Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman, 4/5

This substantial follow-up to the hilarious, brilliantly-structured Adventures in the Screen Trade focuses rather more on the trade and less on the adventures, a fact that will please those looking for practical insight into the realities and technicalities of screenwriting, but perhaps disappoint those looking for pure entertainment.

This book is packed with information, opinions and examples, but there are three basic concepts that remain with me most vividly a few days later:
1. Screenwriters should enter a scene (and by extension, the story) as late as possible.  Scenes should generally be crafted to communicate as concisely and efficiently as possible, taking every opportunity to utilize context and subtext without wasting time on the page.  I know this is probably the first thing you learn in Screenwriting 101, but it was a novel concept to me.
2. Directors are overvalued and writers are undervalued.  Goldman is not unbiased on this point, of course, but there is a lot of evidence that directors often receive excessive, exclusive praise for aspects of a film that were almost entirely the result of someone else’s work.  For example, a writer can create a powerful scene, specifying every detail from the timing to the camera angles, but once filmed, the scene becomes inextricably tied to the director.  The example Goldman uses is the famous crop duster sequence in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest.  It is clear from the script that Hitchcock contributed almost nothing, creatively, to the scene, but what was the writer’s name?  I certainly don’t remember.
3. Protect the spine at all costs.  Goldman believes that every story has a spine–an irreducible core that should not be altered, no matter how much the surrounding details might change.  I thought it was fascinating how, in his example, he boiled each vital part of a book down into one word, creating a short list of essential words that drive the story.  His goal, when translating a book to film is to find and preserve the intent of the original material, which allows a great deal of latitude in how the peripheral aspects are treated.  This idea will provide much food for future thought whenever I encounter films based successfully or, more likely, unsuccessfully on books.

[Why I read it: I enjoyed Goldman’s first book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, very much.]