Status Updates From Which Lie Did I Tell?: More...

By now, Hitchcock has to leave to shoot Vertigo—for me, the most overrated movie of all time—but Lehman is aware that whatever the story is, it’s moving in a northerly direction.

Spitballing is this: two or more people trying to find a story.

Why Do We Write?

I write out of revenge. I write to balance the teeter-totter of my childhood. Graham Greene once said one of the great things: an unhappy childhood is a writer’s gold mine.

.. I like how Goldman arranged the book. This book is excellent

This book is even funnier than the other. Would loved to read about Hollywood by the man if he wrote more about it, at the last stage of his career and after all he experienced there.

If James Cameron had been behind the camera, the huzzahs would have been of this order: “Of course he is a master of size, of special effects, but who would have guessed the man was also a comic genius. There were hints of this wit in some earlier work—especially Aliens—but here he just lets it fly. Next, George Bernard Shaw? Please, James.”

If Steven Spielberg had directed the Zipper Scene, all the critics you’ve ever heard of would have written something along these lines: “After all these years of thrilling us with dramatic adventures, who would have guessed his genius could move so easily to farce. There is no end to the man’s talents. You can feel his touch behind every line of dialogue. More, Steven, please.”

POETRY IS COMPRESSION. Long, short, doesn’t matter, rhyming, not, the same. All the rest, the same. Except if you can tell me everything a poem says more briefly than the poem does, then it isn’t much of a poem.

Eastwood exited the museum, where a car was waiting to drive him the block. He shook his head, crossed the street, started alone up the sidewalk. I followed. I do that. I once saw Jimmy Cagney get off the crosstown bus on East Fifty-seventh Street and start walking with a friend. I forget what I was doing there but whatever it was, nothing on earth was as important to me right then as seeing that man in the flesh ..

For those of you who don’t know, and how dare you not,..

(I was told that the meeting, because of my position, achieved a certain brief notoriety.) At any rate, I was hired.

I thought Linda Hunt was wonderful as The Magician in Maverick. Crazy and weird and tough and different and if you wonder what it is that I am smoking as I write this because you saw the movie and don’t remember Linda Hunt being in it, well, we are both right. She was in it. She was wonderful. She was cut out of the finished film. Shit happens.

Those five minutes of that first screening will be with me forever. If you ask me on my deathbed, have I ever been to Sherman Oaks, I will rise up and cry, “How could those bastards choose real life over meeee?”

... My God, they even applauded the moves on the chess board during games. Fucking surreal. You see a hand take a knight, move it here or there, and “Bravo!” from all around me. But there weren’t enough chess players on earth to make the movie work for a mass audience

Death. Death. Death. There was nothing we could do. Here’s why: when I saw a wonderful failure called Searching for Bobby Fisher, you would have thought you were seeing E.T. Wild and constant applause. You could feel the adoration in the room. So how come the movie stiffed? Because Bobby Fisher was a movie about chess, and the audience I saw it with was made up entirely of an invited group of chess experts. .

He had heard and seen the audience reaction——and he had no idea what it would do. Here is the truth about Titanic: people wanted to see it. Here is the truth about The Postman: people didn’t want to see it. Everything else is mythology.

We have forgotten, in other words, Faulkner’s great dictum: in writing, you must kill all your darlings.

Our talent will fucking stun the civilized world. And when we start out to write our screenplay, it must be so original and dazzling, so different and glorious, people will have no choice but to love us. And why? Because we are so wonderful. The pulse of what we write then is always this: creative. The pulse for a sequel is always this: financial. So they are never of a similar quality.

What we have is a world, as former studio head David Picker so wisely stated, where Hollywood is no longer making movies, they are selling a product. And the product they are selling only happens to be movies. Ask not for whom the bell tolls…

He was not just dead, he was forgotten. Happens to us all. Remember my leper period? There’s a good and practical reason Hollywood likes Dracula pictures—it’s potentially the story of our lives …

.. Absolutely Magnificent. I though Goldman told everything in the last book. But This book maybe be far better.

We came out and were a mild hit: $ 30 million, would have been $ 60 today. A double, to use their terminology. (A home run today is over $ 100 million in box- office gross— although your children will live to see the day when that’s a flop.)

There are no rules to writing, but if there were, caring would be up there.