And the Winner Is...

Three dead writers. It happens, but at least two of them earned Oscars before going to that great big OfficeMax in the sky. Now the one in the middle, Norman Mailer, won nothing and was just at the 49th Academy Awards in 1977 (covering the year 1976) as a presenter, but before you feel too sorry for the man, trust me, he had a very lively literary career anyway. Mailer died in 2007, and he may pop up again on this blog sometime in the future (indeed, I'm remiss in unintentionally having ignored him up to now.)

The man to the right of Mailer is Paddy Chayefsky, who won Best Original Screenplay for Network, a film that, though it takes place in the 1970s, basically predicts 21st century political and media landscapes, minus the tweets (unless the tweets ended up on the cutting room floor.) This was Chayefsky's third Oscar win. He had previously won Best Adapted Screenplay of his own television play Marty at the 28th Academy Awards in 1956, and, at the 44th Academy Awards in 1972, Best Original Screenplay for The Hospital, a film that, though it too takes place in the 1970s, basically predicts the 21st socioeconomic landscape, minus the corporate and big bank bailouts (which again may have very well ended up on the cutting room floor.) Chayefsky died in 1981, but not without first establishing himself as a modern day Nostradamus. 

The man to the left of Mailer is William Goldman, who won Best Adapted Screenplay for 1976's All the President's Men, originally a non-fiction book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate scandal. Now, if you're too young to remember Watergate, it was basically an attempted hit on the Bill of Rights, though unlike current attempted hits, the main hit man, one Richard M. Nixon, tried to do it surreptitiously before the Post reporters (as well as his own voice on tape) made it publicly known. So what did screenwriter Goldman contribute to the cinematic retelling of this nonfiction? "Follow the Money!", which is what an informant nicknamed Deep Throat (who we all found out 12 years ago was actually FBI Associate Director Mark Felt) tells Woodward, played in the film by Robert Redford. Except in real life Felt didn't exactly say that to Woodward (played by himself originally.) He did tell the young journalist to follow up on a lot of others clues, and some of those clues did involve money, and so Goldman simply and cleverly brought all that together in a single, memorable sentence. This was Goldman's second Oscar. In 1970 at the 42nd Academy Awards, he won Best Original Screenplay for the comedy-drama anti-Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which with its snappy dialogue, breathed new life into the buddy-buddy movie. Though he was better known as a  screenwriter, Goldman was also a successful novelist, having wrote The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, and Magic, all of which became movies, and, yes, he also wrote the screenplays. He died eight days ago. R.I.P. William Goldman.