William Goldman

Oscar-winning screenwriter of All the President’s Men and Butch Cassidy

William Goldman, screenwriter. Born: 12 August 1931 in Highland Park, Illinois. Died: 16 November 2018 in Manhattan, New York, aged 87.

Williamgoldman, who won Academy Awards for his screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men and who, despite being one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters, was an outspoken critic of the movie industry, has died. He was 87.

The cause was colon cancer and pneumonia, said Susan Burden, his partner.

In his long career, which began in the 1960s and lasted into the 21st century, Goldman also wrote the screenplays for popular films like Misery, A Bridge Too Far, The Stepford Wives and Chaplin. He was a prolific novelist as well, and several of his screenplays were adapted from his own novels, notably The Princess Bride and Marathon Man.

In a business where writers generally operate in relative obscurity, Goldman became a celebrity in his own right; in his heyday, his name was as much an asset to a film’s production and success as those of the director and stars.

Called “the world’s greatest and most famous living screenwriter” by critic Joe Queenan in a 2009 profile in the Guardian, Goldman achieved renown in Hollywood in the late 1960s when he sold his first original screenplay, for Butch Cassidy, to 20th Century Fox for $400,000 (the equivalent of more than £2.1m today), a record for a screenplay at the time.

Goldman had written the screenplay – the tale of two outlaws from history who try to evade the law in the Old West – in 1965 while teaching creative writing at Princeton University.

Released in 1969, Butch Cassidy, starring Paul Newman as Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid, helped propel the relatively unheralded Redford to superstardom and established Goldman as a major Hollywood player.

Despite his Hollywood success, though, Goldman viewed the film business with a jaundiced eye. He considered himself not a screenwriter but a novelist who wrote screenplays. He wrote more than 20 novels,someusingpennames, in addition to more than 20 screenplays. (He also wrote stage plays, but with little success. Two of them opened on Broadway in the early 1960s but quickly closed. Late in his career he adapted his script for Misery, based on Stephen King’s thriller, for Broadway, but that was a disappointment as well, opening to poor reviews and closing after 102 performances.)

Goldman chose to live in New York City rather than in Los Angeles, to avoid what he viewed as the distractions and irrationality of the Hollywood scene.

“Screenplay writing is not an art form,” he said in a Publishers Weekly interview in 1983, the year his best-selling insider’s view of Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade, was published. “It’s a skill; it’s carpentry; it’s structure. I don’t mean to knock it – it ain’t easy. But if it’s all you do, if you only write screenplays, it is ultimatelydenigratingtothesoul. You may get lucky and get rich, but you sure won’t get happy.”

In Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman made headlines in his famously thinskinned industry when he declared, “Nobody knows anything,” a succinct assessment of the movie business that was embraced by Hollywood insiders and film critics alike. Expanding on his comment, he wrote, “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work.”

Goldman said many times that he did not consider himself a particularly gifted writer, but he displayed a deft touch as a storyteller when it came to writing screenplays. “I have a theory that we gravitate toward affection,” he said in a 1978 interview with The New York Times.

“I have a facility for screenwriting. It’s gone very well. I needed something else to write besides novels, which 2 William Goldman accepts his Oscar for All The President’s Men in 1977

are physically hard and take time. Since nobody wanted my stories and people seemed to want my screenplays, I gravitated toward affection.”

William Goldman was born in 1931 in Highland Park, Illinois, to Maurice and Marion (Weil) Goldman. His father was a businessman whose successful career was scuttled by alcoholism. As a child, William Goldman watched countless films at the venerable Alcyon Theatre in Highland Park; he later said that that was probably where he got many of his best ideas.

At Oberlin College in Ohio, where he enrolled with the intent of becoming a writer, he encountered the first disappointments of his nascent career. “I was so programmed to fail,” he told the Guardian. “I had shown no signs of talent as a young man.” He managed to get the worst grade in his creative writing class, and despite being fiction editor of the school’s literary magazine, he was unable to get a single story published in it. “Everything was submitted anonymously and every issue I would sneak in a story and the three of us” – Goldman and two other editors – “would meet and I would listen while they both agreed whoever wrote this thing (my thing) was not about to get published,” Goldman wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Undaunted, after graduating with a degree in English from Oberlin he went to graduate school at Columbia. On receiving a master’s degree in 1956, he immediately began working on his first novel. “I was so panicked that I would end up my life as a copywriter in an ad agency in Chicago that I wrote The Temple of Gold in less than three weeks,” he said in an online chat in 2001. “I had no idea what I was doing.” It was published in 1957.

After publishing five novels, Goldman was disconsolate about his mixed reviews and modest success.

But Goldman’s fortunes began to turn when actor Cliff Robertson, who had read Goldman’s 1964 novel, No Way to Treat a Lady, approached him about writing a screenplay adaptation of Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes’ bestselling science fiction novel about a mentally challenged man who is turned into a genius.

Goldman agreed and then, realising that he had no idea how to write a screenplay, panicked. Unable to sleep, he recalled, he rushed from his New York City apartment at midnight, headed to an allnight bookstore in Times Square and found a single volume on screenwriting.

Though he was eventually fired by Robertson – “probably because it was a terrible screenplay,” Goldman later said – he kept at it. (The movie was later made as Charly, with a screenplay by Stirling Silliphant. Robertson won an Oscar for his performance.)

Goldman was deeply disappointed with his experience of writing All the President’s Men, based on the book by The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (played by Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) about their role in exposing the Watergate scandal. It was a problematic project in which Goldman butted heads with Redford, who was the producer as well as the co-star, and who in later years played down Goldman’s participation.

Goldman’s screenplay – which included the famous line “Follow the money,” not found in the book – won him his second Academy Award, for best adapted screenplay. But he later wrote: “If you were to ask me ‘What would you change if you had your movie life to live over?’ I’d tell you that I’d have written exactly the screenplays I’ve written.

“Only I wouldn’t have come near All the President’s Men.”

Along with Burden, he is survived by his daughter, Jenny Goldman, and a grandson. Another daughter, Susanna Goldman, died in 2015. His marriage to Ilene Jones ended in divorce in 1991, after 30 years.

GLENN RIFKIN