Oscar winner for ‘Butch Cassidy’ called screenwriting ‘a craft’
NEW YORK — William Goldman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and Hollywood wise man who won Academy Awards for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men and summed up the mystery of making a box office hit by declaring “Nobody knows anything,” has died. He was 87.
Goldman’s daughter Jenny said her father died early Friday in New York due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia.
Goldman, who also converted his novels Marathon Man, Magic, The Princess Bride and Heat into screenplays, clearly knew more than most about what the audience wanted. He was not only a successful film writer but a top script doctor, the industry title for an uncredited writer brought in to improve or “punch up” weak screenplays.
Goldman also made political history by coining the phrase “follow the money” in his script for All the President’s Men, adapted from the book by Washington Post reporters Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate political scandal.
A confirmed New Yorker, Goldman declined to work in Hollywood. Instead, he would fly to Los Angeles for two-day conferences with directors and producers, then return home to fashion a script, which he did with amazing speed. In his 1985 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he expressed disdain for an industry that elaborately produced and tested a movie, only to see it dismissed by the public during its first weekend in theaters.
“Nobody knows anything,” he remarked.
Goldman launched his writing career after receiving a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1956.
He broke through Hollywood in 1969 with the blockbuster Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Other notable Goldman films included The Stepford Wives, A Bridge Too Far and Misery.
In 1961 Goldman married Ilene Jones, a photographer, and they had two daughters, Jenny and Susanna. The couple divorced in 1991.
Born in Chicago on Aug. 12, 1931, Goldman grew up in the suburb of Highland Park. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1952 and served two years in the Army.
Despite all his success as a screenwriter, Goldman always considered himself a novelist.
“A screenplay is a piece of carpentry,” he once said. “And except in the case of Ingmar Bergman, it’s not an art, it’s a craft.”