It is that sensibility, a secret Philosopher’s Stone, which guides The Princess Bride with its decidedly offbeat, New York comic disposition. The young director convinced Goldman that they shared the same comedic sensibility for adapting The Princess Bride to film, and Goldman agreed to pen the script. He could best honor childhood daydreams by giving in to them with one foot firmly removed from their world.Ĭut to the mid-1980s, after Rob Reiner proved his funny bone with This is Spinal Tap (1984). This history of straight-faced drama is what allowed Goldman to pen his personal favorite novel, which looked at the concept of magic and enchanted forests with loving, if bemused eyes. William Goldman’s first breakthroughs in cinema were writing screenplays for films that included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and Marathon Man (the last of which is adapted from his own novel). Goldman came from a theatrical and literary world, studying at Columbia with brother James Goldman (playwright of The Lion in Winter) and John Kander (musical composer of Cabaret and Chicago) as roommates. This achievement should be noted when considering Goldman’s background as not a writer of either children’s literature or high fantasy and its variously dense fabled languages. Instead, The Princess Bride, with its juvenilely titled Princess Buttercup, used this frequent epilogue as a giant springboard into a larger story that involves multiple protagonists with layered agency it contextualizes the idea of “true love” in modern terms within a timeless backdrop. Traditionally, fairy tales end with a young heroine becoming engaged to a prince or some other form of royalty. Presented with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, The Princess Bride was intentionally exploring the genesis of fairy tales and fantasy within its own self-aware artificiality this is about the need for passing morality plays from one generation to the next, usually involving the theme of true love. However, the real cleverness of Goldman’s novel came from deconstructing this heritage while simultaneously paying it homage. Describing the process as the most “strongly connected emotionally to any writing of mine in my life,” Goldman embellished his entire reason to tell the story to his daughters as a narrative-framing device of the story-in which he was abridging a novel by fictional author S. However, Goldman’s compromised conceit of “The Princess Bride” became something more when he started writing it for himself. When William Goldman began the path to writing The Princess Bride novel (which was published in 1973), it had been borne out of a nighttime yarn for his two daughters, one of whom wanted a story with a princess and the other desiring that of a bride. It’s a love letter from outsiders searching for more than fanboy approval. The idea that it could be as celebrated for adults as it was for children seemed a novelty act before Inigo Montoya first hissed, “You killed my father, prepare to die.” Roger Ebert even championed this innovation when he understated, “ The Princess Bride looks and feels like Legend or those other quasi-heroic epic fantasies – and then it goes for the laughs.”Įbert is correct that it pursued humor, but only so far as to tackle the fantasy from the most serious perspective imaginable: that of an adult attempting to articulate the importance of stories with princesses, brides, and perhaps a Dread Pirate Roberts. The Princess Bride came out in an era when fantasy was considered the realm of well-intentioned misfires, with projects like George Lucas’ Willow and David Bowie making the moves on Muppets and Jennifer Connelly alike in Labyrinth. This unabashed joy of passing a cinematic storybook from one era to the next is where the real alchemy of the genre lives-a feat just as surprising now as it was then. For over 30 years, children have been as awed as their parents were amused by the Rodents of Unusual Size, and have been collectively smitten with a love story that considers tumbling down a mountainside an act of romance. In fact, the only thing that has aged a day about the picture is how its initial audience of children is now old enough to share it with kids of their own. The Princess Brideplays just as marvelously in 1080p as it did when I first watched it on a worn VHS tape.
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