Overall, this was very interesting and I suggest it to many people and not just screenwriters or writers, but also anyone interested in the movies at all. Here's the book that will tell you in one way or another why some films were dead before they got to the theater. And how they are made which is fascinating. You almost forget that it's work for these people after you see the final product.


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