Who was that guy?! The diverse genius of William Goldman

Novelist, playwright, coruscating non-fiction writer, screenwriter of comedies, of thrillers, of president-ousting investigative journalism, his stories defied indifference

By David Horovitz

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16 November 2018, 7:48 pm

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David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).

A close relative of mine, asked to introduce herself at a very serious professional conference, had a slightly uncharacteristic rush of fanciful blood to the head. Instead of giving her own name, as all the other participants had dutifully done, she declared, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Unsurprisingly, this implausible revelation was met with a stunned silence. To her immense good fortune, however, while everybody else in the room looked at her as though she was crazy, one of the other attendants got the reference and began to laugh.

The quote comes from William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride,” the ridiculous and wonderful play on a fairy tale that began life in stories he told his daughters and that conquered the world in the 1987 film directed by Rob Reiner, for which Goldman also wrote the screenplay.

Goldman, who has died in New York at 87, once said he’d “gotten more responses on The Princess Bride than on everything else I’ve done put together — all kinds of strange outpouring letters. Something in The Princess Bride affects people.”

Plainly, as my relative’s little story underlines, it does. But it’s not only The Princess Bride. Much of Goldman’s work has affected an awful lot of people. And what’s unusual about that resonant work is its diversity — the range of areas in which it has impacted.

Writer William Goldman at the New York Knicks and Minnesota Timberwolves NBA game at Madison Square Garden on December 23, 2003 in New York. (Ray Amati/Getty Images, via JTA)

Goldman was a fantasy novelist, a playwright, a coruscating non-fiction writer, a screenwriter of comedies, of thrillers, of president-ousting investigative journalism. He wrote characters with principles and quirks, immense qualities and profound flaws, some who existed, some you’d wish existed, some you pray never exist. He wrote stories that defy indifference.

Ask people to cite the most insightful and ego-punctuating work of non-fiction ever written on Hollywood, and many will point to his “Adventures in the Screen Trade.” Ask people of a certain age to fess up to the movie scene that’s most terrified them, and they’ll refer you to Nazi dentist Laurence Olivier torturing his victim Dustin Hoffman (“Is it safe?”) in “Marathon Man” — Goldman’s novel, Goldman’s screenplay. Ask them to name favorite movies, and “Butch Cassidy…” and “The Princess Bride” are often high on the list. Most influential? Try “All The President’s Men.”

It has been a few years since Goldman’s name was up in lights or high on the bestseller lists. But he will not be quickly forgotten.

As Paul Newman’s “Butch Cassidy” — in Goldman’s Oscar-winning original screenplay — would be right to ask: Who was that guy?!