Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting

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Dustin Hoffman refused a scene in Marathon Man that required his character to keep a flashlight in his nightstand, Goldman insists, because Dustin thought it would make him look weak on screen, and every male movie star, deep down, will never allow himself to look weak on screen. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting. It would seem that Hollywood can always find something to worry about on the business side, no matter what era it's in.

That Al Pacino scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is more or less an echo of what Goldman observes here. This] is that big, sad, funny, incisive, revelatory, gossipy, perception-forming book about Hollywood that publishers have been promoting for years -- and now the real thing is finally here.Goldman has many funny stories to tell about Hollywood insiders and a lot of the silliness that is present in the industry. I can't imagine that the same readers who want mouthfuls of dirt about starlets having affairs with directors or a prison guard's testimony that his wife would crawl on her knees just for a chance to fuck Robert Redford also want to read a glossary of screenplay slug lines or the entire script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

In all of Goldman's movies, his humor—and his humanity—shines through, even in deadly serious movies such as All the President's Men. We mostly shouldn't, but I nevertheless decided to read William Goldman’s 1983 memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade because it's so often mentioned on the Rewatchables podcast.His first novel, The Temple of Gold (1957), was followed by the script for the Broadway army comedy Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole (1961).