R.I.P. WILLIAM GOLDMAN 1931-2018...........INCONCEIVABLE.............

               Supreme screenwriter, best-selling novelist.........and best ever behind-the-scenes gadfly when it came to calling out Hollywood bullshit..........

               As a screenwriter, he fairly reveled in his own self-aware cleverness........but he always took us along for the ride. Even as he mocked timeworn cliches in his scripts, he wanted every high point in the story to be higher than we'd ever known........the best kiss ever, the best fight ever, the best chase ever.......(these were actual descriptions in his screenplays that aggravated and amused his directors.....)

                 All of us fledgling and would-be screenwriters  were stunned when he sold his original script "Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid" for an unheard of $400,000.  That not only revolutionized the film business, but the script itself, brimming with memorable dialogue and sequences, ushered in a new creative era of original screenplays.

                   And the hits just kept on coming......."Marathon Man", "The Princess Bride" and his superb screen adaptations of "All The President's Men" and "Misery"........(not to mention his numerous, unsung 'rescue missions' to save other films from their floundering scripts.....)

                 "Nobody knows anything....."

                  That was William Goldman's most memorable quote from the memoir books in which he eviscerated the general ignorance, stupidity and incompetence of  Hollywood studio chiefs and executives.

                  In other words, nobody in the film business possessed any innate foresight or talent to predict which movies would end up as huge hits or dismal disasters.

                   Goldman, like every other screenwriter, endured his share of both..........but his talent for entertaining us never burned anything but bright.  In an industry where nobody knows anything, he knew enough to tell us great stories on film.......in sharp, fresh and original ways all his own.

                    We'll miss him.