Screenwriter meets "novelist": William Goldman with James Caan.
Posted on 11/19/2018 6:57:53 AM PST by Rummyfan
William Goldman liked to call himself a "storyteller", and he told them in almost every form: he wrote films and plays and musicals and novels and children's books and non-fiction; he wrote a very good insider's view of Hollywood (Adventures in the Screen Trade) and an even better one of Broadway (The Season). He was not equally partial to all these outlets. Goldman would have liked to have been a "great novelist", but seemed to intuit early on that it was not for him. He told me long ago in London, during a West End season that was an embarrassment of riches, that he steered clear of theatre because he strongly disliked theatre people - which is one reason his Broadway book is a better read than his Hollywood book. In return, theatre people disliked him back - for example, Adam Guettel, composer and lyricist of a planned Broadway version of The Princess Bride, quit the project a decade or so back after Goldman demanded 75 per cent of the authors' royalties for himself.
So he wrote films, and there must surely be few people in the western world who haven't seen one of them - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Stepford Wives, Marathon Man, All the President's Men, Misery... Over eighty years ago, MGM's peerless producer Irving Thalberg observed that "the most important person in the motion picture process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from realizing it." So Hollywood invited writer jokes: Did you hear about the actress who was so dumb she slept with the writer? And so on and so forth. "Screenwriting is what feminists call 'sh*t-work'," said Bill Goldman. "If it's well done, it's ignored. If it's badly done, people call attention to it."
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Screenwriter meets "novelist": William Goldman with James Caan.
Ah. He’s short. Caan is short.
Even more important, The Princess Bride.
ping
He was a great screenwriter. Loved his books too. Very frank about the games played in filmdom.
“No one in Hollywood knows ANYTHING...” - William Goldman
The Princess Bride ...saw it once and it was was boring. Though Robin Wright was such a beauty and cutie back then. Sean Penn was a very bad choice of mate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=d_fUCuUGGUY
William Goldman interview (1997) with Charlie Rose
Note: this topic is from . Thanks Rummyfan.
Butch wrote some unknown number of letters to people back in the states. Of those which are known to have survived, not even one postdates the shootout in Bolivia on November 7, 1908. That's not a coincidence. He had a lookalike brother who (like the rest of the family) amounted to nothing, who in later years visited old friends he and "Butch" had had in common in their youth, and passed himself off as Butch.
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