“Nobody knows anything.”
In his indispensable book, Adventures In the Screen Trade, A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting, novelist and screenwriter William Goldman famously revealed in his chapter on studio executives the dirtiest of dirty Hollywood secrets:
“Nobody knows anything.”
Not the screenwriter, not the star, not the producer or director, and certainly not the studio executive. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess–and, if you’re lucky, an educated one,” Goldman wrote.
Adventures in the Screen Trade is and remains one of the best books written on the business and art of moviemaking and storytelling. It’s at the top of most old pros’ lists of books recommended to young or wannabe writers, as well as one that this old pro periodically picks up for a reread; in a rare instance of their ‘getting it’ in the 1990s, DC Comics bought a shitload of copies of Adventures in the Screen Trade and handed them out to writers. Oh, that someone would do that for the majority of comic book writers today…!
Goldman, though he hasn’t written much in recent years–he’ll be 81 this summer–is an amazing writer whose credits you might be familiar with even if you don’t know his name. His screenplays include Harper, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Stepford Wives, The Great Waldo Pepper, Marathon Man, (the Academy Award-winning) All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride, Misery, Chaplin, Maverick, and Absolute Power. Among his novels are No Way to Treat a Lady, The Princess Bride (and its sequel, The Silent Gondoliers, both under the open pseudonym of S. Morgenstern), Marathon Man, Magic, Tinsel, Control, and Brothers. He has also written for Broadway (Blood, Sweat, and Stanley Poole, with his brother James, playwright of the classics The Lion In Winter and They Might Be Giants, as well as the superb screenplay–among others–of Robin and Marian).
William Goldman is what I call a “mind-fuck” writer; he takes you straight down a path toward a very specific place and you don’t even realize until you reach the end that he’s veered off that path and brought you to a place you not only hadn’t realized you were headed for, but you had no clue even existed. Remember the twists and turns of Marathon Man? The iconic and breathtaking turn-around ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Just another day at the office for Bill Goldman.
I got to thinking of his “nobody knows anything” dictum this week while working on an advertising custom comics job. I was hired to take characters based on the clients product and turn them into comics form. Working through an ad agency, I’m also managing the production of the project, hiring the artists, letterer, and colorist, and coordinating their activities and the approval process with the agency and the client. With more than eighteen years as an editor of comic books, magazines, and tabloids under my belt, this kind of work is second nature to me. (My secret? Hire really talented people, explain the job to them, then step back and let them do it.)
“Nobody knows anything,” and that, I will freely admit, includes me. When it comes to creative endeavors, we’re all guessing, whether it’s a movie or a comic book. In 1980, someone at United Artists thought Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate was a good idea and that film pretty much sunk the studio. It remained the movie industry’s poster child for epic failure until this year, when somebody at Disney thought John Carter was a good idea. In the 1980s, I created a couple of series (Arion, Lord of Atlantis and Checkmate!) for DC that had legs, lasting three or four years each; in 1996, my Takion went under without a burble after only seven issues. I thought they were all good ideas but, hey, I don’t know anything.
And because nobody knows anything, everybody feels qualified to chime in on creativity. While you would never tell your surgeon, “no, no, I think you should cut here,” those who hire creative people have no qualms about telling us how to do our jobs. This client, who’s probably never even read a comic book doesn’t hesitate to tell me, who has written somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand of them and edited probably another five or six hundred, how to do my job. He is, of course, signing the checks and it’s his prerogative to have it his way. When I go to McDonald’s, I don’t hesitate to tell them I don’t want mustard on my burger; I suppose the client is likewise entitled to the condiments of his choice. Even though I find mustard on hamburgers disgusting, I’m just the fry cook on this meal.
Was the approach I picked to represent the client’s characters the right approach? Or are the client’s changes to what I offered the way to go? On that level, “nobody knows anything” and, like I said, I don’t claim to be an exception to the rule. As far as that goes, my guess is as good as his or yours (or Michael Cimino’s or Disney’s)…but while I sat there making the requested changes, it occurred to me that even though we were both guessing, the difference was mine was an educated guess based on almost forty years of experience.
William Goldman was right: Nobody does know anything…but sometimes, some of us are better guessers than others. And wouldn’t it be swell if everybody would just let those with a clue make a few more of the decisions. Maybe that would lead to a few less Heaven’s Gates or John Carters.
But what do I know?