He won Oscars for \u201cButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid\u201d and \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men.\u201d But his jaundiced view of the movie business was well known.<\/b>
\nWilliam Goldman, who won Academy Awards for his screenplays for \u201cButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid\u201d and \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men\u201d and who, despite being one of Hollywood\u2019s 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 \u201c Misery,\u201d \u201c A Bridge Too Far,\u201d \u201c The Stepford Wives \u201d and \u201c Chaplin.\u201d He was a prolific novelist as well, and several of his screenplays were adapted from his own novels, notably \u201c The Princess Bride \u201d and \u201c Marathon Man .\u201d
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\u2019s production and success as those of the director and stars. Eight of his films each grossed more than $100 million domestically.
Called \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest and most famous living screenwriter\u201d 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 \u201cButch Cassidy,\u201d 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 \u2014 the tale of two outlaws from history who try to evade the law in the Old West \u2014 in 1965 while teaching creative writing at Princeton University.
Released in 1969, \u201cButch Cassidy,\u201d 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 \u201cMisery,\u201d based on Stephen King\u2019s 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.
\u201cScreenplay writing is not an art form,\u201d he said in a Publishers Weekly interview in 1983, the year his best-selling insider\u2019s view of Hollywood, \u201cAdventures in the Screen Trade,\u201d was published. \u201cIt\u2019s a skill; it\u2019s carpentry; it\u2019s structure. I don\u2019t mean to knock it \u2014 it ain\u2019t easy. But if it\u2019s 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\u2019t get happy.\u201d
In \u201cAdventures in the Screen Trade,\u201d Mr. Goldman made headlines in his famously thin-skinned industry when he declared, \u201cNobody knows anything,\u201d a succinct assessment of the movie business that was embraced by Hollywood insiders and film critics alike. Expanding on his comment, he wrote, \u201cNot one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what\u2019s going to work.\u201d
Mr. 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. \u201cI have a theory that we gravitate toward affection,\u201d he said in a 1978 interview with The New York Times . \u201cI have a facility for screenwriting. It\u2019s gone very well. I needed something else to write besides novels, which are physically hard and take time. Since nobody wanted my stories and people seemed to want my screenplays, I gravitated toward affection.\u201d
William Goldman was born on Aug. 12,1931, in Highland Park, Ill., to Maurice and Marion (Weil) Goldman. His father was a businessman whose successful career was scuttled by alcoholism. As a child, William watched countless films at the venerable Alcyon Theater in Highland Park; he later said 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. \u201cI was so programmed to fail,\u201d he told The Guardian. \u201cI had shown no signs of talent as a young man.\u201d
He managed to get the worst grade in his creative writing class, and despite being fiction editor of the school\u2019s literary magazine, he was unable to get a single story published in it. \u201cEverything was submitted anonymously and every issue I would sneak in a story and the three of us \u201d \u2014 Mr. Goldman and two other editors \u2014 \u201cwould meet and I would listen while they both agreed whoever wrote this thing (my thing) was not about to get published,\u201d Mr. Goldman wrote in \u201cAdventures in the Screen Trade.\u201d
Undaunted, after graduating with a degree in English from Oberlin he went to graduate school at Columbia. On receiving a master\u2019s degree in 1956, he immediately began working on his first novel.
\u201cI was so panicked that I would end up my life as a copywriter in an ad agency in Chicago that I wrote \u2018The Temple of Gold\u2019 in less than three weeks,\u201d he said in an online chat in 2001. \u201cI had no idea what I was doing.\u201d It was published in 1957.
After publishing five novels, Mr. Goldman was disconsolate about his mixed reviews and modest success. But his fortunes began to turn when the actor Cliff Robertson, who had read Mr. Goldman\u2019s 1964 novel, \u201cNo Way to Treat a Lady,\u201d approached him about writing a screenplay adaptation of \u201cFlowers for Algernon,\u201d Daniel Keyes\u2019s best-selling science fiction novel about a mentally challenged man who is turned into a genius.
Mr. Goldman agreed and then, realizing 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 all-night bookstore in Times Square and found a single volume on screenwriting.
Though he was eventually fired by Mr. Robertson \u2014 \u201cprobably because it was a terrible screenplay,\u201d Mr. Goldman later said \u2014 he kept at it. (The movie was later made as \u201cCharly,\u201d with a screenplay by Stirling Silliphant. Mr. Robertson won an Oscar for his performance.)
Mr. Goldman attributed the record sale of his \u201cButch Cassidy\u201d script to \u201ca brilliant piece of agenting\u201d by Evarts Ziegler, who engineered a bidding war for the script, even though Mr. Goldman was virtually unknown in Hollywood. The film went on to become the highest-grossing of 1969 and won four Academy Awards, including for best original screenplay.
Of his many novels, Mr. Goldman was particularly fond of \u201cThe Princess Bride,\u201d which was published in 1973. But it took almost 15 years of missteps and false starts for his own adaptation of it to make it to the screen. It was ultimately directed by Rob Reiner, who was far less experienced as a director than Mr. Goldman was as a screenwriter. \u201cI was walking on air,\u201d Mr. Reiner later recalled. \u201cWilliam Goldman said it was O. K. for me to do this.\u201d
In 2012, at a 25th-anniversary reunion of the \u201cPrincess Bride\u201d cast, which included Mandy Patinkin and Robin Wright, Mr. Goldman was asked if he planned a sequel. \u201cI\u2019m desperate to make it and write it and I don\u2019t know how,\u201d he said. \u201cI would love to make it more than anything else I\u2019ve not written.\u201d
Conversely, Mr. Goldman was deeply disappointed with his experience writing \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men,\u201d based on the book by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (played by Mr. Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) about their role in exposing the Watergate scandal. It was a problematic project in which Mr. Goldman butted heads with Mr. Redford, who was the producer as well as the co-star, and who in later years played down Mr. Goldman\u2019s participation.
Mr. Goldman\u2019s screenplay \u2014 which included the famous line \u201cFollow the money,\u201d not found in the book \u2014 won him his second Academy Award, for best adapted screenplay. But he later wrote: \u201cIf you were to ask me, \u2018What would you change if you had your movie life to live over?\u2019 I\u2019d tell you that I\u2019d have written exactly the screenplays I\u2019ve written. Only I wouldn\u2019t have come near \u2018All the President\u2019s Men.\u2019 \u201d
Mr. Goldman was also a sought-after script doctor, well known for his uncredited work. He was widely believed to have written the script for \u201cGood Will Hunting,\u201d the 1997 film that brought Matt Damon and Ben Affleck the Oscar for best original screenplay. He denied having a hand in it.
\u201cI would love to say that I wrote \u2018Good Will Hunting,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Goldman said at a Writers Guild of America seminar in 2003. \u201cBut I did not write it, alas.\u201d
Along with Ms. 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.
Mr. Goldman was, Joe Queenan wrote in 2009, \u201cthe classic case of the creative genius who respects the rules, but has lived his entire life as if the rules do not apply to him.\u201d He expressed his philosophy of writing simply in \u201cAdventures in the Screen Trade\u201d:
\u201cAs a writer I believe that all the basic human truths are known. And what we try to do as best we can is come at those truths from our own unique angle, to reilluminate those truths in a hopefully different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

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