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william goldman

"The trouble with the Oscar show is that it's too short," William Goldman writes more than once in these infectiously droll essays about Hollywood stars, box office roulette, vintage movie years, and the illogic of Saving Private Ryan . Any other writer would be in deep ironical mode saying that, but the great screenwriter ( All the President's Men , The Princess Bride ) and giddy movie enthusiast is hardly a "prevailing view" kind of guy. Wouldn't we have gotten Brando himself at the 1973 Oscars, he argues, if he had unlimited time to defend Indian rights to a billion viewers? Would anything have been better than that? Writing irregularly for New York magazine between 1991 and 1999, Goldman promised to explain "the Hollywood mind" to the rest of us--with the mantra always in front of him that "nobody knows anything." Which leaves him open to occasional free association. Gungha Din is "the most important movie ever made," he writes not once but twice. If Miramax is successful it's because the Weinsteins "live above the store." What do you do with Universal giving Sylvester Stallone $60 million after thirteen duds like Tango and Cash ? "How long do you think you'd hold if you had those thirteen movies played over and over in a locked room?" Goldman asks. But while there's ephemera galore here, and nothing so very lofty, the guy speed-typing his interior monologues loves movies, and when he runs through the dumb things in Good Will Hunting or the great things about (his "all-time favorite") Cary Grant, just try putting the book down. --Lyall Bush

Genres nonfictionfilmessaysmedia tie inwritinghumor

524 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,2000

This edition

Format: 524 pages, Paperback
Published: March 1, 2001 by Lübbe
ISBN: 9783404940103
ASIN: 3404940105
Language: German

About the author

william goldman

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.His brother was the late James Goldman, author and playwright.

William Goldman had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. Several of his novels he later used 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 remarked that "Nobody knows anything"). He then returned to writing novels. He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriting.

Goldman 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 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.

Goldman died in New York City on November 16, 2018, due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia. He was eighty-seven years old.