Adventures in the Screen Trade
Overview
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
about Hollywood written in 1983 by American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
novelist and screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
William Goldman
William Goldman
William Goldman is an American novelist, playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.-Early life and education:...
. The title is a parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
's Adventures in the Skin Trade.
The book is divided into three parts.
"Part One: Hollywood Realities" is a collection of essays on various subjects ranging from movie stars and studio executives to his thoughts on how to begin and end a screenplay and how to write for a movie star.
"Part Two: Adventures" has stories from eleven projects that Goldman
William Goldman
William Goldman is an American novelist, playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.-Early life and education:...
has been involved with, from Charley
Charley
Charley may refer to:*Hurricane Charley , the name of several tropical cyclones, namely the storm which impacted Florida in 2004*Charley Pollard, a character from the audio plays based on the television series Doctor Who...
and Masquerade, to the Academy Award
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
winning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a 1969 American Western film directed by George Roy Hill and written by William Goldman...
and All the President's Men
All the President's Men (film)
All the President's Men is a 1976 Academy Award-winning political thriller film based on the 1974 non-fiction book of the same name by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two journalists investigating the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post...
, to some projects that didn't get made, like a musical remake of Grand Hotel
Grand Hotel (film)
Grand Hotel is a 1932 American drama film directed by Edmund Goulding. The screenplay by William A. Drake and Béla Balázs is based on the 1930 play of the same title by Drake, who had adapted it from the 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel by Vicki Baum...
.
"Part Three: Da Vinci" has Goldman
William Goldman
William Goldman is an American novelist, playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.-Early life and education:...
showing the reader how he would go about adapting his own short story "Da Vinci" into a screenplay.