Oscar winner who worked on ‘Butch Cassidy’ and ‘All the President’s Men,’ dies
Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman, who penned the scripts for the seminal Robert Redford films “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men,” as well as the beloved comedy “The Princess Bride,” has died. He was 87.
Goldman died in New York on Friday due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia, his daughter Jenny Goldman told The Associated Press.
The prolific Goldman wrote some of the most quotable films of all time and also authored a number of novels and memoirs. He became a soughtafter “script doctor,” a hired gun who burnishes a struggling screenplay, because he understood cinematic storytelling as well as the importance of a character’s perspective.
But it was his 1983 book, “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” that had Tinseltown buzzing by explaining that there were no easy answers in show business, readily entering a well-worn catchphrase in the film world’s lexicon.
“Nobody knows anything,” Goldman wrote. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess — and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
That book — described in the Los Angeles Times’ review as “part memoir, part case history and part instruction manual on the screenwriter’s art” — pulled back the curtain on the industry and included outrageous stories about moviemaking. It became required reading for aspiring screenwriters, and later influenced the likes of Ron Howard, Ben Stiller and Ike Barinholtz, all of whom paid tribute to Goldman via Twitter on Friday.
In “Adventures,” the authoritative and outspoken writer, who worked with Clint Eastwood, Michael Douglas, Mel Gibson, Rob Reiner and other major Hollywood players, was uncensored about stars and filmmakers.
“If they are hot, their day differs from ours in one simple way: From morning till night, they live in a world in which no one disagrees with them,” he wrote of actors.
As for directors: “Some of the best directors in Hollywood are writer killers,” he wrote. “What writer killers do is they work with you on a project, and they ask for apples and you try to give them apples, then they say no, pomegranates . ... Then they bring in a friend — who conceivably they wanted to bring all along — and the friend does the screenplay.”
Goldman also coined another great line in American politics: “Follow the money,” which instantly defined the Watergate scandal.
The phrase was uttered by the shadowy “Deep Throat” figure to Redford’s Bob Woodward in the film “All the President’s Men.” Goldman said that he actually thought it came from Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate book but later discovered that it hadn’t.
In 2000, he followed up “Adventures” with another chatty book about Hollywood and the movies titled “Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade.”