Film Flam

William Murray The New York Times Book Review These pieces are very well written, witty, and, on the whole, vastly entertaining...Unlike too many literary people, Mr. McMurtry has few illusions about Hollywood and he is not kind to the place. He finds it full of "self-praise, defensiveness, insecurity, and megalomania." Larry McMurtry is my kind of moviegoer.

Autorentext

Larry McMurtry

Klappentext

McMurtry has been to Hollywood and back--here he takes a funny and penetrating look at the movie industry and uncovers the truth about the moguls, fads, flops and box-office busters.

Zusammenfassung
A noted screenwriter himself, Pulitzer Prize–winner Larry McMurtry knows Hollywood—in Film Flam, he takes a funny, original, and penetrating look at the movie industry and gives us the truth about the moguls, fads, flops, and box-office hits.

With successful movies and television miniseries made from several of his novels—Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, and *Hud—*McMurtry writes with an outsider's irony of the industry and an insider's experience. In these essays, he illuminates the plight of the screenwriter, cuts a clean, often hilarious path through the excesses of film reviewing, and takes on some of the worst trends in the industry: the decline of the Western, the disappearance of love in the movies, and the quality of the stars themselves.

From his recollections of the day Hollywood entered McMurtry's own life as he ate meat loaf in Fort Worth to the pleasures he found in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Film Flam is one of the best books ever written about Hollywood.

Leseprobe
Chapter One: No Clue: Or Learning to Write for the Movies

If one were to make a misery graph of Hollywood, screenwriters would mark high on the curve. Above them one would have to put second-line producers, particularly those educated in the East (it may well be that all second-line producers were educated in the East), and possibly certain publicity people; just below them would come cinematographers, a group that has shown an increasing capacity for morbidity and neurosis since they stopped being plain cameramen. But, in terms of steady, workaday, year-in-year-out dolorousness, the writers have no near rivals. Their gloom may not be as acute as that of a director whose most recent picture has just flopped, but it is more consistent.

For decades, writers have drifted around Hollywood more or less like unloved wives. The people they work for would usually be just as glad to be rid of them, but can't quite think of a way to get by without their services. Hollywood memoirs are clotted with accounts of the abuses and injustices writers feel have been visited upon them; read collectively, these books give one the sense that, for everyone involved, the profession itself was a kind of unfortunate accident -- one that somehow became a habit. In an ideal world, directors would script their own movies, and a number of the greatest directors have shown the ideal to be possible by doing just that.

Of the many crafts necessary to the making of motion pictures, that of the screenwriter is easily the most haphazard, the most impressionistic, and the most vulnerable. Screenwriting, so far, has no rationale, no theory, and is, at best, an indifferent, pedestrian craft-literature. Worse, it offers young craftsmen no easily accessible means of apprenticeship; instead of training an indigenous body of skilled craftsmen to write its screenplays, the movie industry has traditionally preferred to look outside itself, usually to novelists, for whatever writing it needs done.

The dubious assumption this procedure rests upon is that screenwriting is an art, which therefore needs to employ imaginative artists, rather than a craft, which could be expected to rely upon the discipline and the trained skill of gifted artisans. Unfortunately (it seems to me) novelists have lent themselves readily, even eagerly, to this quite possibly fallacious assumption. Most novelists, I believe, harbor the secret belief that they can easily toss off screenplays, rather as most sports fans believe themselves to be potential athletes. Unlike armchair athletes, however, armchair screenwriters, if they have some independent literary reputation, are often allowed to professionalize their fantasy -- which for the most part they do flounderingly.

I don't recall that I harbored this fantasy when I first began to write fiction; but I was led to it quickly enough, and have pursued it about as flounderingly as anyone well could, through a scriptwriting career that has been something less than perfervid. My experiences have convinced me that behind every bad movie there is a bad script; also, that behind most good movies there is a bad script, over which some resourceful director has won a victory; finally, that in the desk drawers and studio files of Hollywood there are thousands of unproduced bad scripts, more numerous than toads during the rain of toads, and not much more cinematic. I am convinced that the principal reason for this proliferation of junk is that, of the hundreds of people employed to write movie scripts, all but a small handful are in reality screenwriters manqué -- people who have neither the intrinsic gifts nor the extrinsic training necessary to the jobs they have been set to do. I have been led to this conviction by the haphazard, not to say chaotic, nature of my own far from complete education as a screenwriter -- an education, or miseducation, perhaps sufficiently typical to be worth describing here.

I encountered my first screenwriter, though not my first script, in Armstrong County, Texas, in the spring of 1962. The screenwriter's name was Harriet Frank, and not long after I met her I encountered my second, her writing partner and husband, Irving Ravetch. Harriet wore a large hat and shrouded herself, sensibly enough, in a great many veils and bandanas -- the spring breeze in Armstrong County is apt to be sandy. Irving shrouded himself mostly in a look of gloom. They were there with Paul Newman, Martin Ritt, and something like six score others, attempting to turn my slight, innocent first novel, Horseman, Pass By, into the movie Hud. This they accomplished with no assistance from me. I was on the set purely as a guest. I saw a copy or two of what I presumed was the script, but the copies were clutched tightly in the hands of functionaries, and I was never able to get close enough even to peek inside. In fact, I quickly realized that my hosts didn't really want me to read the script. They saw me as the Author, not as the altogether timid young man I actually was; I believe they felt that if I read the script I would inevitably feel that they were mutilating my book. I might become upset, or even start to berate them. This was unlikely, since I had more or less mutilated the book myself, before I published it -- in any case, I watched three days of filming and learned absolutely nothing about scriptwriting or filmmaking, except that the latter could be tedious.

Though I learned nothing technical from the experience of Hud, I did learn something psychic, and that was that moviemakers frequently, if not endemically, feel inferior to, and thus nervous and ill-at-ease with, people they believe to be "real" writers. This would seem to be a psychic constant, and it certainly has its effect upon screenwriting. My problem in learning to write scripts has not been that I have been bullied and bludgeoned by insensitive producers; the problem has been that I could find no one -- or almost no one -- who would presume to instruct me in the basics of the craft; and I believe that, nowadays at least, this is a common experience for novelists turned screenwriters manqué. They are presumed to be too gifted to need training; in consequence they never get …