Whenever an older, revered icon of the film industry dies, there are plenty of testimonials and remembrances written about that person. But it’s sad that we only take the time to fully appreciate these people’s brilliance after their passing. Hence, The Greats, a new biweekly column that celebrates cinema’s living legends.
If you were asked to name one living screenwriter—not a writer-director, but a pure screenwriter—the chances are good that you might say William Goldman. This isn’t because he’s the greatest living screenwriter—although he has won two Oscars—but because he’s the most famous. In an industry in which the people who work on scripts are little-known, Goldman has managed to make himself into something of a celebrity. He’s written Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and adapted All the President’s Men, but perhaps the most memorable thing he’s even written were three words in the early 1980s.
Since he introduced the concept in his 1983 memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade, “Nobody knows anything” has become a mantra for an industry in which business decisions and creative decisions are equally fraught with peril and often interconnected. Goldman used the expression to suggest why studios release bad movies or pass on films that turn out to be generation-defining blockbusters for their competitors. Described by Goldman as “the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry,” “Nobody knows anything” spoke to the uncomfortable truth tormenting everyone involved in Hollywood. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work,” he wrote. “Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
Born in 1931 outside of Chicago, Goldman loved movies from an early age, but he first pursued writing novels, including Soldier in the Rain, which was later adapted for film by (alongside others) Blake Edwards and starred Jackie Gleason and Steve McQueen. Soon, he was writing screenplays himself, such as doing rewrites on Masquerade, a 1965 James Bond spoof that starred Cliff Robertson. But it was his work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that made his name.
At first, he thought he might do it as a novel. But that presented some problems. “I’ve never been a great fan of Western novels,” he explained in Adventures in the Screen Trade, and “horses scare the hell out of me.” And because he was busy as a screenwriter, “to do the additional research required to make a novel authentic was out of the question.” But between the time that he started reading stories in the late ’50s about these buddy outlaws until the time he began working on the script in the mid-’60s, he figured out that what drew him to the material was the idea of Butch (played by Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) being so successful as Wild West bandits in America and then heading to South America in their later years and doing the same thing.
“Butch and Sundance did what Gatsby only dreamed of doing: They repeated the past,” Goldman wrote. “And probably that fact—repeating the past—is what I found so moving about the narrative. We all wish for it; they made it happen.”
But Goldman also responded to the idea of them dying “in a country where no one knew their names … it seemed a wonderful vehicle to say something about our lack of knowledge, about our hopeless and terrible and, alas, enduring, permanent loneliness.”
That wistful quality helped make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid a huge hit in 1969, and it went on to be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film won three prizes, including Goldman’s Oscar for the screenplay.
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