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Authors: William Goldman
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money for the first one,” he said. “I did the second one because I wanted, hopefully, to get it right this time.”
He did—it’s the one sequel that’s better than the original.A lot of people will argue for the second Godfather, terrific, but I think the first is the one that echoes.
In Lucas’s case, I think there are precious few on the planet who preferred Return of the Jedi to Star Wars. Well, why, pray tell, should The Phantom Menace be any less boring and flawed than the last of the first trilogy?
People will come up with all kinds of bullshit for whoring. I remember telling people, Well, there was just so much great stuff about Butch and Sundance I couldn’t fit in the first one. Wonderful interesting new material.
Bullshit. That was a whore talking.
And whatever Lucas tells us today about why he did the deed, whatever excuse he comes up with, it will be bullshit. If you disagree, then answer this: Why didn’t he finance a sequel to Howard the Duck ?
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The Year of the Comet (Alas)
[1992]
----
One of the moments that screenwriters can never obliterate from our memories is when we realize that, now and forever, we have written a flop.
And when I say “flop,” I am not referring, not even remotely, to a “ succès d’estime, ” i.e., a film that maybe doesn’t make back all its money but has its passionate admirers. And I don’t mean an effort, however worthwhile, that has perhaps “come a cropper.” Not an effort that “falls short,” that “misses the mark,” that “runs aground.” Not the “ill-judged,” or its cousin, the mighty struggle that went “in vain.”
No, lads. I am talking about the whiff, the stiff, the stinker, the all-out fucking fiasco.
I am talking, alas, of myoriginal screenplay, The Year of the Comet.
If you write screenplays for a living, there are really only three choices. Theadaptation of someone else’s writing is one, and I think the easiest, because someone else has done the brute work, made the people, invented the story. The adaptation of your own work is much harder—I’ve done it several times— Magic, Marathon Man, The Princess Bride (also Heat —no, not the Pacino-DeNiro one, theBurt Reynolds one; and the reason you will not learn more about this baby in these pages is simple: to my knowledge, lawsuits are still flying). What makes this kind of adaptation complicated is that we have gone through so much failure trying to get the novel to work, we tend to cling to our favorite scenes and sequences when we come to make the movie. “Oh, no, I can’t cut that sequence, it almost killed me to write that.”
We have forgotten, in other words, Faulkner’s great dictum: in writing, you must kill all your darlings.
But I doubt anybody doubts the original is the hardest of all, presentsthe greatest problem. Simply because you are, duh, making it up. What saves you in this kind of enterprise is this: your passion. In Butch, I needed to try and tell that story of the two guys, moving through decades and countrysides, who become legends a second and glorious time. In The Ghost and the Darkness, the lions were my passion. I wanted to write about brute power and horror and fear, and at the heart of it, the existence, even for nine months, and even in Tsavo, of evil moving among us.
What made The Year of the Comet possible was this: my passion for red wine.
Now, what kind of tale could I try? Answer: anything. There are no rules when you start in. I could have written a heart-wrenching drama—Ray Milland deux, if you will. A Jimmy Cagney gangster flick, set in Prohibition, about who owns Chicago. I could have made it a George Lucas job, set in the future when scientists have discovered that if you substitute blood for Bordeaux, people will stagger around a lot but they’ll also live forever.
One of the things you probably aren’t aware of is that Easy Rider cost Hollywood hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh, not the movie itself. That was a
He did—it’s the one sequel that’s better than the original.A lot of people will argue for the second Godfather, terrific, but I think the first is the one that echoes.
In Lucas’s case, I think there are precious few on the planet who preferred Return of the Jedi to Star Wars. Well, why, pray tell, should The Phantom Menace be any less boring and flawed than the last of the first trilogy?
People will come up with all kinds of bullshit for whoring. I remember telling people, Well, there was just so much great stuff about Butch and Sundance I couldn’t fit in the first one. Wonderful interesting new material.
Bullshit. That was a whore talking.
And whatever Lucas tells us today about why he did the deed, whatever excuse he comes up with, it will be bullshit. If you disagree, then answer this: Why didn’t he finance a sequel to Howard the Duck ?
----
The Year of the Comet (Alas)
[1992]
----
One of the moments that screenwriters can never obliterate from our memories is when we realize that, now and forever, we have written a flop.
And when I say “flop,” I am not referring, not even remotely, to a “ succès d’estime, ” i.e., a film that maybe doesn’t make back all its money but has its passionate admirers. And I don’t mean an effort, however worthwhile, that has perhaps “come a cropper.” Not an effort that “falls short,” that “misses the mark,” that “runs aground.” Not the “ill-judged,” or its cousin, the mighty struggle that went “in vain.”
No, lads. I am talking about the whiff, the stiff, the stinker, the all-out fucking fiasco.
I am talking, alas, of myoriginal screenplay, The Year of the Comet.
If you write screenplays for a living, there are really only three choices. Theadaptation of someone else’s writing is one, and I think the easiest, because someone else has done the brute work, made the people, invented the story. The adaptation of your own work is much harder—I’ve done it several times— Magic, Marathon Man, The Princess Bride (also Heat —no, not the Pacino-DeNiro one, theBurt Reynolds one; and the reason you will not learn more about this baby in these pages is simple: to my knowledge, lawsuits are still flying). What makes this kind of adaptation complicated is that we have gone through so much failure trying to get the novel to work, we tend to cling to our favorite scenes and sequences when we come to make the movie. “Oh, no, I can’t cut that sequence, it almost killed me to write that.”
We have forgotten, in other words, Faulkner’s great dictum: in writing, you must kill all your darlings.
But I doubt anybody doubts the original is the hardest of all, presentsthe greatest problem. Simply because you are, duh, making it up. What saves you in this kind of enterprise is this: your passion. In Butch, I needed to try and tell that story of the two guys, moving through decades and countrysides, who become legends a second and glorious time. In The Ghost and the Darkness, the lions were my passion. I wanted to write about brute power and horror and fear, and at the heart of it, the existence, even for nine months, and even in Tsavo, of evil moving among us.
What made The Year of the Comet possible was this: my passion for red wine.
Now, what kind of tale could I try? Answer: anything. There are no rules when you start in. I could have written a heart-wrenching drama—Ray Milland deux, if you will. A Jimmy Cagney gangster flick, set in Prohibition, about who owns Chicago. I could have made it a George Lucas job, set in the future when scientists have discovered that if you substitute blood for Bordeaux, people will stagger around a lot but they’ll also live forever.
One of the things you probably aren’t aware of is that Easy Rider cost Hollywood hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh, not the movie itself. That was a
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