William Goldman
When discussing the greatest writers who ever lived, it can be tricky and you can’t really move forward without laying down some specifications. If you’re talking about authors, you have to be more particular. Are we talking about medieval writers? Because the argument definitely leans towards Geoffrey Chaucer. Transcendental authors might prop up Louisa May Alcott as their greatest representative. Post-modern authors could have their pick from a slew of great writers, including Sylvia Plath and J.D. Salinger.
But novels aren’t the be all, end all of writing, of course. Not even close. Playwrights like William Shakespeare make a claim as the greatest writer of all-time. Or poets like Emily Dickinson. Or journalists like Truman Capote. It’s all arbitrary anyway, you’re going to like what you’re going to like and that’s that.
But I think William Goldman is the greatest screenwriter to ever live.
I could run through a list of some of the closest screenplay competitors, but that’s a topic best left to a different piece. This one is about William Goldman and how truly brilliant he was.
Think about his body of work. He wrote twenty-eight screenplays and consulted on five more. Goldman penned four plays that made it to stage, two television pilots, twenty-five books, and a plethora of short stories, articles, and scripts that were never produced. Many writers have mastered one medium. Goldman seemed like he mastered them all.
I just finished rereading The Princess Bride. I’d always grown up with the movie because of my parents’ love for it (I imagine most people experience it in this lens) and I read the book for the first time back in high school, but the illustrated, thirtieth anniversary edition was a treat to dive back into because of how much I love being surrounded by Goldman’s storytelling ability and his way with words. Every sentence he writes has a whimsical sort of fun to it; it’s kind of hard to explain. He was clever and witty and he treated language like a game. His subversion of tropes came about before the tropes even had the chance to manifest as tired or overused. The best example in The Princess Bride comes in the chapter on the Cliffs of Insanity. Interacting in a wry manner that was uncommon in these sort of fairy tales, the dialogue between Inigo Montoya and Westley is charming and delightful. You can hear it all so clearly in your head and it makes you want to talk like that. That’s an exceptional sort of writing. That’s my favorite part of the book and it’s my favorite to continuously reread.
Even characters like Miracle Max, a minor entry into the story, feel fully formed. It’s a testament to his ability to do so exceptional world-building in entirely unconventional ways. Anyone who has read The Princess Bride knows it’s unlike any other work of literature. It’s so impressive that I can’t really think of any prominent examples of writers trying to copy or emulate it. It stands alone. A towering achievement.
And Goldman was proud of his work, too. That much is evident in the screenplay for The Princess Bride, one of the best ever written, because of how many lines come directly from the book. The movie is well-written because the book is well-written. It’s rewatchable and a hell of a lot of fun. The capacity with which Goldman worked with the film’s actors (namely Andre the Giant, Mandy Patinkin, Cary Elwes, and Robin Wright, of course) is also paramount. Patinkin’s delivery of the famed line, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die,” is iconic, sure. But the best delivered line in the movie, for my money, is Wright’s “Oh, my sweet Westley, what have I done?” after pushing him off the hill and hearing his falling, “As you wish!” It’s the perfect dry, wry delivery of a script full of lines witty enough that you might not have realized it if Goldman wasn’t so comfortable leaning into the fun of it all.
Yet, as much as The Princess Bride is probably the defining work that Goldman will have given back to the world, it’s hard to tell the story of how much of a genius he was without delving into some of the other incredibly sharp screenplays he wrote.
I wasn’t too familiar with Goldman outside of The Princess Bride or his appearances on The Bill Simmons Podcast until I offhandedly watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and was blown away. When the credits rolled and Goldman’s name appeared on screen, it suddenly made a lot more sense why I was having such a fun time with a movie I thought was going to be a serious Western drama, but quickly became one of my favorites. Perfect in my eyes! It’s Goldman’s light, masterful touch that’s in all of his writing.
This moment in Butch has been praised to death in terms of the writing and in terms of Robert Redford’s excellent delivery of the line, “I can’t swim.” But all the thought that went into it is what sets Goldman apart. At a screenwriting session, Goldman discussed this moment in the 1969 film and remarked that the sequence that follows, one of the best in the film, only came about because of the historical understanding that Goldman had that Sundance could not actually swim. It was the key that unlocked the whole movie for him and he advised aspiring screenwriters to hold onto something like that in their scripts: a secret that only the writer and the character share. It became an all-time great movie moment in an all-time great film.
Of course, Goldman is found in so many other films which are also among my favorites and some of the best of their respective genres. Is there a better journalism movie than All the President’s Men? Is there a better written adaptation of a Stephen King novel than Misery? Has any “conventional” biopic felt as rewarding as Chaplin?
Goldman also famously consulted on two of the best screenplays ever written in Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men and Matt Damon’s and Ben Affleck’s Good Will Hunting. He famously advised the latter pair to cut out the second half of their script where Will Hunting becomes a part of the CIA. He was just so whip smart.
It’s sad that he’s gone now. He passed back in November at the age of eighty-seven. There won’t be any new writings from the greatest who ever wrote a script, but I don’t know about you, but I haven’t read everything he’s written. Not yet, anyway. The love of the screenwriter is powerful and I can’t wait to celebrate Goldman for as long as I can.
