It was at the origin of unforgettable films, the great critical success and cardboard box office: the screenwriter american William Goldmann, a two-time oscar winner, died Friday at the age of 87 years, announced his family. The native of Highland Park, in the State of Illinois, has experienced first-career novelist: The Temple of Gold , his first novel, published at the age of 26, has been well received by the critics. But it is as a writer that he will be a success around the world by writing an impressive series of hollywood productions.
Butch Cassidy and the Kid (1969), a western with Paul Newman and Robert Redford star, will be her passport to fame, the movie allowing him to win the Oscar for best screenplay. It follow then with The president’s Men (1976), which honors journalists at the origin of the infamous Watergate scandal and earned him a second Oscar, Marathon Man (1976), A bridge too far (1977), the Princess Bride (1987), or Misery (1990), terrifying thriller adapted from a novel by Stephen King.
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The permanent fear of boring the viewer
In an interview with PBS in 2000, William Goldmann explained, was concerned throughout his life to annoy the viewer and used systematically as a series of «tricks» to entertain. «What I have, this is what I had when I started: a sense of the dialogue and the story,» he said modestly, claiming that he did not have the capacity to move to the implementation stage. He explained that he was not, for him, of recipe to write the script for a film. «I wish there was a», joked in this interview.
William Goldman has chosen all his life to reside in New York, away from Hollywood, something he abhorred. «Hollywood is full of buzz and lies,» he said during the interview on PBS. A lucidity on his professional community also expressed in his books, that he will continue to write until the mid-1990s, » explains the site First . In Adventures in the Screen Trade , published in 1983, he painted a table at the vitriol of the film industry.
● The interview of William Golmann to PBS, 2000