Read Which Lie Did I Tell? for Free Online

at that point. He was starring in the number-one TV show of the decade, All in the Family, created and produced byNorman Lear. Ten years later Rob was a director and had formed a little company with his friend and producer Andy Scheinman. Rob had directed This Is Spinal Tap, had just finished a rough cut of his second movie, The Sure Thing. They were sitting around one day wondering what to do next, when Rob remembered the book, talked about it, reread it, got excited.
    Eventually we met and the movie happened. But in between there was a lot of frustration because the movie that established him as a commercial director, Stand By Me, had yet to happen. But he can be magnificently stubborn, and eventually Norman Lear got us the money. I was grateful then, still am, always will be.
    We had our first script reading in a hotel in London. Rob and Andy were there.Cary Elwes andRobin Wright were there, Westley and Buttercup.Chris Sarandon andChris Guest, the villains Humperdinck and Count Rugen.Wally Shawn, the evil genius Vizzini.Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo, was very much there. And sitting by himself, quietly—he always tried to sit quietly—was Andre the Giant, who was Fezzik.
    Not your ordinary Hadassah group.
    Sitting suavely in a corner was moi. Two of the major figures of my time in the entertainment business—Elia Kazan and George Roy Hill—have both said the same thing to me in interviews: that by the time of the first cast reading, the crucial work was done. If you had gotten the script to work and cast it properly, then you had a chance for something of quality. If you had not, it didn’t matter how skillful the rest of the process was, you were dead in the water.
    This probably sounds like madness to the uninitiated, and it should, but it is very much true. The reason it sounds like madness is this: Premiere magazine isn’t around when the script is being prepared. E.T. isn’t around for the casting. They are only around during theshooting of the flick, which is the least important part of the making of any movie. Shooting is just the factory putting together the car. (Postproduction—editing and scoring—is waaaay more important.)
    But shooting is all most people know—from those awful articles inmagazines or stories on the tube that purport to be on the inside but are only bullshit. The movie company knows who is watching and they behave accordingly. Stars do not misbehave when the enemy is about. Directors do not admit their terrors when the enemy is about. Writers, to give us our due, are not even there when the enemy is about. (And when I am forced to be there, and the enemy is about, I lie. “Oh, this is an amazing shoot, it’s just been a dream.” “I don’t know where Dusty [or Barbra or Sly or Eddie or fill in your own blank] gets this bad rap about being hard to work with, he’s [she’s] been a dream here.” So it goes.)
    I was there in London, at the script reading. And I was terrified. Not only is that my natural state when I am around actors, this was almost a decade and a half from when I helped scale the Cliffs of Insanity. Most of the people in the room I knew of. The others I had heard read. But there were two who were essentially new to me.
    Robin Wright, our Buttercup, was new to everybody, except the faithful watchers of the soap Santa Barbara. A California kid of maybe twenty, she was neither experienced nor trained. She was being asked to be first a farmgirl, unspoiled and in love, then a princess, regal and emotionally dead, all this, by the way, with an English accent. (Turns out she has a brilliant ear.)
    It also was important that she be the most beautiful woman in the world, and of course that is all a matter of personal taste, there is no single most beautiful woman. Except looking at Robin that London morning, watching her as she sat there with no makeup, she sure made one hell of a case. We started the reading then, and this is what I thought when we were done—
    —I