TypeTown #34: "All writers are crazy. Even the normal ones are weird."
🎬 William Goldman, Gypsy Rose Lee, Sarah Y. Mason, Babe Ruth, and more...
Welcome, welcome.
It’s been a while.
But here we are, fast learning the lessons of screenwriter and novelist William Goldman after unforeseen events kept us out of action last week.
During a 50-year career, Goldman bashed away on at least five different typewriters, including a Hermes Baby, an Olympia SM9, and a Traveller de Luxe.
His typing prowess was recognised early. When he was drafted into the Army, his dancing fingers landed him a desk role at the Pentagon. And despite the advent of electronic typewriters, he stuck with the manuals for half a century before eventually switching to a Mac.
“It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy. Even the normal ones are weird.”
His writing was crisp and effective. He sold the screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for $400,000 in the late 1960s.
As a relative new kid on the block, the deal was met with cynical scepticism.
But Goldman kept quiet and emerged the winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
He repeated the trick seven years later, collecting the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on All the President’s Men.
“I write out of revenge.”
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Goldman’s output was hugely varied. He worked on A Few Good Men and Indecent Proposal. He also wrote the screenplay for Misery, which featured in TypeTown #19 thanks to James Caan’s shall-we-say vigorous use of a typewriter.
“One of the easiest things in the world is not to write. If it were easy, everyone would do it.”
READ» Newman, Hoffman, Redford and me - The Guardian
READ» William Goldman’s Write Stuff - Intelligent Collector
WATCH» The Writer Speaks: William Goldman - Writers Guild Foundation
Stripping it back to basics
To many, she is the burlesque dancer that caused a sensation in the 1930s and 40s.
But Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970) was no slouch behind the keyboard.
Her autobiography, Gypsy: A Memoir, hit the shelves in 1957 and there is plenty of photographic evidence of her toil.
“I used to come home at night full of inspiration, and sit up with a bottle of Scotch. As I wrote, the words seemed wonderful, just too wonderful to be coming from me. Next morning I always found they were terrible and I could never use anything I wrote.”
She was a fierce advocate for TypeTown’s approach.
“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly… very slowly.”
And she rarely fell into the trap of taking herself too seriously.
“I have everything I had 20 years ago, only it’s all a little lower.”
READ» Gypsy Rose Lee: Woman of Many Talents - Please Kill Me
A film pioneer
Take a glimpse at this behind-the-scenes view of filmmaking 105 years ago.
Sitting at the typewriter is Sarah Y. Mason, succeeding in a man’s world and plotting her path to an eventual Academy Award for the 1933 screenplay Little Women.
Taken during production of Bound in Morocco, the photo shows Mason flanked by director Allan Dwan and actor Richard Rosson. She was the industry’s first script supervisor (known back then as a continuity girl). But her talents soon carried her to full screenwriting.
Mason died in November 1980, having spent her career working in partnership with her husband Victor Heerman as well as raising two children, Catharine and Victor Jr.
READ» Sarah Y. Mason - Women Film Pioneers Project
READ» A Woman to Know: Sarah Y. Mason - A Woman to Know
Worth pausing the platen
📬 My Royal Quiet Deluxe - The Paris Review
📬 Kelye Kneeland’s Bold Type - 425 Magazine
📬 Type-In at the library: Public invited to discover, or re-discover, typewriters - Albuquerque Journal
And finally… typewriters in the wild
In this Turkish TV advert…
In this enticing piece of street art spotted in Germany…
And in this 1927 image of Babe Ruth…
Until next time
❤️ Enjoyed this?
✉️ Forward to a friend and suggest they might subscribe.
☕️ Say thanks with a coffee.
🗣 Anything else? Hit reply and say hello.
I’m inspired with each issue to return to the typewriter, if only for a few pages. My late mom wrote a monthly 12-page newsletter for years on her Olivetti, a food-letter about cooking and life on an island which I rebooted in January into the digital world. I’m toying with producing one issue solely on her old typewriter. Thanks for the inspo!
Great stories. Thank for the research and the inspiration.