[Here’s another
contribution to ROT from Kirk Woodward. He’s discussing the value of William Goldman’s
1969 study of the Broadway season, a
book both Kirk and I have put great store in for decades. No one has followed up on The Season the way Goldman analyzed it, show by show
during 1967-68, and it remains the only such detailed study in print. (The book is perennially reissued in
paperback, so it’s still available in bookstores.) Anyone interested in how the commercial theater
works in the United States, from back stage to the front of the house to the
producers’ offices, will find Goldman’s book astonishingly informative, and it’s
written in a style that makes it readable even for the merely curious as well
as the serious theater student. I’ll let
Kirk explain the rest of the book’s value.
Rick]
I’ve
had one particular kind of conversation so many times that it’s starting to
seem like some sort of déjà vu
experience. It goes something like this: I say to someone who loves theater,
“That reminds me of a chapter in William Goldman’s book The Season. Have you read it?” They tell me they’ve never heard of
it. Crushed, I reply, “It’s the best book on Broadway ever written, one of the
best on theater. I’ll give you my copy.” I do, and I never get it back.
You
may not be particularly familiar with William Goldman’s name (or maybe you
are), but you’re certainly familiar with some of his work. He has written the
screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid (1969), The Stepford Wives (1975),
All the President’s Men (1976),and Maverick (1994), among many other films.
He
began as a novelist; in college I read and loved his first novel, The Temple of Gold (1957), with its
stunning conclusion. Other novels include Boys
and Girls Together (1964) and No Way to
Treat a Lady (also 1964 – he was not happy with its cinematic adaptation by
others), and he has turned a number of his novels into movies, including Marathon Man (1976) with its appalling
dental torture scene, Magic (1978),
and The Princess Bride (1987), one
“magical fantasy” that really is magical.
He
has also worked in theater over the years, and at the age of eighty-one in
2012, he was adapting Stephen King’s novel Misery
for a stage production, as he had adapted it for the screen in 1990. (His
brother James wrote the play The Lion in Winter
and the book for the musical Follies.)
One of the remarkable aspects of Goldman’s remarkable career is that he has contributed to the culture not one but two widely quoted sayings. One, from All the President’s Men, is “Follow the money,” a line inferred in Woodward and Bernstein’s book but phrased that way by Goldman. The other, from his first book about the movies, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), says so much that there is to say about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.”
But
before he wrote his first book about the movies, he wrote The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway (1969), in which he does
something no one had done before: he takes one entire Broadway season
(1967-68), sees every show that
season, organizes the shows under topics, and writes an insightful,
educational, and absolutely delightful book about all of it. My temptation is
simply to quote the whole thing, but one has to draw the line somewhere.
I
will start by saying that some things have changed since 1969, most of them
along lines he proposed (which is not to say his advice is the reason they
happened). For example, in the book he can’t understand why Broadway shows
aren’t advertised on TV. Eventually a few were – the first I recall was Ben
Vereen dancing in the TV commercial for Pippin
– and now any show that can afford it is likely to have a commercial running.
Similarly,
homosexuality is no longer a veiled topic on Broadway. In The Season Goldman bewails the guarded way he has to use to write
about gays and the theater. Those days have gone.
However,
human nature is still human nature, and theater is a remarkably conservative
art beneath changing fashions in playwriting and staging. Goldman brings many
gifts in writing about the theater. He has something to say – his book is
thoroughly researched, to the extent of including a study of audiences,
commissioned by Goldman, by a polling company. And he says well what he has to
say – his narrative gifts as a novelist and screenwriter are continually in
evidence in The Season. His chapters
are structured like dramas: they have beginnings, middles, and ends, propelled
throughout by conflict and suspense. “Each and every Broadway show,” he says,
correctly, “is in reality a little battle to the death.”
But
supreme among his gifts, in my opinion, is his insufficiently recognized gift
for social comedy. He has the eye of a Molière
or a Ben Jonson for the contrast between behaviors and ideals, pretenses and
realities, hypocrisies and truths, illusions and knowledge. He sees what people
pretend to be, and what they are.
The
season that Goldman chose to study was hardly a landmark in Broadway history.
It had some high points: Joe Egg receives
particular praise, and Plaza Suite obviously
continues to be performed. None of his season’s musicals are performed much
anymore except perhaps George M, but
that show survives, if at all, on the strength of its Cohan songs. Most of the
season didn’t represent anybody’s best work. As far as Goldman’s book is
concerned, perhaps that was just as well. Works of brilliance might distort the
picture. Goldman is able to look at the processes that make Broadway what it
is, and let them justify themselves if they can.
As
Goldman presents this wide ranging social comedy, each chapter has a strategy. He may build a chapter around
a single show (Something Different),
around a group of shows (for example: sex comedies, shows about rebellious
youth), around social groupings (gays, Jews), around a job (producers,
reviewers), around a business function (ticket sales, publicity). A single
chapter might go like this: describe a moment in the life of a particular show;
narrate the show’s recent production history; put it in the context of similar
shows of the past; report on conversations with the author and director;
describe a telling moment that takes place at intermission; watch the creative
team in various moments of stress; draw some organized conclusions; and finish
with a revealing anecdote.
As a
result, aspect after aspect of Broadway come to life. Goldman knows how to get
his ideas across. A few examples may suffice. Of Mike Nichols’ directing: “What
Nichols did through this production [of The
Little Foxes] was have the characters behave as if their subconscious were
common knowledge. Now this is simply not what people do.” Of reviewers: “You
get the dregs, the stage-struck but untalented neurotic who eventually drifts
into criticism as a means of clinging peripherally to the arts.” On why
rewrites of shows can be disastrous: “It’s as if you want to go north, due
north, that’s the place, and off you start. But then there’s a change and then
another . . . And then one morning you wake up, and the sun’s dead in your
face, and you think, ‘East, huh?’ . . . And then you think, ‘Well, what the
hell, at least I’m moving and . . . when you get right down to it, I’m a motion
man.”
This
last illustration points out one of Goldman’s most enjoyable strengths as a
writer about Broadway, namely, his illustrations – often extended analogies
that put whatever he’s writing about into perspective. About homosexuals, he
imagines how Jews (like himself) would feel if treated the same way. About the
ideas that musicals should be up-to-date, he writes, “Musical comedy is under
no more obligation to reflect the music of its time than Mr. Balanchine is to
put the New York City Ballet through an evening of the Frug [a dance current at
the time].” About the immortal fame of certain current writers, he writes,
“Want to know whom we named in the eighteenth century as the three greatest
writers of all time? Catch this: Homer, Sophocles and Richardson. Richardson.
You know, that great, great writer
none of us could live without.” (Samuel Richardson was the author, in 1740, of Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. You may
have read it . . . but probably not.)
Some
of Goldman’s useful categorizations include: the Culture Hero (someone who all
of a sudden is acknowledged, not just as a fine worker, but as one of the Great
of the Greats, who can do no wrong – my current example: the South Park guys);
the Snob Hit (the one show a season, usually from England, that everyone feels
they should see, not because they’ll enjoy it, or possibly even understand it,
but because it’s a duty to see it); the Three Theaters (the Musical Theater;
the Popular Theater, which “wants to tell us either a truth that we already
know or a falsehood we want to believe in;” and the Third Theater, which “wants
to tell us something we don’t want to know”); the Muscle (the person who is the
real power behind a production – the Muscle may be an actor, director,
producer, anyone who has the last word); and the Kiss of Death production,
where from the start nothing seems to go right, and the disasters mount up. The
directions he leads his discussion of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party are masterful; but I hope readers will discover
its delights for themselves.
The Season is
Goldman’s only book on theater. Drawing on his experiences in the movies, he
has also written three books on films. I’ve mentioned Adventures in the Screen Trade, and the others are Which Lie Did I Tell? (2000) and The Big Picture (2001, a collection of
Goldman’s daring film journalism, with a nice punning title). These are all
fine books, and Screen Trade is
generally considered a classic and is widely quoted.
In
his books on the movies Goldman continues to batter at the walls of hypocrisy,
self-delusion, and fraud with the weapons of experience and common sense. Why
do movies succeed, he asks? Because people want to see them. Why do films and
filmmakers win awards – or not? Because that’s how the votes go. Nobody, that
is to say, knows anything.
For
me, though, I must say, The Season
trumps the books on cinema, because The
Season is so brilliant about, let’s call it by its name, hypocrisy, and
Hollywood is famously beyond hypocrisy.
It’s gone into hypocrisy as a possibility, and come out on the other side, with
hypocrisy as its very nature. That Hollywood is venal, dishonest, corrupt
doesn’t surprise anyone. What surprises us is when it’s anything else.
But
Broadway is different. There’s something unique about Broadway. The Season tells us a lot about a
flamboyant business, but it never forgets that the potential for genuinely fine
work is always there, and it tells us even more about how we as human beings
get through life . . . especially when there’s prestige and money on the line.
So
in his books on film, Goldman has to up the New Journalistic tone, make his
writing process even more explicit, express more opinions in more earthy ways.
And he tells us a great deal we probably didn’t know about movies. But the
insights on human nature in the film business seem familiar, playing on the
familiar themes of greed, vanity, and hypocrisy, while his insights on human
nature on Broadway continually surprise and delight.
And,
as I said, he doesn’t lose sight of the most remarkable fact of all: that good
work does sometimes get done. An example is The
Season itself, a triumph of dramatic writing – in multiple senses – if
there ever was one.
I have researched Leonardo Shapiro. I believe I have all the info I need. FYI, I graduated from Windsor Mountain School in 1963, the same year as Leonardo. He was a very interesting character! Rick Goeld
ReplyDeleteMr. Goeld--
DeleteYes, Leo was very interesting. Also talented, thought-provoking, and infuriating. Anyone who knew him will certainly agree, at least to one degree or another. I assume you found my profile of Leo and his theater company, Shaliko, in the Winter 1993 issue of 'The Drama Review.' It didn't deal much with his life before New York and Shaliko, but my unpublished expansion covers his early life and schooling, and his post-retirement activities, extensively.
I'd be curious to know what your research is for. (Leo gave his papers to the N.Y. Pubic Library for the Performing Arts, but the last time I checked, they had not been made available for research.)
~Rick