Sorry for the late posting, but geez, I’m having a busy bunch of days here. Wowza.
Anyway, here’s an old favorite of mine. I haven’t heard a lot of Edward Elgar’s music, but whenever I listen to him I come away thinking I need to listen to him a lot more. Elgar wrote this piece while spending several months in the Italian Riviera with his family. I don’t know the first thing about the Italian Riviera, but in this piece I hear adventure and wistful remembrance and drama and excitement. This concert overture reminds me of the very best film music from that form’s Golden Age, and for me, that is a compliment.
Here is “Alassio (In the South)”, by Sir Edward Elgar.
One of a series of occasional posts for National Poetry Month.
One of my major resolutions for 2019 is to read more poetry. I’ve always enjoyed poetry and I always try to read some here and there, but this year I’m trying to be even more serious about it, even to the point of starting a poetry reading journal in which I record thoughts about poems as I read them. I’m also reading some books about poetry in an ongoing attempt to strengthen this particular literary muscle of mine.
I discovered this poem purely serendipitously: by thumbing through one of my copies of The Oxford Book of English Verse. (I have multiple editions of this book, because its contents have not been constant through the many years of its publication, and alongside the eternals are the lesser-so works, and poems are like music in that many that deserve to live on don’t always do so). I found a single poem by a poet named Mary Robinson, of whom I don’t remember ever hearing before. Here is the poem:
January, 1795
Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Titled gluttons dainties carving,
Genius in a garret starving.
Lofty mansions, warm and spacious;
Courtiers cringing and voracious;
Misers scarce the wretched heeding;
Gallant soldiers fighting, bleeding.
Wives who laugh at passive spouses;
Theatres, and meeting-houses;
Balls, where simp’ring misses languish;
Hospitals, and groans of anguish.
Arts and sciences bewailing;
Commerce drooping, credit failing;
Placemen mocking subjects loyal;
Separations, weddings royal.
Authors who can’t earn a dinner;
Many a subtle rogue a winner;
Fugitives for shelter seeking;
Misers hoarding, tradesmen breaking.
Taste and talents quite deserted;
All the laws of truth perverted;
Arrogance o’er merit soaring;
Merit silently deploring.
Ladies gambling night and morning;
Fools the works of genius scorning;
Ancient dames for girls mistaken,
Youthful damsels quite forsaken.
Some in luxury delighting;
More in talking than in fighting;
Lovers old, and beaux decrepid;
Lordlings empty and insipid.
Poets, painters, and musicians;
Lawyers, doctors, politicians:
Pamphlets, newspapers, and odes,
Seeking fame by diff’rent roads.
Gallant souls with empty purses;
Gen’rals only fit for nurses;
School-boys, smit with martial spirit,
Taking place of vet’ran merit.
Honest men who can’t get places,
Knaves who shew unblushing faces;
Ruin hasten’d, peace retarded;
Candor spurn’d, and art rewarded.
I read this poem three times in a row the first time I found it, and I’ve been returning to it ever since. More than that, this single poem has made me keenly interested in Robinson herself, who seems to have lived quite a colorful life. She wasn’t just a poet. She was an early feminist, and an actress (she would be nickanmed “Perdita” after she did notable performances in that role in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale), and later she became the mistress of the Prince of Wales, before he himself went on to become King George III. Though she eventually died in poverty, Robinson has come in for reappraisal in recent years. I have even been reading her own memoirs, and so far they are fascinating (I am only in the early going, before she had struck out on her own after a childhood of paternal neglect and maternal overwork.)
But back to January, 1795. The poem is simply a word painting, creating a sense of a specific place (London) at a specific time. There are no sentences in the poem, just fragments comprising a series of quatrains which are themselves comprised of rhyming couplets. Throughout Robinson juxtaposes specific details, often combining a beautiful one with an ugly one: “Lofty mansions, warm and spacious; / Courtiers cringing and voracious.” This structure puts me in mind of Charles Dickens’s amazing opening line to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” I wonder if Dickens had occasion to read Robinson’s poem.
Science fiction and fantasy author Vonda N. McIntyre has died.
I feel that I’ve done McIntyre a disservice all these years. I’ve read a lot of her work, but none beyond her well-known tie-in books in the Star Trek and Star Wars universes. But on the other hand, she wrote all those books voluntarily and she wrote some of them so well that they stand up even outside their tie-in status. And what’s so bad about tie-in work, anyway? There’s a reason the Trek and Wars franchises are so well-established. I do own a couple of McIntyre’s non-Trek books, and I should probably make reading them a higher priority.
One novel of hers that I especially liked was her original Trek novel Enterprise: The First Adventure, in which she told the story of how the very first voyage of the starship Enterprise under the command of Captain James T. Kirk went. This novel posed a number of challenges for McIntyre: she couldn’t rely on the tried-and-true relationship tropes of Trek. Kirk and McCoy were already good friends at this point, but neither knew the Enterprise‘s Vulcan science officer; there couldn’t be any hint here of “I have been, and always shall be, your friend.” McIntyre also wrote a Lt. Sulu who didn’t even want to be on the Enterprise, and Commander Montgomery Scott who was so skeptical of his new Captain and so possessive of “his” ship that he nearly let his attitude force Captain Kirk to order his transfer off the finest ship in Starfleet.
Another thing McIntyre did in this book is to show that Kirk’s ascent to commanding the Enterprise wasn’t just a straight-line thing that involved no sacrifice at all. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which McIntyre novelized, established that there was one woman in Kirk’s past life who was much more than a momentary conquest. Dr. Carol Marcus might have been the love of his life, and she was the only one (that we ever knew of) to bear James T. Kirk’s child. So in Enterprise, Vonda McIntyre wrote a wonderful scene in which Kirk is torn between his dream of command and a woman he loves. It’s the kind of amazing character writing at which McIntyre excelled. She made you care about these characters. Her writing is full of scenes like this, and now I have to wonder even more what magic she was able to conjure with characters of her very own.
Here’s the scene.
Carol turned, uncharacteristically flustered. “Jim–!”
“Hello, Carol.” He stopped. He wanted to say everything to her, or he wanted to say nothing. He wanted to make love with her, or he wanted never to see her again.
“Talk to you later,” Dr. Eng said, and made a diplomatic exit.
“How are you feeling, Jim?”
He ignored the question. His heart beat hard. “It’s wonderful to see you. I have to leave soon. Can we…I’d like to talk to you. Would you have a drink with me?”
“I don’t feel like having a drink,” she said. “But I will go for a walk with you.”
Jim paused beside Gary, still hoping he might awaken. [That’s Gary Mitchell, Kirk’s best friend who was his First Office in the episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” before his character died.] “Get well, my friend,” Jim said, and left Ms. Chapel the note to give him when he regained consciousness.
They did not have to discuss where to go. Jim and Carol walked toward their park.
Without meaning to, exactly, Jim kept brushing against Carol. His shoulder touched her shoulder; his fingers touched the back of her hand. At first she moved aside.
“Oh–” Carol said impatiently the third time Jim touched her. She took his hand and held it. “We are still friends, I hope.”
“I hope so too,” Jim said. He tried to pretend the electric tingle of physical attraction no longer existed between them, but he found it impossible to deceive himself that much. Being near Carol made Jim feel as if a powerful current case a web over both of them, exchanging and intensifying every passion.
“Are you sleeping any better?” Carol said.
Jim hesitated between the truth and a lie. “I’m sleeping fine,” he said.
Carol gave him a quizzical glance, and he knew he had hesitated too long. She had held him too many times, when the nightmare slapped him awake in the darkest hours of the morning.
“If you want to talk about it….” she said.
“No. I don’t want to talk about it,” he said in a clipped tone. [This all happens in the aftermath of a bad incident that left Kirk emotionally scarred.]…”No,” he said again, more gently. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Still holding hands, they reached the small park and set out along the path that circled the lake. Ducks swam alongside them, quacking for a handout.
“We always forget to bring them anything,” Carol said. “How many times have we walked here–we always meant to bring them some bread, but we never did.”
“We had…other things on our minds.”
“Yes.”
“Carol, there’s got to be some way–!”
He cut off his words when he felt her tense.
“Such as what?” she said.
“We could–we could get married.”
She looked at him; for a moment he thought she was going to burst out laughing.
“What?” she said.
“Let’s get married. We could transport to Spacedock. Admiral Noguchi could perform the ceremony.”
“But why marriage, for heaven’s sake?”
“That’s the way we do it in my family,” Jim said stiffly.
“Not in mine,” Carol said. “And anyway, it still wouldn’t work.”
“It’s worked for quite a number of generations,” Jim said, though in the case of his own parents the statement stretched the truth. “Carol, I love you. You love me. You’re the person I’d most want to be with if I were stranded on a desert planet. We have fun together–remember when we went to the dock and snuck on board the Enterprise for our own private tour–” At her expression, he stopped. “It’s true.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s true. And I’ve missed you. The house is awfully quiet without you.”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“No. We talked about this too many times. No matter what we do, it wouldn’t make any difference. I can’t be with you and you can’t stay with me.”
“But I could. I could transfer to headquarters–“
“Jim…” She turned to face him. She held both his hands and looked into his eyes. “I remember how you felt when you found out you’re getting command of the Enterprise. Do you think anyone who loved you would want to take that away from you? Do you think you could love anyone who tried?”
“I love you,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to lose you, either. But I lost you before I ever met you. I can get used to the quiet. I can’t get used to having you back for a few weeks at a time and losing you over and over and over again.”
He kept seeking a different solution, but the pattern led him in circles and he could find no way out.
“I know you’re right,” he said, miserable. “I just…”
Tears silvered Carol’s dark blue eyes.
They kissed each other, one last time. She held him. He laid his head on her shoulder with his face turned away, because he, too, was near tears.
“I love you too, Jim,” she said. “But we don’t live on a desert planet.”
That‘s how you write a heartbreaking farewell scene…and it comes very early in the book, before we even see Captain Kirk on the bridge of his new ship. McIntyre knew how to set the emotional stage for her stories.
I am really stretching the idea of a “tone poem” with today’s selection, because what we have today is not an orchestral piece at all but rather a choral one, with much of it being a capella (there’s a piano at one point). I heard part of this work whilst driving home the other day and I just had to share it here, where it sort-of ties in to April being National Poetry Month. American composer Morten Lauridsen set five poems by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, each of which deals with the subject of a rose. Lauridsen–who was a forest ranger and firefighter before he turned to music–has this to say about this piece:
In addition to his vast output of German poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) composed nearly 400 poems in French. His poems on roses struck me as especially charming, filled with gorgeous lyricism, deftly crafted and elegant in their imagery. These exquisite poems are primarily light, joyous and playful, and the musical settings are designed to enhance these characteristics and capture the delicate beauty and sensuousness of the poetry. Distinct melodic and harmonic materials recur throughout the cycle, especially between Rilke’s poignant “Contre qui, rose” (set as a wistful nocturne) and his moving “La rose complète.” The final piece, “Dirait-on,” is composed as a tuneful chanson populaire, or folksong, that weaves together two melodic ideas first heard in fragmentary form in preceding movements.
Lauridsen’s composition is deeply intimate and full of harmonic resolution; modern dissonance has no place here. The music is almost luminous at times.
Here is the text of one of Rilke’s rose poems (he apparently wrote more than five, so how Lauridsen chose which ones to set, I don’t know), as sourced from poetry blogger Clarissa Ackroyd.
THE ROSES (Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from French by Clarissa Aykroyd)
VI
One rose alone is every rose,
one, but manifold meaning:
perfect and irreplaceable,
framed by words of being.
How could we ever speak
without the rose,
of sweet interludes in constant farewell,
or of our hopes?
(Original French)
VI
Une rose seule, c’est toutes les roses
et celle-ci: l’irremplaçable,
le parfait, le souple vocable
encadré par le texte des choses.
Comment jamais dire sans elle
ce que furent nos espérances,
et les tendres intermittences
dans la partance continuelle.
Here is Les chansons des roses by Morten Lauridsen.
It’s April Fools Day! I’m not a huge fan of this day as a celebration of pranking people, seeing if you can embarrass them or get them to believe some false news story or the like. But I’d be all for a day in which we celebrate laughter and All Things Funny, whether it’s sophisticated wordplay or gonzo silliness or a good old pie in the face. Here are a few things that always hit my funny bone:
(Here, on an episode of Cheers, Sam finds that his bar has been bricked in as a prank by Gary of Gary’s Old Town Tavern…but all is well because he’s got an Irish band coming….)
And here, because National Poetry Month is starting today, is a poem about laughter by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Momus, God Of Laughter
Though with the gods the world is cumbered,
Gods unnamed, and gods unnumbered,
Never god was known to be
Who had not his devotee.
So I dedicate to mine,
Here in verse, my temple-shrine.
‘Tis not Ares – mighty Mars,
Who can give success in wars;
‘Tis not Morpheus, who doth keep
Guard above us while we sleep;
‘Tis not Venus, she whose duty
‘Tis to give us love and beauty.
Hail to these, and others, after
Momus, gleesome god of laughter.
Quirinus would guard my health,
Plutus would insure me wealth;
Mercury looks after trade,
Hera smiles on youth and maid.
All are kind, I own their worth,
After Momus, god of mirth.
Though Apollo, out of spite,
Hides away his face of light,
Though Minerva looks askance,
Deigning me no smiling glance,
Kings and queens may envy me
While I claim the god of glee.
Wisdom wearies, Love has wings —
Wealth makes burdens, Pleasure stings,
Glory proves a thorny crown —
So all gifts the gods throw down
Bring their pains and troubles after;
All save Momus, god of laughter.
He alone gives constant joy,
Hail to Momus, happy boy!
I’ll be posting about poetry off and on throughout the month. I don’t promise a post every day, but most days.
William Goldman, accepting his Oscar for BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. From Nationalpost.com.
William Goldman died last year. He lived a long and brilliant life as one of the finest screenwriters, penning such films as All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and what might be his most beloved work, The Princess Bride. That last is doubly special because not only is the movie wonderful, but it’s an adaptation of a novel of Goldman’s as well. The novel works wonderfully on its own, and Goldman’s adaptation isn’t just a slavish transliteration of the book to the screen, but rather a loving creation all its own, that has its own focus and its own way of making use of its own medium to tell its story.
Goldman tends to be beloved of storytellers in many mediums, and not just because he was a great storyteller himself. He was also great at writing about storytelling, and this is borne out in two books of his that I consider essential reading for anyone interested in writing, or in film, or in the general enterprise of storytelling to begin with. Those books are Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?.
Here is a wonderful anecdote from the making of Marathon Man, a thriller Goldman wrote (again, adapting an earlier novel of his) about the pursuit of a Nazi war criminal. The film starred Laurence Olivier, Dustin Hoffman, and Roy Scheider. Here is Goldman:
Last Olivier story.
He and Roy Scheider were rehearsing a scene. In the story they are very close to voilence, but both are still trying to figure out what the other one knows. The dialog went like this:
OLIVIER: We must talk. Truthfully. Are you to be trusted?–
SCHEIDER: –No–
OLIVIER: –Was that the truth? Or are you trying to upset me?–
SCHEIDER: –I know why you’re here—and I know that sooner or later you’re going to go to the bank–
OLIVIER: –perhaps I have already been.
Schlesinger [director John Schlesinger] interrupted them. He said, “Larry, that’s supposed to go fast, and after Roy says the line about the bank, you’re taking a pause before ‘Perhaps I have already been.’ Don’t take the pause.”
Olivier said “Of course,” and they started into the dialog again. And then he stopped. “I have a problem about not taking the pause.”
We waited.
“I’m trying to find out information. Roy says, ‘I know why you’re here.’ And I need to find out what that means. Then Roy says, “I know…” And I’m listening. Then he says, ‘I know that sooner or later…’ And I’m still listening. Now he says, ‘I know that sooner or later you’re going to go…’ And I’m still listening. Finally he says, ‘I know that sooner or later you’re going to go to the bank.’ That pause I’m taking is to give me time to register the information about the bank.”
“I understand,” Schlesinger said, “But we’ve got to get rid of the pause.”
Olivier turned to me, then. “Bill,” he said, “could I suggest an alteration in the line? Would it be all right if I changed it so that the line went, ‘I know that you’re going to go to the bank sooner or later?’ You see, then I could register the word bank while he was saying ‘sooner or later’ and I wouldn’t need the pause.”
Obviously it was fine with me and the line was altered and we went on without the pause. And probably this two minutes of rehearsal explained at length doesn’t seem like much put down in black and white.
But that moment—when the actor of the century asked me would I mind if he switched six words around—is the most memorable incident of my movie career. Olivier. Calling me “Bill.” Olivier. Asking me would I mind.
That’s high cotton….
Goldman knows, in Which Lie?, that The Princess Bride might well be the project of his most likely to carry his name into Time. He writes lovingly about that film, focusing in the end on the sad story of Andre the Giant, who so wonderfully played Fezzik in the movie. Andre died a few years later, and was greatly mourned. Here is part of Goldman’s tribute:
Andre would never come out and say that wrestling might not be legit. He fought 300 plus times a year for about 20 years, and all he ever admitted was that he didn’t like being in the ring with someone he thought might be on drugs. When he was in his prime, men who weighed 250 or 300 pounds would hurl themselves on him from the top rope and he would catch them and not budge.
But even seven years ago his body was beginning to betray him. There is a scene at the end of The Princess Bride where Robin Wright—and yes she is that beautiful—jumped out of a castle window, and Andre was to catch her at the bottom.
The shot was set up for Roin to be lifted just above camera range and then dropped in Andre’s arms. Maybe a foot. Maybe two. But not much and Robin was never that heavy.
The first take, she was dropped and he caught her—and gasped, suddenly white like paper, and almost fell to his knees. His back was bad. And getting worse, and soon there would be surgery.
Andre once said to Billy Crystal, “We do not live long, the big and the small.”
Alas.
Next, two bits of inspiration, because every book on storytelling should make people feel better about this most ancient of human enterprises (I suppose there’s one human enterprise that’s older than storytelling, but who knows—stories had to play a part in that one, too). This comes at the end of Adventures in the Screen Trade:
I think there’s a wave of talent rising now. Thousands upon thousands of young men and women who literally love film. I realize this is a book about Hollywood, so obviously there has to be a happy ending. Only I’m not tacking this on. I believe that wave is upon us and that it’s not going to be stopped. And to all that talent, let me say, where the hell have you been and I wish you joy…
…and may you ignore the critics when they attack you, and pay no attention to their praise…
…and may you please remember when your scenes are sludge, that screenplays are structure…
…and may you have peers as willing to improve your project as you must be; treat them kindly, for they will save your ass many times over…
…and may you always remember “it’s only a movie” but never forget that there are lots worse things than movies—like politicians…
…and may you be lucky enough and skilled enough to make some glorious moments for all those people sitting out there in the dark, as earlier craftsmen created such moments for you…
…and finally and most of all…
…may all your scars
be little ones….
And finally, this. It’s a sidebar at the very end of Adventures in the Screen Trade.
Writing Time
The one thing I think all writers like to talk about is their work habits. When do you write? For how long? Where? Endless questions. So I want to spend a minute now on the basic problem facing us all: doing it.
When I began, at twenty-four, the work always came out in a burst. The Temple of Gold took less than three weeks. A year later, Your Turn to Curtsy, My Turn to Bow, less than two. And in between, nothing much happened that bettered the human condition, just going to the movies, a double feature a day, sometimes two, everything on 42nd Street or the Thalia on West 95th. Two years basically wasted until the next book, which was Soldier in the Rain.
I was having a career, God yes. Three novels published by age twenty-eight, two of them million-copy sellers in paperback, the third into a movie.
What I wasn’t having was a life.
I never had a real job so whenever I wanted to write, I could. Morning, night, all night if I watned—and I suspect it I had continued that way, I was heading for disaster.
There is no wrong when it comes to work habits. It doesn’t matter if you use a Mac or a quill pen. There is no best way to go about storytelling. Bergman writes from ten to three and in ten weeks, he’s got a screenplay. Graham Greene, another hero, counted words. Yes, you read that right, he counted each and every word until he reached his magic number—three hundred. And when he got there, guess what, he quit for the day, in the middle of a sentence or not.
They had the one thing writers need most: discipline.
My great editor, Hiram Haydn, was a very busy man. He started or ran publishing houses, had a wife and a bunch of kids, was editor of The American Scholar.
And wrote novels.
He was my editor from Soldier in the Rain through The Princess Bride, was a wondrous father figure for me. Once we were talking about a novel of his, The Hands of Esau, that he was so close to finishing, and I asked him how long since he began it and he said probably eight years.
How do you stay the same person for that long, I wondered?
You just do the best you can, he replied. You hope.
When do you write?
Sunday morning, he said. Every Sunday morning.
That was the only time available to him. The rest of his life was kids and work and family and commuting and meetings and dealing with crazy writers; Sunday morning was all he could carve out, so he played it as it laid.
You have to protect your writing time, he said then.
That’s the best basic advice I can give to any writer. You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.
I think it should always be the same time. Each day, each night, each whatever. Can be half an hour, more when you’re on a roll, probably shouldn’t be less. I know a brilliant young writer who has zero problem writing. Her problem is sitting. Her computer is surrounded by a mine field and she will come up with the most amazing reasons not to try to cross it. And no, she is neither crazy nor along in her problem–
because the easiest thing to do on earth is not write.
The need for a schedule is simple: You’ll have hours, days, when you just sit there, but eventually, you come to know that your writing time is not and things begin to happen as you sit there.
And if you manage to suck it up, if you decide you must get your stories down, then there is one other thing that’s crucial: don’t talk about it. Tell no one.
Once others know, they will look at you strangely, they will question you, they will ask you terrible questions–
–how’s it coming?
–is it fun?
–when is it going to be finished?
–I bet it’s fun
–when can I see it?
You don’t need those words buzzing around your ears. So keep the start of your career secret. Keep the time sacred.
Remember: nobody made you be a writer.
Now, I myself am pretty firmly a member of Team Write Every Day, but you can’t always do that and you shouldn’t feel shame if you can’t do that. But in that case, the best compromise is Goldman’s Team Write At The Same Time Each Day/Week/Whatever, because there’s another, shorter term for members of Team Write When You Feel Like It. That term is nonwriters.
One last bit. In discussing the script to Casablanca in Which Lie Did I Tell?, Goldman says as an aside, “I wish to God I’d written lines as glorious as ‘I was misinformed.’”
Well, here’s the thing about that. Casablanca famously boasts that wonderful last line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” That is an amazing final line, and I consider it one of the two greatest last lines in movie history.
The other? It’s by William Goldman. Here’s the scene, after the Grandpa has finished reading the book to The Kid:
THE KID: Grandpa?
The Old Man stops, turns.
THE KID: Maybe you could come over and read it again to me tomorrow.
GRANDFATHER: (a beat) As you wish.
And his smile is enough. As The Grandfather steps out the
door, tipping his hat–
William Goldman died last year. He lived a long and brilliant life as one of the finest screenwriters, penning such films as All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and what might be his most beloved work, The Princess Bride. That last is doubly special because not only is the movie wonderful, but it’s an adaptation of a novel of Goldman’s as well. The novel works wonderfully on its own, and Goldman’s adaptation isn’t just a slavish transliteration of the book to the screen, but rather a loving creation all its own, that has its own focus and its own way of making use of its own medium to tell its story.
Goldman tends to be beloved of storytellers in many mediums, and not just because he was a great storyteller himself. He was also great at writing about storytelling, and this is borne out in two books of his that I consider essential reading for anyone interested in writing, or in film, or in the general enterprise of storytelling to begin with. Those books are Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?.
Here is a wonderful anecdote from the making of Marathon Man, a thriller Goldman wrote (again, adapting an earlier novel of his) about the pursuit of a Nazi war criminal. The film starred Laurence Olivier, Dustin Hoffman, and Roy Scheider. Here is Goldman:
Last Olivier story.
He and Roy Scheider were rehearsing a scene. In the story they are very close to voilence, but both are still trying to figure out what the other one knows. The dialog went like this:
OLIVIER: We must talk. Truthfully. Are you to be trusted?–
SCHEIDER: –No–
OLIVIER: –Was that the truth? Or are you trying to upset me?–
SCHEIDER: –I know why you’re here—and I know that sooner or later you’re going to go to the bank–
OLIVIER: –perhaps I have already been.
Schlesinger [director John Schlesinger] interrupted them. He said, “Larry, that’s supposed to go fast, and after Roy says the line about the bank, you’re taking a pause before ‘Perhaps I have already been.’ Don’t take the pause.”
Olivier said “Of course,” and they started into the dialog again. And then he stopped. “I have a problem about not taking the pause.”
We waited.
“I’m trying to find out information. Roy says, ‘I know why you’re here.’ And I need to find out what that means. Then Roy says, “I know…” And I’m listening. Then he says, ‘I know that sooner or later…’ And I’m still listening. Now he says, ‘I know that sooner or later you’re going to go…’ And I’m still listening. Finally he says, ‘I know that sooner or later you’re going to go to the bank.’ That pause I’m taking is to give me time to register the information about the bank.”
“I understand,” Schlesinger said, “But we’ve got to get rid of the pause.”
Olivier turned to me, then. “Bill,” he said, “could I suggest an alteration in the line? Would it be all right if I changed it so that the line went, ‘I know that you’re going to go to the bank sooner or later?’ You see, then I could register the word bank while he was saying ‘sooner or later’ and I wouldn’t need the pause.”
Obviously it was fine with me and the line was altered and we went on without the pause. And probably this two minutes of rehearsal explained at length doesn’t seem like much put down in black and white.
But that moment—when the actor of the century asked me would I mind if he switched six words around—is the most memorable incident of my movie career. Olivier. Calling me “Bill.” Olivier. Asking me would I mind.
That’s high cotton….
Goldman knows, in Which Lie?, that The Princess Bride might well be the project of his most likely to carry his name into Time. He writes lovingly about that film, focusing in the end on the sad story of Andre the Giant, who so wonderfully played Fezzik in the movie. Andre died a few years later, and was greatly mourned. Here is part of Goldman’s tribute:
Andre would never come out and say that wrestling might not be legit. He fought 300 plus times a year for about 20 years, and all he ever admitted was that he didn’t like being in the ring with someone he thought might be on drugs. When he was in his prime, men who weighed 250 or 300 pounds would hurl themselves on him from the top rope and he would catch them and not budge.
But even seven years ago his body was beginning to betray him. There is a scene at the end of The Princess Bride where Robin Wright—and yes she is that beautiful—jumped out of a castle window, and Andre was to catch her at the bottom.
The shot was set up for Roin to be lifted just above camera range and then dropped in Andre’s arms. Maybe a foot. Maybe two. But not much and Robin was never that heavy.
The first take, she was dropped and he caught her—and gasped, suddenly white like paper, and almost fell to his knees. His back was bad. And getting worse, and soon there would be surgery.
Andre once said to Billy Crystal, “We do not live long, the big and the small.”
Alas.
Next, two bits of inspiration, because every book on storytelling should make people feel better about this most ancient of human enterprises (I suppose there’s one human enterprise that’s older than storytelling, but who knows—stories had to play a part in that one, too). This comes at the end of Adventures in the Screen Trade:
I think there’s a wave of talent rising now. Thousands upon thousands of young men and women who literally love film. I realize this is a book about Hollywood, so obviously there has to be a happy ending. Only I’m not tacking this on. I believe that wave is upon us and that it’s not going to be stopped. And to all that talent, let me say, where the hell have you been and I wish you joy…
…and may you ignore the critics when they attack you, and pay no attention to their praise…
…and may you please remember when your scenes are sludge, that screenplays are structure…
…and may you have peers as willing to improve your project as you must be; treat them kindly, for they will save your ass many times over…
…and may you always remember “it’s only a movie” but never forget that there are lots worse things than movies—like politicians…
…and may you be lucky enough and skilled enough to make some glorious moments for all those people sitting out there in the dark, as earlier craftsmen created such moments for you…
…and finally and most of all…
…may all your scars
be little ones….
And finally, this. It’s a sidebar at the very end of Adventures in the Screen Trade.
Writing Time
The one thing I think all writers like to talk about is their work habits. When do you write? For how long? Where? Endless questions. So I want to spend a minute now on the basic problem facing us all: doing it.
When I began, at twenty-four, the work always came out in a burst. The Temple of Gold took less than three weeks. A year later, Your Turn to Curtsy, My Turn to Bow, less than two. And in between, nothing much happened that bettered the human condition, just going to the movies, a double feature a day, sometimes two, everything on 42nd Street or the Thalia on West 95th. Two years basically wasted until the next book, which was Soldier in the Rain.
I was having a career, God yes. Three novels published by age twenty-eight, two of them million-copy sellers in paperback, the third into a movie.
What I wasn’t having was a life.
I never had a real job so whenever I wanted to write, I could. Morning, night, all night if I watned—and I suspect it I had continued that way, I was heading for disaster.
There is no wrong when it comes to work habits. It doesn’t matter if you use a Mac or a quill pen. There is no best way to go about storytelling. Bergman writes from ten to three and in ten weeks, he’s got a screenplay. Graham Greene, another hero, counted words. Yes, you read that right, he counted each and every word until he reached his magic number—three hundred. And when he got there, guess what, he quit for the day, in the middle of a sentence or not.
They had the one thing writers need most: discipline.
My great editor, Hiram Haydn, was a very busy man. He started or ran publishing houses, had a wife and a bunch of kids, was editor of The American Scholar.
And wrote novels.
He was my editor from Soldier in the Rain through The Princess Bride, was a wondrous father figure for me. Once we were talking about a novel of his, The Hands of Esau, that he was so close to finishing, and I asked him how long since he began it and he said probably eight years.
How do you stay the same person for that long, I wondered?
You just do the best you can, he replied. You hope.
When do you write?
Sunday morning, he said. Every Sunday morning.
That was the only time available to him. The rest of his life was kids and work and family and commuting and meetings and dealing with crazy writers; Sunday morning was all he could carve out, so he played it as it laid.
You have to protect your writing time, he said then.
That’s the best basic advice I can give to any writer. You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.
I think it should always be the same time. Each day, each night, each whatever. Can be half an hour, more when you’re on a roll, probably shouldn’t be less. I know a brilliant young writer who has zero problem writing. Her problem is sitting. Her computer is surrounded by a mine field and she will come up with the most amazing reasons not to try to cross it. And no, she is neither crazy nor along in her problem–
because the easiest thing to do on earth is not write.
The need for a schedule is simple: You’ll have hours, days, when you just sit there, but eventually, you come to know that your writing time is not and things begin to happen as you sit there.
And if you manage to suck it up, if you decide you must get your stories down, then there is one other thing that’s crucial: don’t talk about it. Tell no one.
Once others know, they will look at you strangely, they will question you, they will ask you terrible questions–
–how’s it coming?
–is it fun?
–when is it going to be finished?
–I bet it’s fun
–when can I see it?
You don’t need those words buzzing around your ears. So keep the start of your career secret. Keep the time sacred.
Remember: nobody made you be a writer.
Now, I myself am pretty firmly a member of Team Write Every Day, but you can’t always do that and you shouldn’t feel shame if you can’t do that. But in that case, the best compromise is Goldman’s Team Write At The Same Time Each Day/Week/Whatever, because there’s another, shorter term for members of Team Write When You Feel Like It. That term is nonwriters.
One last bit. In discussing the script to Casablanca in Which Lie Did I Tell?, Goldman says as an aside, “I wish to God I’d written lines as glorious as ‘I was misinformed.’”
Well, here’s the thing about that. Casablanca famously boasts that wonderful last line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” That is an amazing final line, and I consider it one of the two greatest last lines in movie history.
The other? It’s by William Goldman. Here’s the scene, after the Grandpa has finished reading the book to The Kid:
THE KID: Grandpa?
The Old Man stops, turns.
THE KID: Maybe you could come over and read it again to me tomorrow.
GRANDFATHER: (a beat) As you wish.
And his smile is enough. As The Grandfather steps out the
door, tipping his hat–
