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I know that I’ve been lazy on updating my book list, but I have been reading.  This book actually came from a recommendation by Bill Simmons.  A couple years ago he started a page on ESPN Page 2 where he would review the best sports books.  I loved this and it’s actually what got me back into reading again this summer.  I read a couple and still have The Last Shot and Loose Balls sitting around to read.  Anyway, I sent him an email and a message on twitter about liking the list and asking him to start it up again.  For a short period of time he did, making some suggestions on his twitter account.

You’ll see a few more of his suggestions show up, but Adventures in the Screen Trade was my first choice.  Now, it looks like a long book, and it is.  But a lot of that is due to the two screenplays he has in there: one that he drafted from a short story of his also published here, and then the full screenplay he wrote for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Seeing as how I have no desire to learn how to write screenplays, I skipped over those and the instructional parts at the very end.  I just read about his stories and experiences.  And they were fantastic.

He has a lot of very entertaining stories about actors he’s worked with, scripts he’s seen altered, interactions between people on the set, etc. but I don’t want to ruin them all here for you.  Nothing I write in describing them will do them justice.  What I will do, however, is talk about a few other things from the book that I liked a lot.

It gets started early too.  Page 5 talks about the early days of Hollywood and how everyone had to license from Thomas Edison because of his patents.  Not many people had the money to do that, or the distribution network to really be noticed, so they all just pirated it and didn’t pay royalties instead.  That’s part of why they located out West.  As Goldman puts it

Sure, Hollywood had all that great shooting weather.  But more than that, being three thousand miles west made it easier to steal.

And look at them now, fighting tooth and nail to stop people all over the world from being able to watch their products rather than finding new distribution methods.  Hardly shocking, but you wonder what goes through their minds with things like this.

There also times when you can see how obvious it is that this book was written in 1983, the year before I was born.  Here are his thoughts on Bambi in the context of cartoon movies of the time

Bambi took all of our heads off.  Because, primarily, they don’t make movies like that anymore – animation stinks these days because of costs.  It’s all jerky and when the mouths move they don’t coincide with the words and the color is bland.  My guess is that Bambi works better now than it did when it came out in 1942, and I think it’s only going to improve as the quality of animation continues to deteriorate.

Looking back on this, it is pretty true.  I can’t remember a cartoon movie from my very early childhood that was actually that good.  However, then Disney brought the game back, hit it’s stride in 1989 and pumped out this murderer’s row of 6 straight animated movies: Little Mermaid (1989), DuckTales The Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990), The Rescuers Down Under (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994).  Damn.  Not a bad run.  Computer animation wasn’t far behind with Toy Story coming out in 1996 and then animated movies were saved.  Millions of kids are thankful that he was wrong about this.

This is getting long, but yeah, between the interesting facts he points out (I had no idea who does what on a Hollywood set) and the amazing stories from working on movies like All The President’s Men and The Right Stuff I would put this book at the top of the list for your next book purchase.  It’s available used for $3 on Amazon.  Just do yourself a favor and hit the link.

Adventures in the Screen Trade