William Goldman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the screenwriter/novelist. For the mathematician, see William Goldman (professor).

William Goldman (born August 12, 1931) is an American novelist, playwright and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. He lives in New York City.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College in 1952 and an MA degree at Columbia University in 1956.

He had been estranged for many years from his brother, playwright James Goldman, before James's death in 1998.[citation needed]

William Goldman published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. He later used several of his novels as the foundation for his screenplays. In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood. (In one of these he famously sized up the entertainment industry by concluding: "Nobody knows anything.") He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriting. For many years he often has been called in as an uncredited script doctor on troubled Hollywood projects.[citation needed]

Goldman has won two Academy Awards: an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and an Academy Award for Writing 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 own 1976 novel) in 1979.

Among the many other popular scripts written by Goldman are The Stepford Wives (1975), Marathon Man (based on his novel) (1976); A Bridge Too Far (1977); Misery (1990); Chaplin (1992); Maverick (1994) and Absolute Power (1997).

He was married to Ilene Jones until their divorce in 1991. The couple had two daughters.

[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. 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 details of Goldman's life given in the introduction and commentary for The Princess Bride are also largely fictional. For instance, he says that 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 emigrated 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 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 name.

[edit] Career

According to Goldman's memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman began writing when he took a creative writing course in college. He did not originally intend to become a screenwriter. His main interests were poetry, short stories, and novels.

[edit] Miscellanea

 Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines.
The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.
This section needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2006)
  • Has a self-described obsession with height, and always wants to find out how tall actors and other famous people really are, going so far as to go into a pool with Sylvester Stallone to see how tall he was in bare feet.
  • Doesn't drive; claims he can't concentrate that long.
  • Wrote mostly serious, literary works until death of his first agent when he began writing thrillers starting with Marathon Man.
  • Doesn't like “bloodbath action” movies and spoofed them in Last Action Hero.
  • Turned down The Graduate (“didn't get the book”), The Godfather (loved the book, but didn't want to glamorise the Mafia) and Superman (a big comic fan, but he didn't want to write with a major movie star in the lead, as was the original plan, so they hired Mario Puzo).
  • Goldman is often quoted in Hollywood for his dictum about the uncertainties of show business, "Nobody knows anything."
  • In the DVD commentary for Fight Club, actor Edward Norton refers to William Goldman as one "ranting and raving about their own obsolescence" in reference to Goldman's criticism of the quality of modern films, particularly those of 1999, the year Fight Club was released.

[edit] Credits

[edit] Broadway

[edit] Screenplays (Produced)

[edit] Screenplays (Unproduced)

  • SHAZAM
  • Low Fives
  • The Sea Kings
  • The Thing Of It Is

[edit] Television

[edit] Novels

[edit] Non-fiction and memoirs

  • The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway - 1969
  • The Story of 'A Bridge Too Far' - 1977
  • Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting - 1983
  • Wait Till Next Year (with Mike Lupica) -1988
  • Hype and Glory - 1990
  • Four Screenplays - 1995
    • Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, and Misery, with an essay on each
  • Five Screenplays - 1997
    • All the President's Men, Magic, Harper, Maverick, and The Great Waldo Pepper, with an essay on each
  • Which Lie Did I Tell? (More Adventures in the Screen Trade) - 2000
  • The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? and Other Essays - 2001

[edit] Children's books

  • Wigger (1974)

Winnie the Pooh (1971)

[edit] Other

  • New World Writing Number 17 - 1960
    • A collection of stories, poems and articles by several authors, with an 11-page story entitled "Da Vinci" by Goldman
  • The Craft of the Screenwriter by John Brady - 1981
    • Includes a profile on Goldman and a lengthy interview about his craft
  • The Movie Business Book by James E. Squire (Editor) - 1992
    • Includes an As Told By William Goldman piece
  • Writers on Directors by Susan Gray - 1999
    • Goldman has a piece on Rob Reiner in this book, and another on Norman Jewison
  • The First Time I Got Paid For It: Writers' Tales From the Hollywood Trenches - 2000
    • Introduction by Goldman
  • Goldman speaks candidly about his writing process in American Film Foundation's series Screenwriters: Words into Motion.

+

[edit] References

  1. ^ Rich, Frank. 2005. [1]| ‘Don’t follow the money’], The New York Times, 12 June