Excerpt: William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade.

p.180

HARPER My name is Lew Harper. To see Mrs. Sampson.

After a pause there is a click. After the click, the gate swings open. HARPER gets back in his car and starts to drive forward.

CUT TO

HIS FIRST VIEW OF THE SAMPSON HOUSE. It is enormous, surrounded by a vast expanse of lawn. Among other things VISIBLE are a tennis court, a swimming pool with patio and pool house, a large garden filled with flowers.

CUT TO

HARPER, driving along, taking it all In.

This is a perfectly adequate opening to a movie. (We don't know it's a detective story yet.) What we do know is a guy in a beat-up car is expected, for some reason or another, at a mansion.

It doesn't tell us much more than that but at least it's direct. If something interesting happens soon, we'll be interested; if not, not.

And that was how the movie opened when production began. I was back in New York when I got a call from the coast saying they needed a sequence immediately to cover the opening credits.

What?

Just a credit sequence and fast. Whatever it was, they'd shoot it. Get it in the mail. I hung up. Get what in the mail? I sat at my desk and did what any hopefully professional writer would do when he is asked to do something he doesn't know how to do.

I panicked.