Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

  I remember being shocked when this happened. Pissed, too. Finally a settlement was made, not even remotely a fair one. When you hire me, you are hiring my work and my time. Never happened since.

  The second memory is something I think I said. (I read in a magazine that I did, although I have no real recollection of it.)

  Chevy and Bodner tried to bring me back after the fiasco. For one final whack at the material. To write into the script what was so important to them. (Class, repeat after me: the loneliness of, riiiiight, invisibility.)

  They were both gentlemen and I listened. Then I got up, said this: "I'm sorry, but I'm too old and too rich to put up with this shit." And left.

  Wouldn't that be neat if it was me ... ?

  * * *

  Bill the Virgin This is the opening of the first movie I was ever hired to do, thirty-five-plus years ago. (The movie became Cliff Robertson's Oscar winner, Charley.) In other words, I am letting you read my very first words as a screenwriter. This is clearly one of the brave acts of my young life.

  It's pretty clunky stuff.

  The only sign of talent I can find is this: the scene appears nowhere in Daniel Keyes' glorious short story, "Flowers For Algernon," on which the whole enterprise is based. We knew it must have taken place, but we don't see it or talk about it.

  When I was fired immediately after turning in the screenplay, I remember feeling so failed, wanted desperately to have another chance. Looking back now, I couldn't have asked for a better introduction to the screen trade.

  * * *

  GOOD OLD CHARLEY GORDON

  First Draft Screenplay by:

  April, 1964 William Goldman

  Based on the short story

  Flowers For Algernon

  By Daniel Keyes

  FADE IN ON:

  A MACHINE.

  This particular machine is the most modern and up-to-date model yet manufactured for the use of anesthetists. It has gauges and tubes and a black, bladder-like bag with which an anesthetist can control a patient's breathing, and it has tanks of gas labeled Nitrous Oxide and Oxygen and Cyclopropane. This machine, in other words, is an anesthetist's dream of heaven and it would only be used in operations of major import.

  CUT TO:

  A surgeon's face. (It is DOCTOR STRAUSS.) Now it is clear that we are in an operating room and that an operation is very much in progress. And now the camera begins to move.

  A SLOW CIRCULAR SHOT begins, taking in all the people around the operating table. They are deadly serious and terribly concerned. Among the people we pass are:

  ANOTHER DOCTOR (this is DOCTOR NEMUR), TWO SCRUB NURSES, then a CIRCULATING NURSE, another CIRCULATING NURSE, then one ANESTHETIST, then another ANESTHETIST and then finally, we are back on the face of the SURGEON. He pauses, closes his eyes while a gloved hand dabs the perspiration from his forehead. Turning, the glances at the operating room door, or more specifically, at the round window in the center of the door.

  CUT TO:

  The window. Behind it, staring through the glass, is MISS KINNIAN. As it registers on her face that DR. STRAUSS is watching her, she nervously tries for a smile, doesn't quite make it, then holds up two fingers and crosses them slowly, as a child might.

  CUT TO:

  DR. STRAUSS. He nods, turns back to operation, very, very serious. And so is everyone in the room, very, very serious. Everything suggests an operation of major import.

  CUT TO:

  Long shot that takes in all the people, the nurses, the anesthetists, the doctors. Everyone is seen but the patient.

  A drum begins.

  Slowly, with an awesome steadiness, the camera starts to move in closer to the operating table.

  The drum beats louder.

  A nurse scurries around the table.

  Louder on the drum; louder, but no faster.

  DR. STRAUSS is perspiring heavily and again a gloved hand dabs at his skin.

  Relentlessly, the camera moves on, wedging in between the shoulders of two nurses.

  We still do not see the patient.

  Slowly the camera tilts up, up toward the great circular light high above the operating table. For a moment, the light is almost blinding.

  The drum stops.

  The camera swoops down to the table, revealing that the patient is ALGERNON.

  ALGERNON is a white mouse.

  A VERY FAST FADE-OUT.

  C

  R

  E

  D

  I

  T

  S

  The Princess Bride

  [1987]

  * * *

  Here is how the novel The Princess Bride happened.

  I loved telling stories to my daughters. When they were small, I would go into their room and stories would just be there. Anyone who knows me knows that I don't think much of what I do is very terrific, but, my God, I was wonderful those early evenings. Stuff just came. I knew that because the girls would sneak out and tell their mother and she would say to me, "Write it down, write it down," and I told her I didn't need to, I was on such a hot streak I knew I'd remember.

  All gone, of course, and of all the stuff I've done over almost forty-five years of storytelling, more than anything I wish I had those moments back. Doesn't matter, really. Woulda shoulda coulda ... At any rate, I was on my way to Magic Town around 1970, and I said to them both, to Jenny, then seven, and Susanna, then four, "I'll write you a story, what do you most want it to be about?" And one of them said "princesses" and the other one said "brides."

  "Then that will be the title," I told them. And so it has remained.

  The first snippets are gone. A couple of pages maybe, maybe a little more, sent from the Beverly Hills Hotel to home. Since it was to be a kid's saga, the early names were silly names: Buttercup, Humperdinck. I'm sure those pages weren't much. I have never been able to write in Southern California. (My fault, of course. I find it just too, well, wunderful. There was a time, before the recent madness, when people actually thought of L.A. as being that, wunderful.

  Wandering now, I suppose nothing surprises me more than Los Angeles's becoming a place people leave. For the first half-century of my life, it was, he says in as cornball a way as he can muster, the American dream. Walls closing in? Just drive to the western ocean, you'll be fine. For me, abrasiveness helps, so I have always written in New York.

  Anyway, the early pages disappeared. As did the notion of writing something for my ladies. At least consciously. (I don't understand the creative process. Actually, I make more than a concerted effort not to understand it. I don't know what it is or how it works but I am terrified that one green morning it will decide to not work anymore, so I have always given it as wide a bypass as possible.)

  There is a story of Olivier after a particularly remarkable performance of Othello. Maggie Smith, his Desdemona, knocked on his dressing room door as she was on her way out of the theater and saw him staring at the wall, holding a tumbler of whiskey. She told him his work that night was magic. And he said, in, I suspect, tears and despair, "I know it was ... and I don't know how I did it."

  This relates to me in but one way: The Princess Bride is the only novel of mine I really like. And I don't know how I did it.

  I remember doing the first chapter about how Buttercup became the most beautiful woman in the world. And the second chapter, which is a rather unflattering intro of Prince Humperdinck, the animal killer in his Zoo of Death.

  But then I went dry.

  The nightmare of all of us who put words on paper. I stormed around the city, wild with ineptitude, because, you see, all these moments had already happened in my head--the sword fight on the Cliffs of Insanity, for example; Inigo and his quest for the six-fingered man, for example; Fezzik and his rhymes--but I didn't know how to get to them, had no way to string them together. And I could feel the window of creativity starting to close. We move on, we move on, it's okay, we'll find other stories left to tell ...

  But I didn't wan
t to tell other stories, I wanted to tell this one. And I couldn't find a way. I suppose the most desperate I have ever been was when I was twenty-four and done with grad school and done with the army and about to become an accursed copywriter in some ad agency in Chicago when I wrote my first novel, The Temple of Gold, in three weeks. It was a couple of hundred pages long and I had never written anything more than thirty and I remember thinking, when I was on this page or this page or this page, "I don't know where I am, all I know is I've never been here before." But the book got published and suddenly I was what I always dreamt of but never thought I'd be, a writer.

  Then I got the idea of the "good parts," that the whole Princess Bride story would be an abridgement of another, longer, book.

  That made the novel possible. My book would be an abridgment of an earlier book, written by S. Morgenstern. Morgenstern's book would be one my father had had read to him by his father when he was sick (in the movie it's the grandfather reading it to me) and from which my father read me only the good parts because he didn't want to bore me.

  Which meant I could jump wherever I wanted. I was free. So I did the opening chapter which explains how I got sick and my father started reading to me--

  --and then I started to fly.

  For the only time, I was happy with what I was doing. You can't know what that means if, most of your life, you haven't been stuck in your pit, locked forever with your own limitations, unable to tap the wonderful stuff that lurks there in your head but flattens out whenever it comes near paper.

  The most startling creative moment of my life happened here. I remember going to my office and Westley was in the Zoo of Death (the Pit of Despair in the movie--budgetary reasons), and he was being tormented by the evil Count Rugen, who got his Ph.D. in pain (or would have, but doctorates didn't exist then, this was after education but before educators realized the real money was in diplomas). Westley is strapped in The Machine and Prince Humperdinck roars down and turns it all the way up and Inigo and Fezzik are on the way to the rescue when the Deathscream begins and they track it and as I was going to work that morning I kind of wondered how I was going to get Westley out of it. I sat at my desk and had coffee and read the papers and fiddled a while. Then I realized, I wasn't going to get him out of it. And I wrote these words: Westley lay dead by The Machine.

  I think I must have looked at them for a long time. Westley lay dead by The Machine. He was perfect and beautiful but it hadn't made him conceited. He understood suffering and was no stranger to love or pain, yet the words were still there.

  Westley lay dead by The Machine ...

  You killed him, I thought. You killed Westley. How could you do such a thing? I stared at the words, and I stared at the words some more, and then I lost it, began to cry. I was alone, you see, no one could help me get out of where I was and I was helpless. Even now, more than twenty years after, I can still truly feel the shocking heat of my tears. I pushed away from my desk, made it to the bathroom and ran water on my face. I looked up and there in the mirror this red-faced and wracked person was staring back at me, wondering who in the world were we and how were we going to survive?

  I tell you this because I guess I want you to know that although I don't think it is a good life, writing, not insofar as having relationships with other people, having loves, all that emotional stuff we all long for, or say we long for, still, there are worthwhile times. And if you were to ask me the high point of my creative life, I would say it was that day when Westley and I were joined.

  The rest of the book went the way it's supposed to but never does. Hiram Haydn, my editor, loved it, but more than that, I loved it. After it was done I got very sick, was hospitalized, thought I was going to die.

  Here is how the movie The Princess Bride happened.

  The Greenlight Guy at Fox liked the book. (Note: those Premiere 100 types Out There have all these different titles. Vice President in charge of this, Executive in charge of that, on and on. All salad. In movies, there is but one power, that of being able to greenlight a picture. Each studio has a grand total of one greenlighter. Understand, most of us alive in the Continental United States can greenlight a picture. Of course, a movie can cost five thousand dollars. That is an affordable sum for a lot of us to be, at least for a little while, a mogul. Now, what kind of picture will you get? You will not have car crashes. You will not enjoy the services of Mr. Schwarzenegger. It may not be what sets hearts aflutter on Saturday night in Westwood. But, if you can purchase enough film stock, it will be a movie. That's our movie. At each major studio there is a guy who can greenlight any movie, and today, "any movie" can mean up to $100 million. Those other executives at that studio, regardless of their titles, they are only oil slicks.

  As I was saying, the Greenlight Guy at Fox liked the book.

  I was in.

  Problem: he was not remotely sure if it was a movie. So an odd deal was struck. They would buy the book and I would write a screenplay but they would not buy that unless they decided to make the movie. In other words, we each had half of the pie.

  I wrote the screenplay. The GG at Fox liked it but wasn't 100 percent convinced yet that it was a movie. So he sent me to London to meet with Richard Lester, who was just coming off a considerable success with The Three Musketeers. Lester, most famous for the Beatles pictures, is a brilliant man, a Philadelphian who lives in England.

  We met, he had some suggestions, I did them, he liked what I did, but better than that, the only man of true import in the whole matter, the GG at Fox, liked what I did.

  Home and dry.

  Except: the GG at Fox was fired.

  Here is what happens when that happens. The old GG is stripped of his epaulets and his ability to get into Morton's on Monday nights, and off he goes, rich--he had a deal in place for when this happened--but humiliated.

  The new GG takes command with but one rule writ boldly in stone: nothing his predecessor had in motion must ever get made. Why? Say it gets made. Say it's a hit. Who gets the credit? The old GG. So when the new GG, who can now get into Morton's on Mondays, has to run the gauntlet there, he knows all his peers are sniggering, "That asshole, it wasn't his picture."

  Death.

  So The Princess Bride was buried, conceivably forever.

  Of course, I was upset by this, but I was too frantic to give it the weight it deserved. Because there had been a reaction to my sickness, and it was that I realized I was forty-two years old, had zero money in the bank, and a wife and two kids I had to provide for. So I provided. Movies and books and rewrites of books and endless rewrites of movies, and it was all honorable work, I wasn't throwing a bag over my head and doing it for Old Glory. I cared. (There are no rules to writing, but if there were, caring would be up there. Or, as we intellectuals are fond of saying, you had better give a shit.)

  But none of it meant to me what The Princess Bride did. And I finally realized that I had let control of it go. Fox had the book. So what if I had the screenplay, they could commission another. They could change anything they wanted. So I did something of which I am genuinely proud. I bought the book back from the studio, with my own money. I think they were suspicious that I had a deal or some plan. I didn't. I just didn't want some idiot destroying what I had come to realize was the best thing I would ever write.

  After a good bit of negotiating, it was again mine. I was the only idiot who could destroy it now.

  I read recently about the fine Jack Finney novel Time and Again, which has taken close to twenty years and still hasn't made it to the screen. The Princess Bride didn't take that long, but not a lot less either. I didn't keep notes, so this is from memory. Understand, in order for someone to make a movie, they need two things: passion and money. A lot of people, it turned out, loved The Princess Bride. I know of at least two different GGs who loved it. Who shook hands with me on the deal. Who wanted to make it more than any other movie.

  Who each got fired the weekend before they were going to set things in motion. Be
lieve this: one studio (a small one) closed the weekend before they were going to set things in motion. The screenplay began to get a certain reputation--one article listed it among the best that had never been shot.

  The truth is that, after a decade and more, I was always waiting for the other shoe to come clunking down, and it always did. But events that had been put in motion a decade before eventually would be my salvation.

  When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was done, I took myself out of the movie business for a while. (We are back in the late '60s now.) I wanted to try something I had never done: nonfiction. I got a very silly idea from listening to some very disturbed acquaintances talking of the pluses and minuses of their respective mental institutions. "The Hatches" was what I decided to write--a magazine-length piece based on the premise that mental institutions might send out brochures as if they were colleges and universities. "Our Manic-Depressive Department is known worldwide." I decided to visit them and talk about the entrance requirements, class size, size of student body, quality of food, like that. I realized before I had gone much further that the piece was dead if Meninger's didn't cooperate. I dropped the idea. I have never liked being at anyone's mercy.

  I fiddled for a while, wondering what I could investigate where I knew someone would always talk. I decided on Broadway. I had been a failed playwright already, had three plays on by the time I was thirty, hated it--it was just too brutal. Unlike a movie or a novel, where there is often a year between when you finish and when the public is allowed in, on Broadway it's immediate--you are often still rewriting as Opening Night comes thundering down. Your scar tissue never gets a chance to heal. Agony.

  So I knew a lot about the theater, had a lot of friends and acquaintances who worked that side of the street, had done my graduate work in theater. Plus, the theatrical world is so filled with envy, hatred, and bile, I knew someone would always tell me what was going on. If the producer or writer wouldn't talk to me, well, I could get to stage managers.