Film Biographies & Interviews, Filmmaking, Screenplays

Adventures in the Screen Trade

Name: Adventures in the Screen Trade
Author: William Goldman
ISBN: 9780446388993

by William Goldman

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Synopsis

The book is divided into three parts. "Part Hollywood Realities" is a collection of essays on various subjects ranging from movie stars and studio executives to his thoughts on how to begin and end a screenplay and how to write for a movie star."Part Adventures" has stories from 11 projects that Goldman has been involved with, from Charly and Masquerade, to the Academy Award-winning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men, to some projects that remained unrealised, such as a musical remake of Grand Hotel.In "Part Da Vinci", Goldman shows the reader how he would go about adapting his own short story "Da Vinci" into a screenplay. The full text of "Da Vinci" and the subsequent screenplay that he wrote are included, followed by interviews with key movie industry figures, including director George Roy Hill, cinematographer Gordon Willis, and composer Dave Grusin.'I don't know if it's ever been both a guide to how to write and a guide to how to navigate the experience of being a professional in the industry. Even though he existed at the most exalted level, it never felt like that. It felt democratic and egalitarian in the way he wrote. Before his book, people never really gave thought to screenwriters, their craft, or their place in the ecosystem of movie-making. Bill not only shone a light on that and inspired a whole new generation of writers, he also made movie-making and showbusiness understandable to a vast general audience' Peter Morgan, writer of The Crown and Frost/NixonAs befits more than twenty years in Hollywood, Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman's sparkling memoir is as entertaining as many of the films he has helped to create. From the writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men and Marathon Man, Adventures in the Screen Trade is an intimate view of movie-making, of acting greats such as Redford, Olivier, Newman and Hoffman, and of the trials and rewards of working inside the most

About the Author, William Goldman

William Goldman

His name may be most familiar from award-winning screenplays such as All the President's Men, but William Goldman had a previous life as an original, enthralling novelist who is worth exploring both for his books that would become great movies (The Princess Bride, Marathon Man) and for the ones that didn't.

Biography

William Goldman, screenwriter, prior to Dreamcatcher, adapted the Stephen King books Hearts in Atlantis and Misery for Castle Rock Entertainment.

Goldman won Academy Awards® for his adaptation of the incisive political expose, All the President's Men, and for his original script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Both screenplays also earned him Writers Guild Awards. Other honors include Lifetime Achievement Awards from the WGA and from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. Goldman has been an author for forty-five years.

Since his first novel, The Temple of Gold, he has written more than two dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction.

Author biography courtesy of Newmarket Press.