Hollywood tales

“You have no idea how often I’ve had creative meetings about a script, only to realize half an hour in that the producer or executive hasn’t read my script at all.

Usually this happens when you’re discussing a rewrite, and they make a remark about a scene that was in the first draft but is gone now. Except they don’t know it’s gone.

I don’t know how frequently this happens in other industries, but it sure happens in movies. It’s always a shock and impossible to handle. Because you can’t say, ‘Hey, putz, that’s not in the script anymore.’

I had one meeting with the late Steve McQueen, involving a Western I’d written that, he told me over the phone, he liked a lot, and could we meet?

We met, and the then director of the project, Don Siegel, was also present. And this is about how it went.

McQUEEN
I want a campfire scene where the two guys get drunk and talk about the old days.

SIEGEL
He’s got that — I think it’s fine.

McQUEEN
I don’t mean that kind of campfire scene, I mean a campfire scene.

We met like that for several hours and I still don’t know why. But it was madness. Here I was, closeted with these two men whose work I’ve admired for years, and McQueen kept going on and on about things that he wanted in the script that were already in the script, and Siegel tried to do his best. I just sat there, nodded, took notes, prayed for it all to end. I wasn’t surprised, a few weeks later, to learn that Siegel had walked the picture.”

 — William Goldman, “Adventures in the Screen Trade”

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