Comics’ Books - S02, E01 - Transcript
GUEST: STUART GOLDSMITH
HOST: LUCY DANSER
LUCY DANSER: Hello and welcome to Season 2 of Comics Books, the podcast where your host Lucy Danser, that’s me, talks to my favourite comedians and comic writers about the books they love.
[MUSIC]
LD: Today’s guest is an excellent comedian who has been featured on the Conan O’Brien Show, Alan Davies As Yet Untitled and the childrens CBBC show The Dog Ate My Homework. I first discovered him as the host of the outrageously great The Comedians Comedian podcast, interviewing stand ups about anything and everything to do with writing and performing comedy. It’s the very lovely and hilarious Stuart Goldsmith. Hello!
STUART GOLDSMITH: Thank you very much, hello, what a lovely, I was just, because you’d said I could listen to that introduction and if not offer feedback you said, “I’ll change it if you want”. And apologies for betraying a podcasting secret there. But I was listening going, “No this is nice, this is nice” and then you said “the very lovely and hilarious” and I thought, if I were a lady I would go “No, put hilarious first”. But I’m not and I have the luxury, the mediocre white man privilege of being able to go sure I’ll be lovely up top. I’m fine with that.
LD: “I’ll be lovely!”
[LAUGHTER]
LD: Well I was already nervous because obviously you could just tell me what I’m doing wrong.
SG: Oh no I hope I won’t do that. I mean it is in my nature! But I won’t, not because it’s you but because everyone, I’m an absolute prick for kind of giving people unsolicited feedback and suggesting stuff. What, I mean we’ve barely been on like ten mins, already I’m like, “Lucy are you taking a backup? Here’s why you should be taking a backup.” I’m an absolute nightmare and I will try to be as humble as befits my actual status as opposed to my perceived status within podcasting.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: Do you know, I quite enjoy it. It’s like we’re doing two-in-one, we’re doing a masterclass as well as a chat about books.
SG: I wouldn’t call it a masterclass. An adjacency class. Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: So we were going to try and avoid talking about lockdown the more that this series went on. As I said to you just before we started, we started this series in lockdown, we didn’t think that we would still be recording it remotely.
SG: Yes
LD: Months on. You know,
SG: Yes. Oh did you not? Bless!
[LAUGHTER]
SG: Yeah, as soon as it happened I thought, four years, dig in for four years.
LD: Four years!?
SG: Yeah yeah yeah. Well no to be honest immediately I thought, dig in for a year because I’m very pessimistic but I also think it’s good for planning purposes. So I thought if I plan for a year and then two months later it’s all over, pleasantly surprised. Now it’s obviously going to be a year and so everyone’s thinking it might be 18 months so I’ve gone bollocks, four years.
[LAUGHTER]
SG: And then I’ve just acclimatised myself to the idea of four years, and then I’ll be pleasantly surprised. It’s how I live my life and it’s a tremendous way to be unhappy all the time.
LD: Oh good, so I’m actually not going to take that part of the masterclass.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: So you know like, while we’ve been doing this, I thought that this section of the podcast where I say, “oh hello you’re a comedian what do you do for a living?” would for the most part not be very interesting because, I mean it’s interesting but everyone does the same thing for the most part. They do stand up and I’ve already read out a list of things they’ve been on. But obviously now actually that’s a much more loaded question. Like, what do you do?
SG: Yeah sure, drive a van. I don’t, I’m lucky I don’t drive a van but yeah I mean anyone, my God I mean where to begin? After Dishi Rishi’s incredibly, I don’t even know what the words are, my art escapes me. But listen I’m one of the very very lucky ones. I was connected to a small following before lockdown happened and so when the job element of my job kind of went pop, when the stand up bit went pop, the stand up had become, although it remains my main thing, the trunk of the tree as Sarah Millican says, it’s my main thing but there was a lot of ancillary stuff going on and now that has just come to the fore. So I’m really lucky. I don’t think of myself as this, I have to choose my words carefully, I am still definitely first and foremost a stand up comedian and I’ve been lucky enough to do, I mean, because I’m in Bristol we have Lakota, I did the first gig back in the country, that was like a big outdoor thing. They had verve and dynamism and crucially the right architecture to do a legal gig before anyone else did. So because of that and just my kind of connections through my podcast to the sorts of people who like having ideas and trying them I have been very well served for live gigs and I’m back up and running as a live act as well. Although those are obviously tailing off as we draw towards Winter and it’s too cold to gig outside. For pussies I should say! As a former street performer as we know if it’s not February 9 am and I’m not on the cobbles of Covent Garden,you know what I mean? If I can handle that we can all handle an outdoor gig. But God honestly trying to talk to me it’s like getting stuck in a maze designed by Christopher Nolan, nested point within nested point within nested point. I’ve been very very lucky, I’m still doing lots of stand up, I’m also doing loads of other things as well, I’ve never been busier and I hope that I’m still being a good Dad and co-parent because I hope that all the time I’m spending on the three or four other projects I’m doing is time I would otherwise have been driving up and down the motorways. And I’m really happy not to do the driving up and down motorways anymore and it’s making me feel treacherous about stand up, not the art but the lifestyle.
LD: Yeah.
SG: I’ve got kids now, my eldest has just started school and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being away at evenings and weekends when I could be hanging out with him because that’s his only free time. So I’m doing loads and loads of stuff. A chat show, I’m doing talks with businesses about what comedy can teach them about resilience and authenticity and other stuff, all based on leveraging the knowledge of the last eight years of in-depth podcasts. And that’s been very satisfying because I have the only comedy podcast which isn’t funny so I can’t, I haven’t built a huge live audience off the back of my podcast because it’s not funny, it’s not supposed to be. But what I have been able to do is kind of be in a market of one for whatever it is that I do, which is sort of an in-depth investigation into not simply writing jokes and performing them but also mental health, resilience, how you cope with the sort of endless agony of having to constantly create stuff.
LD: Yes.
SG: And I’ve interviewed over 350 people about precisely how they do that. So I’ve sort of created a niche for myself and I’m finding it absolutely thrilling to be doing that. So that’s what I’ve been doing and I can talk about all of it endlessly. At some point you’re going to have to mention books and I’m going to reveal myself as an absolute uneducated charlatan who has only ever read books by white men. It was just so distressing answering your email and going, “Oh God I’ve got to try and give the appearance of some kind of intellect. But it’s nothing, I read only trash.
LD: OK, well like I said it also doesn’t matter what you read, it matters that you read. Also you have kids so I’m going to be very interested in hearing how reading has changed for you with them.
SG: Oh yes, that I can do and that definitely takes out the Stu’s never read War and Peace element of my collywobbles.
LD: Well there you go, you’re fine, you’re absolutely fine. I feel like maybe I’m edging into your not funny podcast territory.
SG: Oh true, no I realised as I said that. This is, but do you know what I mean? Yeah, we are similar in that this is not a podcast designed simply to get big yuks, I guess it’s not a kind of riffing thing, you’re definitely in the territory so yeah. But it’s simply because mine is called The Comedians Comedian one would expect it to be funny!
LD: So I think we will talk about books. Let’s go straight in, let’s start talking about books but I would also like to hear a little bit more about the other things that you’re doing so we’ll come round to some of those things throughout. I guess I’d like to know how you began reading, what your first introduction to reading was?
SG: This is the question I find the hardest to answer. And I think throughout, my memory doesn’t seem to function in the way that other people’s do,that my wife’s does for example. I have very few really concrete memories of childhood. If someone reminds me of a thing I go, “Oh God yeah” but I find it very very hard, it’s dogged me my whole life, very hard to reach in and pick a particular thing. I can’t tell you what the first book is that I read. I know, one of the joys of parenthood, has been reading books to my children and in reading them going I recognise that picture, Mr Noisy, when he’s learned his lesson and tiptoes down the hill. That picture is kind of etched in my mind somewhere and when I turned onto that picture for the first time in, you know, in 30 plus years, I’ve really had a big emotional wallop and those happen all the time when you’re parenting.
LD: Jess Fostekew was saying that when she’s now reading some books to her son that her Mum had kept from when she was younger, she’s discovered that maybe they are not uh correct for our items.
SG: Oh hundreds, hundreds of things like that. We’re reading Peter Pan at the moment, the original Peter Pan by JM Barrie and it’s absolutely loopy. I mean it’s really weird. Like what we think of as Peter Pan, what most people think of, what I certainly did, was the Disneyfication of it, and this is, it’s not like a red reding hood were you go actually the real one is just full of rape and murder, it’s not that bad, but like Peter Pan, it’s not Never Never Land, it’s The Never Land and the whole thing is sort of a metaphor, we haven’t finished it yet but from what I can judge it’s, the whole thing is a metaphor for the sort of dream state when a child is falling asleep. So it’s a metaphor for imagination and a metaphor for youth. Wendy visits there with Peter, all of the lost boys are desperate for her to be their mother because they all miss their mothers, so there’s all sorts of gender politics in it. Wendy is basically there as the concept of motherhood, so all of these boys miss being nurtured. Peter himself is a prick and Hook is a murderer and they just constantly kill each other and then come back to life, and kill each other and come back to life, and this whole thing is this sort of soupy, it’s almost like, it has a kind of Ulysses kend of quality, I’ve never read Ulysses, I’m dropping it in to look clever, but what I imagine Ulysses is like, whereby it’s a big soupy abstract monologue. It really feels like that. It’s much weirder and less A to B than I was expecting. So yeah you’ve got to keep an eye out.
LD: But it’s not that children’s books are necessarily getting more safe because I mean when I pick up a kids book nowadays I’m often surprised at how deep they hit with some of the storytelling.
SG: Mate. I mean yeah I totally agree. I mean I wouldn’t say that they were safer. And weirdly I was saying this to my wife the other day. We have got probably seven or eight books where a princess decides she doesn’t want to be locked up in a tower and she goes off and kicks the ass of the wimpy knight and goes and does her own thing. We don’t have a single book where a woman gets imprisoned in a tower. Like we’re so busy being kind of, making sure we don’t lay any groundwork about a) this is a role of a woman or this is, you know we really try to watch out for that. But as a result, all of our books now are about princesses who won’t be, you know all of the knights are wimps. You know “I came, I saw, I shocked, I awed, you should have seen me swing my sword”. That is of course from The Worst Princess which is fantastic. But um, they’re all terrible pathetic creatures and there’s loads of strong women as far as the eye can see.
LD: Well no, you know, I think it is good to see where those stories come from as well though. You know the reason we have all these stories is because we’ve had the other type of story for such a long time.
SG: Yes although he’s four and I don’t know whether, like I can tell him a story, I don’t know how much context I can give him. We do try.
LD: Yeah yeah yeah.
SG: But no, I am constantly, listen it is no exaggeration to say that I cry easily. And one of the books I mentioned to you, Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson, the Don! She wrote The Gruffalo, she wrote most childrens books it seems. She has got the industry in a headlock and if you’re a smaller author trying to get noticed, probably you look at Julia Donaldson as like, “God let me get a word in”. She writes two sorts of books. Either slightly pointless rhyming stuff like The Snail and the Whale which frankly I could happily never read again. And obviously as a parent I have to read it a lot. And she writes sort of breathtaking stuff where I cannot get through Paper Dolls without , I can do it without crying now but I can’t read it in a normal tone of voice without going [makes noise], like without swallowing my words as I’m reading it. Because I mean, should I spoil it? It’s so brief I can’t really tell you what happens in it without spoilering what it turns out to be about.
LD: Well yeah, so I read it.
SG: Did you read it? Tell me what you thought of Paper Dolls.
LD: I also, I didn’t cry but I was very close.
SG: You monster. You didn’t cry! The bit where you realise that she’s talking about memory! And you go, “Oh, that’s what this is about”.
LD: I did make that noise though. I made that noise when you’re just like [gasps].
SG: Who’s going to snip the paper dolls in half halfway through the book, spoiler alert!
[LAUGHTER]
SG: But when you realise that it is, I won’t give too much away but that’s what Donaldson is so good at on our ones, don’t get me started on the Smartest Giant in Town, [unclear] but the ones where, my favorite stuff in the world is like an episode of South Park where it’s apparently something light and then you go, “Oh that’s what they’re doing”. And Donaldson is amazing at doing that. The Paper Dolls, oh it’s a lovely story, and they laughed and they danced and they sang. When it gets to the final, and they laughed, I literally tear up now, when it gets to the final, and they laughed, and they danced and they sang. And to me what that story means is, you have limited time before you become a memory, what you do with that time is up to you. So laugh and dance and sing. And it’s about community and it’s about family and it’s about motherhood and it is, it’s, for me, it’s kind of perfect art because it is beautiful in and of itself, it’s beautifully written, it’s beautifully drawn, not beautiful in the sense in that it’s saccharine but the sounds are lovely to say, the pictures are lovely to look at and it gives you just enough meaning that it’s goes there we go, what do you make of that. And you go, I make everything of that.
LD: I feel like we could talk about kid’s books for a long time.
SG: Mate! Rugby tackle me to the ground and move me on. Because I won’t do it myself.
LD: We do actually have an episode about kid’s books coming up so I’ll let you know about that.
SG: Oh yeah yeah sure, but I will now make you talk about grown up books. I know you’re excited to do that.
[LAUGHTER]
SG: I’m just going to reveal that I only like one or two things and I read all of them in the series. But that’s me.
LD: I was going to say! So, obviously the Terry Pratchett book.
SG: Ah, Sir Terry. The wisest writer.
LD: I’ve never read a single Terry Pratchett book.
SG: Can I guess why? Is it because you’ve been put off by the cover art which looks all bibbly bobbly gobliny and seems pointless?
LD: I think it’s because of a few things.
SG: Is it because of the fans? Is it because you’ve seen a picture of him in his preposterous black hat? There are so many reasons not to engage with him and they are such a shame because the wisdom in the books. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth. I don’t care for the ones about the wizards, they’re all a bit bibbly bobbly, they’re a bit real ale, but what’s going on under the surface of them is the most brilliantly sagacious if that’s how you pronounce it. I mean wise, I’ve just said wise, double wise. [LAUGHTER] The most double wise kind of satire. And they are one of those things where, you know again for me it’s all about revelation. The moment that hits hardest with me is when I realise what’s going on. And the Terry Pratchett books particularly and I probably mentioned, did I mean Guards! Guards!?
LD: You said Guards! Guards! but you said it didn’t really matter.
SG: It doesn’t really matter. Guards! Guards! , he kind of started off writing it as a tribute to the people who rush in when the baddy says, you know the leader of the baddies goes, “Guard, seize him”. And it’s supposed to be about those people, the little people.
LD: Right.
SG: He’s incredibly good at changing the paradigm of,changing the perspective of who we anticipate to be the hero. You know, one of the messages, so Guards! Guards! turns out to be about the formation of the police but he puts it in this lovely little microcosm world of this crazy little city and so he’s in control of all the variables. And so you see this is what it must have been like starting a police force. So some of them are about what it was like, you know peelers and bobbies and that stuff, and the taint of corruption and someone saying we’re going to do it differently now. And it’s just full of proper stuff where you go oh this is a good man, writing about how hard it is to be good when the temptations of corruption and legacy and all of those things are there. And so he writes about how the police avoid becoming a militia and they avoid corruption and then the police, you know it becomes about war and the character in it, the best character in those books, apart from Granny Weatherwax, nevermind it just sounds so twee but they’re so so good is Samuel Vines. And you follow Sam Vines career from being a beat cop to being the commander of the watch. And he is constantly, he’s a kind of flat foot cop who gets risen, gets progressed through the ranks by, kind of by virtue of humanity, by doing the right thing even when it’s difficult. Like obviously some people are there for the bibbly bobbly stuff and that’s fine. I’m there for a lot of it. I’m not into the wizards.
LD: Yeah I think you’re right. I think for me I’ve always loved contemporary literature in our world, dealing with characters and emotions and that kind of thing. I think that’s what I’m naturally drawn to. And so yeah I think these fantasy worlds, as I’m getting older I’m kind of, I’m enjoying them more but the only time I’ve ever honestly said that I’d like to read something by Terry Pratchett is when I watched the documentary he made before his death that was to be aired after his death.
SG: Ah okay.
LD: Incredible. And that was the first time I realised that there was a lot more real world underneath his sort of-
SG: It’s all about the real word. You know, for me if character A says I think this and character B, you know, that’s soap opera, here’s me saying exactly what I mean and here’ sme saying exactly what I think. The whole point of Terry Pratchett is that there’s all this stuff on top so you can look through it, so you can see it as a prism and say, “Oh it’s really about this” and the only way you can talk about what’s real is what’s talking about what’s artifice. So those stories are aimed at younger readers and I cannot wait to get my son into them.
LD: So your first choice was Firestarter.
SG: Yes. Oh I do remember reading that as a teenager yes. Again I probably wrote in brackets ‘Firestarter but pretty much any Stephen King will do, I’ve read all of them’. I think I wrote, I initially wrote Skeleton Crew which is a book of Stephen King short horror stories that I read far too young. I read twelve and they gave me nightmares for days. I read at the age of eleven or twelve on a family holiday. I tore through them. I was gripped, I couldn’t put it down and I became a dark sad little boy because they just, it was too young to be reading those stories. And you know, Quitters Ink, which is a brilliant short story about someone who, he gets handed a card in an airport bar and it’s going to help him stop smoking. And the way this company help you stop smoking it transpires in this short story is that they, you basically sign a waiver and then they threaten you and they threaten your life and they threaten your family and gradually they cut your fingers off, they follow you constantly and if they see you with a cigarette they cut off one of your wife’s fingers. And then that’s the thing. Scared me deeply, I was eleven or twelve. I was like the world is a terrifying place.
LD: Goosebumps. You were supposed to be reading Goosebumps.
SG: I was supposed to be reading Goosebumps but I had that kind of precocious read above my level thing. And they’re brilliant stories, they’re so well written. Stephen King is a genius and just because he turns up in airports and is massively successful doesn’t mean he’s not a genius. His ability to to get you into the mind of someone. His characters think like I think. They’re somewhere terrifying and for some reason they remember the cover of a jar of peanut butter they had when they were a kid. That’s how minds work. That’s what Stephen King is so good at doing. And that’s why often his films aren’t, you know the adaptations aren’t good, because the films don’t put you in the mind of the person, they just have the plot and the plot isn’t the best bit.
LD: Well you know what, thinking of making the films of these. You know they’re remaking Firestarter?
SG: I didn’t know that and I don’t care. I’ve been, you know, hey I’ve been burnt before! Slam!
[LAUGHTER]
SG: You know what's good about Firestarter is, I read it maybe, I probably sought it out after Skeleton Crew, maybe I read it about fourteen/fifteen. I didn’t seek anything out at the age of, listen to me! I probably found it in a B&B and it was definitely, it felt like this is too grown up and not allowed and there’s a sexy bit and I’m not allowed this. It’s about a little girl that’s experimented on, or you find out later that she’s experimented on. She’s a pyrotechnic, a pyrokinetic, I can’t remember the word.
LD: ‘Cos she, her parents meet in a kind of experimental set up?
SG: Something like that. Her Dad can do this thing where he pushes people, just italicised, he just gives them a little push in italics, and he can get people to change their mind about things. He uses that power to break her out but she’s this dangerous pyrokinetic who starts fires all over the place. And, they’re not called The Firm, they’re called The Shop.
LD: The Shop.
SG: The Shop. It’s like a CIA type organisation. And basically I think the inspiration for it was the MK Ultra experiments which the CIA apparently did in real life where they gave acid to people and tried to make them psychic against their will. And it’s sort of about that.
LD: I just wanted to know actually, because you said that you read Stephen King too young and freaked yourself out. Did you then continue reading, freaking yourself out or did you give yourself a Stephen King break?
SG: No. 100%. I began reading everything he ever read and now I’ve read I would say almost everything he’s written.
LD: Is Firestarter your number one?
SG: Is it the best? No. I would say, oh it’s a good question, they’ve all got such different things to them. Like even the Tommyknockers which he’s publicly disavowed and said he wrote when he was on coke and booze. I love it! It’s, such, oh yeah it’s great. The Tommyknockers, okay! Of course that sounds risible, like who’d be scared of that? The point is it’s a child’s name, it’s a child’s rhyme and so the ideas of a child’s rhyme because it’s a child, what it’s about, it’s so funny. It is funny in retrospect. What it’s about is, there’s some sort of alien artifact outside a small town and it's having an effect on the people there and the effect it’s having is that everyone starts getting really good at inventing stuff. Everyone gets a bit of a, someone’s trying to mow the lawn and the character walks past the next day and they’ve invented some sort of weird hovering thing using half a skateboard, a bit of a toaster and a battery that they’ve put and it’s like a weird hovering thing and it’s a better lawn mower. Because they’ve all been given this gift of understanding the world differently. And then of course being a horror novel it all goes wrong and there’s a sort of price you have to pay. And it’s really funny because you hear later, “Oh he wrote it on coke and pills and booze and stuff and just stayed up all night and wrote it all over the course of several nights”. It’s about mania. It’s maybe not about that but it’s underpinned by I just, I can’t control myself, I just have to make and create and adapt and change and fix and I can’t sleep and I’m just ending up doing all this building. And it’s obviously his psyche screaming at him, “Stephen, knock it on the head, have a rest!” So even that one, it is widely derided I guess, I could read it again. I could start reading it again now. I wanna be inside the heads of the people. I would say a favourite, I couldn’t pick a favourite without looking at a list. I mean The Stand is a huge post apocalyptic future, it’s a huge huge book and we’re arguably heading towards it now. Under the Dome the book it’s great because it’s very classic King in that an impenetrable dome suddenly appears over a little town and as a result we just get to live in the heads of everyone in that town as they gradually go nuts and go well this is all very well, we’ve got everything we need but we can’t leave.
LD: I love that you said,”Oh I don’t like to read things that make me feel depressed or down” but really you seem to have been stoking your anxiety for many years with Stephen King.
SG: Oh God, thank you, how much money do I owe you? You’re absolutely right. I have. I have been stoking my anxiety. I read that first one, I read Skeleton Crew and it was brilliant and I couldn’t look away. It was like an alien artifact. I was like go away from it. I can’t! And it did stoke my anxiety and that’s exactly what I go back to King for, yeah.
[MUSIC]
LD: See I think you were worried that you wouldn’t sound intellectual enough but actually I would say it doesn’t matter if you do or not because when you talk about books you are really animated. And you’ve read really a lot.
SG: Yeah but I’ve read a lot of rubbish. But not rubbish. I suppose I just have this preconception, this idea that you know I don’t, I haven’t read about Ta-Nehisi Coates, not even the comics. Do you know what I mean? Like I am aware that it’s very insular and it’s me reflecting back on me and it’s me kind of just tickling myself and getting all excited by the things. And it’s a regret and I didn’t realise it at a time when I had lots of time to write/read and with the best will in the world now I will intend to broaden my horizons but just there’s no time for reading. You know. There’s parenting and just to come back to what we were talking about at the beginning, I’ve got four or five projects on at the moment any of which, if it was the only thing I was doing, could occupy all of my time. Any time I stop I go I’m fucking exhausted. I can’t even sit and watch Money Heist on Netflix. I keep double screening and checking my emails when I’m trying to relax in front of Money Heist or to give it it’s much better original Spanish title, House of Paper.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: Everyone has been talking about Money Heist and I have not given it a moment.
SG: It’s fine. I like the idea but with any series you’re like this would make an incredible two movies. But really it’s like all the Marvel stuff on Netflix. Here’s a three episode arc stretched over thirteen episodes with a load of tedious A, B, C, D subplots where you’re sort of going, “Oh sure, why are we doing it, why don’t you just shorten it? I’d pay the same money for it”.
LD: Yeah!
SG: The exception to that of course is Dark. Have you seen Dark on Netflix?
LD: I have not.
SG: It’s a German series. It’s not just a dumb time travel thing, it’s German so it’s actually very intelligent and you have to read. You have to read the subtitles. That’s most of the reading I’ve done recently is the subtitles of Dark! It’s the most complex time travel drama and it’s about no no no, but it’s about people. You don’t even realise it’s about time travel until episode three, sorry.
LD: That sounds quite complex.
SG: It’s so complex but it’s three series and done and by the final episode, impossibly against all the odds they tie it all up beautifully and it all makes sense.
LD: OK I like that then!
SG: Yes. Honestly by midway through season three you’re like this is the final season, how the fuck are you going to do this? And they do it. You magnificent bastards you did it!
[MUSIC]
LD: The only book that you chose that was maybe a bit different, a bit more instructional, was Adventures in the Screen Trade.
SG: Oh yeah, yeah. I might even have it here next to me. Pathetically it might be propping up a temporary desk I’ve been forced to build in the cellar. And William, I never know, is it Goldman or Golding? I never know.
LD: It says Goldman here.
SG: I’m not prepared to, I’m going to search him.
LD: Didn’t William Golding write Lord of the Flies?
SG: Yes thank you, that’s who I’m getting confused with. William Goldman thank you and back in! William Goldman wrote the screenplay for Marathon Man and The Princess Bride.
LD: Yes.
SG: And he wrote the book of The Princess Bride. And so he’s a novelist and a screenplay writer and he writes this incredibly funny, salacious, rule breaking, gossip filled book called Adventures in the Screen Trade and then there’s a sequel as well which is as good frankly. And it’s almost, it’s basically a guide to how to write a screenplay. A backstage, salacious thing about Hollywood and an exploration of why screenplay writing is hard, why stardom is pathetic and immaterial and why stories work or don’t work. And for anyone who loves Story by Robert McKee which is how to write stories, it’s the perfect companion piece. And it’s, two more white guys there if you’re counting.
LD: Oh!
SG: And it’s just brilliant and it’s one of those books I think about all the time and it’s related to everything and I can barely have a conversation without going, “Well it’s like that thing in Adventures in the Screen Trade”. You know I just got it, I just read all of it, devoured all of it and went “Oh!” There’s a bit in, I can’t remember if it’s in the first book or the sequel. There’s a bit where he says here’s three stories taken from newspapers, they’re all brilliant stories, they’ll all make great screenplays. Which of them do you think could be best? And he prints these three little clip out stories and you turn the page and he goes, none of them and here’s why. And it’s things like with this particular story about someone who did X 30 years ago and did this, he’ll say here’s why it won’t work as a screenplay. Who’s your leading actor? What leading actor can, and this is pre-digital effects that we can arguably do now.
LD: Yes.
SG: Which leading actor wants to be the young person and which leading actor is gonna play the older person because they’re just so far away from each other enough that you couldn’t be the same person to do it. But who’s the lead? And you’re never going to get Harrison Ford to do it because. Do you know what I mean?
LD: Yeah, wow.
SG: It’s almost more to do with production than writing some of it. But what’s at its core is he talks about how stars can never be happy because if you’re, I mean he wouldn’t have said Tom Cruise but let’s say Tom Cruise, you’re only as good as your last movies. Look at Will Smith. Look what happened with Will Smith’s career. You're constantly under pressure, you’re constantly looking over your shoulder. No-one cares about writers he says, and writers aren’t necessarily happy but if you’re a writer you’re doing the actual work of it and he says if you want to be a star good luck to you I promise to stare at you as you walk past. He sort of feels sorry for actors in a way that reminds me of, you know Patton Oswalt, American comedian Patton Oswalt?
LD: Yes.
SG: He tells a story in his stand-up actually, I forget which special it is, about being a character actor and why it’s better to be a character actor. And he talks about being at an industry party with an enormous buffet and no-one is touching the buffet because they’re all slavishly following diets, they can’t risk looking out of shape. I saw a photo of Chris Pratt this morning and he’s gone all Hollywood leading man diet because obviously he’s now a Hollywood leading man and you’re like no don’t stop being Chris Pratt. But Patton tells a story about going round just hoovering the buffet. He’s got it all to himself and he comes round the corner and he bumps into Brian Dennehy coming in the opposite direction. And it’s like hey character actors hey! So you know it’s that sort of tone throughout and I just think it’s a fascinating and funny book that’s again really wise.
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LD: Before we wind up then, we always ask someone to tell us about their favourite independent bookshop.
SG: Oh yeah, well that’s easy. I’m in Bristol and I love Storysmith. Storysmith is on North Street in Bedminster, and it is a brilliant little bookshop. I believe it’s still open, I hope to God it survives the pandemic. I don’t have a huge relationship with it, we’re discovering it, my kids love sitting on little bean bags and getting grubby finger marks over, ‘so sorry so sorry’, over the lovely books there. And we don’t go there as often as I would like to but it’s one of those places which is an outing in and of itself. You can go there and there’s these little bean bags for the kids and you can sit and spend a bit of time there and you don’t feel like they’re looking at you thinking, “Well come on buy something”. You feel like they’re happy that you’re in there loving the books that they love.
LD: But then you do buy something.
SG: And then you absolutely, you don’t go without buying anything, that’d be terrible. We just don’t go often as we’d like to.
LD: Oh thank you so much for talking to me today Stuart this has been delightful.
SG: Really enjoyed it thanks for having me.
LD: I think you came off as pretty intellectual.
SG: Oh I hope so, I was really trying my best.
[LAUGHTER]
SG: No I wasn’t. If I can say one thing honestly in my defence, I wasn’t trying to appear intellectual. I think everything I’ve said I’ve said honesty. I do worry that it’s a very narrow window through which I’m perceiving the world but I have spent a good bit of time at that window. So if that means I get away with it then good.
LD: You win. Well thank you so much.
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SG: I wish all podcasts ended with a sardonic ‘You win’
LD: You win! Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Comics’ Books. Hopefully you’ve had a chuckle, learned something new and, most importantly, added some new reads to your list. You can find full listings of all the books we talked about today in the show notes. If you enjoyed the podcast it’d help us out massively if you could leave us a review on your listening platform. Finally, you can follow us on twitter, facebook and instagram at ComicsBooksPod.
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