Which Lie Did I Tell?

by William Goldman

  There are no good ones.)

  Back briefly to my age. I doubt any of you would be interested in the genres that hooked me into films. But the basic pulse still must be there: if you want to write The Matrix—and I liked The Matrix—go with God.

  Just care.

  Pitching

  There is a reason pitching comes right after original screenplays—people don’t usually pitch adaptations.

  (But how would you like to have been in the room when Van Zant pitched his vomitous Psycho carbon? You must remember that—because if some asshole executive can say, “Gee, what a fresh and great idea that is, wait’ll I get home tonight and tell the wife”—the point being that if Psycho got greenlighted, there’s hope for us all.)

  Okay, what do I know about pitching? First thing, find a teacup. Then barely cover the bottom with water. No, that’s too much.

  I know nothing about the subject. I have only, in a third of a century, pitched once—and this to friends—and I was so awful I quit halfway through.

  But truth to tell, it doesn’t matter what I know because you are not going to be pitching to me.

  I think I would accept every pitch made to me. Because I remember my panic when I tried to do it. But it is a definite part of Hollywood now. A writer has an idea and in the old days, he might have written it. Sometimes he still does. But more and more, the agent gets his client a meeting with a studio exec in which the idea is discussed, i.e., pitched.

  Hollywood, as we know, has zero sense of history and there is a feeling pitching is relatively new. Total nonsense. If you’ve read any history at all, you know it was invented by Torquemada to make his days pass more happily during the Spanish Inquisition. He would tell imprisoned playwrights that if they could interest him in an idea, he would let them live long enough to write it. If they didn’t, he dropped the fellow into a large vat of boiling tar, which of course is where the term “pitch” comes from.

  The Ten Commandments of Pitching

  1. Never forget whom you are talking to. The studio executive views you as an impediment to either his lunch or his tennis game. But some part of him also knows you might help his career. He doesn’t want to listen to you, he would rather he lived in a world where he didn’t have to listen to you. So do not bore him. Rule one is this: Be brief.

  2. Brief means this: in and out in five minutes. Unless the executive asks you to stay.

  3. Remember you are not telling the story, you are throwing out a hook.

  3a. Keep it simple.

  3b. Not a lot of detail.

  3c. One or two lines. What you tell the executive is this: “Here’s the setup, boom.” If they buy the setup, there is a real chance they will buy the movie.

  4. Grab them. You want them to think, “Yeah, I get that.”

  5. People are busy. (Same as rule one but I thought you ought to be reminded.)

  6. Do not pitch more than one idea per meeting.

  7. If you can, leave an outline. Executives love this. Not a detailed shot-by-shot deal, but a couple of pages where you start with what you hit them with and thicken it a bit, embellish it; if you have any glorious scenes in mind, put those in. (Likewise, if your ending sucks, leave it out.) Giving them something to read can only be a plus. It helps them fill out your pitch. It also makes them think you actually care about the piece of shit you are selling. (Piece of shit, as you should know, is the way executives refer to screenplays Out There.)

  8. Never read a pitch. Some writers are more comfortable doing it that way, but the meeting is about your future, not your comfort. Learn to tell your story. Practice it by yourself or on friends until you are comfortable. Executives like eye contact.

  9. Pitch the same idea ten times in one day. Obviously, keep that news to yourself. Do not say to Mr. Fox, “I would love to talk more but I’m late for my meeting with Mr. Time Warner.”

  9a. Be aware of the values of multi-pitching. It is good to get your idea out there. Especially if you are new, because more people will know of your existence.

  9b. Be aware of the risks of multi-pitching. It is not good if your goal is to have a relationship with a particular studio, which you might actually want. There are no secrets in the movie business. Everybody knows somebody. Be aware that your multi-pitch day will get out. Never tell anyone you are giving them an exclusive if you aren’t. Your word actually has a certain value in Southern California. Even if theirs doesn’t.

  10. Never forget that even if they buy your pitch, most studios are planning on firing you as soon as you hand them your first draft.

  Okay, let’s try something. I will attempt to pitch for you a couple of the originals I talked about a few minutes before. See what you think.

  Butch: “It’s a western, it’s about these two guys, one of them is the leader of this huge gang and the other is his sidekick who’s a great shot and this millionaire forms this posse to stop them from robbing his railroads and—”

  I’m gasping already.

  Try again. “It’s a western, kind of a modern-day Gable-Tracy adventure flick about these two guys who take off for South America with one of the girlfriends and—”

  Worse. I’m dead now.

  I don’t think Butch lends itself to pitching. Doesn’t mean it’s good or terrible, just that the story doesn’t compress easily.

  The Sea Kings: “It’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on the high seas—these two great pirates who actually sailed together, one’s the most dangerous in history, Blackbeard, and the other’s the only rich pirate ever, kind of as if Bill Gates decided he was done being a computer nerd and wanted a life of adventure.

  “See, Blackbeard has had all the adventure in the world and what he wants is to retire rich, and Bonnet, the rich guy, what he wants is to have all the adventure in the world. And when they meet and sail together, what I want this to be is the story of these two amazing guys who are each other’s dream.”

  What do you think? I don’t mind that so much. What I hope I did was make you want to know more.

  The Year of the Comet: “A Cary Grant–Audrey Hepburn romantic comedy about this great couple who meet and just hate each other but they’re both chasing a ten-million-dollar bottle of wine across London and the French Riviera, where they have wild adventures. And no, they don’t hate each other at the end.”

  I don’t think that’s too terrible. Might hook someone. (Maybe at the end of the day, if they were tired.) How’s by you?

  My personal feeling is that neither The Great Waldo Pepper nor Mr. Horn lend themselves easily to this process. They are more character studies, they are darker, their heroes die.

  You pitch them for me, see how you do.

  One last crucial thing: the better known your work is, the higher your reputation, the more likely you are to receive a positive response. This whole deal is a ridiculous crapshoot, thriving today because most executives do not know how to read screenplays. And hate having to read them.

  But if you are starting out, it’s a quick way to solvency. So get your story comfortably inside you. And tell yourself you’re going to go into that office a nothing but you’re coming back a star!

  Stay in Your Genre

  You must always be aware of the kind of movie you are telling: romantic comedy, high adventure, family drama, bloodbath action (don’t), special-effects thriller, horror, farce, whatever.

  Each genre has a set of unwritten constraints. If you’re writing a farce, you must be skilled at basic plotting, because farce, to be really funny, has to be really real. The minute you stretch things in a farce, it shatters. If I am visiting my best friend and my wife is hiding in a closet because she’s been having an affair with him, there must be a totally sound reason for me to be needing to get into that closet right now. The minute it’s a frivolous reason, the farce dies.

  I know you must be sick of the jump-off-the-cliff scene, and this is the last time I will mention it, but as terrific as it was with Butch, it would have totally destroyed a
movie such as, say, Casablanca.

  You could set it up in that picture very easily. At the end, the Nazi Conrad Veidt is chasing Bogie and Claude Rains. They are in cars racing across the airfield. The cars crash into each other and they are forced to continue the chase on foot.

  And Rains is old and let’s say Veidt was a runner at Nazi school, and he’s closing the gap, closing the gap—

  —when up ahead is this cliff and down there is Vichy France and freedom and the chance to battle injustice and they shout Horseshit and over they go, splashing down into the river and the current carries them to safety while old Conrad can only snarl down from the top of the cliff.

  Kills the movie, right?

  When you are dying in the night trying to plot your screenplay, you might do well to remember Bogie and Claude, so ridiculous. And remember the kind of story you are telling.

  And don’t go wandering, you’ll kill the babe while it’s still in swaddling clothes.

  The Two Hollywoods

  Two war movies help us understand the duality of the movie business: one, Saving Private Ryan, written by Robert Rodat, directed by Steven Spielberg; the other, Shame, Ingmar Bergman handling both chores. (If you have never heard of Shame, sad for you, and please believe that.)

  The Spielberg gets more and more awful for me the more I think about it; the Bergman is just what it was when I first saw it: shattering. It deals in eighty-eight minutes with a married couple, musicians (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman) whose country has become a battlefield. Never mind which side is advancing or retreating, they don’t know, why should we? In the course of their story, Von Sydow, the wuss of the duo, toughens up, kills. Ullman, the strength, weakens. The movie ends with the two of them trying to escape, in a crappy boat stuffed with other desperate people, going nowhere across an unforgiving sea.

  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.