The Worst Thing William Goldman Ever Wrote
Now, mind you, I like a lot of William Goldman's work. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride. He's a terrific writer.
But he is also responsible for the single most problematic quotation associated with Hollywood in existence. I firmly believe that it has become an excuse for storytellers in Hollywood to turn off their brains, to ignore story logic, to indulge their personal whims whether or not it makes sense. Really. I blame this quote.
"In Hollywood, nobody knows anything." -- William Goldman.
There you have it. When writers can't figure their way out of a story problem, or even don't want to do the work to figure it out, when writers don't want to give up a favorite sequence in their script that they feel SURE will knock the socks off everyone, inspite of their first readers telling them "no", when writers fell that something is wrong, but don't know what -- that quotation gets trotted out, as if it excuses them from dealing with the problem. "Oh well, as William Goldman says, nobody knows anything anyway."
Now, admittedly, there are plenty of example of some brainless decisions being made by Powers That Be in Hollywood. Such as the head of Warner Brothers deciding that because their last few films with female leads have tanked, women therefore cannot carry a movie, ever, and therefore Warners will NOT greenlight a film with a female principal lead.
The fact that the stories for those films were bad, no that can't have anything to do with it. It's all the women's fault. We'll completely overlook those films that were indeed carried most successfully by women: such as Silence of the Lambs, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, The Queen. Not a successful film in that bunch, is there? Not big box office, or Academy Awards?
The problem is that most people don't want to take the time to figure out why something "doesn't work". Nor do they distinguish different types of "doesn't work".
I once tried pitching a script idea to the Disney Studio where Maid Marion was the main character. I called it "Marion of the Woods". When I submitted the idea, the response I got back from the representative of the story department at the studio was that Robin Hood was a flop for movies now. He pointed out that Disney had done a Robin Hood film years before -- the animated flick, where animals took the parts of the tale. I was pitching a live action. He then went on to observe that not even Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn could make a hit of Robin and Marion. Therefore Robin Hood was dead as a film property.
I was a bit flabbergasted at the reasoning. Robin and Marion is a beautifully made and acted film. It's actually one of my favorites. But I know full well why it did not do well at the box office: in general, audiences do not want to watch stories of the death of heroes, especially the "he's going to die soon, anyway, because he's old" type, especially of the legendary type of hero that Robin Hood is. Legendary heroes are supposed to go on forever, or their ends are supposed to be obscured from everyone. That is, if you aren't going to give them the big victory and sacrifice type of ending that William Wallace gets in Braveheart. But the deaths in Robin and Marion are not comfortable: Marion's declaration at the end of the film as they are dying makes us uneasy -- "I loved you more than God."
Anyway, instead of asking the audience what the problems were with something that flops, the Powers That Be make arbitrary decisions about what they consider to be the factors. Actress X is grossly overpaid because her last couple of films flopped. It must be her fault that they flopped. It couldn't possibly be that the script was flawed, or the director clumsy. Because really, "nobody knows anything."
I admit, I could make a serious crusade out of this. After all, I'm about to launch a book on mythic motifs for writers, and I'm claiming that I actually DO know SOMETHING.
(Sorry, I'd only meant the quotation to be bolded, but I can't seem to get the rest of the text UNbolded! Bah.)