Book Review: Adventures in the Screen Trade
This is book thirty-one in 52 books in 52 weeks
William Goldman has written great screenplays like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man and The Princess Bride? In Adventures in the Screen Trade he goes behind the scenes of the movie making business, telling stories of how screenplays go from the writer to the screen. After a short history of Hollywood and the people working in it, he talks about working with great acotrs like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. It’s interesting to hear the problems he runs into while trying to find how to structure a story and sell it to the people making the movie.
He’s very good at telling a story obviously, and the stories are very funny. The negotiations he has to make while trying to get a story from beginning to sound crazy, it’s a miracle any movie are actually finished. At the end of the book he includes the screenplay for Butch Cassidy, and writes about the process of writing it. He has a very personal way of writing.
A-
My other books in 52 weeks
Other people writing reviews
- Jaime reviews Good to Great
- Heliologue reviews When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
- Nick reviews Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
As an on-and-off film critic, my impression is that there’s a hole in my shelf where this book is supposed to be. Does it shed much light on Goldman’s personal aesthetic philosophy of what makes a “good” screenplay, and if so, what did you think?
I read the sequel to this book a while ago, Which Lie Did I Tell, and I think you’d probably get more out of that if you want to know more about his philosophy. I think both of them are pretty important if you’re a big film buff though.
http://www.amazon.com/Which-Lie-Did-Tell-Adventures/dp/0375703195/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217622743&sr=1-2