Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

  If you're in the movie business, you try to pay as much attention as you can to audience reaction; you try to read it. And as I sat there, surprised at what was going on around me--I'd seen the picture, remember, with a few people, and the credits were just that, credits--I wondered what it was the audience was reacting to. It sure wasn't any zippy dialog of mine, because there was no talk at all.

  Then, when he looked at the filled coffee cup, the sound seemed to be peaking. But it wasn't. For when he finally took that first swallow and practically gagged, the theatre exploded.

  I still just sat, listening to the people. The appreciative laughter continued practically till he drove up to the mansion. And once the plot began, everything played at a much higher level than I'd imagined possible when I first saw the movie at the screening.

  Why?

  Obviously, I can't be sure of the answer. The audience certainly knew a lot more about him than the way the movie originally opened. They knew he lived alone, in a pit of an office. They knew he went to sleep with the tv for company. They knew he didn't sleep well, not when he's up before the alarm. They knew there was a woman, because of the photograph, they knew he felt something for her from the way he saluted her, they knew she wasn't with him, he was very much alone. And they knew a lot more, too--yes, he was a detective, not a successful one, and he carried a gun, so he didn't seem like someone to take lightly. The battered car told a lot about him.

  But mainly it was that business with the coffee.

  Whenever anyone talked about Harper to me in the weeks that followed, that was the moment they remembered--drinking that horrible stuff. (Just like the jump off the cliff is what people always mention first in Butch.) And the laugh that went along with it, that was a laugh of affection.

  In a detective story of this type--The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep--all you really have going for you is your main man: You see everything, the whole world, through his eyes, he keeps you company every step of the way. And if you don't like being with Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, not all the plot skill in the world is going to make it a happy journey. If you are turned off by your host, forget it, it's over. And what the coffee moment really turned out to be was an invitation that the audience gladly accepted: They liked Lew Harper.

  From that moment forward, the script was on rails.

  Four brief memories from that Warner Bros. film.

  First: I was called to California for the start of shooting. And before we began on that opening day, Jack Warner himself visited the set.

  He was the last of the titans, of the legendary studio heads who ran things in the so-called golden age of film; the Mayers and the Thalbergs had long since gone. I had heard stories about them all, not many flattering. They were brutal men, gut fighters, etc., etc.

  Mr. Warner, when he appeared that day, was immaculately dressed. He had an aide with him, and the purpose of his visit was simply to wish everybody luck. He shook hands with Newman and with Jack Smight, the director, both of whom he knew. Then he said hello to a bunch of the rest of us, his aide preceding him, telling him who we were and what our names were. It was all over quickly, a final wave and he and his aide were gone.

  Shooting started.

  Hours later, alone, I was wandering around the lot. I'd never been on a Hollywood film studio before and when I came to the Western street, lined on both sides with false fronts of saloons and general stores and all the rest, I was in hog heaven. I love Westerns, and Warners' had made a bunch of them, and I looked around and around, lost in memory, trying to remember which store front I might have seen in which movie. I have no idea how long I stood there by myself, but eventually I realized I wasn't by myself anymore.

  Mr. Warner, also alone, was standing down the street, staring at me. I didn't know if I should be there or not, I didn't know if I'd committed some gaffe that would irritate the man, I didn't know anything except I fell like a ten-year-old getting caught in the wrong place by the school principal.

  He looked at me for a long moment before he kind of shook his head and smiled and said, "Goldman, what the hell are you doing here?"

  I was relieved he wasn't angry and we talked for a few minutes, maybe about the street, maybe about the old days, maybe about a million things. The truth is, I don't remember a single word of what was said.

  I was simply stunned that he'd remembered my name....

  Second: Late in the movie, Robert Wagner is revealed as one of the villains. Newman, as the detective, forces the revelation. Wagner, boyish and innocent-seeming, is supposedly involved with the film's ingenue, but Newman suspects that instead his real love is an aging drug-addict singer. Newman accuses Wagner of being less than he should be; Wagner, convincingly, pleads his case. Newman seems to believe him, Wagner is relieved. Then Newman goes on to say how happy he is that Wagner is innocent, because the drug-addict singer is slime. And then Newman launches into this long speech about just how loathsome and despicable she is, and the speech goes on and on, insult following insult until Wagner can't take it anymore, his true love is being sullied, and to make Newman shut up, he pulls a gun.

  Okay, they shoot the master shot.

  Now it's time for Wagner's close-up. The camera is on him, and all Newman has to do is stand out of range with the script in his hands and read his string of insults. The camera rolls, Newman reads, and suddenly, as actors say, Wagner fills the moment--

  --on camera, in close up, Robert Wagner starts to cry. This is, let me tell you, a bonus. And it's genuinely exciting.

  And no one is more excited than Newman. In fact, he's so excited at what's happening with Wagner that Newman begins fucking up his lines. All he has to do is stand there and read and he can't get the goddam words out right.

  It didn't matter, thankfully. They got the shot. Wagner was so deep into what he was doing that the crying continued. After the shot was finished, everyone ran to Wagner and milled around, congratulating him; it was that thrilling.

  Wagner said a moment like that had never happened to him before. And he also added one more thing: It was the first time in his experience that a major star had actually stayed around and stood there off camera, reading the lines with him, acting along, as it were. Usually, when the star is done with his shot, it's off to the dressing room, and the remaining performer gets to act with the script girl reading the star's lines. Script girls are very important on the set, they work like hell--but they are also noted for a certain woodenness when it comes to reciting dialog. No question that Newman's presence helped Wagner fill the moment.

  And if you ever see the movie, the moment's right there. That's not glycerine on Wagner's face as he pulls the trigger. Those were very real tears....

  Third: There are some stars of whom you just never hear anything bad. Newman and Lemmon and Heston and Peck, of their generation.

  And Wagner, maybe one generation down, is another. Still another is--or sadly, was--Natalie Wood. Wagner and Wood had been married, but by the time of Harper they were divorced and going very separate ways.

  One afternoon, when he wasn't needed, Wagner wandered off the set and I went along. Nearby, on another sound stage, Inside Daisy Clover was shooting, starring Natalie Wood. Wagner went in and I followed, watching as, far away at the very front, she was doing a take of a musical number.

  I continued to watch. Wagner did, too, climbing several steps up a ladder. There were several takes and then she was released, and I don't know if it was accident, design, whatever, but when she left the set to go to her dressing room she passed by the ladder and the following dialog took place.

  WAGNER

  (from above)

  Hi.

  WOOD

  (stopping, looking up)

  Oh. Hi.

  WAGNER

  That looked good.

  WOOD

  You think?

  WAGNER

  I do. Yeah.

  WOOD

  Hope so.

  (little smile, starting off)

&
nbsp; Bye.

  WAGNER

  (watching after her)

  Bye.

  I stood there like a gnome watching him watch her, and they were, of course, very famous faces to me; I'd read about their courtship and their marriage and their troubles and divorce, and certainly that was not very telling dialog.

  But the subtext sure let you know a lot.

  Their subsequent remarriage pleased a lot of people, just as her obscene drowning sent a lot of people into shock. From all I could gather, they were as well liked as any in the Hollywood community.

  There are a lot of dreadful jokes about movie funerals, the most famous, I guess, dealing with Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia and perhaps the leading ogre of his era. At the services, someone expressed surprise at the number of people present, to which the reply came, "Give the public what they want and they'll turn out."

  No jokes surrounded Natalie Wood. I suspect few deaths in recent years have upset so many. Thirty years a star and a lady every year.

  Remarkable....

  Fourth and final memory: The screening of Harper that I previously referred to was another learning experience for a screenwriter. My wife, Ilene, and I were living in Princeton at the time and we drove in for it. I was, obviously, excited. My very first real movie. Masquerade had come out, but that wasn't mine, not like Harper was.

  (I don't attend screenings if I can avoid them, by the way. I suppose I average one every two years. I don't think they're helpful--sneaks, yes, enormously, but not screenings. You sit there with a few other people, all of them in the business, and no one's a real audience. George Abbott, the legendary Broadway director, once said, "You can't tell anything about what you've got until there are hot bodies out front." By "hot bodies" he meant people who paid their money to see the show. Theirs was the reaction that meant something.

  And I think movies would be better if more company executives sat there with the people. Some do, but most don't. They leave their offices and walk into a small room and tell the camera operator via intercom that they're ready and then the movie rolls and often they talk through what's going on up there and when it's over they're quickly back in their offices. For me, that has nothing whatsoever to do with moviegoing.)

  Anyway, we arrived at the building where the screening was to take place early, and we wasted a few minutes outside because, my God, you don't want to be the first, and then we elevatored up to the screening room. There was a publicity guy guarding the door, and I said my name was Goldman and he looked at a small list in his hand and then eyed me, truly, with suspicion.

  "What're you doing here?" he said then.

  I hadn't expected the question and couldn't come up with anything, but Ilene, with emphasis, said, "He's the writer."

  The publicity guy didn't budge or change expression. "Yeah?" he said finally. "Well, what're you doing here...?"

  Chapter Five

  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

  As mentioned earlier I first came across the Butch Cassidy story in the late fifties, researched it on and off for eight years. In the beginning I had no idea that I would ever write it, and it never crossed my mind that when I did put it down, it would be in the form of a screenplay; this was all long before Cliff Robertson came into my life.

  By the time I did the initial draft, in the mid-sixties, I was already into movie work, so the idea of trying to make a movie of the piece did not seem forbidding. Plus, I've never been a great fan of Western novels, horses scare the hell out of me, and to do the additional research required to make a novel authentic was out of the question. The movie came out in '69 and is still with us today on television.

  Looking back on it from a distance of perhaps a quarter century, I still think now what I thought then: It is a glorious piece of narrative, original and moving.

  The whys of that I'll get to in a moment, but let me just give the bones of the story here. There are three main characters, the two title roles and Etta Place, the Sundance Kid's mistress. Butch led an outlaw gang, of which Sundance was a member. When a murderous and implacable Superposse was sent to kill them, Butch and Sundance barely escaped and Butch decided to head for South America where life, in theory, would be a bit less precarious. The three went to Bolivia, where eventually the men were killed.

  Why the movies never told this story before, I can't say, but my guess is because of the last third of the narrative, the South American section: Butch did something Western heroes simply do not do--he ran away.

  If I speak primarily about Butch, it's because there isn't a great deal known about the Sundance Kid or Etta. Sundance was a phenomenal gunman who may have been born in New Jersey. That's about it. of Etta, there is even less: She was either a schoolteacher or a prostitute who traveled with them, left before they died. (There are numbers of photographs of prostitutes in the Old West. There are also some pictures of Etta: She looked like Jeanne Grain, and even the young whores then looked old. To me, she had to be a schoolteacher.)

  Butch is pretty well documented. A good Mormon boy, he was born Robert Leroy Parker in Utah in 1866. (He took the alias of Cassidy after his boyhood idol, Mike Cassidy, who first got him interested in robbery.)

  By the 1890's, Butch was the head of the largest, the most successful, and the last great outlaw gang--The Wild Bunch, the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The remarkable thing about this was that Butch was no gunman at all: He never killed a man until late in life, when he was serving as a payroll guard in South America. He was neither particularly big nor strong, never much of a fighter. Nor was he the brains of the outfit; they had a resident intellectual, Elza Lay, who did as much of their planning as anyone.

  Now, The Wild Bunch consisted of some of the most murderous figures in Western history. Arrogant, brutal men. And yet, here running things was Cassidy. Why? The answer is incredible but true: People just liked him.

  Everybody liked Butch. Sometimes (and I could never figure out how to get this into the narrative) when he was being followed, he would ride up to a farm and say, more or less, "Look, I'm Butch Cassidy, there are some people after me, I'd really appreciate it a lot if you'd hide me for a while."

  And they would. There have been only two American outlaws who were outsized legends during their careers: Butch was one, Jesse James the second. But people liked Butch before he was famous. This next anecdote is true--and it killed me not to be able to find a place to use it.

  When he was a young man, Butch was in jail in Wyoming. He came up before the governor with a chance at parole. The governor said, "I'll set you free if you promise to go straight." And Butch answered--really he did--"I can't do that."

  The governor, naturally, was a bit taken aback, but before he could say much, Butch came up with the following offer: "I'll make you a deal," he told the governor. (This is a convict offering the governor a deal, remember.) "I'll promise that if you let me go, I'll never break the law in Wyoming again--"

  --and the governor accepted the deal, set Butch free--

  --and Butch never again broke the law in Wyoming: If his gang did a job there, he refused to go along.

  You've just got to admire someone like that. I did, anyway. I still find him fascinating.

  The period in our history we have glamorized as the "Wild West" was actually very short--it began with the end of the Civil War, died with the turn of the century. A total of approximately thirty-five years. Butch pulled his last job in this country in the fall of 1901.

  One of the organizations he had picked on more than once was the Union Pacific Railroad, owned by E. H. Harriman. Harriman got fed up and, at great expense, formed the Superposse. He put them in a special train, outfitted them with whatever they needed, and paid them well.

  In real life, the instant Butch heard about the existence of this new enemy--the half-dozen finest lawmen together and out to get him--he took off immediately for South America. The Superposse never actually chased him, since he and Sundance and Etta were long gone.

  The trio s
pent some days in New York in 1902--we have wonderful photographs documenting their visit. One of Butch's weaknesses was he loved having his picture taken.

  Butch and Sundance died seven years later, and in that time they led a remarkably varied life, robbing, rustling, ranching, taking various aliases as their needs dictated. My image of them during this time was as if Willie Mays, instead of retiring, had gone to Japan to play baseball and become home-run champion again.

  Butch and Sundance did what Gatsby only dreamed of doing: They repeated the past. As famous as they were in the states, they were bigger legends in South America: bandidos Yanquis.

  And probably that fact--recapturing their past--is what I found so moving about the narrative. We all wish for it; they made it happen.

  One more thing. As a writer I believe that all the basic human truths are known. And what we try to do as best we can is come at those truths from our own unique angle, to reilluminate those truths in a hopefully different way.

  I believed, back a quarter century ago, that it was not possible for two people truly to know each other. No matter how close the husband and wife, the father and son, the lover and beloved, we are locked inside ourselves. In Butch and Sundance I had two friends who lived through decades together, who traveled tens of thousands of miles, only to die bloody in a country where no one knew their names, where they barely spoke the language--

  --it seemed a wonderful vehicle to say something about our lack of knowledge, about our hopeless and terrible and, sadly, permanent loneliness....

  I feel now that Butch was by far the most important screenplay, for me, that I ever wrote or will write, not because of the success of the film--

  --but as a learning experience.

  The film work I'd done had either been dialog rewrites or adaptations of novels. And in an adaptation, obviously, you've got the source material to move you along.

  Butch was an original.

  I had to find the story.