Inessentials

On Friday night I had the pleasure of watching a 35mm print of 1969′s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In attendance were William Goldman, the screenwriter, and Robert Crawford, who directed The Making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which invented the making-of documentary that is now an expected part of every DVD release. At the time, no one had ever thought to film what was happening behind the scenes on a film. George Roy Hill, who directed Butch Cassidy, wanted to know what exactly it was that he did as a director, and he thought it would be helpful to students of film studies (then a burgeoning topic of study) at his alma mater Yale University. (You can watch the entire documentary for free here. Some NSFW language.) Crawford had interesting things to say about the production and its stars, but the highlight of the evening was listening to 78 year-old William Goldman discuss screenwriting and the production of Butch Cassidy in particular.

While there were plenty of revealing elements about the casting of the film (originally Paul Newman wanted to play the Sundance Kid with Jack Lemmon in the Butch Cassidy role; Marlon Brando wanted in; Warren Beatty wanted in; Robert Redford was a virtual unknown at the time), it was Goldman discussing the writing process that was so interesting. He had plenty of advice to give. For starters, don’t be a playwright. (In part because critics are people who have failed at everything else in life and are thus very nasty, a view I thought had died away years ago.) Second, quoting himself in what has become a classic line about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” Why did his script sell for a record $400,000 after a bidding war when two weeks before every studio but one rejected it? Because in Hollywood, everyone is guessing. Nobody knows why (to use his examples) The Hangover was a massive hit and the Bruce Willis vehicle Surrogates flopped. But one thing you can be sure of is that the wrong person will be blamed. When Hill was searching for a cinematographer for Butch Cassidy, he chose Conrad L. Hall. But Warner Brothers blamed Hall for Morituri (1965), a flop addled by production problems, problems that Goldman attributed to its notoriously difficult stars, Marlon Brando and Yul Brenner. Hill provided an ultimatum to the studio over Hall, the studio caved, and the result is one of the most luscious soft-focus westerns ever made.

That soft-focus style (over-exposed, back-lit) has gone out of fashion (hastened in part by the shift from film to digital over the last decade, I would speculate), but watching the light play off Newman, Redford, Katherine Ross, and those Utah and Wyoming landscapes off a well-preserved film strip is something staggering to behold. I’m a firm believer in watching a movie in a manner as close to its recording style (digital projection for digital video, film projection for film strips) and this further confirms my commitment to that principle.

Goldman, who also wrote the scripts for The Princess Bride (based on his book), The Stepford Wives (1965), All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, Misery, and Absolute Power, is a film legend. But as he expressed, the only two films he was involved with that he thinks worked out okay are Butch Cassidy and The Princess Bride.

He admitted that this is only the second time in the last forty years that he has watched Butch Cassidy, and he said he was pleased by how well it helped up. He attributed that success to the performances of Newman and Redford, the direction of Hill, and the cinematography of Hall, but it doesn’t take Woodward and Bernstein to figure out that the screenwriter gave the film many of its most poignant and influential elements: the Jules and Jim-style interplay of the three leads, the meditations on the death of the Wild West and all that was lost and gained by it, the immensely influential dialogue filled with playful banter and light-hearted irony, the twist on the no-backing-down attitude of John Wayne westerns, and the fully formed male leads that most film historians agree invented the buddy-film genre. Hill may have been devastated that people laughed at his tragedy (to the point of cutting out many of the scenes that got the biggest laughs), but the blend of comedy and tragedy created a tone hardly matched in American film.

Thank you, Mr. Goldman.