Read Online Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman - Free Book Online

product. If you say you've got Chariots of Fire, you're going to have to go on and on explicating just what it is that you're talking about.
    This shorthand is especially helpful to the business people at the studio.
    This past holiday season, UA had four pictures out in the marketplace. (A different UA group, by the by, than the people who bought the Talese book-who'd come and quickly gone.) It was a tremendous lineup and quickly describable: "We've got Peter Fslk in a raunchy comedy. Richard Dreyfuss in a Broadway smash, Lemmon and Matthau together again with Billy Wilder, and Steve Martin in a musical." It's no wonder with product like that, they were able to get
    fabulous bookings in the best theatres all around the country. And with those fabulous bookings what did they achieve? The four films-All the Marbles, Whose Life is It Anyway?, Buddy, Buddy, and Pennies from Heaven-probably lost a minimum of fifty mil- lion dollars, maybe as much as seventy-five.
    But they got booked in theatres. Which is the name of the game for the business people at the studios. Should we be surprised at the theatre owners grabbing those movies? Of course not, they'd have been out of their gourds not to. Should we be surprised at the failures of the films? A very faint maybe. Clearly, this is hindsight, which never fails. And again, nobody ever knows. But each of these films had a giant problem attached. Let's take them in the order in which they opened.
    The Ffeter Falk film. All the Marbles. In description it still sounds terrific. It's a raunchy comedy in which Falk plays the manager of two gorgeous girls who are tag-team wrestling part- ners. It takes place, for the most part, in raunchy tank towns, with Falk always the hustler. And no one plays that kind of sleazy character better than Peter Falk. The problem: The movie takes pro wrestling seriously. We know that when Bruno Sammartino enters the ring, he's pretty much a shoo-in. He may get pounded, he may be beaten almost senseless. But one way or another, he's going to triumph. Whether pro wrestling is actually rehearsed or not, I have no idea. But the outcome is not in doubt.
    All the Marbles treated each match as if it were the pro football playoffs leading toward the Superbowl. The matches, we were asked to believe, weren't fixed or phony, any more than the seventh game of the World Series. Would an audience buy that premise? When I saw the movie they sure didn't.
    The Richard Dreyfuss film. Whose Life Is It Anyway? This was certainly a famous show on Broadway: Tom Conti won the Tony for his performance, and then, with tremendous publicity, Mary Tyier Moore took over the part, for which she was also awarded. But it was never much of a commercial hit. I don't think it ever had a single sellout week. It was well reviewed-as was the movie-but perhaps the problem was the subject mat- ter.
    Whose Life deals with a young sculptor who is totally crippled in an auto accident. He's incapable of moving from the neck
    down. And the story is that of his right to have himself killed. Coming Home dealt with a cripple, too, and it did business. But it was a romance. And no matter how the ads for Whose Life tried to sell you that it was about life, it wasn't - The ads on F.I.S.T. tried to tell us it wasn't a story of a labor union organizer but about a man. But hey, that man was a labor union organizer. And Whose Life dealt with death. Would the audience want to see such subject matter? Maybe treated as a fantasy-Heaven Can Wait-but treated realistically? They never have.
    The Lemmon / Matthau / Billy Wilder comedy. Buddy, Buddy. Lemmon and Matthau have proved a superb comedy team, most successfully in The Odd Couple back in '68. And Billy Wilder? Unquestionably one of the great directors and one who is most skilled at comedic material. In one half-decade, his comedies included Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. But his last major success was lrma la Douce, and that in