William Goldman, legendary screenwriter of such movies as The Princess Bride, All the President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was just one of the great figures we lost in 2018. Goldman was a wily observer of the movie business, well known for coining the expression “Nobody knows anything” in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade.
Recently, archivists uncovered these other aphorisms in his notebooks:
Everybody knows something.
Nobody knows nobody because nobody knows themselves of course. (“Know thyself” even if you’re nobody.)
Not everybody knows I coined the expression “Nobody knows anything.”
Almost everybody knows at least one of my movies although not as many know I contributed to Bill Simmons’ The Book Of Basketball and wrote about Dave DeBusschere. (You just had to look that up in Wikipedia… how hard is that?)
Nobody knows somebody.
Somebody doesn’t know that nobody knows them because somebody doesn’t know nobody.
If somebody else knows nobody knows somebody and tells that somebody, then somebody knows nobody knows them. This would also mean somebody knows nobody because nobody told somebody else. “Hey, dude, I know somebody. Can you let them know I know them?”
This also assumes that once somebody learns that nobody knows them, they’re cool with that and don’t mind being friends. Somebody could ghost nobody, implying “I don’t want to know you.” (This calls into question what knowing and knowledge truly is… to be explored later.)
Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee (except the people who are too young to know that commercial).
If a tree falls in the forest, nobody better get out of the way.
Teach a man to fish, he still doesn’t know anybody, except the person who taught them to fish.
Somebody said a lotta things but nobody knows exactly who that somebody is. Therefore, somebody is anonymous.
Somebody somewhere doesn’t know that nobody knows anything.
If nobody knows anything, can nobody know something?
This will depend if a set called anything has a member of the set called something. But if something is not a member of the set called anything, then there’s no way nobody can know something.
Nobody knows how the hell I wound up getting into set theory when all I was doing was writing about how fucked up the screen trade is. Who the hell knew that if you spend $267 million to make a movie that’s 90% special effects with Benedict Cumberbatch, Idris Elba, Zoe Saldana, two dozen other stars plus Peter Dinklage as a giant it will do over $2 billion in global box office, not including merchandising and all that other shit. Meanwhile, The Favourite ends with a slow, lap dissolve of bunnies hopping around, for some unknown reason, and that’s the art house darling of the year. Jesus fucking Christ. Nobody knows a fucking thing.
