The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (166 page)

That was then. Whoopi Goldberg is not park-able, off to the side. Yet not many black women are in this book. Whitney Houston hardly makes it on the strength of
The Bodyguard
, where she certainly sings, too. But there is something to be said about that hokey film. Ms. Houston acts; she plays a character at least as credible as Kevin Costner’s; she is plainly involved in the plot as a mature lead—by which, it follows, she is available for our fantasies; and the film never notices that she is black. This could be the first time a negotiably attractive black woman has played a romantic role that could as easily have gone to a white.

Am I forgetting someone? Do I have to go along with the notion that Jeanne Crain was colored in
Pinky?
Are we expected to overlook the rumor and even the visual hint that Kay Francis and Merle Oberon had “mixed” blood?

All of which is a way of saying that Whoopi Goldberg may have gotten this far because she is not patently available for romance in a movie. She is a clown, and a supporting actress. But there are those working now—Alfre Woodard or Angela Bassett—who could audition for “white” roles as easily as Olivier or Welles played
Othello
. Some day soon such “outrages” must occur. The movies are so hungry for things never seen before, and America will not prevent the logical destiny of interracial love affairs.

Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg has done the following:
The Color Purple
(85, Steven Spielberg);
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
(86, Penny Marshall);
Burglar
(87, Hugh Wilson);
Fatal Beauty
(87, Tom Holland);
Clara’s Heart
(88, Robert Mulligan);
The Telephone
(88, Rip Torn);
Homer & Eddie
(90, Andrei Konchalovsky);
The Long Walk Home
(90, Richard Pearce);
Soapdish
(91, Michael Hoffman);
Sarafina!
(92, Darrell James Roodt);
The Player
(92, Robert Altman);
Sister Act
(92, Emile Ardolino);
Made in America
(93, Richard Benjamin); and
Sister Act II
(93, Bill Duke). Several of these films are so bad, it is unlikely a white actress could have survived them.

In 1994, Whoopi hosted the Oscars—uneasily: she was often funny, but she didn’t master that oddly old-fashioned crowd. So she challenged them all the more (which some found healthier than
Sister Act
).

Whoopi has done the Oscars again, in 1996, 1999, and 2002—but more recently she seems to have settled for
Hollywood Squares
. She does nearly anything, with a lot of voice work and very few good pictures: the voice of Shenzi in
The Lion King
(94, Roger Alters and Rob Minkoff);
Star Trek: Generations
(94, David Carson); a voice in
The Pagemaster
(94, Maurice Hunt);
The Little Rascals
(94, Penelope Spheeris);
Corrina, Corrina
(94, Jessie Nelson);
Boys on the Side
(95, Herbert Ross);
Moonlight and Valentino
(95, David Anspaugh);
Theodore Rex
(95, Jonathan R. Betuel);
The Sunshine Boys
(95, John Erman);
Eddie
(96, Steve Rash);
Bogus
(96, Norman Jewison);
The Associate
(96, Donald Petrie); Myrlie Evers in
Ghosts of Mississippi
(96, Rob Reiner);
In the Gloaming
(97, Christopher Reeve);
Cinderella
(97, Robert Iscove);
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
(98, Kevin Rodney Sullivan);
A Knight in Camelot
(98, Roger Young);
Alegría
(98, Franco Dragone); the Cheshire Cat in
Alice in Wonderland
(99, Nick Willing);
The Deep End of the Ocean
(99, Ulu Grosbard);
Girl, Interrupted
(99, James Mangold);
Monkeybone
(01, Henry Selick);
Rat Race
(01, Jerry Zucker);
Call Me Claus
(01, Peter Werner).

She was the voice of Miss Clavel in
Madeline: My Fair Madeline
(02, Scott Heming); a voice in
Blizzard
(02, LeVar Burton);
Good Fences
(03, Ernest R. Dickerson);
Bitter Jester
(03, Maija Di Giorgio); and in her own TV series,
Whoopi
. Her movie work now consists of voices, cameos, and film that may not open.

William Goldman
, b. Chicago, 1931
“Storyteller” is how Goldman would like to be remembered. And that is the sensible way of regarding him, whether as novelist, screenwriter, or the author of two enjoyably anecdotal books about Hollywood,
Adventures in the Screen Trade
(1983) and
Hype and Glory
(1990). He would prefer to be a novelist and, like most of the best movie writers, he has no illusions about the power or creative personality of writing for the screen: “If
all
you do is write screenplays, then it
becomes
denigrating to the soul.” Goldman is caustic, unsentimental, and penetrating, so long as those qualities can be delivered briefly and instantaneously. In other words, he thinks in knockout lines and argues in brilliant segues. Like all the long-lived Hollywood writers (though Goldman opts for New York), it is Goldman’s instinct to prefer speed and efficiency to commitment. He seems never to have shown any interest in directing, nor in having control over his films.

Nevertheless,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(69, George Roy Hill) was an original script, an acute mixing of Western formula and contemporary idiom, just sufficiently real, touching, funny, and disarming to gather up the world’s pleasure. No one else let the film down, but Goldman made it. More intriguingly, one could claim that his adapted screenplay saved
All the President’s Men
(76, Alan Pakula) from plot labyrinth, gave it the necessary melodrama, and enshrined the fallacy of indefatigable news hounds. The clarity of the movie was only made possible by Goldman—think of the book, think of the real events, and marvel at how the picture
works
. Deep Throat seems to have written it, and so screenwriting and the paranoia about conspiracy become interdependent.

Goldman’s novels have made many of his films:
No Way to Treat a Lady
(book 64; film 68, Jack Smight);
The Princess Bride
(book 73; film 87, Rob Reiner);
Marathon Man
(book 74; film 76, John Schlesinger); and
Magic
(book 76; film 78, Richard Attenborough).

As a writer for hire, he has also done
Masquerade
(65, Basil Dearden);
Harper
(66, Smight);
The Hot Rock
(72, Peter Yates);
The Stepford Wives
(75, Bryan Forbes);
The Great Waldo Pepper
(75, Hill);
A Bridge Too Far
(77, Attenborough);
Mr. Horn
(79, Jack Starrett) for TV; the dismal
Heat
(87, R. M. Richards); and a very effective comeback, Stephen King’s
Misery
(90, Reiner), beautifully plotted, even if it shirks some of the crazier ambiguities about writing freely or under duress. He also did the screenplay for
Year of the Comet
(92, Peter Yates); and
Maverick
(94, Richard Donner).

Few movies nowadays have the narrative intricacy or the speed of which Goldman is capable. He is one of the writers on Attenborough’s
Chaplin
, but, alas, he was both present and conscious when the device of the publisher/interlocutor was conceived. It was his idea!

In truth, it’s too long since Goldman worked on a good film. If he means to go on writing very smart books about his trade, he needs steadier credentials than
The Chamber
(96, James Foley);
The Ghost and the Darkness
(96, Stephen Hopkins)—which did have the signs of something good;
Fierce Creatures
(97, Robert Young and Fred Schepisi), where his work is uncredited;
Absolute Power
(97, Clint Eastwood) where you might want it to be uncredited;
The General’s Daughter
(99, Simon West); and two adaptations from Stephen King—
Hearts in Atlantis
(01, Scott Hicks) and
Dreamcatcher
(02, Lawrence Kasdan).

He works on, but no new screenplay seems to have been produced.

Samuel Goldwyn
(Schmuel Gelbfisz) (1879–1974), b. Warsaw, Poland
Goldwyn withdrew in splendid, insufferable egotism from the two most significant mergers in the history of the American film industry. This led to his being known as the greatest “independent” film producer in a world of vast corporations. But all those corporations grew from a tiny band of entrepreneurs who knew and mistrusted one another. Now that the majors have perished or are living on transfusions from larger corporations, it is easier to look back eighty years and see the shabby way they came into being. In those terms, Goldwyn looks less an “independent” than an opinionated loser, edged out by marginally shrewder men. The structure of the film industry emerged from the squabbles of a gang of boys. Goldwyn was the kid who would play no game but his own, and thus he had to play alone. It is as generous to build him up as a creative or far-seeing man, as it would be wrong to disparage the achievement of an immigrant who became very rich indeed. The tragedy—if one is in that frame of mind—is that an untutored Polish glove merchant, within so short a period, should have achieved such eminence as a purveyor of mass-market fiction that he turned “respectable.”

Bernard Shaw pierced Goldwyn’s pretentious core when he said of the producer’s attempts to buy the film rights of a play: “The trouble, Mr. Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in money.” The history of the movie tycoons has a clear lesson: they neglected money, or were inept with it, but adored meaning and message in their films, despite every omission of taste or talent. Is it any wonder, battered by Wall Street and the critics, that they ended up as studied, bewildered eccentrics, desperately seeking distinction? Thus Goldwyn is likely to survive as the author of so many non sequiturs, a mogul’s clangers. One of those—“Include me out”—could be the motto of his career.

Goldwyn left Poland at age eleven, worked in England for four years with a blacksmith, and arrived in America in 1899. Tired of hot irons and horses, he went in for smart gloves and smooth hands. When the glove business faltered, he switched into movies. With his brother-in-law, Jesse Lasky, and Cecil B. De Mille he formed Lasky Feature Plays. When that outfit merged with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, Zukor and Goldfish stared balefully at one another across a small, crowded empire. Goldfish left and in 1916 teamed up with the Selwyn brothers. He changed his name to that of the new company, thus making it seem his own. (This is the touch of business genius knowing that the brothers would hardly alter their names to Selfish. And Goldwyn was dottily famous for his “touch.”) It was at this time that Goldwyn launched Will Rogers. But Goldwyn quarreled with the Selwyns and broke away from them in 1922. As a result, he was only a stockholder when the Goldwyn company was sold out to Metro. But from 1924 on, with his assumed name holding hyphens for the largest major, Goldwyn himself produced independently, through United Artists until 1940, and then usually with RKO.

Goldwyn liked movies, and he had a better-than-average record in choosing directors, even if he seldom let them do their best work. His eye for actors and actresses was much less reliable, while he had a positive craving for spending large amounts on serious writers and unpromising material.
Wuthering Heights
is typical of this ambition outreaching itself. Only Goldwyn would have applied Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur to Emily Brontë, asked Gregg Toland to photograph Haworth in California, and given Olivier’s Heathcliff Merle Oberon as Cathy.

There is no pattern to his product, save that of restless opportunism:
The Highest Bidder
(21, Wallace Worsley);
Doubling for Romeo
(21, Clarence Badger);
The Eternal Cry
(23, George Fitzmaurice);
Potash and Perlmutter
(23, Badger);
Cytherea
(24, Fitzmaurice);
In Hollywood with Potash and Perlmutter
(24, Alfred Green);
Tarnish
(24, Fitzmaurice), the first of many Goldwyn pictures starring Ronald Colman;
The Dark Angel
(25, Fitzmaurice);
A Thief in Paradise
(25, Fitzmaurice);
His Supreme Moment
(25, Fitzmaurice);
Stella Dallas
(25, Henry King);
Partners Again
(26, King);
The Winning of Barbara Worth
(26, King);
The Magic Flame
(27, King);
The Night of Love
(27, Fitzmaurice);
The Awakening
(28, Victor Fleming);
Bulldog Drummond
(29, F. Richard Jones);
Condemned
(29, Wesley Ruggles);
The Rescue
(29, Herbert Brenon);
This Is Heaven
(29, Alfred Santell);
Whoopee!
(30, Thornton Freeland), the first of several Eddie Cantor films;
Raffles
(30, Harry d’Arrast and Fitzmaurice), still with the suave Colman;
Street Scene
(31, King Vidor);
Arrowsmith
(31, John Ford);
Cynara
(32, Vidor); two more Cantor pictures,
The Kid from Spain
(33, Leo McCarey) and
Roman Scandals
(33, Frank Tuttle);
Nana
(34, Dorothy Arzner), with Goldwyn’s lamentable European importation, Anna Sten;
Kid Millions
(34, Roy del Ruth);
The Dark Angel
(35, Sidney Franklin);
Wedding Night
(35, Vidor), with Sten again;
Barbary Coast
(35, Howard Hawks);
Come and Get It
(36, Hawks and William Wyler); the excellent
Dodsworth
(36, Wyler);
Stella Dallas
(37, Vidor);
Beloved Enemy
(37, H. C. Potter);
Dead End
(37, Wyler);
The Adventures of Marco Polo
(38, Archie Mayo);
The Goldwyn Follies
(38, George Marshall);
The Cowboy and the Lady
(38, Potter);
The Hurricane
(38, Ford);
Wuthering Heights
(39, Wyler);
The Westerner
(40, Wyler);
The Little Foxes
(41, Wyler);
Ball of Fire
(41, Hawks);
The Pride of the Yankees
(42, Sam Wood);
The North Star
(43, Lewis Milestone);
The Princess and the Pirate
(44, David Butler);
Up in Arms
(44, Elliott Nugent);
Wonder Man
(45, Bruce Humberstone), both with Goldwyn’s new star, Danny Kaye;
The Best Years of Our Lives
(46, Wyler);
The Kid from Brooklyn
(46, Norman Z. McLeod);
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
(47, McLeod);
The Bishop’s Wife
(47, Henry Koster);
A Song Is Born
(48, Hawks);
Enchantment
(48, Irving Reis);
My Foolish Heart
(49, Mark Robson);
Roseanna McCoy
(49, Reis);
Our Very Own
(50, David Miller);
Edge of Doom
(50, Robson);
I Want You
(51, Robson);
Hans Christian Andersen
(52, Charles Vidor);
Guys and Dolls
(55, Joseph L. Mankiewicz); and
Porgy and Bess
(59, Otto Preminger).