Abdullahi Gelle’s Reviews > Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade > Status Update

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.

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.