That Time William Goldman Almost Gave Up Trying to be a Writer

“I graduated from Oberlin College in fifty-two, did the Army for two years, then went to graduate school at Columbia University for two years. It was then the summer of 1956. I was twenty-four, and I’d always wanted to be a writer. I’d shown no signs of talent. I got the worst grades in class.”
—William Goldman
Shoptalk by Dennis Brown

Unpublished William Goldman was living in Chicago in 1956 and figured it was time to “fish or cut bait” on his dream of being a writer and wrote a short novel called The Temple of Gold. A guy he knew in the Army helped him connect with a editor at Knopf who said if he doubled the length they’d publish it and that’s how it went down. Goldman was 26 when it was published. If that hadn’t of happened he says the whole trajectory of his life would have been different.

“I would have never written anything more. Since I had shown no signs of talent, and since no one was saying, ‘Keep at it, Bill, you’ve really got the goods,’ if The Temple of Gold had not been taken, I never would have had the courage to inflict another novel on anybody. I know this is true.
—William Goldman

Goldman was said to write his second novel Your Turn to Curtsy, My Time to Bow in 7 to 10 days. The first movie made from a novel of his was Soldier in the Rain (1963). He wrote the screenplay for Harper (1966) starring Paul Newman and before his career was over he’d win two Academy Awards (All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid) as well as write the screenplays for Marathon Man, Misery, and The Princess Bride.

Aaron Sorkin called him the “dean of American screenwriters.” Goldman did okay for someone who’d shown no sign of talent.

Related Post:
The Dean of American Screenwriting—William Goldman (1931-2018
Writing Quote #64 (Bernard Malamud) “I felt the years go by without accomplishment…”

Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles

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‘WHAT IS THE SIMPLE EMOTIONAL JOURNEY?’—Screenwriter Billy Ray’s Mantra

“[When I was in my early 20s] my father told me to read a book called Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. . . . It was just so insightful about how screenwriting actually works. And I think I imitated Goldman’s style in a pretty thief kind of way. Reading his screenplays really taught me about making scripts readable. Making them feel kind of  breezy. Taking your reader inside the emotional experience of a movie.  That was a huge influence for me. . . .  On the computer monitor on which I’m seeing your face right now, in big block letter across the top, it says WHAT IS THE SIMPLE EMOTIONAL JOURNEY? That’s always the mantra for me. That‘s always the true north. Screenwriting is an intellectual exercise that’s designed to illicit and emotional response.”
—Oscar nominated screenwriter Billy Ray (Captain Phillips)
UCLA’s Story Break podcast interview with Simon Herbert and Chris Kyle

If you missed the movie Richard Jewell last year check it out. It was written by Billy Ray and directed by Clint Eastwood and for various reasons got lost in the shuffle and did not have a good box office run. But it is one finely crafted film including Paul Walter Hauser‘s performance in the lead role which was quite an emotional journey.

”The best advice I ever heard about screenwriting . . . ” —Billy Ray
Billy Ray’s Directing Advice 
Screenwriting Quote #162 (Billy Ray)
Information is the Death of Emotion — Christopher McQuarrie 
40 Days of Emotions 

Scott W. Smith 

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‘I suppose half of the screenplays I’ve written have actually seen production’—William Goldman

Statistically, in my own case, I suppose half of the screenplays I’ve written have actually seen production. And I am being dead honest when I tell you this: I have absolutely no more idea as to why some of them happened than why some of them didn’t. Of course it’s more than possible that my work wasn’t much good. But remember, executives are not necessarily in pursuit of quality.”
William Goldman
Adventures in the Screen Trade

Screenwriter Scott Frank (Minority Report, Get Shorty), in an interview with Brian Koppelman, said there was a five year period between 2007 and 2012 where “one script after another” that he spent up to a year and a half on that didn’t get made.  A process he found “agonizing” and said of those experiences, “It makes me feel that I’ve just wasted a year and a half of my life.” But part of the process that led Frank to get Oscar and Emmy nominations in 2018 for his work on Logan and Godless. 

Scott W. Smith

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The Dean of American Screenwriters—William Goldman (1931-2018)

“[William Goldman]was the dean of American screenwriters and still is.”
Aaron Sorkin (after learning of Goldman dying in November)
LA Times

Where were you in 1983? Some of you weren’t even born yet. But that’s when William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade came out. I was in film school in 1983 and had never lived in a house or apartment that had cable TV, had never used a personal computer, was still a year away from owning a VCR to rent VHS movies, and more than a decade away from using the Internet for the first time.

Yes, 1983 was a different world. Movies for a large number of people were still the chief form of entertainment. Like many Americans then, my high school and college years were full of weekly movie going. Often multiple movies in the same week. And I even remember once going to three different movies on the same day.

I remember movie lines that wrapped around the theater when ET came out in 1982.

Contrasts that with high school and college students today who tell me they rarely go to movie theaters, and when they do stream movies they do it in spirts (often in the background while playing video games).

So the movie-going experience has evolved greatly from the world that Goldman wrote about in 1983. But Adventures holds up well and it’s well worth your time to read, or re-read.

It’s the book that Aaron Sorkin read when he was learning to learn and write screenplays. The original book version included the screenplay for Goldman’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (back when you couldn’t just go to the Internet and find screenplays) which proved instructional to Sorkin because it was “an incredibly readable screenplay” (as opposed to the screenplays as just a blueprint idea of screenwriting).

“Bill wanted you to have the movie experience while writing screenplays. . . . So now when I’m writing a screenplay I want whoever is reading it, the studio, a director, an actor, I want to come as close to the experience that you’re going to feel in the theatre as possible, I want to put that on the page.“
Aaron Sorkin
TIFF Masterclass via Mentorless

Goldman later actually became a personal mentor to not only Sorkin, but others including Scott Frank, Tony Gilroy, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

If you’re just starting your screenwriting journey consider cutting through all the clutter out there a read Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade and his book Four Screenplays with Essays—which include his scripts for Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, and Misery.  

Then watch those movie versions as well.

That’s a pretty solid education from the dean of American screenwriting.

You’ll be learning from a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter who was born during the Great Depression, was enthralled by the classic movies of the 30s and 40s, who after college and a stint in the Army became a novelist in the 1950s, a screenwriter beginning in the 1960s, and when he’s screenwriting career slow in his fifties he became known for his non-fiction writing including Which Lie Did I Tell?, Hype & Glory, and The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood.  

William Goldman lived a full life of 85 years and lived to write about it, and be apart of Q&As at various film festivals in his closing years.

Scott W. Smith

 

 

 

 

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‘I don’t understand the creative process…’—William Goldman

The Princess Bride is the only novel of mine that I really like. And I don’t know how I did it . . . I don’t understand the creative process. Actually, I make more than a concerted effort to not understand it.”
William Goldman
Four Screenplays with Essays
Page 270

P.S. One of the things I enjoy discovering is how contradictory writers and artists can be. Here’s the flip side of Goldman’s quote;

“The whole thing is a mystery to me. It’s like I go to work and I sit around taking a nap and read a couple of books and curse myself for being a lazy swine. And at some point a work of some description shows up and I say how did that get there? . . . What I’m trying to do—I’ve written a lot of books [on acting and writing]—is understand a mysterious process. Try to get closer to a mysterious process.”
Screenwriter/playwright/novelist David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, The Verdict)
WTP with Marc Maron podcast interview

Related posts:
Where Do Ideas Come From? (A+B=C)
Creativity and Milking Cows
Frank Gehry on Creativity

Scott W. Smith

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The Best Character Introduction William Goldman Ever Came Across—and the Importance of Knowing the Sundance Kid Couldn’t Swim

Here are some of the first lines of dialogue in the screenplay and movie Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid:

BUTCH: What was the matter with that old bank this town used to have? It was beautiful?

GUARD: People kept robbing it.

BUTCH: That’s a small price to pay for beauty.

One of the great true [Butch] Cassidy stories was when he was young and in jail in Wyoming, I think it was, and he came up for parole and the Governor met with him and said, ‘I’ll parole you if you promise to go straight.’ And Butch thoght a moment and then said this: ‘I can’t do that.’ In the stunned silence he went on: ‘But I’ll make a deal with you—if you let me out, I promise to never work in Wyoming again.’

And the Governor took the deal, and Butch never robbed in Wyoming again.

Even today, that’s probably the best character intorduction I ever came across. When I was researching material, reading whatever I could find all those years, I knew this was how we would meet Butch. And that kind of building block is essential when you’re stumbling through material, trying to get a grip on the best way for you to tell this particular story. The entire Superposse chase, almost half an hour of screen time, was only writable for me because I knew the Sundance Kid couldn’t swim, something I’d read was true of a lot of western figures of that period. I don’t know how it is for others, but building up confidence is the single hardest battle I face every day of life.”
William Goldman, screenwriter of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid
Four Screenplays with Essays 
page 3

Scott W. Smith

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William Goldman on What Makes a Good Movie (According to Rosalind Russell)

“Let me tell you the super story that Cliff Robertson told me a dozen years ago, and I think I’m giving the credit properly. It was a story he had been told by Rosalind Russell. I think he met her during the filming of Picnic. She said, ‘Do you know what makes a good movie?’ And he answered something like, ‘I don’t know—good script, good actors, good cameraman, and good directors, etc., etc.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘ A couple of moments that people remember, that they can take with them, is what makes a good movie.’”
William Goldman (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride)
The Craft of the Screenwriter
Interview with John Brady
page 149

Note: I originally posted this quote in 2009 under the title Screenwriting Quote of the Day #118.

Scott W. Smith

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Getting a C Grade in Creative Writing on the Way to Winning Two Screenwriting Oscar Awards

I was eighteen and an aunt gave me a copy of Mixed Company, a book of his (Irwin Shaw) collected stories. I’d never read a word by him, never heard his name. But I remember the lead story in the book was The Girls in Their Summer Dresses. About a guy who looked at women.

Followed by The Eighty Yard Run… Well, The Eighty Yard Run is about a football player. Shit, I remember thinking, you can do that? You can write about stuff I care about?…At eighteen, I began writing stories. Not a whole lot of acclaim. I took a creative writing class at Oberlin.  Everyone took it because it was a gut course. I wanted a career. Everyone got A’s and B’s, I got the only C…. I have, somewhere, hundreds of rejection slips…My confidence is not building through these years. I hope you get that.”
Two-time Oscar Winning screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men)
The First Time I Got Paid for It, Writers’ Tales from the Hollywood Trenches edited by Peter Lefcourt and Laura J. Shapiro

 

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Don’t Waste Your Life (2.0)

“If there’s one thing I learned in prison it’s that money is not the prime commodity in our lives…time is.”
Gordon Gekko
2009 script Money Never Sleeps written by Alan Loeb

On this repost Saturday I’m going back to a 2008 post I wrote after a tornado hit Iowa. When a tragedy hits somewhere in the world or someone famous dies I think of this post. This week actor James Gandolfini (The Sopranos) died at age 51. My thought and prayers go out to the Gandolfini family. If there is a face to the positive change that hit television in the late 90s it is of Tony Soprano played by Gandolfini.

But Dang, 51 isn’t that old. Though that’s how old screenwriter/blogger Blake Snyder (Save the Cat) was when he died. Shane Black who I’ve been quoting all week is still very much alive at age 51. I happen to be 51. So that number did jump out at me when I heard the news.

Death is no respecter of age—or of persons. So this is just a reminder to have a life beyond your work and creative endeavors.

“Screenwriting is a huge part of my life. It’s my profession, it is my vocation. It has been so for nearly two decades now and hopefully for another decade still. It’s not the most important thing in my life by far. By far! You know, my wife, my kids, it’s not the be all, end all.”
Screenwriter Craig Mazin (Identity Thief)
Scriptnotes Ep. 87

Here’s the post that originally ran on May 31, 2008:

“When you drink from the well, remember the well-digger.”
Chinese proverb

Parkersburg, Iowa
©2008 Scott W. Smith

Last Sunday one of my partners at River Run Productions had 15 seconds to make it into his basement with his wife and dog before an EF 5 rated tornado ripped through his Parkersburg, Iowa home.

In less than a minute his house was gone and both cars totaled. But he, his wife and dog were safe. The storm killed seven people, destroyed over 200 homes, and damaged another 400.

Iowa is no stranger to tornadoes, but this one was the most powerful to hit the state in over 30 years. It’s one more reminder that things can change in a New York minute—or even an Iowa minute.

Friday I went to Parkersburg to shoot footage of the destruction and interviews for an insurance company.  I have been through a hurricane in Florida and a major earthquake in California and I have never personally seen the devastation that I saw as the result of that tornado.

From where I took the above photo, every direction I looked basically looked the same. It’s amazing that more people weren’t killed. Human beings tend to have short memories so this is one more thing to help remind us how fragile life is.

I’ve written a lot about writing on this blog but not much about keeping life in perspective with a creative career. The fact is most of us have difficulty balancing our lives.

I’ve collected some of my favorite quotes over the years that are a little random, but I hope there’s something in here that you can hang your hat on—or at least cause you to smile or reflect on your life and dreams. But mainly I want you to understand that whatever creative dreams you have there’s more to life than chasing that rainbow.

“My biggest disappointment so far is that having a career has not made me happy.”
Shane Black
(Quote after being paid $1.75 million for writing The Last Boy Scout and $4M for The Long Kiss Goodnight)

“It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy, even the normal ones are weird.”
William Goldman
Adventures in the Screen Trade                                                                  

 “I don’t dress until 5 p.m. I have a bathrobe that can stand…Yes, I am divorced. One writes because one literally couldn’t get another job or has no choice.”
Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind)

“I got into screenwriting for the best of all reasons: I got into it for self-therapy.”
Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver)

“For the first couple of years that I wrote screenplays, I was so nervous about what I was doing that I threw up before I began writing each morning. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s much better than reading what you’ve written at the end of the day and throwing up.”
Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct)

“I’m not very good at writing. If I succeed, it’s by fluke.”
Shane Black (Lethal Weapon)

“If you get rejected, you have to persist. Don’t give up. It was the best advice I ever got.”
Anna Hamilton Phelan (Mask)

“The myth about me is that I sold my first screenplay and it’s true. But I had also worked very hard as a fiction writer for ten years and that’s how I learned the craft of telling stories.”
Akiva Goldman (A Beautiful Mind)
He also has a masters in fiction from NYU

“I spent 18 years doing stand up comedy. Ten years learning, four years refining, and four years of wild success.” (It’s worth noting that Martin was on top when he walked away from stand up comedy and never performed as a comedian again.)
Steve Martin
Born Standing Up

“Starting in 2002, I knew for a fact that I had to get out of this business. It was too hard. It wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough, it was that it was too hard. What kept me in it was laziness and fear. It would be nice to say it was passion and I’m a struggling artist who didn’t give up on his craft. All of that sounds good, but the truth is it was laziness and fear.” 
Alan Loeb (Things We Lost in the Fire)

“Like the career of any athlete, an artist’s life will have its injuries. These go with the game. The trick is to survive them, to learn how to let yourself heal.”
 Julia Cameron
The Artist’s Way

Dee: “Jane, do you ever feel like you’re just this far from being completely hysterical 24 hours a day?”
Jane: “Half the people I know feel that way. The lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people are hysterical 24 hours a day.”
Exchange from Lawrence Kasden’s Grand Canyon

“We’re constantly buying crap we don’t need and devoting ourselves to endeavors which, perhaps on reflection, with a little bit of distance, would reveal themselves to be contrary to our own best interest.”
David Mamet      

“Everything in this town (L.A.) plays into the easy buttons that get pushed and take people off their path; greed, power, glamour, sex, fame.”
Ed Solomon (Men in Black)

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”
Stephen King

So life in general is hard, and being a writer or in the creative arts is a double helping of difficulty.

Several years ago Stephen King was hit by a van when he was on a walk. One leg was broken in nine places and his knee was reduced to “so many marbles in a sock,” his spine was chipped in eight places, four ribs were broken, and a laceration to his scalp required 30 stitches. It was as if his characters Annie Wilkes (Misery) and Cujo had ganged up on him.

But he had learned a thing or two about adversity after an earlier bout with drugs and alcohol that he eventually won. One of thing things he learned was to not to get a massive desk and put it in the center of the room like he did early in his career. That is, writing shouldn’t be the most important thing in your life.

“Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room.  Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
Stephen King
On Writing 

Two years ago I produced a DVD based on the book Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper. The concept was to shoot a Koyaanisqatsi-style video that that showed the arc of life from birth to death. I shot footage from New York City to Denver. I shot footage of a one day old baby in a hospital, people walking into an office building in Cleveland, snow failing in a cemetery and the like.  One of the shots for that video was in Parkersburg, Iowa.

It was a traditional Friday night high school football game at Aplington-Parkersburg High School. (What makes this school unique is though the town only has a population of 2,000 it currently has 4 active graduates playing in the NFL.)  That high school building is a total loss because of the tornado. Here’s a photo of the scoreboard sign that was blown down during the storm.

There will always be the storms of life. And as I’ve written before, movies can help us endure those storms and even inspire us. (“Throughout most of the Depression, Americans went assiduously, devotedly, almost compulsively, to the movies.”-Carlos Stevens) So work on your craft because we need great stories that give us a sense of direction, but don’t waste your life just writing screenplays.

Related Posts:

Don’t Waste Your Life (Part 2)

words & photos copyright ©2008  Scott W. Smith

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Shane Black’s Style

“[Shane Black] isn’t Hollywood’s most prolific writer — he only has a handful of credits, including the first Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Last Boy Scout— but for a time, he was its most highly paid, and the $4 million he earned for the 1996 action film The Long Kiss Goodnight is still a Hollywood record for a spec script. How did Black do it? Simple: He made reading his screenplays way too much fun.”
Kyle Buchanan
Why Iron Man 3 Director Shane Black Was Once Hollywood’s Hottest Screenwriter

“I recommend if you haven’t read it go back and read Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , the original screenplay by William Goldman who was sort of my mentor, my rabbi, along with James L. Brooks. There’s plenty to be found in these old writers especially Goldman. Walter Hill and William Goldman are two of my favorites and if you’re going to write screenplays, or if you already are and you want a boost or a shot in the arm—look at the structure, they way they’re written, the style of those two authors—Walter Hill and William Goldman— because between the two of them they account for the bulk of the stylistic stuff I do on the page as a writer.”
Writer/Director Shane Black speaking to students in Minneapolis in the above video

Here are a few examples pointed out in Kyle Buchanan’s Vulture article of Black’s writing style:

Joshua  and Riggs. Two soldiers. Their eyes lock. And you better hand on to your popcorn, boys and girls, because it’s about to get ugly.
Lethal Weapon

Dark. Depressing. Sprawl of furniture. Stack after stack of sports magazines. Drop all your belongings out of a plane. They will land like this.
The Last Boy Scout

The LEADER: a haggard-looking man sporting a soup stain on his tie, whoops, that’s the design, sorry.
The Long Kiss Goodnight

P.S. If you’ve never read William Goldman’s classic book Adventures in the Screen Trade make it your next read as it not only includes insights into screenwriting and the film industry, but his entire screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It’ll give you a better jolt than a can of Red Bull—and cost about the same amount. (You can find a used copy on Amazon for under three bucks.)

Related post:

Screenwriting Quote #118 (William Goldman)
William Goldman Stands Alone
Screenwriting Quote #65
Shane Black & Willie Mays (A word of warning on trying to copy Black’s style)
Meet Your First Audience (Tip #36)
Descriptive Writing (Frank Darabont)
Descriptive Writing (Stephen King)
Descriptive Writing—Part 1 (tip #22)

Scott W. Smith

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