Which Lie Did I Tell?

The Leper [1980-85] I don't think I was aware of it, but when I started work onAdventures in the Screen Trade,in 1980, I had become a leper in Hollywood. Let me explain what that means: the phone stopped ringing. For five years, from 1980 till 1985, no one called with anything resembling a job offer. Sure, I had conversations with acquaintances. Yes, the people whom I knew and liked still talked to me. Nothing personal was altered in any way. But in the eight years prior to 1978, seven movies I'd written were released. In the eight years following, none. I talked about it recently with a bunch of young Los Angeles screenwriters, and what I told them was this: If I had been living Out There, I don't think I could have survived. The idea of going into restaurants and knowing that heads were turning away, of knowing people were saying "See him?--no, don't look yet, okay, now turn, that guy, he used to be hot, can't get arrested anymore," would have devastated me. In L.A., truly, there is but one occupation, the movie business. In New York, the infinite city, we're all invisible. Example: my favorite French bistro is Quatorze Bis, on East Seventy-ninth. Best fries in town, great chicken, all that good stuff. Well, I was there one night last year when another guy came in, and we had each won two Oscars for screenwriting, and we lived within a few blocks of each other-- --and we had never met. (It was Robert Benton.) Impossible in Los Angeles. But that kind of thing was my blessing during those five years. My memory was that the leprosy didn't really bother me. I asked my wonderful ex-wife, Ilene, about it and she said: "I don't think it did bother you, not being out of Hollywood, anyway. But one night I remember you were in the library and you were depressed and I realized it was the being alone that was getting to you. You always enjoyed the meetings, the socialness of moviemaking. You were always so grateful when you could get out of your pit." I wrote five books in those five years (couldn't do it now, way too hard) and then the phone started ringing again. This is why it stopped in the first place. There is a famous andamazinglyracist World War I cartoon that showed two soldiers fighting in a trench. One was German, the other an American Negro who had just swiped at the German's throat with his straight razor. (When I say racist, I mean racist.) The caption went like this: German Soldier: You missed. American Soldier: Wait'll yo' turn yo' head. The point being, in terms of my screenwriting career, I never turned my head. Looking back, there was no real reason to. I was on my hot streak then. I was a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in those years. Between '73 and '78 this is what I wrote: Three novels: The Princess Bride (1973) Marathon Man (1974) Magic (1976) And six movies: The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) The Stepford Wives (1975) All the President's Men (1976) Marathon Man (1976) A Bridge Too Far (1977) Magic (1978) If you had told me, that 1978 November day whenMagicopened, that it would be nine years before my next picture appeared, I doubt I would have known what language you were speaking. It wasn't as if I'd stopped writing screenplays afterMagic. But the lesson I was about to learn was this: studios do not particularly lose faith in a writer if a movie is terrible. Producers do not forget your name if a movie loseGoldman, William is the author of 'Which Lie Did I Tell?' with ISBN 9780375403491 and ISBN 0375403493.