I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting. Example: Back in the late sixties, Life magazine, then a weekly, had a performer on its cover who they said was the biggest movie star in the world. Anyway, Goldman goes on to cheerfully disparage studio execs, actors, directors, actors, audiences, and also actors. He has won two Academy Awards for his screenplays, first for the western _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_ (1969) and again for _All the President's Men_ (1976), about journalists who broke the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon.

Goldman's insider's approach is still compelling, though I wondered how much of what he says about how Hollywood works is still true 36 years later. Sadly, Goldman believes that the auteur theory was responsible for the collapse of the career of Alfred Hitchcock. 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. Over the years I have met and worked with a dozen prize-winning American directors, and there is not one whose “philosophy” or “worldview” remotely interests me. Goldman starts by telling readers that Nobody Knows Anything in Hollywood, by which he means that the movie business is extremely hard to predict, marked by frequent failures and occasional big hits.Writing in the wake of the "Heaven's Gate" disaster which shook the confidence of almost everyone in Hollywood (1982), Goldman still manages to end the book on an upbeat and hopeful note. But then we'd have missed a glorious roller-coaster ride through Tinseltown stuffed to the gills with anecdotes of such toe-curling detail that you believe every word. The point being that if a studio giant couldn’t guess the biggest star in his business, the territory is a bit murkier than most of us would imagine. Goldman takes us to very entertaining book of memories about his experience in the "screen trade" highly recommended. Oscar winner William Goldman, who wrote such classic films as HARPER, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, MARATHON MAN and ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN shares his unique, often difficult, experiences working with top directors, producers and stars like Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier.

BIll's such a regular guy that, when he came to LA for his first movie biz meeting, he couldn't stand the thought of being picked up at the airport by a chauffeur-driven car and insisted on riding up in front with driver, because that's what regular guys like him and me and you do. Goldman is one of the best storytellers this country has produced, which may seem a bold claim to some, but it happens to be true.Goldman has many funny stories to tell about Hollywood insiders and a lot of the silliness that is present in the industry.

I'm not quite enough of a film buff to really care about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Marathon Man. He then solicits feedback from a suite of movie insiders: a director, editor, cinematographer, etc . The recent sad news of the death of William Goldman reminded me of an episode (October 2017) of the wonderful Backlisted Podcast about his book Adventures in the Screen Trade.The only real stinker in the story is that Goldman was convinced (incorrectly) that nothing would be able to beat E. and into his own professional experiences and creative thought processes in the crafting of screenplays. His most famous axiom, that “nobody knows anything” is one of those things that grow truer with time and experience. Goldman was referring to success in the movie business, the idea being that when something worked and was a hit, it just kind of worked and nobody really knew why, though everyone with a hand in the production would claim otherwise.