Work In Progress

How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, by Roger Corman, is an interesting look at low budget film making.

If you find many of Corman's films interesting, it's worth a read, because he talks about a lot of them (I suspect that many of them are pretty interchangeable).

One of the things that I never realized about Corman films is how fast they're made. Very often the scripts didn't exist until Corman saw a set that he wanted to use (because it was available cheaply) and would have a story which uses the set written in a week or two. It explains why so many of his films are so bad in so many ways.

That being said, having seen a fair number of Roger Corman films, it is surprising how many of them have at least a few good ideas or a few bits of quality in them. Overall I found the book somewhat interesting and don't regret the money I paid for it or the time I spent reading it.

William Goldman's sequel to Adventures in the Screen Trade, Which Lie Did I Tell? was a really interesting book and an enjoyable read, more so than the first one. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that being 26, I hadn't seen many of the movies discussed in the first book, and so the references were more abstract. This effect will obviously vary with the age of the reader, but I suspect that the audience for people considering a career in the screen trade is not that old, simply because few people take up new careers in their 40s and 50s (I find it very reassuring that some people do, and many of the ones who do do so quite successfully).

The other, more significant reason, is that Goldman matured. When he wrote Adventures, he was 52, whereas Which Lie was written when Goldman was 69. It's generally been my experience that people in their sixties tend to be either a lot more crotchety, or a lot more mellow, than themselves in their 40s and 50s. Part of it may be simply getting tired, but I think much more it's that after 40 years of working and worrying, people have seen enough of the world to realize that they don't need to worry nearly as much as they thought that they did when they were younger. Whatever the reason, Goldman does seem much more at peace with hollywood when he started. (I don't mean to give the impression that he praises it; he still observes many of the idiocies and ego-driven problems which go on in hollywood, but he has more of a sense of humor about it.)

In any event, I recommend Which Lie Did I Tell? even more strongly than I did Adventures in the Screen Trade. It's a great complement to the first book — I bought them at the same time and read them together, and I think that I did the right thing. The second doesn't require the first to have been read, but I think that you get more out of them together.

Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman, is a fascinating look at what being a mainstream hollywood screenwriter is about. I must confess that while I consider myself to have finished it, I've probably only read about 2/3 of it. Written in an extremely personal, conversational style, the portions of it which recount Goldman's experiences are extremely interesting and education, but like C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letter, it's difficult reading. (For those who haven't read that great work of Lewis's, the words are easy, but the emotions are tiring.)

If you're interested at all in mainstream screen writing, or in how the plots of mainstream hollywood movies are made, I heartily recommend it. The plots of mainstream movies are created with a process that only starts with the screenwriter, and Goldman covers this in great depth. Like most human activities, film making is really an ad-hoc affair; a large number of people scramble to get it done and fulfill their own goals as well as they can, and the dynamics of this are varied but Goldman makes them seem understandable.

I was drawn to the book by my interest in screenwriting (I haven't done any yet, but I am quite interested in it) and am quite glad that I bought the book.