Oscar-winning screenwriter hated the industry that brought him such success
Life Story
When William Goldman presented his screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he was forcefully told by one studio luminary: ‘‘John Wayne don’t run away.’’ Goldman, who has died aged 87, went on to win a best screenplay Oscar for the irresistibly stylish western about two outlaws on the run, which includes Goldman lines such as Butch’s sardonic request to the Sundance Kid: ‘‘I don’t want to sound like a sore loser, but when it’s over, if I’m dead, kill him.’’
Goldman won a second Oscar for adapting Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s journalistic account of the
Watergate scandal for the 1976 film
All the President’s Men,
which was hailed as a ‘‘triumph of storytelling and artful manipulation’’. It included his most memorable line of dialogue, when Deep Throat tells Woodward: ‘‘Follow the money.’’ The original sentence he had taken from Woodward was: ‘‘The key was the secret campaign cash and it should all be traced.’’ Goldman was so sure that he had written a line that would enter movie folklore that he called a friend to tell them: ‘‘I just want you to remember that I wrote ‘Follow the money’.’’
Woodward and Bernstein were not happy with the screenplay and brought in Bernstein’s wife, Nora Ephron, to produce an alternative. It was not used.
Goldman’s successes made him rich, but not happy. His father had killed himself and Goldman had found him dead on the bedroom floor when he was only 15. He went on to develop a deep cynicism about the world, admitting that he wrote out of anger and a desire for revenge. Working in Hollywood studios only amplified his disenchantment.
Despite being one of the world’s most successful screenwriters, Goldman was consigned to the ‘‘too difficult to work with’’ box. In 1983, after several years out of work, and still too rich to care if he worked again, Goldman published an acid memoir,
Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting.
The sentiment of the book, which became almost as well known as his films, can be summed up by its opening line, in which he declared: ‘‘Nobody knows anything.’’ In other words, nobody has any idea which film is going to work commercially.
Perhaps predictably for a writer, he had no time for the auteur theory, which asserted that the director was the author of the film, and he thought that films had become too long, saying: ‘‘If you cannot tell your story in an hour and 50 minutes you had better be David Lean [who directed epics such as
Lawrence of Arabia].’’
Filmed in 1969, Butch Cassidy was Goldman’s first original screenplay and it was the culmination of eight years of research into
He thought films had become too long, saying: ‘‘If you cannot tell your story in an hour and 50 minutes, you had better be David Lean.’’
the two western outlaws, engagingly played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Goldman was paid a record US$400,000 for the script. He was a tall, athletic man who was described as an expert in ‘‘cheerful grimness’’ and talked as he wrote, ‘‘in short sentences with upper-case emphasis’’, putting his pithy style down to his panic that people would stop reading. ‘‘That’s why I have so many one-word paragraphs. I want to jerk your eye around.’’
William Goldman was born into a Jewish family in Chicago. He read compulsively as a child to blot out the ‘‘suburban hell’’ surrounding him and started submitting stories to his high school magazine. He said: ‘‘I had shown no signs of talent as a young man. Two brilliant girls would read them and they would say, ‘We can’t possibly publish this shit,’ and I would agree.’’
But Goldman developed the ability to take on a wide variety of subjects. Thus the 1975 films The Stepford Wives was a feminist fantasy, and The Great Waldo Pepper, starring Redford, celebrated a 1920s stunt pilot.
For Marathon Man (1976) he adapted his own novel, a labyrinthine tale about a Nazi war criminal who surfaces in New York. He was played, despite the actor’s serious illhealth, by Laurence Olivier. The scene in which Olivier’s dentist tortures Dustin Hoffman for information was so brutal that it had audiences looking away, or even leaving the auditorium, until it was over.
Despite having savagely bitten the hand that had so generously fed him, Goldman was eventually allowed back to Hollywood, adapting two of his own novels for the 1986 thriller Heat, with Burt Reynolds, and the comic fairytale The Princess Bride, which had started years before as a bedtime story for his daughters.
He had married Ilene Jones, a model, in 1961. He is survived by their two daughters, Jenny and Susanna.
His wife left him in 1991. He said, with typical brevity: ‘‘I didn’t see it coming.’’ – The Times