Excerpt:
William Goldman's Adventures
in the Screen Trade.
p.177
chapter four
Harper
Harper, my next screenplay, was when I first
began to learn at least a little about the
craft of screenwriting.
It was also, inadvertently, when I began
to learn about how movies actually happen.
Boys and Girls Together had been published,
to calamitous notices. (The New York Times
said "a child of nine could understand
this book before he could lift it." From
there, the review got really bad.) However,
a producer, Elliott Kastner, had optioned
it for films.
I met with Kastner to talk about the book
- I was not to be the screenwriter, which
was plenty okay with me - but before we got
into discussing any notions about how to
turn a six-hundred-plus-page book into a
one-hundred-twenty-page script, he began
talking about a movie he'd recently seen,
a very successful Western called The Professionals.
"I'd like to do a movie like that," he
said.
"I'd like to do a movie with balls."
I suggested he read some of the Lew Archer
detective books by Ross Macdonald, and if
he liked them, I'd reread them and try and
do a screenplay for him. He called the following
Monday and said he was very much interested
and that he would op-
tion whichever one I said.
There were probably ten Archer books published
by this time, and like an idiot I started
with the most recent and worked my way back. "Like
an idiot" pertains to the fact that
as the series went along, Macdonald was increasingly
leaving the roots of the tough-guy Hammett-Chandler
tradition where he began and was getting
more interested in character complexity,
less with plot.
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