THB #288: Years End 2 - What We Don't Know 1

The obvious place to start today’s newsletter is with the late, great William Goldman. He wrote the most quoted comment on Hollywood ever and, ironically, the most often misquoted.

The quote comes from Screen Trade, which should be the first book anyone who wants to understand the movie business should read. It is old (40th anniversary in 2023) and the discussion of movie stars will seem ancient… but the nature of the humans who run the show and want to run the show will never change. I reccomend all the books shown here and many by everyone from Lynda Obst to Sam Wasson to Mark Harris to David Puttnam to Soderbergh to John Gregory Dunne to Julia Phillips and beyond. But the first stop is still “Adventures in the Screen Trade.”

Nobody Knows Anything.

And the real context… no one knows what is going to work. It’s always a guess. It’s always a leap. It’s always a risk.

We are in an era of industry media over-promsing and under-delivering insight. It’s not because the writers are dumb, unsk…