He talks a lot about Hollywood and there are some darling little stories about particular stars and directors, then he shows you the actual screenplay for the movie with directions to the actors etc. Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College in 1952 and an MA degree at Columbia University in 1956. I'm curious as to what Goldman thought of Hoffman's Oscar-winning performance six years later as an almost helpless savant in Rain Man. If you want to work (and succeed) in Hollywood, then this is a book that you must carry around with you. In 1978, Goldman wrote the screenplay for Magic, which was based on his novel, starred the great Anthony Hopkins, and was directed by Richard Attenborough.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. If survival in the Hollywood film industry is possible, then there is no better "survival guide" than this book, because Goldman tells it like it is. In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood (in one of these he famously remarked that "Nobody knows anything"). Goldman has many funny stories to tell about Hollywood insiders and a lot of the silliness that is present in the industry.

The last section of this book where he goes from a short story to a screenplay and then tears it to shreds, is brilliant. His other notable works include his thriller novel Marathon Man (first published 1974) and comedy-fantasy novel, The Princess Bride (first published 1973), both of which Goldman adapted for film. Not surprisingly, Goldman is not a fan of the auteur theory, a notion promulgated by young French new wave critics (including Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) in the Fifties asserting that the director is the author of the movie. Written almost forty years ago, so many of the trials and tribulations Goldman describes, as well as his larger concerns about the where the business is heading, feel like they could have been written yesterday.

on and behind the scenes for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, and other films. The full text of "Da Vinci" and the subsequent screenplay that he wrote are included, followed by interviews with key movie industry figures, including director George Roy Hill, cinematographer Gordon Willis, and composer Dave Grusin.I read it because one of my favorite authors read it when he had to do a screenplay of one of his novels. According to Goldman, the single most important fact in the movie industry is that "Nobody Knows Anything".