Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

  I am not suggesting that you have to go like a streak when you're running for curtain. In Butch Cassidy, for instance, after they are shot and the Bolivian cavalry arrives, getting the cavalry into position takes sixty seconds. It could have been done in one: You could have seen the officer giving instructions (as you do) and then, instead of shot after shot of armed soldiers running up stairs, you could have just gone to the final shot when they're all in position; the same information would have been given.

  But not the emotion. Because since, in theory, we're rooting for the heroes to get away, the awesome number of troops ranged against them has an impact that has nothing to do with numbers.

  Endings, frankly, are a bitch.

  A proper ending for a film is one in which an expectation is fulfilled for the audience. But once they get a sense of it coming, often they're ahead of you. You don't have to rush. But you must never waste even a single shot--because I think the ending requires the most delicate and thoughtful writing of any part of a movie.

  Example of a misconceived ending: Excalibur.

  The movie is the story of the Arthurian legend, and Excalibur, of course, is this magical sword that Arthur possessed.

  Okay, we're into the closing minutes and Arthur is mortally wounded. He lies there bloody while a knight, Percival, drops beside him. Arthur says to take Excalibur and find a smooth stretch of water and pitch the sword into the water. Percival doesn't want to do it. Arthur says "Go."

  So Percival goes. And he rides and he finds some pretty lake or whatever and he rides into it and he takes Excalibur, brings it up to throw it--

  --but he can't bring himself to do it. We're in on Percival's face now and we see he's suffering. He's got his orders, but this, after all, is a magical sword. Finally, he turns his horse around and rides back to Arthur, still clutching the weapon.

  Arthur is still expiring. How'd it go? he asks. Percival says, I couldn't do it. Arthur says, well, you've got to, because someday, when a worthy king comes by, Excalibur will rise again from the waters for him. Back, Percival gets on his horse. Back to the pretty lake or whatever. He hesitates, finally does what he's been told to do, and the sword magically disappears beneath the surface. Now he goes back to Arthur a second time, only Arthur's dead and gone, drifting mystically out to sea in some boat. Credits start to roll.

  Why is that so terrible?

  Because that entire first trip of Percival, where he can't bring himself to follow orders, deflates the ending of the movie dreadfully. You sit there (I did, anyway) getting pissed at the flick just when you're supposed to be most deeply engrossed: My God, King Arthur is dying.

  And it was all so unnecessary. Percival could have made his objections and Arthur could have explained about some future king passing by and the sword rising for him, the first time. That extra ride to the water and back--and we're not talking about much more than a minute of screen time--was, for me, irritating and damaging.

  I think I can guess why it's there. Excalibur is a very valuable article, and even when his dying King gives an order, noble Percival can't follow it. In other words, the creators of the film were setting up the sword.

  But this is the end. If we haven't established after close to two hours that Excalibur is not your everyday weapon, we are in very big trouble.

  This identical sequence would have worked just fine at the beginning of the film. Because then Percival's disobedience would have told us something we didn't know: Excalibur is the most valuable sword in the world. But to tell us something we already know at the end of a film is deadly.

  Screen time is a most mysterious thing: The same scene must be written differently depending upon where it comes in the narrative, beginning or middle or end. Because the more information an audience has, the less additional information it requires. And the ladling out of when and where something is necessary is one of the requisite components to skillful storytelling.

  As has been said for years, it's possible to conceive narrative as an endless piece of string. The writer makes two snips, one for the beginning, one at the end, and the placement of those snips may be as important as anything a writer does.

  Narrative as I see it has nothing whatsoever to do with what you consider the story. We are moved by different things, interested in different aspects, confident in making different confrontations work. So we will cut the string in not remotely the same spots.

  It's usual to note that in a screenplay, not only do you attack each scene as late as is possible, you attack the entire story the same way. The camera tells you so much so quickly that you are always forced to get on with it.

  Jaws began with the shark snacking on the girl, but it didn't have to; 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't begin in the future but thousands of years in the past. You could have done the same with Jaws--shots of little one-cell sea creatures and then structures a little more complex and then the tiniest minnow and then a bigger minnow and then a small fish that shockingly bites a smaller fish and then to piranhas and then, all the time with the music building, maybe a barracuda and then a small shark, music very loud now, and then a bigger shark until--climax, crash of cymbals--Peter Benchley's monster comes roaring at us on the screen.

  Might have worked. Sure didn't hurt 2001.

  You must cut the narrative string yourself, with what you emotionally feel is sound. No one can tell you how or when. Because there are no rules.

  To try and validate that, let me end this discussion with another film directed by the man who directed North by Northwest, Mr. Hitchcock. More specifically, Psycho, my favorite of his work and a film that a film freak recently referred to as "the greatest splatter film."

  Two points about Psycho, one briefly dealing with screen time, and then on to its ending.

  My guess is, when that movie is mentioned, everyone first thinks of the shower scene. Janet Leigh and what happens to her. But when we say "the shower scene" we don't mean the lady adjusting the water temperature before she lathers up and we don't mean Tony Perkins doing his household chores later, getting the tub all nice and tidy again. We mean this: the knifing. I don't know if there are that many more famous sequences in modern films. The impact, the shock, all of it. From first stab to last, it runs seventeen seconds. To repeat: Screen time is most mysterious.

  Now to the ending. For me perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Psycho is this: I don't know of another major film that has as atrocious, as boring--as in all ways wrong--an ending.

  In the last reel, Janet Leigh's sister, Vera Miles, goes into the main house and she's in panic and alone and she runs just where we don't want her to run--into the basement.

  Now she's in a room down there and turns on a light revealing--sitting alone, her back to us--"Mother." She goes to the old lady, turns the chair (and I can still hear the audience scream), and in close up comes this chilling-in-the-deepest-sense shot of the skeleton with clothes on. Vera screams in terror, turns--and whammo, there's Tony Perkins in drag, the killing knife in his hands. More screams as he starts to attack, and then the hero, John Gavin, leaps into the room and the light bulb is swaying as he wrestles with Perkins and the music is blasting away and we have the fight intercut with Vera's hysteria and these shots of "Mother," her skull changing in front of us as the light bulb in the ceiling swings and swings. Fabulous.

  It's sure as hell a high spot, and I'm willing to bet it's the last thing most of us remember clearly, but it's not the ending.

  The ending is seven full minutes away.

  And five of those seven minutes are taken up with one of the great snooze scenes, where the local shrink comes in and delivers this agonizingly primitive course in Freud, where he tells us that Perkins is a nut-cake.

  Well, we've been pretty clued in to that fact by this time.

  I can only guess as to why that doesn't mar the movie; I think the high points are so extraordinary that we're more than satisfied, we'll forgive anything. When I saw the movie, in 1960, I remember the audience screamed so mu
ch during the basement sequence that they were almost relieved there was nothing more to jolt them--there was nervous laughter and chitchat from the basement till the end. Nobody listened to the psychiatrist.

  In any case, Psycho, for me, remains unique. The most important minutes of the film are totally soporific, and yet the film is still a glory. Amazing. Maybe Hitchcock is the only director who could have pulled it off.

  After all, he spent half a century getting away with murder....

  Speed

  I think screenplays should be written with as much speed as possible--and with even more deliberation.

  By "as much speed as possible" I don't mean to suggest you should throw a bag over its head and do it for Old Glory. But I do believe that you should push yourself hard and continually.

  What's important to decide here is your own specific pace. If, for example, when you're going well, you do one to two pages a day, when you write a screenplay, I would try and reach the second number. If you do seven to ten when you're rolling, try and get to ten.

  The reasoning (if you can call it that) is, I believe somehow, that extra energy translates itself to the page, and from there to the reader.

  Maybe it does, anyway. Maybe sometimes.

  As an example of the "deliberation" mentioned above, I'd like to talk briefly about the writing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  I first read about Butch and Sundance in the late 1950's, and the story of the two outlaws fascinated me. I began researching them in a haphazard way; there weren't many books about them then, but there were articles and I would seek them out and read them. The more I read, the deeper my fascination became.

  In 1963 I met a movie producer, Lawrence Turman (The Graduate), and talked to him about the material. He was tremendously helpful in trying to figure out a story line.

  Because as colorful as the material was, it had inherent problems. It covered a number of years, it moved from continent to continent. Terribly sprawling. Now, if you're writing an epic, you can sprawl to your heart's content, but this was no epic; rather, I thought it was a personal story of these two unusual outlaws.

  Eventually, I'd done all the research I could bear, I hoped I had a story that would prove coherent, so I sat down and wrote the first draft in 1966.

  It took four weeks.

  When someone asks how long it takes to write a screenplay, I'm never sure what to answer. Because I don't think four weeks is what it took to do Butch. For me, eight years is closer to the truth.

  In any case, before you begin, you must have everything clear in your head and you must be comfortable with the story you're trying to tell. Once you start writing, go like hell--

  --but don't fire till you're ready....

  Subtext

  You are standing on top of a hill with a snowball in your hand. You swing your arm back and let it go. If the snow is dry, the object that reaches the bottom of the hill will look very much like the object that left your hand. But if the snow is moist, if it's good packing, what reaches the bottom of the hill will have traveled the same path as when the snow was dry, but it will have accumulated size and weight.

  That accumulation brings us to the problem of subtext.

  This is going to be very brief, since subtext is worthy of many volumes of discussion. Probably no narrative work in any form of any quality can exist without it and, probably again, no narrative form can exist without it as easily as the screenplay. (Because the camera expresses so much of it for us.)

  What is subtext? Just what the word implies. The text is what's written on the page. Sub- means "under" or "beneath." Subtext, then, is not stated in the words, but it is the pulse beating beneath those words; it is the unexpressed subconscious life that brings size and weight to your writing.

  Three examples, the first from Raymond Chandler, in describing correctly, I think, decent movie writing.

  A man and his wife are riding silently upward in an elevator. They are silent, the woman carries her purse, the man has his hat on. The elevator stops at an intermediate floor. A pretty girl gets on. The man takes off his hat.

  This is not a scene about manners. It's about a marriage in trouble. The subtext tells us, with wonderful economy, a helluva lot about that married couple. If, for example, the couple's destination is a divorce lawyer, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Wherever they're heading, they're not giddily enchanted with each other. And if, a few pages on, they have a wild fight, the simple act of his removing his hat for the pretty girl would make a logical and movingly human trigger.

  The World According to Garp. More specifically, the scene where we first meet Robin Williams as the grown-up hero.

  Mary Beth Hurt is sitting on the grandstand of the college athletic field, studying. In front of the grandstand is the running track. Robin Williams appears on the right-hand side of the frame, runs to the left out of the frame. Pause. Now he reappears, running backward. Then he leaves the track and begins running up and down the bleachers, right next to where she's studying, and he says something like I hope I'm not bothering you, and she says something like no, not at all, and he keeps on going up and down as they get into what it is she's studying.

  This is a scene about neither athletics nor academics, it's about making love.

  All About Eve, the glorious central twenty-five-minute party sequence. (It's where Bette Davis utters the now famous line "Fasten your seat belts; It's going to be a bumpy night." It's also where Marilyn Monroe scored so heavily as an aspiring actress, "a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art.")

  The setup for the party is this: Davis is a great, flamboyant aging (she's just turned forty) Broadway star. She is in love with Gary Merrill, her director, who is in love with her. As well as being talented, he is also thirty-two. Merrill has been in Hollywood, directing his first film, but now, the night of his return, is his birthday.

  Davis is upstairs, dressed, her guests about to arrive. Thelma Ritter tells her that Merrill has already arrived and has been downstairs for twenty minutes, talking with Anne Baxter, Davis's secretary. Everybody loves Anne Baxter except Davis, whom Baxter is driving mad with her kindness.

  Davis goes downstairs, interrupts Baxter and Merrill. Baxter leaves them. They have a fight: Why didn't he come upstairs? He explains gently that Eve is fascinated with Hollywood and they were just talking. She doesn't buy. He gets angry.

  There are eight more scenes that follow in which a lot of narrative happens, important to the movie but not to this discussion. During the course of the party, Davis starts sober, gets increasingly drunk, and manages to insult everyone in the world near and dear to her.

  She behaves outrageously, but you don't hate her. Because the sequence isn't about how Merrill was late, and it isn't about Davis being jealous of Anne Baxter.

  It's about her terrifying fear of aging.

  And it's funny. And it's sad.

  You can categorize movies in infinite ways. One way that pertains here is this: There are three kinds of movies--

  (1) movies that aspire to quality and succeed

  (2) movies that aspire to quality and don't succeed

  (3) movies that never meant to be any good at all.

  The third group, alas, comprises the majority of commercial films. It's hard to define this kind of film, but try this: movies for which the original pulse was either totally or primarily financial. Rip-offs, spinoffs, sequels, etc. This is the sort of film that we want to avoid, but few of us are so lucky.

  And in this third group, subtext is not a word much bandied about. You don't fret a whole lot about subtext if you're writing Halloween VI or Conan the Barbarian.

  But if you, as a writer, aspire to quality, it must be alive under every page you've done. Look at what you've written: If all that's going on in your scenes is what's going on in your scenes, think about it a long time.

  Then repack your snowball....

  Protecting the Star

  Bogart.

  ... I won't play the
sap for you... you killed Miles and you're going over for it...

  ... I ain't sorry for you no more, you crazy, psalm-singing, skinny old maid...

  ... you gotta get up pretty early in the morning to outsmart Fred C. Dobbs...

  ... my health. I came to Casablanca for the waters...

  ... of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she had to walk into mine...

  ... if she can stand it, I can: Play it...

  ... we'll always have Paris...

  ... here's looking at you, kid....

  This is just a personal opinion, but I don't think any other star got to deliver as many memorable dialog lines as Bogart. With Gary Cooper we think "Yup." Gable got the famous "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Brando had "I could have been a contender," and Tracy--I can't come up with a single line to associate with that great actor.

  But perhaps no line in any Bogart picture is as germane to this discussion as a wonderful zinger from The Barefoot Contessa, a 1954 movie written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Bogart and Ava Gardner. Here's the line:

  ... what she's got, you couldn't spell, and what you've got, you used to have....

  I'll try and set up the situation where the line appears. Bogart is an on-his-uppers movie writer/director. He is given a job and, in Spain, discovers Ava Gardner. In the course of the first hour or so of the action, they do three movies together, all of them vastly successful, and Gardner becomes the leading sex symbol of the world.

  Nothing of a sexual nature ever happens between Bogart and Gardner because, when they meet, he is already in love with a script girl, whom he marries. The part of Bogart's wife is tiny, with no more than a few lines to speak in the entire film. Totally unimportant to the plot. (I suspect she only exists as a character because Mankiewicz wasn't interested in a Bogart-Gardner romance and the wife conveniently enabled him to ignore that problem.)