Bruce Graham's 'According to Goldman' at Act II

Movie Script Writing 101 would be an appropriate alternative title for the play. Author Bruce Graham teaches playwriting and screenwriting at Drexel University, while actor Tony Braithwaite, who plays the lead, teaches drama at St. Joseph’s Prep. Both of them also had brief careers in Hollywood, so their pairing in According to Goldman gives the work a feeling of authenticity that draws in the audience.

A bitter has-been

The story centers on a middle-aged screenwriter, Gavin Miller (Braithwaite), who has given up Hollywood to become a college professor. His wife Melanie (Susan Riley Stevens) has settled pleasantly into a life of visiting neighbors, cooking, and gardening, but Gavin is not comfortable. He yearns to write another screenplay but is shunned by his agent and everyone he worked with in the film community. Turns out he was discarded as a has-been, and he’s bitter. He takes his affectionate wife for granted, calling Myrna Loy “the perfect wife” while Melanie stands just a few feet away.

In his classroom lectures, Gavin quotes the screenwriter William Goldman saying, “Nobody knows anything in Hollywood”: This is the “According to Goldman” in the play’s title. Gavin warns his students that Hollywood today is all about sellable formulas rather than quality.

An awkward religious studies major, Jeremiah (Luke Brahdt), joins Gavin’s class. He appears to be an innocent geek with a love for old-fashioned silver-screen glamour. Two fantasy episodes have Jeremiah tap-dance to Astaire songs, rather like Leo Bloom singing “I Want to Be a Producer” in the musical version of Mel Brooks’s Producers.

Kindred spirits

Gavin feels that he’s found a kindred spirit in Jeremiah, and they collaborate in writing a script. As they work on it, Graham hints at how the plot will develop. For example, Gavin lectures that final acts must contain shorter scenes, rising stakes, and complications. Another neat element is the way scenes overlap, with the last word of one character’s speech repeated by the key person in the next scene, moving the action from one stage area to another cinematically.

In the premiere production of this play, by the Philadelphia Theatre Company in 2004, I recall Gavin interpreted as egotistical and manipulative. In this production, Braithwaite, directed by David Bradley, is cynical but not as misanthropic. Both approaches are valid, but we empathize more with the Braithwaite interpretation. Braithwaite gives the character in his teacher persona a sense of confidence, but I wonder if stronger hints of insecurity would add even more plausibility to the surprising denouement.

In February 2015, Castle Rock Entertainment released a movie called The Rewrite which has an eerie resemblance to According to Goldman. Hugh Grant plays a discarded screenwriter who becomes a college screenwriting teacher and collaborates with a geeky student on a potential movie script. Marc Lawrence is listed as writer and director, and Graham receives no credit.