Read Online Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman - Free Book Online
Authors: William Goldman
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Consul, Breathless, The Cotton Club, King David, No Mercy, Miles from Home.
He was not just dead, he was forgotten. Happens to us all. Remember my leper period? There’s a good and practical reason Hollywood likes Dracula pictures—it’s potentially the story of our lives …
The Author Sees His Children
Misery was Stephen King’s baby. He made it up. And we wanted very much that he like what we had done with it. He was in California and a screening was arranged, hundreds of people, and he sat unnoticed in the middle of the audience. (King, in case anyone is interested, is amazingly unpretentious. And real smart.)
Anyway, the screening starts and we are pacing around in the back or sitting in corners, because this book meant a lot to him. Near the climax, Annie Wilkes is bringing some champagne into Paul Sheldon’s room,supposedly to celebrate, but as in the novel, she is planning to kill him. She puts a gun into her apron.
Now, by total accident, the person sitting next to King is involved with Castle Rock. And reported the following. As Annie takes the tray down to Paul’s room, an edgy Stephen King is hunkered down in his seat, muttering to himself. And this is what he is saying: “Look out … don’t trust her … she’s got a gun in her ayy-pron …”
(He liked it fine. As did we all.)
----
Talent Tends to Cluster
I think the ’90s are by far the worst decade in Hollywood history.
Many reasons, starting with the possibility that, being an old fart in good standing, I hate anything new. Let me throw in a couple of other possibilities.
Talent tends to cluster. We knowAeschylus was not the only guy hacking out plays in Athens. We know that Balanchine had Robbins, that Placido had Luciano, that Chekhov and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and a bunch of other Russians all walked a similar earth.
And today, in every single art I can think of, is a time of low talent. When I took a modern novel course at Oberlin in 1951, we studied people who had published between 1900 and 1950 but who all had written something in the year 1927. So we read Dos Passos and Wolfe and Steinbeck and Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald—not, alas, the same today.
Not for painters or singers or writers or screenwriters.
But no discipline makes my point more than movie directors.
We had one great one until very recently—Mr. Kubrick.
What I came to town, in 1953, such was not the case. And remember, there are a lot of directors I am not counting, because they were not involved with Hollywood financing or Hollywood sensibility—Bergman, Buñuel, Clair, Fellini, Kurosawa, Renoir, to pick a quick half dozen.
And I am also not counting some old guys who were still capable of thrilling us—Capra, Chaplin, De Mille.
Following is a list of top directors and my favorites of their movies.
Cukor
The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady
Curtiz
The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca
Donen
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Singin’ in the Rain (codirected withGene Kelly)
King
Twelve O’Clock High, The Gunfighter
McCarey
The Awful Truth, Going My Way
Minnelli
An American in Paris, Gigi
Reed
Odd Man Out, The Third Man
Siegel
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry
Siodmak
The Killers, The Crimson Pirate
Walsh
High Sierra, White Heat
Pretty impressive. Ten terrific directors, all of them operating at the same time. Are we agreed? Hope so.
Now here’s the shocker: none of these guys made my first team. I’m talking Ford, I’m talking Hawks and Hitchcock, Kazan and Lean, plus Mankiewicz and Stevens, not to mention Wilder and Wyler and Zinnemann.
All these brilliant guys turning out one film after another, some of them glories, some of them not—
—and don’t you wish they were around today?
But they’re not, and what we see suffers as a sad result.
It wasn’t just the directors, either. Here is a list of a bunch of young performers who all were in the same acting class. New York City, 1947.Robert Lewis was the teacher and
He was not just dead, he was forgotten. Happens to us all. Remember my leper period? There’s a good and practical reason Hollywood likes Dracula pictures—it’s potentially the story of our lives …
The Author Sees His Children
Misery was Stephen King’s baby. He made it up. And we wanted very much that he like what we had done with it. He was in California and a screening was arranged, hundreds of people, and he sat unnoticed in the middle of the audience. (King, in case anyone is interested, is amazingly unpretentious. And real smart.)
Anyway, the screening starts and we are pacing around in the back or sitting in corners, because this book meant a lot to him. Near the climax, Annie Wilkes is bringing some champagne into Paul Sheldon’s room,supposedly to celebrate, but as in the novel, she is planning to kill him. She puts a gun into her apron.
Now, by total accident, the person sitting next to King is involved with Castle Rock. And reported the following. As Annie takes the tray down to Paul’s room, an edgy Stephen King is hunkered down in his seat, muttering to himself. And this is what he is saying: “Look out … don’t trust her … she’s got a gun in her ayy-pron …”
(He liked it fine. As did we all.)
----
Talent Tends to Cluster
I think the ’90s are by far the worst decade in Hollywood history.
Many reasons, starting with the possibility that, being an old fart in good standing, I hate anything new. Let me throw in a couple of other possibilities.
Talent tends to cluster. We knowAeschylus was not the only guy hacking out plays in Athens. We know that Balanchine had Robbins, that Placido had Luciano, that Chekhov and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and a bunch of other Russians all walked a similar earth.
And today, in every single art I can think of, is a time of low talent. When I took a modern novel course at Oberlin in 1951, we studied people who had published between 1900 and 1950 but who all had written something in the year 1927. So we read Dos Passos and Wolfe and Steinbeck and Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald—not, alas, the same today.
Not for painters or singers or writers or screenwriters.
But no discipline makes my point more than movie directors.
We had one great one until very recently—Mr. Kubrick.
What I came to town, in 1953, such was not the case. And remember, there are a lot of directors I am not counting, because they were not involved with Hollywood financing or Hollywood sensibility—Bergman, Buñuel, Clair, Fellini, Kurosawa, Renoir, to pick a quick half dozen.
And I am also not counting some old guys who were still capable of thrilling us—Capra, Chaplin, De Mille.
Following is a list of top directors and my favorites of their movies.
Cukor
The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady
Curtiz
The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca
Donen
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Singin’ in the Rain (codirected withGene Kelly)
King
Twelve O’Clock High, The Gunfighter
McCarey
The Awful Truth, Going My Way
Minnelli
An American in Paris, Gigi
Reed
Odd Man Out, The Third Man
Siegel
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry
Siodmak
The Killers, The Crimson Pirate
Walsh
High Sierra, White Heat
Pretty impressive. Ten terrific directors, all of them operating at the same time. Are we agreed? Hope so.
Now here’s the shocker: none of these guys made my first team. I’m talking Ford, I’m talking Hawks and Hitchcock, Kazan and Lean, plus Mankiewicz and Stevens, not to mention Wilder and Wyler and Zinnemann.
All these brilliant guys turning out one film after another, some of them glories, some of them not—
—and don’t you wish they were around today?
But they’re not, and what we see suffers as a sad result.
It wasn’t just the directors, either. Here is a list of a bunch of young performers who all were in the same acting class. New York City, 1947.Robert Lewis was the teacher and
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