Throng

Sunday, 26 April 2009, 10:15PM on ITV1

The South Bank Show profiles William Goldman who can lay claim to being the most successful and acclaimed screenwriter of the last four decades. 

Melvyn Bragg interviews Goldman at home in New York, where he started his writing career as a novelist but quickly turned his hand to screenplays. By the end of the 70s he had some of Hollywood’s most iconic movies to his name including: Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, The Stepford Wives, All The President’s Men and A Bridge Too Far. 

William Goldman has won Oscars for Butch Cassidy (Best Original Screenplay 1969) and All The President’s Men (Best Adapted Screenplay 1976). 

At the start of the 80s, after a seemingly faultless career, he fell out of favour and – to use his own term - became a ‘leper’. With no scripts to write, he decided to publish a searing Hollywood memoir called Adventures In The Screen Trade. Goldman’s Tinseltown was fickle, ruthless, money-obsessed and - most surprisingly - completely clueless. He claimed that no one in the filmmaking process had the first idea of how successful a movie would be, with his now famous motto, “No one knows anything”. He wrote a follow up in 2001 Which Lie Did I Tell? 

Five years on and William Goldman’s career rose again when Rob Reiner took a fancy to his novel The Princess Bride. The resulting 1987 film became a cult classic on the back of strong word-of-mouth. He still harbours ambitions to write a sequel and has apparently written the first 100 pages. 

Further screenwriting credits include: Misery, Maverick, The Ghost and The Darkness, Absolute Power, The General’s Daughter, Dreamcatcher, and Mission Impossible Two. Rumours still abound of his secret ‘doctoring’ on many films including Good Will Hunting but he has officially ‘doctored’ films such as the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy Twins and Attenborough’s Chaplin.. 

William Goldman is a true master of his craft and he’s delightfully honest when talking about that craft.