Free Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman

word of mouth exerts. But On Golden Pond is already more popular than For Your Eyes Only, the James Bond film. And it's also passed the Reynolds and the Eastwood and Bill Murray. In fact, it conceivably can catch Superman II, making it one of the fifteen most popular films in American history.
    Naturally, it's a nonrecurring phenomenon. Freak casting, they'll tell you. Hank and Hepbum, Jane and Hank, that's all she wrote.
    I don't believe that. Granting the skill and charm of those three performers, I think the movie would have worked every bit as successfully with other actors of equivalent skill-say Jimmy Stewart and Bette Davis with Susan Sarandon as their child. Or Jimmy Cagney or Fred Astaire teamed with Irene Dunne or Ingrid Bergman. With Blythe Danner or Sissy Spacek as the daughter.
    When I saw On Golden Pond I heard something so wonderful, something I hadn't heard in a movie theatre in years-the sound of middle-aged laughter. Well, you're not going to hear much of that in the future. Do you realize how many copies of American Graffiti the studios have churned out in the last years? Or Halloween? Or Rocky? The stomach turns. Well, On Golden Pond may be bigger than any of them. And I'm sure they'll never rip it off. Because it would mean a total opening up of what constitutes a commercial film. And that's scary-so much more comforting to make Death Wish XXIII.
    Maybe the most depressing comment made to me while I was interviewing for this book was by a bright studio guy who told me why On Golden Pond was breaking through. He said, "It's because it's got Jane Fonda in it."
    Now, Jane Fonda is a very big star, but the same fortnight that On Golden Pond started, so did Rollover, another Jane Fonda film, only she wasn't the support in Rollover, she was the star- -and it didn't open. Total wipeout. Maybe twenty million down the tubes. This
    with a name co-star and a name director. So why did the studio guy say Fonda made On Golden Pond? Because he was desperate to come up with something, anything, that wouldn't shake the foundations of what he knew to be true-what kind of film to make.
    There's a whole world of subject matter that will never be touched by the major studios. Because the executives know the sort of film that may work. Just like the bright boys in Detroit knew, a while back, that what the American public really wanted was a great big glossy gas-guzzling car. And all that interest that was starting in Japanese cars? Just another nonrecurring phenomenon. ...
    ALL NIGHT LONG
    I don't know of any other movie that better illustrates the inter- relationships of studio execs and stars than the Gene Hackman film All Night Long.
    Ail Night Long is a fragile Film, very short-it runs only eighty- four minutes and has a distinctly European feel, which is not surprising when you consider that the idea bc:gan with its ultimate director, the Frenchman Jean-Claude Tramont.
    Tramont wanted to do a movie about people who work at night.
    That was all he had, just that notion, but it struck a chord with the people at Fox, who said to go ahead and Find a writer. They would develop it step by step.
    Tramont found the wonderfully talented W. D. Richter (Slither, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and Richter agreed to attempt a script. What Richter eventually wrote was the story of a man in crisis, a man named George Dupler. (The part eventually played by Hackman.)
    George has worked, for twenty-plus years, in regional sales for a large pharmaceutical company. His wife is sort of a sludge, but not evil. His teen-age son also isn't much to crow over: The kid is done with school and, when he works at all, paints houses. George has the kind of life, then, that's okay if you're happy, terrible if you're not.
    George isn't happy--all he ever wanted to do was be an inventor.
    As the story opens, George has just been passed over for promotion. He takes the news badly: First he slugs his boss, then he throws a chair through a closed window.