But the movie is the reason we're back together. I doubt that my publishers would have sprung for this edition if the movie hadn't happened. If you're reading this, dollars to donuts you've seen the movie. It was a mild success when it first hit theaters, but word of mouth caught up with it when the videocassette came out. It was a big hit in video stores then, still is. If you have kids, you've probably watched it with them. Robin Wright in the title role began her film career as Buttercup, and I'm sure we all fell in love with her again in Forrest Gump. (Personally, I think she was the reason for that phenomenon. She was so lovely and warm, you just ached for poor dopey Tom Hanks to live happily with someone like that.)
Most of us love movie stories. Maybe back when Broadway held sway, people loved theater stories, but I don't think anymore. And I'll bet no one begs Julia Louis-Dreyfus to talk about what it was like shooting Seinfeld episode number 89. And novelist stories? Can you imagine cornering Dostoyevsky and begging him for funny stuff about The Idiot?
Anyway, these are some movie memories pertaining to The Princess Bride I thought you might not know.
I had taken time off from writing The Stepford Wives screenplay to abridge the Morgenstern. And then someone at Fox heard about it, got hold of a manuscript copy of the book, liked it, was interested in making a movie out of it. This is early '73 we're talking about. The "someone" at Fox was their Greenlight Guy. (Referred to hereinafter as the GG.)
You will read, in such magazines as Premiere and Entertainment Weekly and Vanity Fair, endless lists about the "100 most powerful" studio figures. These various idiots all have titles: Vice President in charge of this, Chief Executive in charge of that, etc.
The truth: they are all oil slicks.
Only one person per studio has anything resembling power, and that is the GG. The GG, you see, can make a picture happen. He (or she) is the one who releases the fifty million bucks—if your movie is aimed for Sundance. Triple that if it's a special effects job.
Anyway, the GG at Fox liked The Princess Bride.
Problem: he wasn't sure it was a movie. So we struck a peculiar arrangement—they would buy the book, but they would not buy the screenplay unless they decided to move forward. In other words, we both owned half the pie. So even though I was tired from finishing the abridgement, I went on nervous energy and did the screenplay immediately after.
My very great agent, Evarts Ziegler, came to town. Ziegler was the one who orchestrated the Butch Cassidy deal, which, along with The Temple of Gold, my first novel, changed my life as much as anything. We went to lunch at Lutéce, chatted, enjoyed each other, parted, me to my office on the Upper East Side in a building that had a swimming pool. I used to swim every day because I had a very bad back then, and the swimming eased things. I was heading for the pool when I realized this: I didn't want to swim.
I didn't want to do anything but get home fast. Because I was shivering terribly now. I made it home, got to bed, the shivering replaced by fire. Helen, my superstar-shrink wife, came in from work, took one look at me, got me to New York Hospital.
All kinds of doctors came in—everybody knew something was seriously wrong, nobody had a guess as to what it might be.
I woke at four in the morning. And I knew what was wrong. Somehow, the awful pneumonia that almost killed me when I was ten—the reason my father read The Princess Bride to me in the first place was to get me through those first woeful posthospital days—well, that pneumonia had come back to finish the job.
And right then, in that hospital (and, yes, I expect this will sound nutty to you) as I woke in pain and delirium, somehow I knew that if I was to live, I had to get back to that place where I was as a child. I started yelling for the night nurse—
—because somehow my life and The Princess Bride were forever joined.
The night nurse came in and I told her to read me the Morgenstern.
"The what, Mr. Goldman?" she said.
"Start with the Zoo of Death," I told her. Then I said, "No, no, forget that, start with the Cliffs of Insanity."
She took one close look at me, nodded, said, "Oh, right, that's exactly where I'll start, but I left my Morgenstern at the desk, I'll just go get it."
The next thing I knew, here came Helen. And several other doctors. "I went to your office, I think I picked up the right pages. Now what is it you want me to read?"
"I don't want you to read anything, Helen, you never liked the book, you don't want to read to me, you're just humoring me, and besides there's no part for you—"
"I could be Buttercup—"
"Oh, come on, she's twenty-one—"
"Is that a screenplay?" this handsome doctor said then. "I always wanted to be a movie star."
"You be the man in black," I told him. Then I pointed to the big doctor in the doorway. "Give Fezzik a shot."
That was how I first heard the screenplay. These medicos and my genius wife struggling with it in the middle of the night while I froze and sweated and the fever raged inside me.
I passed out after a little while. And I remember thinking at the last that the big doctor wasn't bad and Helen, miscast and all, was an OK Buttercup, and so what if the handsome doctor was a stiff, I was going to live.
Well, that was the beginning of the life of the screenplay.
The GG at Fox sent it to Richard Lester in London—Lester directed, among others, A Hard Day's Night, the first wonderful Beatles film—and we met, worked, solved problems. The GG was thrilled, we were a go—
—then he got fired, and a new GG came in to replace him.
Here is what happens Out There when that happens: the old GG is stripped of his epaulets and his ability to get into Morton's on Monday nights and off he goes, very rich—he had a deal in place for this inevitability—but disgraced.
And the new GG takes the throne with but one rule firmly writ in stone: nothing his predecessor had in motion must ever get made. Why? Say it gets made. Say it's a hit. Who gets the credit? The old GG. And when the new GG, who can now get into Morton's on Mondays, has to run the gauntlet there, he knows all his peers are sniggering: "That asshole, it wasn't his picture."
Death.
So The Princess Bride was buried, conceivably forever.
And I realized that I had let control of it go. Fox had the book. So what if I had the screenplay; they could commission another. They could change anything they wanted. So I did something of which I am genuinely proud. I bought the book back from the studio, with my own money. I think they were suspicious I had some deal or plan, but I didn't. I just didn't want some idiot destroying what I had come to realize was the most important thing I would ever be involved with.
After a good bit of negotiating, it was again mine. I was the only idiot who could destroy it now.
I READ RECENTLY that the fine Jack Finney novel Time and Again has taken close to twenty years and still hasn't made it to the screen. The Princess Bride didn't take that long, but not a lot less either. I didn't keep notes, so this is from memory. Understand, in order for someone to make a movie, they need two things: passion and money. A lot of people, it turned out, loved The Princess Bride. I know of at least two different GGs who were mad about it. Who shook hands with me on the deal. Who wanted to make it more than any other movie.