The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hollywood loses superstar screenwriter
William Goldman won two Oscars in five-decade career.
Badly hung over, the detective rises from a fold-out couch in his office. He turns off the TV that has been on all night, dunks his head in ice water, shuffles into the kitchen and prepares a fresh coffee filter, only to realize he is out of grounds.
He opens his wastebasket. Spies yesterday’s filter. Hesitates ... and fishes it out. He gulps from his mug with an expression of revulsion and resignation, imparting everything the viewer needs to know about his life. The rotten coffee is the least of his problems.
That opening scene, from the 1966 mystery film “Harper” starring Paul Newman, is widely considered a masterpiece of screenwriting, revealing depths of character without a single word.
It was the work of novice screenwriter William Goldman, who went on to become a towering craftsman of the movies — winning Academy Awards for the convention-flouting Western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and the Watergate thriller “All the President’s Men” (1976) and adapting his fantasy sendup novel “The Princess Bride” into a generational touchstone in 1987. He died Nov. 16 at 87 at his home in Manhattan of complications from colon cancer and pneumonia, said his daughter Jenny Goldman.
In a career spanning more than five decades, Goldman regarded himself as a novelist who just happened to write motion pictures. “In terms of authority,” he wrote in “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” his 1983 memoir and acid critique of show business, “screenwriters rank somewhere between the man who guards the studio gate and the man who runs the studio (this week).”
But his film legacy vastly overshadowed his best-selling and genre-crossing books. He became a phenomenal critical and commercial success in Hollywood, not least for his talent for indelible cinematic phrasemaking.
From “Butch Cassidy”: “Rules??! In a knife fight?”
From “All the President’s Men”: “Follow the money.”
From “The Princess Bride”: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
From “Marathon Man,” his Nazi-conspiracy novel turned film, which contains the most terrifying dental sequence of all time: “Is it safe?”
With a rare exception of talents such as Billy Wilder, screenwriters had long tended toward obscurity. Goldman became one of the first authors to change that tradition when “Butch Cassidy” fetched what even he considered an outlandish $400,000 in a studio bidding war. It made him an instant celebrity, lionized and vilified.
“It got in all the papers, because nobody at this time knew anything about screenwriters — because all they knew is that actors made up all the lines and directors had all the visual concepts,” he told the Writers Guild Foundation. “And the idea of this obscene amount of money going to this (guy) who lives in New York who wrote a Western drove them nuts. It was the most vicious stuff and, when the movie opened, the reviews were pissy.”
The tale of inept bank robbers was a virtuosic takedown of the mythology surrounding the American West. Newman played the fast-talking outlaw Butch; Robert Redford, then a relative unknown, was cast as his sardonic partner in crime, Sundance.
Their tough-guy attitudes are played for laughs in a memorable cliff-dive into a raging river. They need to make the leap to evade a posse, but Sundance confesses he can’t swim. “Are you crazy?” Butch chortles. “The fall will probably kill ya.”
Critics were slow to embrace the film — Pauline Kael’s review in the New Yorker ran with the headline “The Bottom of the Pit” — but audiences responded to its comically absurdist, anti-establishment tone. An interlude featuring Butch and a female companion riding a bicycle to the tune of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” became one of the most memorable sequences in 1960s cinema. The film cost $6.5 million to produce and generated more than $40 million, and it made Redford a breakout sensation.
Goldman collaborated with Redford on several more films, most notably but most unhappily “All the President’s Men,” based on the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate break-in and cover-up that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Redford had purchased the rights to the book and hired Goldman to write the movie version. “It seemed, at best, a dubious project,” Goldman wrote in “Adventures in the Screen Trade.” “Politics were anathema at the box office, the material was talky, there was no action.”
Goldman looked upon the Watergate saga, with its inept conspirators, as something of a “comic opera.” He opened with the break-in by Nixon operatives at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, presenting the burglars as bumblers with the wrong set of keys.
Redford, who like the reporters regarded the affair as a grievous subversion of democracy, reportedly objected to the shaggy-dog approach, reminiscent of “Butch Cassidy.”
Many hands began operating on the script — a source of discontent for Goldman. He took credit for the movie’s unorthodox finale, which showed Woodward and Bernstein making an embarrassing mistake. Goldman believed that audiences, who would watch the film for the first time two years after Nixon resigned, would understand that the reporters, dogged but human, had been vindicated.
Goldman’s screenwriting career later soared under director Rob Reiner with “The Princess Bride” — a fractured fairy tale that winks at cliches of romance and swashbuckling adventure — and then “Misery” (1990), based on Stephen King’s novel about a popular writer held hostage and brutalized by a sociopathic fan. (Goldman helped write the 2015 Broadway play version starring Bruce Willis and Laurie Metcalf.)
Among other films, Goldman worked on the tonguein-cheek Western “Maverick” (1994); “Absolute Power” (1997), adapted from David Baldacci’s best-selling suspense novel; and two further King adaptations, “Hearts in Atlantis” (2001) and “Dreamcatcher” (2003). For years, Goldman was one of the bestpaid script doctors in Hollywood, reportedly making $1 million for four weeks’ work.
Goldman, who learned his trade from a screenwriting guidebook he bought in 1964 at an all-night bookstore in Times Square, abhorred film schools and auteur theory. In profanity-laced interviews, he repeated his mantras: “Screenplays are structure,” “stories are everything.”
He had his share of flops, such as “The Ghost and the Darkness,” a 1996 thriller about the hunt for two lions who kill railway workers in Africa. It was a taut story, starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer, and got strong reviews but played to empty theaters.
“If you can believe in the existence of evil, you can understand that story,” he told the Guardian in 2009. “Nobody wanted the lions to be that successful. We live in a Disney world. Maybe we miscast the lions.”