The only real stinker in the story is that Goldman was convinced (incorrectly) that nothing would be able to beat E.

No one knows how to make a successful film, so the safe bets will always be to attract stars and make sequels.

The last section of the book is a particularly helpful exercise where he takes one of his short stories, wrestles it into a screenplay, and then interviews a cinematographer, a production designer, an editor, a composer and a director about what they would do with his finished product. I'm really fond of Philip Kaufman's script and direction of The Right Stuff, which is faithful to Tom Wolfe's book, so it's probably fortuitous that Goldman was fired, particularly since he had no interest in Chuck Yeager, the most compelling character from Wolfe's book. That Al Pacino scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is more or less an echo of what Goldman observes here.

For a long time, Sylvester Stallone could be Rocky or Rambo, but he succeeded in very few other roles. The last section of this book where he goes from a short story to a screenplay and then tears it to shreds, is brilliant.

I'm not quite enough of a film buff to really care about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Marathon Man. But for all the dish in Adventures (and there is plenty), Goldman also has a lot to say about the craft of screenwriting. If there's any profession where some perspective is required on your importance to the engine that pays you, it's screenwriting.

on and behind the scenes for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, and other films. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It's a creepy, well-acted psychological thriller, so I'm curious why Goldman doesn't even mention it. And there's a bunch of other good stuff and fun anecdotes as you already know, though those parts actually do feel a bit dated. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

This] is that big, sad, funny, incisive, revelatory, gossipy, perception-forming book about Hollywood that publishers have been promoting for years -- and now the real thing is finally here. Some of Goldman's answers were edited into a magazine piece for Esquire; this was read by an editor at a publishing house who contacted him about writing a book on screenwriting. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. His most famous axiom, that “nobody knows anything” is one of those things that grow truer with time and experience. According to Goldman, the single most important fact in the movie industry is that "Nobody Knows Anything".