William Goldman Dismissed Dialogue, But His Quotes Are Iconic Anyway

Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman died on Thursday night at age 87. He leaves behind a legacy as one the most respected and most referenced screenwriters in movie history.

Goldman won two Oscars in his career for what are probably his most celebrated accomplishments: the scripts for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. He wrote the script for The Princess Bride and the novel upon which it was based. His creative partnership with Rob Reiner included adapting Stephen King’s Misery into an Oscar-winning vehicle for Kathy Bates (for whose casting Goldman reportedly went to bat). His two books about screenwriting, Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? are treated as essential tomes for anyone looking to work in Hollywood.

In the latter memoir, as excerpted by the Telegraph in 2000, Goldman reiterates something he’d often said about screenwriting and in particular writing dialogue: “Because most critics and media writers still think screenplays are dialogue, I don’t care how often I tell you this – dialogue is one of the least important parts of any flick.”

Which is obviously true. There’s structure and concepts and of course the story of the film itself. Goldman’s career as a script doctor was nothing if not a testament to the small changes in a film’s story that can make a world of difference. What’s funny about Goldman downplaying the importance of dialogue is that he was easily one of the most quotable screenwriters in Hollywood. Whether it was Deep Throat urging Bob Woodward to “follow the money” in All the President’s Men or Paul Newman laughing hysterically “The fall will probably kill you!” in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Dialogue may not have been Goldman’s first priority, but he was sure great at it.

The Princess Bride is nothing if not chock full of quotable dialogue, from Westley’s tender “As you wish” to “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.” His words were so indelible that they could be equally effective as squawked by Billy Crystal’s Miracle Max or delivered in Andre the Giant’s garbled French accent (“You’ve been mostly dead all day”).

Marathon Man, another film adapted from Goldman’s own novel, gave Laurence Olivier the last indelible moment of his long and storied career, as his sinister Nazi dentist demanded to know “Is it safe?” as he drilled into Dustin Hoffman’s teeth (though, honestly, it’s everything that Olivier says leading up to that moment, as he describes the act of drilling into a healthy tooth, that gets the audience squirming).

In Goldman’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery, he and Reiner made structural changes to the novel, which was originally told strictly through Paul Sheldon’s limited POV. But again, Goldman’s gift for enduring quotes shone through. While King provided “I’m your number one fan,” neither Annie Wilkes’s “It’s for the best” before hobbling Paul nor her deadpan “God, I love you” right after appear in King’s text.

In Goldman’s later career, as he moved into script doctoring, it becomes harder to tell which quotes are attributable to him. We know that Aaron Sorkin raved about how helpful Goldman was in helping to develop A Few Good Men, a movie which is nothing if not highly quotable (“You can’t handle the truth!” and all). Sorkin would later (mis)quote Goldman’s Butch Cassidy line in the West Wing episode “The Fall’s Gonna Kill You.”

Goldman also consulted on Malice, another Sorkin script, and while Alec Baldwin’s monomaniacal surgeon’s Gilbert & Sullivan-quoting “I am never, ever sick at sea” speech seems pure Sorkin, his “I am God” bluntness does feel like it could have been a Goldman special.

This is speculation, of course. The same kind of speculation that led to years of persistent rumors that Goldman secretly wrote the bulk of the Good Will Hunting script that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck won the Oscar for. Goldman has always denied having any involvement beyond backing up Rob Reiner’s suggestion that the boys eschew their earlier conspiracy-thriller angle and focus on Will’s relationships with his therapist and his girlfriend. Still, it’s been hard for hardcore cinephiles to divorce themselves from the delicious notion that “I’m going to see about a girl” came from the same pen that wrote all those other famous lines we’re always quoting.

Even in Goldman’s memoirs, he couldn’t help but deliver quotable wisdom. “Nobody knows ANYTHING,” Goldman famously wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade, a sentiment about the utter unpredictability of Hollywood success that gets trotted out every time the art of movie-making starts to get treated too much like a scientific formula. You could have the most bankable star telling the most focus-group-tested story and it could still go wrong. The least likely stories can become hits. There’s an art to it, you see. And there was an art to the way William Goldman wrote dialogue, even if he never found it all that important. It’s that quotable dialogue that will serve as his memorial forever.

Where to stream Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Where to stream All the President's Men

Where to stream The Princess Bride

Where to stream Misery