Free Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman

tremendous success. I am talking about all the idiots who decided to rip it off and capture the suddenly exposed “youth market.”
    Charade was another money-loser. A great success by itself, it unleashed a stream of other idiots who decided to do their own romantic-comedy-thrillers. Forget that they didn’t havePeter Stone’s wonderfully stylish script, Stanley Donen’s equally stylish direction. Plus those two ugly clods toiling in the vineyards, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.
    I was one of the leading idiots, and for my sins I decided to write a romantic-adventure-comedy-thriller about a bottle of red wine.
    The settings were pretty much preordained by the nature of the material. Sing Sing somehow seemed wrong. Devil’s Island, too. So I wrote it to take place in the most romantic places I knew—London, the Scottish Highlands, and the French Riviera.
    Now, those places pretty much dictated that the story be a chase. I had to get from one to the next. With at least some semblance of logic.
    My movie would be a chase, then, after a bottle of wine.
    But it couldn’t be Hearty Burgundy. Had to be a wine worth the travel. So I invented what surely would have been, had such a thing ever existed, the most valuable wine ever. 1811, known in Europe as “The Year of the Comet,” is generally thought of as being the greatest year for wine, if not ever, certainly of that century.
    And if it was great then, and in a sufficiently large bottle, it might be drinkable in 1978, the year I wrote it (or indeed, 1992, the year the movie got released). So I decided on a bottle of the most famous red, Chateau Lafite Rothschild. And I made up a celebratory bottle—Napoleon had been having some good years in that era—that was bigger than any ever made, a bottle equal to two regular cases of wine.
    I liked that for a lot of reasons. The bottle would have been worth many millions, so its breaking might be useful. It would still possibly taste as good as anything yet found on Planet Earth. And it would be heavier than shit, helpful if I could figure out how to use that for comedic moments.
    For my lovers I thought it might be wonderful to write a role forGlenda Jackson as my wine lady. (We are a quarter century back when I am fiddling with the idea.) Can’t remember who I thought of for the man, but Cary Grant must have been in my heart.
    Remember, this was the second of a three-picture deal I had signed with Mr. Levine, following A Bridge Too Far and Magic. It was finally released by Castle Rock in 1992—and if you think that time leap is unusual, well, it isn’t. You only need one person who has the wherewithal to make your movie to make your movie.
    Nothing had happened to the notion—it was still a romantic comedy about a chase after a legendary bottle of wine. Wine’s still around and there is some evidence that romance has survived too, if you look hard enough. But no one wanted it back in the ’70s. Castle Rock, just starting out, did. If God wanted to punish me and made me take a job as a studio head, the first thing I would do is hire all the bright young film-school students and movie nuts I could find and have them read every script my studio owned. I am guessing, but thousands is probably low. And since the studio heads are what they always have been, hardworking and imperfect, I am betting I could find a bunch that slipped through the cracks. All that it takes for the worst screenplay of all time to become the best screenplay of all time is the news thatTom Cruise wants to do it.
    Anyway, the wine picture disappeared for over a decade. And then, suddenly, it was a movie. What I want to talk about now was our first public screening.
    I don’t think even a phenomenon like Mr. Spielberg knows for sure what he has until he sees it in front of strangers. Oh, sure, he has the most amazing commercial track record of all time. And sure again, Jurassic II probably was not much of an angst-maker. But for the rest, he is like the