Free Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman Page A

rest of us, at your mercy.
    There is an amaaaazing amount of bullshit that you read in the print media or hear on the tube about why movies are hits or flops. Titanic was this, that’s why it turned out the way it did. The Postman was that, that’s why it turned out the way it did. Everybody wanted to see the young lovers on the big ship. Nobody wanted to seeKevin Costner in a movie about an apocalyptic mailman.
    Well, that’s only true after it opens.
    I was with one of the top executives at one of the studios that was involved with Titanic and this person said to me, with fingers very much crossed—this is the week it opened, remember— “If it just does a hundred million at the box office, we’ll be okay.” Now this is a very bright fellow. And had seen the screenings and pored over the results. He had heard and seen the audience reaction—
    —and he had no idea what it would do.
    Here is the truth about Titanic: people wanted to see it.
    Here is the truth about The Postman: people didn’t want to see it.
    Everything else is mythology.
    I felt pretty good about The Year of the Comet. I mean, I felt pretty good for me. I mean, I wasn’t slashing my wrists. Any number of reasons, but chief, I think, is that I had been around the shoot.Peter Yates, the fine English director, is a friend, has been for many years, and he runs a very pleasant set.
    I knew we were not Bergman, but I also knew we had delivered what we set out to do, a romantic-adventure-comedy-thriller, this one about a legendary bottle of wine. How big a hit we might be, of course I had zero idea. We could fail, too.
    But no way we could be a disaster.
    I remember the evening of the sneak very well, still, almost a decade later. I sat where I like to sit, all the way back, rear corner, left or right. I watched the audience come in. They were young Californians, and kind of excited to be there in thetest audience. Usually, people at these test screenings are excited. It’s something most of them have never done before, never will again.
    And they can be, at least I think they can be, wonderfully helpful. Especially when they are confused about something. Very often those of us involved with the effort think we have made something clear, when in fact, we have not. I love test screenings for that kind of help.
    By far the best screening I ever saw or will see—not a test, but the first time the movie was shown in New York—was Jaws. A lot of people donot remember what a disaster it was in the making, but it was comparable to Godfather I and Tootsie. No one remembers what disasters those two were, either, before they were released. But they were. Nightmares the media glommed on to, ridiculed constantly, only to shut up when the final product was shown.
    Jaws went wildly over budget, had a director in diapers who was clearly helpless, unable to deal with those pesky little problems that cropped up, like disastrous weather and a monster that didn’t work. Then it went into the silence all movies enter—postproduction. (Not a lot of famous funny editing-room stories.) Anyway, there we are in the theater, a thousand people maybe, some famous, most not, all curious.
    Lights down, time to fish or cut bait.
    I never remember any music hitting an audience like those first guttural notes ofJohn Williams’s great score. There were gasps two seconds in. And nobody spoke for two hours. Laughed a little. Screamed a lot. And 124 minutes later, when the lights came up, we all knew something remarkable was about to go out into the world.
    I was there becauseRichard Zanuck andDavid Brown, the producers, had been heads of Fox when Butch Cassidy was purchased and made. And if Jaws was the best, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the worst.
    I had never seen it all put together. Director George Roy Hill had been in despair after the first sneak, because, as I said earlier, the audience had laughed too much, which made the ending a problem. So he set about taking out