Which Lie Did I Tell? William GoldmanBloomsbury £8.99, pp485Buy it at a discount at BOL

Writing for someone else, as any Fleet Street hack will moan over a snifter in the Groucho, is always to get none of the credit and take all of the blame. Scriptwriter William Goldman agrees, even though he crafted a catalogue of stonkingly good Hollywood hits.

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Which Lie Did I Tell? , a disarming memoir of one man’s struggle to make it in film, benefits from a bracing candour. But the hundred rejection slips, the tales of triumph spurned through principle or pratfall – The Godfather was turned down because it promoted gangsterism – is the stuff of dozens of memoirs.

What makes this book different is Goldman’s dissection of the way Hollywood now works. Accounts executives are threatening the future of the trade because they don’t understand film and most are creatively illiterate. Stars – even if Goldman occasionally gushes – are actually vain, awkward and often short. There are no decent film critics left.

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Sequels, worst of all, are ‘whores’ movies’, derivative and cheap. The pulse for a sequel is always financial, not creative. ‘Well, why, pray tell, should The Phantom Menace be any less boring and flawed than the last of the first trilogy?’ Why indeed. That Which Lie Did I Tell? is a sequel to Goldman’s own brilliant Adventures in the Screen Trade – and the title of that bestseller was borrowed from Dylan Thomas – does not undermine Goldman’s case at all. His brutal frankness throughout leaves him as subject to his own strictures as anyone else.

Best of all are the author’s appraisals of his own and other people’s work. The orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally and the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest get the treatment, and he gives a stark analysis of his own classic creations – the water jump and the closing scenes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. ‘I can’t do better than that. It’s the best ending I’ve ever been involved in.’

If you harbour ambitions to become a screenwriter, don’t waste hundreds of pounds on a bogus writing course – for £8.99 you can now have a masterclass at home.

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