The old Tinseltown aphorism that “nobody knows anything,” coined by screenwriter William Goldman in his 1983 showbiz guidebook ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’, once put a heartening worldview in shorthand. Because movies are an unruly commodity, their quality subject to unique and highly personal assessment of value from a fickle viewership, it’s impossible to predict what will or won’t work.
For creative types, Goldman meant this as encouragement to stick by one’s artistic convictions in the face of bean-counters reluctant to take risks on a vision. And for studio suits at the decision-making level, he intended his words as a reminder that a hit cannot be engineered through gaming of market forces, but by investing capital and trust in collaborators with the skills to turn in a quality product.
Forty years on, Goldman’s immortal phrase now applies predominantly to film’s consumers rather than its makers. The modern Hollywood – a digitised industry, with streaming-first upstarts banging on the doors of the old giants as they turn to apps and online platforms in search of a future – increasingly depends on opacity, under which a given title’s performance should be as difficult to discern after its
