Close encounter: The screenwriter of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”

The door knob rattled as usual a few minutes before eight. Faces poked in, checking to see if the professor was really still talking. It was Monday evening, my poetry lecture, and the next class shuffled noisily in the hall, primed to start. Their impatience each week is annoying, particularly because we’re made to cool our heels as the class before ours takes its time exiting. The moment we began gathering our things, the door swung open and the next class pressed in, not bothering with the usual courtesy of letting us leave first. 


Yeesh—film students. 


Among the 20- and 30-somethings were two older gentlemen, one the professor, the other a guest—although I didn’t know which was which. Then I looked closer. One student seemed in charge, hurrying the entrants to grab seats. “Is that William Goldman?” I asked him. It was.


No wonder they were eager to start.

When I read Mr. Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride (1973) one long-ago summer, I knew that’s how I wanted to write: in a way that could marry an off-kilter fairy tale with everyday conversational style. I was glad to read that the process of creating Princess had made Mr. Goldman very happy. He writes in Which Lie Did I Tell: More Adventures in the Screen Trade: 

“You can't know what [it] means if, most of your life, you haven't been stuck in your pit, locked forever with your own limitations, unable to tape the wonderful stuff that lurks there in your head but flattens out whenever it comes near paper.” 

Mr. Goldman has written several novels, but he’s better known for his screenplays, among them Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), and of course The Princess Bride (1987). His most famous line? It’s got to be “Follow the money,” Deep Throat’s directive to Bob Woodward (played by RR) in All the President’s Men (1976). The real Deep Throat (who we now know was FBI agent Mark Felt) never actually said those words, but so what—it’s a movie! 

Dustin Hoffman and Redford as Carl Bernstein 
and Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men

I’ve put in a request to sit in on the rest of Goldman’s classes this semester. (Do you know how hard it is to type with crossed fingers?) It’s one of those perks I’m really going to miss when I leave Columbia: rubbing elbows with not just great talent but artists who’ve influenced my choices in life.


Epilogue:
I talked my way into the next lecture—I could attend if I promised not to tell anyone and I could find a chair (a deal clearly struck with at least a dozen other Goldman fans). I had missed theButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid talk. The original screenplay was Goldman’s big break, and the movie set Redford’s stardom for good. Soon I had a copy of an original All the President’s Men script tucked in my bag!


At the President’s lecture, Goldman began to speak before he’d taken off his parka: “Write this down: Stars are not your friends.” He went on to discuss the making of the movie with less rancor than his opening remark hinted at but let us know that the process had been a far cry from the honeymoon ofButch. (The April 2011 Vanity Fair spells out the troubles between the two men in an excerpt from Michael Feeney Callan’s Redford bio.) Redford produced the film, indeed decided the story of two hungry journalists on the trail of a monumental coverup had the makings of a great movie before it was a book. But he vacillated on the script, first hiring Goldman and then hearing out a version proffered by Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron. 


Goldman was clearly pissed, and I gather it’s only recently the writer and the movie star have made peace. Frankly, much of what he discussed comes directly from the pages of his Adventures in the Screen Tradeand Which Lie Did I Tell? Nevertheless, it was a treat to hear the words at the source.

Updated 4/11