Touring Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

By Paul Gray

ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE by William Goldman; Warner Books 418 pages; $17.50

In the mid-1920s, Ben Hecht received a telegram from Herman Mankiewicz, a friend and fellow writer who had made a pioneering trek from New York to Hollywood. Hecht was firmly advised to do likewise: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around."

It got around. Before long, writers of every stripe, from Dorothy Parker to Clifford Odets, had discovered this fantastic new way to waste their gifts and souls. That, at least, was the story many of them told throughout the '30s and '40s. The figure of the gin-soaked Hollywood sell-out became such a stale literary cliche that it found its way into the movies, where the studios and their hired scribblers could enjoy a hollow laugh at each other's expense.

Author-Screenwriter William Goldman, 51, has been around long enough to remember the bad old image of his trade. He began his career in 1957 as a writer of respectable fiction, far from the siren song of show business, and has published twelve novels. But he also labored successfully in Hollywood (eleven credits) during the period when movies became films, directors auteurs and screenplays the subjects of scholarly monographs. In discussing his own work for the people "Out There," he neither cringes nor crows: "In terms of authority, screenwriters rank somewhere between the man who guards the studio gate and the man who runs the studio (this week)."

Such modesty typifies the manner of Adventures in the Screen Trade, a loose collection of anecdotes from Goldman's Hollywood experiences, plus thoughts on the present state of the film industry and how-to hints for aspiring writers with stars in their eyes. Goldman does not mention his two Oscars (for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men) or the beefy six-figure fees that his work has commanded. He emphasizes instead the pervasive uncertainty that seeps through all stages of moviemaking. He sets "the single most important fact" about his subject in capital letters: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. Films that cannot fail do so, disastrously. "We're home," Richard Zanuck once cabled his father Darryl after a movie preview. "Better than Sound of Music." The object of this enthusiasm was Star!, which Goldman describes as "the Edsel of 20th Century-Fox." Success is equally impossible to foresee; the author rehearses the litany of studios that said no to Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E. T.

All this confusion, Goldman insists, has created a power vacuum that performers have filled by default. He has worked with some of Hollywood's biggest names and has learned from hard knocks: "Never underestimate the insecurity of a star." They do not know exactly how they got where they are, but they are fairly sure they will not be there for long. Goldman offers some research to support their fears. Of the ten top-grossing headliners in 1976, as measured by theater receipts, only two (Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds) made the same list in 1981. The s author underscores what all this means to lowly screenwriters: "Stars will not play weak and they will not play blemished, and you better know that now." Exceptions to this rule? Goldman raises some only to demolish them: "Of course De Niro will play a psychopath in Taxi Driver. Some psychopath -- he risks his life trying to save the virtue of your everyday ordinary-looking child prostitute, Jodie Foster."

Goldman is enough of an insider to command attention to, if not total agreement with, such statements. He is also generous with caustic soundstage glimpses of movies in the making. Here is Dustin Hoffman on the set of Goldman's Marathon Man, browbeating an ailing and clearly enfeebled Laurence Olivier into walking around and around a large room with him, improvising a scene. Recalling this long ordeal, Goldman notes "Hoffman's need to put himself on at least equal footing with this sick old man." Someone else the author will probably not work with in the future is Robert Redford. The actor's role as the Sundance Kid helped make him a megastar. By the time of All the President's Men, Redford was no longer Goldman's old pal but his producer. "He had asked me to come to Utah for the month to work with him -- and he wouldn't give me his phone number." This was before Redford invited him to look over a second screen play of the same book, written without Goldman's knowledge by Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron. The author recalls Redford's request as "a gutless betrayal."

Most good books about Hollywood, including this one, are in fact histories of accidents, chiefly bad ones. That movies are still being made, some even made well, certainly defies the illogic that goes into their creation. Goldman ends his guided tour of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land on an up note, predicting that a horde of talented new graduates from film schools will gallop West and rescue the studios from them selves. Whether they will be allowed to write anything but sequels to Porky 's remains an open question. An altogether different scenario suggests itself: DISSOLVE TO AMBITIOUS YOUNG WRITER seated before TV console, his face bathed in flickering greenish light. Suddenly he smacks his forehead with the heel of his hand. AYR (excitedly): Why did I waste my childhood on words? Space Invaders, hah! Pac-Man, hah! At last I have programmed the game that will make millions and millions and . . . -- By Paul Gray This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.