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

by William Goldman

  War is, to coin a phrase, hell.

  Saving Private Ryan, with its justly famous twenty-four-minute early battle sequence, its fine Homer-like Odyssey hour where Ryan is sought, becomes, once he is found, a disgrace. False in every conceivable way possible, including giving the lie to its great twenty-four minutes. That sequence told us war is hell, too. The last hour tells us that war can be a neat learning experience for little Matt Damon.

  In other words, Hollywood horseshit.

  I would like to explain what I mean by that phrase. I love Hollywood movies. I was brought up in the thirties and forties with Hollywood movies. I have spent half my life writing Hollywood movies.

  There are really two kinds of flicks--what we now call generic Hollywood movies, and what we now call Independent films.

  Hollywood films--and this is crucial to screenwriters--all have in common this: they want to tell us truths we already know or a falsehood we want to believe in.

  Hollywood films reinforce, reassure.

  Independent films, which used to be called "art" films, have a different agenda. They want to tell us things we don't want to know.

  Independent films unsettle.

  Understand, we are not talking here of art and commerce. Hollywood films can be, and often are, art. Independent films, most of them, for me anyway, are pretentious and boring.

  And yes, I know my definitions are simplistic. Hollywood films can unsettle, Independent films can reassure. But in general, for this discussion, let's go with them.

  One quick example to be mentioned here--Shakespeare in Love, art flick or Hollywood?

  I might be tempted to say, my God, it's Shakespeare, how can it not be an art film? Plus those costumes, Dame Judi, all the other British accents. If ever there was an art film, doesn't it have to be this baby?

  Not even close. Because what Shakespeare in Love tells us is that the love of a good woman makes everything wonderful. Well, I don't know about you, but I want to believe that. I want to have a shot at Gwyneth's sweet boobies, because I just know they can change the world.

  If only t'were so. How many hopeless drunks are out there not married to Lady Macbeths but to a good woman? How many fucked-up people are clinging to their sanity with a good woman right alongside, helpless?

  Listen, Bill Shakespeare and I both write for a living. And I have been blocked, too. Days when nothing happens, weeks when you just sit there, months when you storm around the city, cursing your lack of talent and your helplessness.

  And nobody's boobies are going to make God smile.

  We want to believe. Life would be just so much happier a place if only that were so. But alas, it's Hollywood horseshit. (Although I sure wanted to believe it when I was in the theater.)

  Does the fact of the two Hollywoods affect screenwriters? I have never waffled for you before and I sure won't start now--it does and it doesn't.

  It does not remotely affect how we tell our stories.

  It totally affects which stories we choose to tell.

  Famous cartoon from fifty years back. A couple are at the original run of Death of a Salesman. The man turns to the woman, here's what he says: "I'll get you for this!"

  The point is that most of us work all day, often at something we don't much love anymore but we do it till we drop. At the end of our average days, we want peace, we want relaxation, maybe a bite of food, a few kind words. We do not want to watch Willy Loman's suicide.

  What we are really dealing with when we talk of the two Hollywoods is audience size.

  Most people want to be told nice things. That we really are decent human beings, that God will smile on us, that there is true love and it is waiting for you, just around the next corner. That the meek really will inherit the earth.

  Most people want to be told nice things. I cannot repeat that too often to anyone who wants to screenwrite for a living. You can be Bergman if you have the talent, you can tell sad human stories--but do not expect Mr. Time Warner to give you $100 million to make your movie.

  The studios are in business for only one great and proper reason: to stay in business. If you want to tell a reassuring story, no reason not to shoot for a studio flick with all the, yes, good things that entails. If you want to tell a different story, write it wonderfully but write it small. Avoid car chases and star parts and special effects.

  Great careers are possible in Independent film. The Coens and John Sayles are as good as anybody operating anywhere.

  Join them. God knows we can use you.

  * * *

  III.

  Stories

  * * *

  * * *

  I get movie ideas all the time. Stories just appear, sometimes from the papers, sometimes from some distant blue when suddenly a couple of connectives happen and there it is: a movie.

  I am, alas, a totally instinctive writer, with--please believe this--next to no idea of what I'm doing. I do not think well, wish I did. That poetry section you read at the start of Part II ("Heffalumps!!!")--that's as deep as I get.

  But yes, I am a veritable wellspring of movie ideas.

  My friend John Kander, who laughed at me in short-story class? John has been a first-rank composer all his life. In the theater, no one has the melodic gift John Kander has. You have been humming him for decades, "All That Jazz," "New York, New York," "Cabaret," and on and on.

  You know how Kander comes up with those melodies? He wakes up every morning of the world with music playing inside his brain. Every waking moment. And when he is given a lyric to set, all he does is dip into the constant flow of music, and there it is, a song.

  Now the hitch is this, as Kander puts it: "Sometimes the most awful horrible music you ever heard is going on inside my head all day."

  Same with me and stories: occasionally one will pass muster, but mostly, the next day, not even close.

  You have already read the only two pieces of real material that seemed to me to be great and wondrous movie stories when I first came upon them, the Butch Cassidy saga and the tale of the killer lions I tried to make work in The Ghost and the Darkness.

  One leaped to the head of the class, the other kind of slowly made its way along, never quite getting there. Glorious stuff of lion violence, but like any special-effects flick, when you can't care about the story, not enough.

  I truly believe I did not tell that story as well as I should.

  This part of the book is about figuring out what movie stories are, and trying to tell them as well as they should be told.

  When I say ideas drop into my head, that's true. But only twice have they ever immediately become something. (That's in forty-five years plus of sitting here, a stat I always give young writers who wait around for inspiration.)

  In 1963 I was living on Eighty-sixth and York, had a writing space in a guy's apartment two blocks north. And an article in the Daily News said that up in Boston, where the Strangler case was the crime of the decade, a new theory was evolving: namely, that the murders might be the work of two different madmen.

  On the two short blocks' walk uptown that morning, No Way to Treat a Lady literally dropped into my head. Based on the premise that what if there were two stranglers, and what if one of them got jealous of the other. (This was changed in the movie totally, so I am not its biggest fan.)

  In 1982, I was on a water bus in Venice with Ilene. We were leaning over the railing looking out at the fabulous street that is the Grand Canal and, as we passed a couple of gondolas with silent gondoliers working the oars I turned to Ilene and said these words: "I know why the gondoliers don't sing."

  And then it was a mad rush trying to get off the vaporetto and back to the hotel so I could write down this story that had just suddenly appeared and I can still remember the race back because I knew if I didn't get it all down right then, it would leave me. The book, The Silent Gondoliers, written by S. Morgenstern, the great Florinese author of The Princess Bride, came out the following year.

  The story involved this n
ot even remotely handsome gondolier, who could make a gondola dance like no other gondolier in history, who loved music so much, but who, alas, was tone-deaf. He does everything to try and change his fate, but you can't do that, so finally he risks his life to save the Gondoliers' Church during the worst storm in the history of that great city.

  We are talking here a fable, but not the simplest-plotted one on the block, and where it came from I will never begin to understand. Or what would have happened if we hadn't taken the water bus. Or if the gondoliers we had passed had been singing.

  Suddenly in this case, connectives clicked in and two books were the result.

  I am at the mercy of connectives. By which I mean, I guess, narrative bits that hook together, taking us deeper into whatever story we're struggling with. When I said before I am totally instinctive, I was serious. I cannot logic my way into making these connectives happen. (I can do it with other writers' work, just not my own.) Sometimes I will get x bits into a story, then a connective hits and I am twice as far along, twice x, say--

  --and then it ends.

  I have written a couple of novel beginnings--a hundred pages here, more there, and ... nothing. And you change, time etches on us all, your pulses change and the story turns out to be ... nothing. Soon you wonder, what the hell was that supposed to be? And who were you then ... ?

  Okay. The first of the three crime stories. Printed exactly as I read it in the San Francisco Chronicle, April 26th, 1999. You'll have to squint, but I think you'll find it worth the effort.

  Story One: The Old Guy

  * * *

  Last of 'Rub-a-Dub-Dub' Fugitives Florida cops arrest robber who escaped from San Quentin 20 years ago in a kayak

  Bill Wallace, Chronicle Staff Writer

  * * *

  A 78-year-old career bank robber, who once tweaked San Quentin guards by escaping with two colleagues in a prison made kayak named "Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Marin Yacht Club," is in trouble again.

  Forrest Silva Tucker, a reputed member of the real "Over The Hill Gang" in Boston is in custody on suspicion of robbing a Florida bank and later leading Broward County sheriff's deputies on a car chase.

  In trying to avoid arrest Thursday. Tucker Allegedly led officers on a chase, blundered into an enclosed schoolyard and war captured after he lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a palm tree.

  Deputies said the chase ensued after Tucker, wanted for a bank robbery earlier that day in the town of Jupiter, was spotter visiting his girlfriend in Pompano Beach.

  "You don't normally think of a 78-year-old man having a girlfriend, but apparently he had quite a way with the ladies," said Kirk Englehardt, a spokesman for the Broward County Sheriff's Department.

  Tucker, a Miami native, may have that reputation in Florida, but he is best remembered in the Bay Area for engineering one of the most innovative escapes in San Quentin history.

  With two other inmates. Tucker, a former boatyard employee who had a smattering of knowledge about marine design and construction, built a crude kayak and painted the blue prison caps

  He and his accomplices wore a bright orange.

  On Aug. 9. 1979, Tucker and fellow inmates William McGirk and John Waller launched their boat from a partially hidden beach on prison grounds.

  Their flimsy craft, made of pieces of plastic sheeting, wood, duct tape and Formica, lasted just long enough for them to paddle several hundred yards to freedom right under the noses of several tower guards.

  At one point, as they paddled frantically to keep the boat afloat, a tower guard called out to see if they needed help form the Coast Guard.

  No problem, called back one of the kayakers: "My Times is still ticking."

  After the three turned up missing during the afternoon count, guards found the kayak beached beyond the prison walls. On one side was its name: "Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Marin Yacht Club." That side, the one facing the prison, had been painted bright blue: the other side was left unfinished.

  Within a matter of months, McGirk and Waller were back at San Quentin. They were tried twice for escape, but both times amused jurors refused to convict them.

  Tucker, meanwhile, remained free.

  The next time he surfaced was a few years later in a Boston credit scam. The judge hearing the case freed him on his own recognizance after chagrined Marin County prosecutors said they did not want to try him for the San Quentin escape Lost in the official correspondence between the two states was that Tucker still had years to serve on his original San Quentin sentence. Tucker walked out of the Boston court and never went back.

  Tucker's connections to the Bay Area go back to the early 1950s when he and a crime partner, Richard Bernard Bellew, were arrested for a half-dozen East Bay banks robberies.

  At the time of his arrest for the Bay Area robberies, Tucker already had a rap sheet going back to a 1936 bicycle theft. There were also two other convictions, including a Florida bust in which be had escaped from the jail ward of a South Dade County hospital by picking the lock on his leg irons.

  After being convicted for the East Bay holdups, Tucker was sent to Alcatraz to serve his term. During a medical visit to Los Angeles General Hospital in 1956, he escaped and managed to get as far as Bakersfield before he was captured by the California Highway Patrol.

  He was later transferred to San Quentin. Where he engineered his greatest escape.

  Over the next few years, Tucker was identified by law enforcement agencies as a member of a group of elderly criminals in Massachusetts called the "Over the Hill Gang," which robbed supermarkets in Boston and its suburbs. He was suspected in 17 armed robberies over the years, most recently in a series of bank robberies in the part of southeastern Florida known as the Gold Coast.

  Tucker's 20 years as a California fugitive came to an ignominious end against a palm tree last week. Deputies who searched the vehicle after the crash said they found burglary tools, weapons, police scanners and large amount of cash.

  He is scheduled for a court appearance later this week.

  (c)1999 San Francisco Chronicle Page A1

  Some pretty interesting stuff there, yes?

  I think so, anyway, which leads me to this, which seems like the most important of all questions: Is it a movie?

  The operative word in that sentence is "seems." "Is it a movie?" is not even remotely a valid question. Here is what you must remember: Anything can be a movie.

  I'm not being cute. If you believe in a story, if you believe you can make the story play and make it interesting, then yes, it can be a movie. The question that should be asked, must be asked, before you start out to make a movie is: Is it a movie I would like to write?

  Lots of positives and negatives here. Tucker, the "old guy" of this chapter's title, has a lot of appeal, at least he does for me. Before I get to specifics, I'm going to show you what I do when I'm interested in a piece of material. I reread it, and mark stuff that I find particularly interesting or usable. Just a line or a check in the margins. Remember, we may be starting on writing a movie here.

  What I want you to do now is this: go back and reread the article and make your own marks. Anything that you think might be appealing for a flick.

  Turn the page now and you'll see what I liked.

  * * *

  Last of 'Rub-a-Dub-Dub' Fugitives Florida cops arrest robber who escaped from San Quentin 20 years ago in a kayak

  Bill Wallace, Chronicle Staff Writer

  * * *

  A 78-year-old career bank robber, who once tweaked San Quentin guards by escaping with two colleagues in a prison-made kayak named "Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Marin Yacht Club," is in trouble again

  Forrest Silva Tucker, a reputed member of the real "Over The Hill Gang" in Boston, is in custody on suspicion of robbing a Florida bank and later leading Broward county sheriff's deputies on a car chase.

  In trying to avoid arrest Thursday, Tucker allegedly led officers on a chase, blundered into an enclosed schoolyard and was captured after he lost control of his vehicle
and crashed into a palm tree.

  Deputies said the chase ensued after Tucker, wanted for a bank robbery earlier that day in the town of Jupiter, was spotted visiting his girlfriend in Pompano Beach.

  "You don't normally think of a 78-year-old man having a girlfriend, but apparently he had quite a way with the ladies," said Kirk Englehardt, a spokesman for the Broward County Sheriff's Department.

  Tucker, a Miami native, may have that reputation in Florida but he is best remembered in the Bay Area for engineering one of the most innovative escapes in San Quentin history.

  With two other inmates. Tucker, a former boatyard employee who had a smattering of knowledge about marine design and construction, built a crude kayak and painted the blue prison caps he and his accomplices wore a bright orange.

  On Aug. 9. 1979, Tucker and fellow inmates William McGirk and John Waller launched their boat from a partially hidden beach on prison grounds.

  Their flimsy craft, made of pieces of plastic sheeting, wood, duct tape and Formica, lasted just long enough for them to paddle several hundred yards to freedom right under the noses of several tower guards.

  At one point, as they paddled frantically to keep the boat afloat, a tower guard called out to see if they needed help form the Coast Guard.

  No problem, called back one of the kayakers: "My Times is still ticking."

  After the three turned up missing during the afternoon count, guards found the kayak beached beyond the prison walls. On one side was its name: "Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Marin Yacht Club." That side, the one facing the prison, had been painted bright blue; the other side was left unfinished.

  Within a matter of months, McGirk and Waller were back at San Quentin. They were tried twice for escape, but both times amused jurors refused to convict them.

  Tucker, meanwhile, remained free.

  The next time he surfaced was a few years later in a Boston credit scam. The judge hearing the case freed him on his own recognizance after chagrined Marin County prosecutors said they did not want to try him for the San Quentin escape. Lost in the official correspondence between the two states was that Tucker still had years to serve on his original San Quentin sentence. Tucker walked out of the Boston court and never went back.