Butch Cassidy and the Sundance writer
Screenwriter created Redford-Newman classic, as well as Princess Bride, All the President’s Men
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 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 send-up novel, The Princess Bride, into a generational touchstone in 1987.
He died Friday 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 Goldman adapted The Princess Bride from his novel. 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 bestselling 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. Pre- pare 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.
Goldman collaborated with Redford on several more films, most notably All the President’s Men, based on the book by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate break-in and coverup that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Redford had purchased the rights to the book and hired Goldman to write the movie. “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 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.
Goldman’s screenwriting career later soared under director Rob Reiner with The Princess Bride — a fractured fairy tale that winks at clichés 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, 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.”
“Politics were anathema at the box office, the material was talky, there was no action.” WILLIAM GOLDMAN ABOUT ADAPTING ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN