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I once talked about how you can live your life up to a point and not encounter certain things that everyone takes for granted to be common knowledge. It seems, though, that from that point on, encounters with this phenomenon seem to occur more frequently.
In all my years in Hollywood, I never heard this quote, yet I have heard it from three different sources in the past month. "Nobody knows anything." This is the credo of William Goldman, bigshot Hollywood muckedy-muck (yes, that was his official title) who wrote a book titled Adventures in the Screen Trade. Goldman also wrote a movie titled Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among others. Apparently, everyone in Hollywood knows about "Nobody knows anything" and nobody told me... until now. I guess me not hearing about this just goes to prove that it's right on the money.
I've collected a few other great quotes that I've heard recently, and I'd like to share them with you.
"Don't commit suicide because you'll change your mind two weeks later."
- Art Buchwald
"If I was a writer starting out today, I might consider backing into screenwriting via another route. Sometimes the best way into the game is around it."
- screenwriter Shane Salerno (Armageddon, Shaft, Ghost Rider)
"I'd keep playing. I don't think the heavy stuff's gonna be coming down for quite awhile."
- Carl, the assistant greenskeeper of Bushwood Country Club
(Bill Murray in Caddyshack)
Whenever anyone asks me what keeps me going, I always say that I'm afraid that as soon as I unplug my phone and throw it in the moving truck, somebody I gave a script to will pick that moment in time to call me to tell me they want to make my movie. After all that time, if I had just held on for two more minutes, I would have seen the payoff. I couldn't bear the thought of moving back to Connecticut, getting a "real job" and one day seeing some big star interviewed saying "Someone gave me this great script that I was dying to make, but we couldn't find the writer... so, since I was free, I took the offer to do Spice World 2." That's when I'd kill myself. I'd never be able to live with the thought that I screwed up that big, and I know that after Spice World 2 no one's ever going to hire that actor again.
So, not being a big fan of suicide, I'm hanging in there, and I want you to do the same. There's so many people out there wasting good talent - don't you be one of them. That's my quote. When things get to feeling like they're too much to bear, keep playing, because the heavy stuff may not come for quite a while.
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