William Goldman
Goldman at the 2008 Screenwriting Expo
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
• Columbia University (MA 1956)
William Goldman (born August 12, 1931) is an American novelist, playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
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[edit] Early life and education
Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, the son of Marion (née Weil) and Maurice Clarence Goldman, who worked in business.[2] He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College in 1952 and a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1956. Goldman lives in a penthouse apartment in New York City.[3] His brother, James Goldman, who died in 1998, was a playwright and screenwriter.
[edit] Career
[edit] Novelist, playwright and screenwriter
According to his memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), Goldman began writing when he took a creative-writing course in college. His grades in the class were "horrible".[3] An editor of Oberlin's literary magazine, he would submit short stories to the magazine anonymously; he recalls that the other editors, upon reading his submissions, remarked "We can't possibly publish this shit."[3] He did not originally intend to become a screenwriter. His main interests were poetry, short stories, and novels. In 1956 he completed an MA thesis at Columbia University on the comedy of manners in American.[4]
Goldman's first novel, Temple of Gold, was written in less than three weeks.[5] Goldman published five novels, and had three plays produced on Broadway, before he began to write screenplays. He wrote mostly serious literary works until the death of his first agent,[when?] when he started writing thrillers, the first of which was Marathon Man.[citation needed]
Goldman began writing screenplays in his 30s.[3] He researched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for eight years, and used Harry Longbaugh (a variant spelling of the Sundance Kid's real name) as his pseudonym for No Way to Treat a Lady. After deciding he did not want to write a cowboy novel, he turned the story into his first original screenplay and sold it for a record $400,000 in the late 1960s.[3] Goldman felt that the script's potential, and the eight years of research involved in writing it, justified the fee.[3] He went on to use several of his novels as the foundation for his screenplays, such as The Princess Bride. His book No Way to Treat a Lady was made into a film in 1968, but Goldman did not write the adaptation, which varied from the book.[6]
Goldman wrote the famous line "Follow the money" for the screenplay of All the President's Men; while the line is often attributed to Deep Throat, it is not found in Bob Woodward’s notes nor in Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book or articles.[7] However, the book does have the far less quotable line from Woodward to Senator Sam Ervin, who was about to begin his own investigation: "The key was the secret campaign cash, and it should all be traced..."[8]
Goldman was unhappy with the movie; The Guardian says that he changes the subject when asked about the movie, but suggests that his displeasure may be because he was pressured to add a romantic interest to the film.[3] In his memoir, Goldman says of the film that if he could live his life over, he would have written the same screenplays, "Only I wouldn't have come near All the President's Men."[9] He said that he has never written as many versions of a screenplay as he did for that movie.[9] Speaking of his choice to write the script, he said "Many movies that get made are not long on art and are long on commerce. This was a project that seemed it might be both. You don't get many and you can't turn them down."[5]
The book Robert Redford: The Biography by Michael Feeny Callan quotes Redford as saying that Goldman didn't actually write the filming screenplay for the movie,[10] a story that was excerpted in Vanity Fair.[11]Written By magazine conducted a thorough investigation of the screenplay's many drafts and concluded, "Goldman was the sole author of All The President's Men. Period."[9]
Goldman was the original screenwriter for the film version of Tom Wolfe's novel The Right Stuff; director Philip Kaufman wrote his own screenplay without using Goldman's material, because Kaufman wanted to include Chuck Yeager as a character; Goldman did not.[6]
He wrote the screenplay for Rob Reiner's 1990 adaptation of Stephen King's novel Misery, considered "one of [King's] least adaptable novels".[6] The movie performed well with critics and at the box office, and earned Kathy Bates an Academy Award.[6]
Among the other scripts Goldman has written are The Stepford Wives (1975), Marathon Man (based on his novel) (1976), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Chaplin (1992), Maverick (1994) and Absolute Power (1997).
One of Goldman's best-known unproduced scripts is a pirate adventure, The Sea Kings. It reportedly was to star Sean Connery and Roger Moore as pirates Blackbeard and Bonnet, but the budget was too high and the project was scrapped.[12]
[edit] Memoirist
In the 1980s Goldman wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood. In the first of these, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he famously summed up the entertainment industry in the opening sentence of the book, "Nobody knows anything."[13][14][15]
[edit] Autobiographical fiction
Simon Morgenstern is both a pseudonym and a narrative device invented by Goldman to add another layer to his novel The Princess Bride.[16] He presents his novel as being an abridged version of a work by the fictional Morgenstern, an author from the equally fictional country of Florin. The name may be a reference to Johann Carl Simon Morgenstern who coined the term Bildungsroman describing the genre of story.
The details of Goldman's life given in the introduction and commentary for The Princess Bride are also largely fictional. For instance, he claims his wife is a psychiatrist and that he was inspired to abridge Morgenstern's The Princess Bride for his only child, a son. (The Princess Bride actually originated as a bedtime story for Goldman's two daughters.) He not only treats Morgenstern and the countries of Florin and Guilder as real, but even claims that his own father was Florinese and had immigrated to America. At one point in The Princess Bride, Goldman's commentary indicates that he had wanted to add a passage elaborating a scene skipped over by Morgenstern. He explains that his editors would not allow him to take such liberties with the "original" text, and encourages readers to write to his publisher to request a copy of this scene. Both the original publisher and its successor have responded to such requests with letters describing their supposed legal problems with the Morgenstern estate.
In the 15th and 25th Anniversary Edition of The Princess Bride, Goldman claimed that he wanted to adapt the sequel written by Morgenstern, Buttercup's Baby, but he was unable to do so because Morgenstern's estate wanted Stephen King to do the abridgment instead. He also continued the fictional details of his own life, claiming that his psychiatrist wife had divorced him, and his son had grown to have a son of his own.
Goldman also wrote The Silent Gondoliers under the Morgenstern pseudonym.
[edit] Critical reception
In their feature on Goldman, IGN said "It's a testament to just how truly great William Goldman is at his best that I actually had to think hard about what to select as his 'Must-See' cinematic work".[6] The site described his script for All the President's Men as a "model of storytelling clarity ... and artful manipulation".[6]
Three of Goldman's scripts have been voted into the Writer's Guild of America hall-of-fame's 101 Greatest Screenplays list.[9]
[edit] Awards
He has won two Academy Awards: an Award for Best Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and an Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men. He has also won two Edgar Awards, from the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Motion Picture Screenplay: for Harper in 1967, and for Magic (adapted from his 1976 novel) in 1979.
[edit] Personal life
He was married to Ilene Jones from 1961 until their divorce in 1991; the couple have two daughters.
In an Internet chat hosted by CNN, Goldman said that his favorite writers are Miguel de Cervantes, Anton Chekhov, Somerset Maugham, Irwin Shaw, and Leo Tolstoy.[5]
