Author: Glenn Rifkin / Source: New York Times
The screenwriter William Goldman at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009. He was attending a screening of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” one of two films for which he won the Academy Award. Joe Kohen/WireImage, via Getty Images
William Goldman, 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, died on Friday in Manhattan.
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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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. Eight of his films each grossed more than $100 million domestically.
Called “the world’s greatest and most famous living screenwriter” by the critic Joe Queenan in a 2009 profile in The Guardian, Mr. 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 $2.75 million in 2018 dollars), a record for a screenplay at the time.
Mr. 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.
Paul Newman, left, and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969). Mr. Goldman achieved renown in Hollywood when he sold the “Butch Cassidy” screenplay to 20th Century Fox for $400,000, a record at the time.
Released in 1969, “Butch Cassidy,” starring Paul Newman as Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid, helped propel the relatively unheralded Mr. Redford to superstardom and established Mr. Goldman as a major Hollywood player.
Despite his Hollywood success, though, Mr. Goldman viewed the film business with a jaundiced eye. As he often pointed out, he considered himself not a screenwriter but a novelist who wrote screenplays. He wrote more than 20 novels, some using pen names, 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.)
Mr. 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 ultimately denigrating to the soul. You may get lucky and get rich, but you sure won’t get happy.”
In “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” Mr. Goldman made headlines in his famously thin-skinned 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.”
Norman Mailer, center, presented the writing Oscars to Mr. Goldman, left, for “All the President’s Men” (best adapted screenplay) and Paddy Chayefsky for “Network” (best original screenplay) at the 1977 Academy Awards.
Mr. Goldman said many…
The post William Goldman, Screenwriting Star and Hollywood Skeptic, Dies at 87 appeared first on FeedBox.