William Goldman
Hollywood screenwriter whose killer one-liner s defined the movie world
WHAT’S THE key to a successful movie? Star actors? A great director? A huge budget? Maybe all of this, maybe none. The truth is NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.
That famous sentence – caps and all – was just one of William Goldman’s killer one-liners, summing up in just three words the truth about the movie industry.
But then Goldman, who has died aged 87, was a skilled craftsman who knew how to use words to memorable effect. He was also the man who put screenwriting on the map, becoming, in the process, something of a star himself.
He started out – and continued to be throughout his screenwriting career – a novelist and a fairly successful one at that. His first book The Temple of Gold (1957) and the four that followed didn’t set the world alight, but his 1964 novel No Way to Treat a Lady attracted the attention of actor Cliff Robertson who asked Goldman to adapt for the screen a successful science-fiction novel Flowers for Algernon.
Although Goldman’s script was binned, he realised writing screenplays came easily to him and as he would say later in his brilliant and revealing Hollywood memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), it was less hard work and time-consuming than novel-writing.
It would also prove to be very lucrative: his first screenplay for the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sparked a bidding war and was eventually sold to 20th Century Fox for $400,000 (more than $2.75 million today).
Goldman had taken a tired and rather unfashionable genre – the Western – and totally revamped it, presenting it as a picaresque adventure and making affectionate fun of its ‘heroes’ by way of sparkling, witty dialogue.
The public loved it and so eventually did the critics: Butch Cassidy made a killing at the box office and won four Academy Awards, including one for Best Original Screenplay. It also made a star of one of the two protagonists, a young actor called Robert Redford, besides enhancing even further the reputation of its other star, Paul Newman.
William Goldman was born in Chicago, the son of Maurice, a Chicago businessman, and Marion Weil. The atmosphere in the family was tense due to Marion’s “hectoring” personality and William’s alcoholism, which would destroy his business and cause him to commit suicide by overdosing on pills when William was 15.
Movies became young William’s escape route and the Alcyon Theater, in his home suburb of Highland Park, would become a home from home. Determined to become a writer, he attended Oberlin College in Ohio but his short stories were returned with rejection slips. After a degree in English and two years in the Army, Goldman enrolled for a master’s at Columbia University.
While there he wrote his first novel, The Temple of Gold, quickly followed by others, among them No Way to Treat a Lady (1964), which would be turned into a film starring Rod Steiger, in 1968.
Goldman never gave up writing novels, although some of them are best known for the movies they
became, like Marathon Man and The Princess Bride.
Goldman was to win a second screenwriting Academy Award – for All the President’s Men – but adapting the Woodward and Bernstein’s book for the screen was a fraught and unhappy affair.
The problem was that Goldman and Robert Redford, who had bought the rights to the book, was the movie’s producer and had a starring role in it, had conflicting views on the project. Goldman, who believed that “politics were anathema at the box office,”wanted to make the ludicrous, amateurish conspirators figures of fun. Redford, on the other hand, saw the episode as a real threat to the democratic process and insisted it be treated seriously.
It was Redford’s movie and he had his way. Many hands tinkered with the original script and Redford would later play down Goldman’s role, although one of the movie’s iconic lines, “Follow the money,” is pure Goldman.
In a career spanning several decades, Goldman rewrote the rules of screenwriting and, thanks to his achievements, enhanced the profession’s profile.
When he had started out, he had scoured New York’s Times Square for books about screenwriting, but had found just one. Now bookshops’ shelves are groaning with them. Yet, he had this simple advice for wouldbe screenwriters: “Go and see a movie all day long.” His reasoning was that, by evening, utterly bored with the movie, one would start watching the audience and realise what makes people tick.
In Hollywood, he maintained till the end, there are no cast-iron guarantees to success, no magic formula. NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.
William Goldman married Ilene Jones in 1961 but they divorced in 1991. He is survived by his partner, Susan Burden, a daughter, Jenny Goldman and a grandson. Another daughter, Susanna, predeceased him. His brother, James Goldman, also an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, died in 1998.
JULIE CARBONARA