Adventures In The Screen Trade

William Goldman

Editions

Review

William Goldman here tells the story of how he became a screenwriter, and gives an entertaining portrait of Hollywood in the twenty years from the beginning of the sixties to the early eighties.  He recalls encounters and meetings with stars, producers, directors and agents, anecdotes and vignettes – all in a suitably entertaining way, and – unusually, as you will gather from this book – he writes with a sense of humour about himself and about the films he worked on.

The book is divided into four sections – of which the two most interesting are the chapters dealing with the different Hollywood players, and then the accounts of individual projects on which the author worked.  Some never got off the ground; others, for example ‘Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid’, went on to be huge successes.  This is no shock horror exposé of Hollywood along the lines of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls pbk £8.99, but it sounds authentic enough, and if you’ve ever considered trying your hand at a screenplay, this must be on your reading list.

The sequel – as I’m sure Hollywood would have it – to this volume, Which Lie Did I Tell? pbk £8.99, tells Goldman’s story from the mid-eighties onwards.  There had to be a sequel, didn’t there? - review by Dan Fenton