Quote of the Day (Budd Schulberg, on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscar Speech Omission)

“I watch the Awards shows year after year and I have noticed a trend. When Gwyneth Paltrow won for Shakespeare in Love, she thanked the producer and her agents. She thanked her hairdresser and every member of her family. She must have thanked 50 people. But she never mentioned the writer. She didn’t even mention Shakespeare. They don’t want to thank the people who created their characters and who put the words in their mouth. There can’t be anything without the writer.”— Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg (1914-2009), quoted in “The Real Contender: A Conversation with ‘On the Waterfront’ Screenwriter Budd Schulberg,” Hudson Reporter, July 29, 2000

Budd Schulberg, with more than 80 years of experience in the film community as the son of a studio executive, screenwriter, and observer of the industry, was venting about the lack of respect so long accorded to scribes in Hollywood.

Their indignities have been legion—they have watched in frustration as:

*their terrific script goes into “turnaround,” or development hell; or as

*their script is given to one or more other writers for polishing (Turner and Hooch, the early Tom Hanks film that teamed him with an ugly dog, went through eight different writers!); or as

*their script gets turned by some combination of other writers, directors and producers into something radically different (or, in the words of William Holden’s hack in Sunset Boulevard about his last project, it “was about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You'd never know because when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat”); or as

*they are banished from the set so they can’t object to the director's damage to their work; or as

*the angrier ones try to use whatever meager leverage they’ve accumulated to protect their scripts by becoming directors themselves, as with Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder; or finally, as Schulberg noted,

*actors forget to say thanks for writing the lines that helped them win the biggest professional honor of their careers.

But, if Schulberg had lived almost a decade longer, his outrage might have been, if anything, even more intense than what he conveyed in this interview.

After all, that producer that Gwyneth Paltrow thanked in her weepy speech on Oscar night almost a quarter century ago? It was Harvey Weinstein, a figure she later described as a “bully”—and now, of course, not just the poster boy of the #MeToo movement but also a felon convicted of rape and assault.

By the way, “the writer” Paltrow neglected to mention? It was actually two: Marc Norman and Sir Tom Stoppard—and that year they shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Shakespeare in Love.

So let’s see tomorrow night who thanks the writers—and who, like Paltrow, for whatever reason, never gets around to it.

Quote of the Day (John Gregory Dunne, on the Screenwriter-Director Pecking Order)

“Once you accept the idea that says because you get paid $200,000 to write a script and the director gets $500,000 to direct it, he's $300,000 smarter than you are, then Hollywood becomes a very amusing place to work.”— Hollywood screenwriter/novelist John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003), “Tinsel,” in Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2006)

Quote of the Day (William Goldman, on the Predictive Powers of Hollywood)

“Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.” —William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983)

William Goldman—born on this day 85 years ago in Highland Park, Ill.—is indelibly associated with the film industry. The above remark, endlessly—and rightly—quoted about Hollywood, illustrates the wry perspective he brought both to Adventures in the Screen Trade and to Hype and Glory (1990), the latter about two of the most disparate—and, for a number of male minds, enviable—judging assignments anyone has ever held in a single year—at the Cannes Film Festival and the Miss America Pageant. (In the early to mid-1990s, he also wrote a highly entertaining column on the film industry for New York Magazine.)

These wry observations are the fruit of a screenwriting career that began in the 1960s. Two of his works won him Oscar gold—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. (Though the first of the two consumed eight years of his life, he has far fonder memories of that than the adaptation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s account of their work on Watergate, which evidently involved more rewrites than he cares to think about).

In a sense, the comic western Butch Cassidy and his amusing take on fairy tales, The Princess Bride, are outliers in Goldman’s career: he has been far more involved with the detective/suspense genre, including Marathon Man and Magic.

But for my money, two of his best works in this genre came from early in his career: Harper (1966), starring Paul Newman, an adaptation of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novel The Moving Target, and No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), his novel (later adapted by John Gay) about a serial killer. His agent at the time, unsure about its commercial prospects and with what he considered a better novel by Goldman in hand, urged him to issue it under a pseudonym. Goldman obliged with “Harry Longabaugh” (a.k.a., The Sundance Kid).

Ironically, the novel netted Goldman the best reviews of his career to that time—proving perhaps that in publishing, as in Hollywood, “nobody knows anything.”

(The image accompanying this post, of William Goldman at the Screenwriting Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Nov. 16, 2008, was taken by “TheDemonHog” and is posted on Wikimedia Commons.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Player,’ on Whom To Cut From the ‘Artistic Process’)

Studio executive Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins): “I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.”—The Player (1992), screenplay adapted by Michael Tolkin from his novel, directed by Robert Altman