Bo Goldman, who has died aged 90, was an American screenwriter who twice won Academy Awards for unconventional stories driven by indelible characters – defined by Goldman as “people who have a kind of courage and [an] aristocracy of the heart”.He initially struck gold aged 43 with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), his first produced feature-length script. From Ken Kesey’s novel, Goldman unfurled a multifaceted drama, stocking each rec room and therapy session with wildly disparate personalities while punching up the barbed back-and-forths between Randle P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher).
Even by the New Hollywood’s standards, the film was a curveball, but its gimlet eye for human behaviour and anti-authoritarian edge made it a critical and popular smash. As 1975 closed out, it was the seventh biggest earner in history; the following March, it became the first film since It Happened One Night (1934) to sweep Oscars’ so-called “Big Five”: Best Picture, Director, Actor and Actress – and Best Screenplay for Goldman and Lawrence Hauben.
Goldman even (briefly) won over a vocal critic: Kesey, who’d successfully sued for damages over claims the filmmakers were “butchering” his book and vowed to boycott the finished feature. Years later, Kesey confessed to stumbling across a film on TV one evening and being drawn in by the characters; upon realising it was Cuckoo’s Nest, he switched channels.
A second Oscar followed for Melvin and Howard (1980), a funny, generously expanded anecdote about the encounter between mechanic Melvin Dummar and an ageing Howard Hughes. The script had bounced around Hollywood – at one point drawing Mike Nichols’ interest – before being embraced by the relatively untried Jonathan Demme, who leant into Goldman’s offbeat rhythms and richly drawn supporting parts. Pauline Kael, in a rave review, called it “an almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination”.
Shoot the Moon (1982) saw Goldman’s long-nurtured screenplay about separating spouses brought to the screen by Alan Parker. For years, producers had passed on the material, often admitting its description of marital disquiet fell too close to home; yet its honesty proved a core strength, enabling exceptional work from leads Albert Finney and Diane Keaton. After declaring it “perhaps the most revealing American movie of its era”, Kael paid Goldman the ultimate compliment, signing off by quoting his dialogue verbatim: “You’re kind to strangers.” “Strangers are easy.”
Here, though, Hollywood royalty conspired to scupper the film’s box-office prospects: Warren Beatty insisted no other Keaton film should be released against Reds (1981), dooming Parker’s film to a February graveyard slot. Thereafter, Goldman mostly consoled himself with well-paid, lower-stakes work-for-hire.
A ready picketer during the three-month writers’ strike of 1981, he entertained few illusions as to the scribe’s place in the commercial movie ecosystem: “If you’re lucky enough to get recognition and be good at it, then this tension gets tighter and tighter between you and the studio and the director. You’re fighting for your work all the time… They hold all the cards. And to them it’s shoes. They’re selling shoes.”
He was born Robert Spencer Goldman on September 10, 1932 to Julian Goldman, a department store magnate who retained Franklyn Roosevelt as legal counsel, and his wife Lillian (née Levy), a millinery model. They shared a 12-room Park Avenue apartment, but after the Depression wiped out the family fortune, an uncle with property interests was tapped to put the young Robert through Dalton, Exeter and Princeton, what he later dubbed “all my fancy schools”.
At Princeton, he showed promise as a songwriter and gained an enduring pen name after The Daily Princetonian misspelt “Bob”. Upon completing three years as a personnel sergeant on the Pacific atoll of Enewetak, he headed to Broadway as the lyricist of First Impressions, a musical adaptation of Pride & Prejudice starring Hermione Gingold and Farley Granger.
He sidestepped into TV towards the end of the Golden Age, adapting Days of Wine and Roses and Heart of Darkness for CBS’s Playhouse 90 (1956-60). A conversation with Burt Lancaster redirected his attentions towards feature writing – beginning with Shoot the Moon, the script that caught Forman’s eye and landed Goldman the Cuckoo’s Nest gig.
Various unrealised projects – a Wild Strawberries remake starring Gregory Peck, an Elvis movie with Nicholson as Colonel Parker – now seem more interesting than Goldman’s subsequent screenplays. Scent of a Woman (1992) at least showcased much-laurelled scenery-chewing from Al Pacino as a blind charmer, but the exasperating Meet Joe Black (1998) had only Brad Pitt’s vapid Grim Reaper to offer for three hours.
Script doctoring provided a steady income. Goldman tinkered with Forman’s Ragtime (1981) and Goya’s Ghosts (2006), and old foe Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990), where an attribution dispute further soured creative relations. After shunning Beatty’s pleas to sharpen Bugsy (1991), he received belated “story by” credit on the actor-director’s Rules Don’t Apply (2016), another, altogether baggier Howard Hughes tale.
In later life, he lived in Maine with his costumier daughter Serena Rathbun and filmmaker son-in-law Todd Field. He remained much admired by his peers, receiving the Writers Guild lifetime achievement award in 1998. Eric Roth, Oscar winner for Forrest Gump (1994), called Goldman “the pre-eminent screenwriter”. But Goldman reserved the last word for himself. Director Martin Brest informed the New York Times upon Goldman’s death that his friend held to a characteristically thoughtful mantra: “Your life is what’s not in the obituary”.
He is survived by five of his six children with Mabel Rathbun Ashforth, his spouse of 63 years, who died in 2017; his son Jesse died in 1981.
Bo Goldman, born September 10, 1932, died July 25, 2023.
