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What it argues
William Goldman wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, Marathon Man, and The Princess Bride, among many others. Adventures in the Screen Trade, published in 1983, is his account of how Hollywood actually works — and the opening line has become one of the most quoted in the industry: "Nobody knows anything." Goldman means it literally: no studio executive, no director, no star, no producer can reliably predict which films will succeed. The blockbuster business runs on hunch, luck, and the inability to learn from failure.
The book moves between two modes. The first is memoir: Goldman describes his career, the films he's worked on, the collaborations that went well and the ones that didn't. He is candid about his own failures and unusually direct about the industry's structural dysfunctions — the star system, the development process, the relationship between writers and directors that almost always results in the writer losing. He writes about Dustin Hoffman's behavior during the filming of Marathon Man with a directness that was considered startling at the time.
What it gets right
- 1.
Nobody knows anything. This is Goldman's most famous assertion: no one in Hollywood can reliably predict whether a film will succeed, and the belief that anyone can is a collective self-deception.
- 2.
Stars matter enormously in Hollywood not because they make films better but because they make films financeable. The economic logic determines the creative one.
- 3.
Screenwriting is structural work. A script is built from the ending backward, and every scene must serve a dramatic function. Beautiful prose in a screenplay is nearly irrelevant.
What it covers
Who wrote it
William Goldman (1931–2018) was an American novelist and screenwriter whose credits include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, and Misery. He won Academy Awards for both Butch Cassidy and All the President's Men. Goldman wrote Adventures in the Screen Trade in 1983 and followed it with Which Lie Did I Tell? in 2000, a sequel covering the years between. He worked steadily in Hollywood for five decades and was known for his directness about how the industry operated. His novel The Princess Bride was adapted from a screenplay he had written and remains a beloved text in both forms.
