Source Novel and Goldman's Self-Adaptation The Princess Bride (1987)

William Goldman is one of a small handful of major American screenwriters who has adapted his own novels for the screen — Marathon Man (1976), Magic (1978), The Princess Bride (1987), and the novella adaptation of Misery (1990, written by Goldman from Stephen King). Of those, The Princess Bride is the case where the source-novel-to-screenplay relationship is most architecturally interesting, because the novel was already pretending to be a translation/abridgment when Goldman wrote it.

What the 1973 novel actually is

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, the "Good Parts" Version Abridged by William Goldman is constructed as a meta-fictional joke. Goldman (the author) presents himself (a fictionalized version) as having loved an obscure Florinese satire by S. Morgenstern as a child — read aloud by his immigrant father during a long illness. As an adult, Goldman discovers that Morgenstern's text is actually a long political satire on the Florin court, with the adventure parts buried in long satirical digressions about hat-buying, packing for a trip, and customs procedures. He produces an "abridgment" that includes only the "good parts" — the kissing, the swordfights, the giants — with italicized commentary on what he has cut.¹

The conceit is elaborate. There is no S. Morgenstern. There is no Florin. The italicized commentary is invented by Goldman. The "abridgment" is the entire book.

"I had this idea for a metaphor: that childhood reading is always already abridged. We remember the good parts. The author who really understood that, I thought, would be the author who pretended to be the abridger." — William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983) (book, not available online)

What the screenplay does with the conceit

Goldman wrote a single screenplay draft for Rob Reiner in 1986. The major structural problem he had to solve was the frame. The novel's metafictional commentary cannot survive a screenplay because the comments-on-the-margin device is intrinsically print. The screenplay's solution — a grandfather reading to a grandson — preserves the novel's emotional architecture (a child being read to in a sickbed) while abandoning the post-modern apparatus.²

"The frame had to come over. That was non-negotiable. The book is about a sick child being read to. So the movie is about a sick child being read to. We just had to find a frame that worked on screen." — William Goldman, Vanity Fair (2012)

The script also compressed the novel's longer interior digressions (the Zoo of Death sequence, much of Inigo's backstory, several of Buttercup's chapters) and cut the novel's bleak coda (in the book, Westley and Buttercup are pursued at the end and the outcome is left ambiguous). Reiner has said that Goldman initially resisted cutting the dark coda and then watched a test screening and changed his mind on the spot.³

What survived verbatim

A great deal of the screenplay is the novel's dialogue, transposed verbatim. The Inigo–Westley duel patter ("I admit it, you are better than I am" / "Then why are you smiling?" / "Because I know something you don't know — I am not left-handed!"), the Vizzini iocane scene almost in full, the Miracle Max routine, the Impressive Clergyman's wedding speech — all are nearly word-for-word from the novel. The screenplay's craft is largely in the cuts, not the additions.

"The book did most of the work. My job was to figure out which 110 pages of dialogue to leave on the floor." — William Goldman, Which Lie Did I Tell? (2000) (book, not available online)

Goldman, Hollywood, and the self-adapted novel

The screenwriter-adapting-his-own-novel pattern is rarer than it sounds. Most novelists who try it once stop trying. The complaint is consistent: a novelist's instincts (interiority, digression, voice-driven prose) are exactly the instincts a screenplay needs to suppress. Goldman is the exception that proves the rule, and his explanation in Adventures in the Screen Trade is structural: he was a screenwriter first who wrote novels on the side, not the reverse. By the time he adapted The Princess Bride he had been writing screenplays for nearly twenty years; the novel had been written by someone who already thought in screen scenes.⁴

The other major screenwriter-adapting-own-novel cases of the era — Michael Crichton on The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, Larry McMurtry on several of his own books — share Goldman's profile: working screenwriters who write novels rather than novelists who get pressed into screenwriting. The pattern is rare because the underlying psychology is rare.

"Goldman is the gold standard for self-adaptation because he never thought of himself as a precious novelist. The book was a screenplay he had written sideways." — Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution (Penguin, 2008) (book, not available online)

The novel's afterlife

The 1973 novel has remained continuously in print. A 25th-anniversary edition (1998) added a new Goldman introduction in which he claimed to be working on a sequel called Buttercup's Baby — itself a hoax, with several dozen pages of fake "abridgment" included. The 30th-anniversary edition (2003) reprinted the same. Goldman never wrote the actual sequel; the joke was the bit.⁵