The old Hollywood gag about the Polish starlet who was so dim she slept with the writer may be in need of some revision in light of the recent history of the film industry. These days, the endless "development" of thousands of scripts, most of which will never be made (but which provide a lucrative income for thousands of writers), is the envy of the world's other film industries. If only European/British/Irish film-makers could adopt the commercially astute, hard-nosed American attitude to screenwriting, the wisdom runs, then all their problems would be solved. But Hollywood writers still wear their put-upon, underdog status as a badge of honour, and none more so than William Goldman.
When the original Adventures in the Screen Trade was published in the early 1980s, it was hailed as a witty, incisive, insider's-eye view of the movie-making process. Goldman, an Oscar-winner for his scripts for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men, had a lot to say on the motley collection of hustlers, hucksters, artists and chancers who make up the ever-shifting workforce of the Hollywood dream factory. His most memorable aphorism, "Nobody knows anything", itself became a sort of article of faith.
Now in his late sixties, Goldman has been near the top of the Hollywood tree for more than three decades now, although, as he details here, he went through a bad patch in the 1980s, when, after a string of flops, he "became a leper" for five years. His rehabilitation came, working with director Rob Reiner, on the marvellous, underrated The Princess Bride (based on his own novel) and the excellent Steven King adaptation, Misery - one of the most interesting anecdotes in this book concerns Goldman's insistence that in the film, as in the book, Kathy Bates should cut James Caan's feet off rather than merely breaking his ankles. As millions of viewers know, he lost that argument, and is typically forthright about why he was wrong.
While cagey about naming names (most of the people he has worked with are described in unctuously glowing terms), Goldman has plenty of bile to spill in general: "directors - even though we all know from the media's portrayals of them that they are men and women of wisdom and artistic vision, masters of the subtle use of symbolism - are more often than not a bunch of insecure lying assholes." Strong stuff, but it pales in comparison with his view of critics: "If you detest them, as you should, if you find them poor sad inept creatures, as they are, if you feel that not only are they failures as critics - which goes with the job - but worse, failures in life, then why on earth would you bother to read them?" Ouch . . . actually, Goldman is a pretty good critic himself, as his unpicking of key scenes from films as diverse as Bergman's The Seventh Seal and The Farrelly Brothers' There's Something About Mary shows.
He is also absolutely right about critics' readiness, out of ignorance or laziness, to ascribe sole authorial rights in a film to its director. It's this sort of muscular, no-nonsense, opinionated prose which makes Which Lie Did I Tell? an occasionally entertaining read.
But when he gets down to setting out chapter and verse on "how to write a screenplay" that many readers - other than those who dream of a screenwriting career themselves - may find their attention wandering. Ploughing through some 100 pages of a truly dreadful screenplay for a nonsensical family caper thriller which Goldman claims to have written especially for this book - although one suspects it might have been mouldering in a drawer somewhere for a few years - is not a lot of fun, and the script notes he receives from various movie biz notables add little to the sum of human knowledge.
Which Lie Did I Tell? has more than its fair share of this sort of padding material, and is also full of misspelt names and typographical errors - not very important in a screenplay, perhaps, but highly irritating here. Also, the relentlessly glib tone and arrogance become hard to take. This is a man, after all, who can say of sequels: "they are whore's movies . . . I remember telling people, Well there was just so much great stuff about Butch and Sundance I couldn't fit in the first one. Wonderful interesting new material. Bullshit. That was a whore talking." Absolutely true, of course, but it's a measure of Goldman's limited self-awareness that it never occurs to him that the same could be said of this book.
Hugh Linehan is an Irish Times journalist
