William Goldman, Writer Of ‘The Princess Bride,’ Dies At 87
Nov 16, 2018, 10:28 AM | Updated: Jun 8, 2022, 5:16 pm
William Goldman has died. (Photo by Ray Amati/Getty Images)
(Photo by Ray Amati/Getty Images)
NEW YORK (AP) — William Goldman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and Hollywood wise man who won Academy Awards for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men” and summed up the mystery of making a box office hit by declaring “Nobody knows anything,” has died. He was 87.
Goldman’s daughter Jenny said her father died early Friday in New York due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia. “So much of what’s he’s written can express who he was and what he was about,” she said, adding that the last few weeks, while Goldman was ailing, revealed just how many people considered him family.
Goldman, who also converted his novels “Marathon Man,” ”Magic,” ”The Princess Bride” and “Heat” into screenplays, clearly knew more than most about what the audience wanted. He was not only a successful film writer but a top script doctor, the industry title for an uncredited writer brought in to improve or “punch up” weak screenplays.
Goldman also made political history by coining the phrase “follow the money” in his script for “All the President’s Men,” adapted from the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate political scandal. The film starred Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. Standing in the shadows, Hal Holbrook was the mystery man code-named Deep Throat who helped the reporters pursue the evidence. His advice, “Follow the money,” became so widely quoted that few people realized it was never said during the actual scandal.
A confirmed New Yorker, Goldman declined to work in Hollywood. Instead, he would fly to Los Angeles for two-day conferences with directors and producers, then return home to fashion a script, which he did with amazing speed. In his 1985 book, “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” he expressed disdain for an industry that elaborately produced and tested a movie, only to see it dismissed by the public during its first weekend in theaters.
“Nobody knows anything,” he remarked.
Despite all his success as a screenwriter, Goldman always considered himself a novelist and didn’t rate his scripts as great artistic achievements.
“A screenplay is a piece of carpentry,” he once said. “And except in the case of Ingmar Bergman, it’s not an art, it’s a craft.”
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The late AP Entertainment Writer Bob Thomas contributed to this report.
