Read Which Lie Did I Tell? Online
Authors: William Goldman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Film & Video, #Nonfiction, #Performing Arts, #Retail
Which Lie Did I Tell? (31 page)
Take Littleton, an uncontested nightmare, but is it any more lunatic than the fact that several of the networks sent out press releases afterward proudly announcing their rise in ratings since they started covering the massacre?
What’s so awful about this is that people are taking the insanity for granted.
A news event like Littleton, well, of course, that must be written about. What is so terrible is that after the news has been given, after all the pictures shown, they keep on showing them again and again. OJ, Di, Monica. Katie flies out for the interviews and Diane sheds such tears and Reba flies out—first telling the world what she is doing—to sing “Amazing Grace” at the
second
funeral.
Hey, what about the dead kids, anybody give a shit about them?
And I assume you must be wondering, Why am I telling you all this? I guess the answer is, I wonder if it is affecting screenwriting. Is the second-rateness of the world right now going to drag us storytellers down?
The answer is, I don’t know, but I do know we have to try harder. It’s easier, as the audience dumbs down and expects less, to be satisfied with less than our best work.
I hope Towne is wrong in his feelings about our lack of shame. When I look at this great scene, when I feel the awful pain of the Dunaway character looking at Nicholson and saying, after the revelation, “My father and I, understand, or is it too tough for you?”
Or is it too tough for you?
Those words still echo inside me every time I watch the scene, and I go to my own life and wonder, could you have faced
this
? What would you do if
that
happened? My mind goes spinning away, visiting all kind of dark places we all have and hide.
And what about Marge? Where did she come from? And how wonderful that we have, at last, an American Sherlock Holmes, though ours is a woman. And pregnant. And kind.
Mr. Ziegler, referred to earlier, was once told that technology was going to change everything. He shook his head no. “I don’t care,” he began, “what you say. I don’t care if your fucking technology figures out a way to beam movies from the moon directly into our brains.” And here he paused a moment before finishing with this: “People are still going to have to tell stories.”
Hear, hear.
As I was walking out of my building yesterday, a doorman signaled for me to stop. I did. Then he opened the
New York Daily News,
indicated something for me to read.
It was a cartoon. It showed a man sitting at a computer. Ordinary nerdy writer-type guy with one unusual physical attribute: the top of his head was open and his brain was gone. On further inspection, he had taken his brain, stuck it in an ashtray. The caption was something like this:
How to be a successful screenwriter.
That was yesterday.
Today I am having morning coffee in a little place out on Long Island. I pick up a weekly newspaper, come awake reading an obit of Alan Pakula, who had a house in this area, was a true gentleman, and died in a freak car accident. Something fell off the vehicle ahead of him, and, as if aimed by Lucifer, came through his windshield and killed Pakula.
Okay. I am reading the article and I am thinking of the line I heard spoken by
Walter Payton, one of my heroes, and it is this:
Tomorrow is promised to no one.
(I managed to sneak that into
Absolute Power,
the Eastwood–
Ed Harris scene in the coffee shop. Made the scene for me.)
Okay, back with the obit, talking of the many achievements of Pakula’s career. (A lot of people don’t realize what a wonderful producer he was. You love
To Kill a Mockingbird
? If you don’t, seek help immediately. Well, Alan produced that.) Now the obit is coming to an end. Here is the last paragraph.
“Two such characters are present in what is likely to emerge over time as Pakula’s greatest triumph,
All the President’s Men.
Adapted from the Robert Woodward–Carl Bernstein account of their investigation into the Watergate break-in, Pakula’s movie has so many elements necessary in a first rate movie that it’s a virtual how- to manual. Into it, Pakula has packed a convoluted yet clear narrative, suspense, the grit of the best documentaries, mystery (the shadowy appearance of Deep Throat), sound and editing
finesse and colorful characters played—even in the smallest roles—by fine actors.”
Okay, working backwards now.
“colorful characters played—even in the smallest roles—by fine actors.”
Full marks to Pakula here. He not only had final say on who played what, he coaxed splendid work from all concerned. I don’t think Redford has topped it since. Robards won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Jack Warden,
John McMartin,
Martin Balsam, Hoffman remarkably unmannered. Super ensemble work.
“sound and editing finesse”
—That is a phrase written by someone who read it someplace and knows zip about movies. I have no idea what it means. Sound guys are off in their own world. But I would certainly credit Pakula with working with his editor to give terrific pace to what is essentially a talk piece.
“the grit of the best documentaries, mystery (the shadowy appearance of Deep Throat)”
—Sorry, that is
Gordon Willis you’re talking about here. Directors have little to do with the actual look of a flick. You say to your
cinematographer, “I want this to look like a Hopper painting,” and you pray he can do it. The
documentary look was always present in the Watergate material. Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy would have known it shouldn’t look like a
Doris Day musical.
And the Deep Throat appearances? All all
all
Gordon Willis, the prince of darkness among great cameramen. (An old joke was that Willis shot the only movie where you could not tell Paul Newman’s eyes were blue.) One of the Oscar winners from this flick said in his acceptance speech that the main reason the movie worked was Gordon Willis. If Pakula did anything, he knew enough to shut up and watch a master and go along for the ride.
“Into it, Pakula has packed a convoluted yet clear narrative, suspense”
—Total horseshit. That was from the book. Everything in the movie is from the book and there is a very
good reason for that—it
had
to be. There were a lot of powerful men from Nixon on down who were not presented back-lit and beautiful. Warner Brothers was terrified
of lawsuits, as they well should have been. It was a risky undertaking and the last thing they needed was to have the release delayed because of court dates. Woodward and Bernstein had not been sued for their book. Meaning, it was accurate. Now, as any lawyer will tell you, you can sue the Pope for bastardy. Doesn’t mean you’re going to win, but if you have the money in this great land of ours, nothing will stop you. And these powerful Nixonites sure could have sued the movie.
But since they didn’t sue the book, their case was woefully weakened.
As long as the movie stayed strictly with the book. Which it did.
So to credit Pakula for story or look is simply wrong. He was a hired gun, certainly not the guy the producer wanted, and he came into a finished situation.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear—Pakula did a splendid job directing this flick. I am not in any way criticizing his
directing
—I think it was outrageous he didn’t win the Oscar. (
Rocky
robbed the store that year.)
But to ever give a director credit for work he had nothing to do with is as damaging as not giving him credit for what he did do. I have written this before, but there are eight people that have to be at their best for a flick to reach its potential:
Actor
Cinematographer
Composer (if you don’t believe me, rent
Chariots of Fire
)
Director
Producer
Production Designer
Sound
Writer
If you like a movie, praise us all.
If I seem to be more personal in what follows, it’s for one reason:
because I remember.
I have no idea what the other writers went through in the course of their lives, leading to the production of the scenes you have now read; I don’t know where they were or who they thought they were, any of that stuff. And if I know about me, it’s because I couldn’t block out all that I wanted to.
I had no idea when I sat down to write it, but I have come to believe that the jump off the cliff in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
has turned out to be the most important scene of my life. I can argue that everything good that has come out of my relationship with Hollywood was because of this scene.
What
did I know when I wrote it? About screenwriting, really very little. The
first draft of
Butch
was done over the Christmas vacation of 1965–66, when I was, quite by accident, teaching creative writing
at Princeton University.
My then-wife Ilene and I moved to Princeton early in ’65, when our second daughter, Susanna, was about to be born. I remember, just as we were settling in, getting news of a start date for
Harper,
my first American film. (I had doctored
Masquerade
the year before.)
I think I may have done another screenplay around this time.
In the Spring the War Ended,
from the fine novel by
Richard Zinackis. A marvelous piece of material, and as current now as then—it was about American deserters in World War II, thousands of them, all of them hiding out in Brussels. Their nightmare was simply that when World War II ended, their own private war was about to begin—ignored while the cannons blasted, now they were targeted, and how were they going to survive, somehow get back home?
I wrote the screenplay and the producer liked it, gave it to a top director,
Martin Ritt, who climbed immediately onboard. But Fox, the studio that owned the material, buried the project because they needed all the Pentagon cooperation they could get, since they were about to enter production on
Patton.
I don’t remember if I swore off movies at the time, but I was more than a little frustrated, and very pissed. And certainly, for the time being, a novelist again.
The teaching came about this way.
We had moved, I had taken a room at an inn there where I planned to write. Then the writing professor came calling. Princeton had two in those days, the regular full-time guy, and a visiting guy.
It turned out it was the regular guy who contacted me, because he had suddenly gotten a shot at a year’s sabbatical and in order to accept it he had to find another writer immediately to replace him. And since I was right there in town, I was asked.
And I was thrilled. Every piece of nonfiction I’ve ever tried has had, at its basis, teaching. I always wondered how I would like the life of a professor. I talked it over with Ilene and we agreed there was no downside. The job would be seven or eight hours a week of teaching and seminars, and for the rest, I would get to work on a novel. I had not attempted anything in over two years, having been wiped out by
Boys and Girls Together.
(I had wanted to write a long novel. Dumbest thing I ever did.)
It was finished in ’63, published in ’64 to brutal reviews. I was on the verge of tears for a month. The good thing that came out of it was that I decided never again to let the fuckers get to me. I have not read a review of anything of mine in thirty-five years now, and never will, good or bad.
Aside: I don’t think that’s a terrible idea for us. If there is a critic you love—and I don’t care from what field—then you must read that critic, whether he is dealing with your work or anyone else’s. If you detest them, as you should, if you find them poor sad inept creatures, as they are, if you feel that not only are they failures as critics—which goes with the job—but worse, failures in life, then why on earth would you bother to read them? End of aside.
A word about my work habits. I was a total writing failure growing up. By which I mean I could never get anything published, not even when at Oberlin I was fiction editor of the literary magazine. There were three of us who decided what got printed, two brilliant young women and
moi,
one of them the poetry editor, one the overall boss. All work was submitted anonymously, and each issue I would take my latest glory
and stick it in with the other stories, and each time when the three of us met—I can still feel my heart pounding—oh God, I wanted someone here on earth to admit that I might, just might, please let me have just a fucking smidgen of talent.
“Well, we can’t publish
this
shit.” That’s what my two lady friends would say. Each issue. “Well, we can’t publish
this
shit.”
I took a creative writing course at Oberlin. I was the only one in it who wanted to write. Got the only C. Everyone else, B-pluses or A’s.
I remember my oldest friend on earth,
John Kander, of Kander and Ebb the songwriting team (
Chicago, Cabaret, New York, New York
) was in the class and the day before each assignment was due—and I would have spent hours and hours and hours on my stories, working all week on them—Kander would look at his watch and say he better get started on a story.
Get started on a story.
The fucker hadn’t even begun, hadn’t given it a thought. And each week when he got his A and I got my C, he couldn’t help it, he would fight it, he apologized for his behavior—but he would just get helpless with laughter.
I took an essay-writing course. The half-dozen most brilliant girls at Oberlin—no place has more brilliant girls than Oberlin—and I was the class idiot. (I am not making this shit up.)
The teacher, wonderful
Professor Roellinger, would always start with me. And these genius girls would sit there, nodding silently. Then Roellinger would say, “Who can help Bill out on this?”
And they would all raise their brilliant little hands.