William Goldman is an American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. He had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before going to Hollywood to write screenplays, including several based on his novels.
Simon Morgenstern is a pseudonym, a narrative device invented by him to add another layer to his work, The Princess Bride.
Background
Goldman (born August 12, 1931) 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. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College in 1952 then went into the army. He knew how to type, so was sent to the Pentagon where he worked as a clerk until discharged with the rank of corporal in September 1954. He then went to Columbia University where he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 1956. All this time he wrote short stories in the evenings, but struggled to get them published.
He and his brother James, the playwright, shared an apartment with their friend John Kander (also Oberlin and Columbia MA) and helped out Kander, a composer, by writing the libretto for his dissertation. All three later won separate Academy Awards. (Kander was the composer of Cabaret, Chicago and a dozen other famous musicals.) Goldman lives in a penthouse apartment in New York City. His brother, James Goldman, who died in 1998, was a playwright and screenwriter.
Education
William Goldman graduated from Highland Park High School in 1948.
He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College in 1952 and a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1956. He and his brother James, the playwright, shared an apartment with their friend John Kander (also Oberlin and Columbia MA) and helped out Kander, a composer, by writing the libretto for his dissertation. All three later won separate Academy Awards. (Kander was the composer of Cabaret, Chicago and a dozen other famous musicals.)
Career
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". 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." 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 America.
Goldman's first novel, Temple of Gold, was written in less than three weeks. 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 he started writing thrillers, the first of which was Marathon Man.
Goldman began writing screenplays in his 30s when Cliff Robertson hired him to adapt Flowers for Algernon. Robertson then hired him to do some rewriting on Masquerade, which was Goldman's first screen credit.
Goldman 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. Goldman felt that the script's potential, and the eight years of research involved in writing it, justified the fee. 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.In 1973 Goldman succumbed to a rare strain of pneumonia which resulted in him being hospitalised and affected his health for months. This inspired him into a burst of creativity, including several novels and screenplays. He says his novel writing moved in a more commercial direction following the death of his editor Hiram Haydn.
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. 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..."
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. 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." He said that he has never written as many versions of a screenplay as he did for that movie.] 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."
In Michael Feeney Callan's book Robert Redford: The Biography Redford states that Goldman didn't actually write the filming screenplay for the movie, a story that was excerpted in Vanity Fair. 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."
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". The movie performed well with critics and at the box office, and earned Kathy Bates an Academy Award.
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.
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."
Michael Sragow, reviewing The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? and Other Essays, writes, "Much of his gruff humor and charm derives from emphatic statements of the obvious. In writing about movies, seeing the obvious is an undeniable gift—and pounding it home conveys how difficult it can be for common sense to penetrate hype. Goldman also applies a fine-honed sledgehammer to Good Will Hunting, a movie on which he consulted for one day and insists he likes. He observes that Robin Williams, playing (he chortles) 'the shrink with only one patient,' finds an awesomely simple solution to curing the mental torment of the young genius Matt Damon: he tells the boy, 'It's not your fault,' 10 times. Goldman, like a gleeful prosecutor, repeats the phrase for us 10 times, in italics.
Sragow also describes Which Lie Did I Tell? (More Adventures in the Screen Trade): "In addition to brief descriptions of topics like spitballing (brainstorming story notions) and expansions or reprints of behind-the-scenes stories already published as introductions to Goldman's screenplays, it contains famous scenes from other writers' screenplays; how-to advice on judging ideas, on turning ideas into stories and on writing them in a way that hooks the attention of a director or a star; and a partial draft of a script, with reactions from esteemed peers."