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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