It’s not the relationship between a play performed and a script, or even of a house and an architect’s plan. If anything it’s the relationship between a battle plan and a battle. There are those who believe that the art form of Hollywood is movies. I believe this—except on my cynical days, when I believe that the art form of Hollywood is contracts, and that occasionally movies get made as an unavoidable part of the contract-making process. When I was a young man I went out to Hollywood with a book, convinced that I was smarter and better and wiser than any other young man who had gone out to Hollywood and fallen afoul of the system, and I watched as my weeks turned into a rough assemblage of every Hollywood cliché you’ve ever heard of. “You’d have to be mad to want to do this,” I thought, and I went away again. In his introduction to these scripts, Roger Avary is much too honest about the process of getting this script made. This is because Roger is a Holy Madman. When he dies, no matter what amazing things he does between now and then, they will mention in the obituaries that he concluded his short Oscar acceptance speech by saying, “I’m gonna go now ’cause I really got to take a pee.”
