GOLDMAN, Bo 1932-

PERSONAL: Born September 10, 1932, in New York, NY; son of Julian (a Broadway producer and proprietor of retail stores) and Lillian (a hat model; maiden name, Levy) Goldman; married Mab Ashforth (a jewelry designer), January 2, 1954; children: Mia, Amy, Diana, Jesse, Serena, Justin. Education: Princeton University, B.A., 1953.

ADDRESSES: Home—1065 Greenfield Rd., St. Helena, CA 94574. Office—CAA, 9830 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90212-1804. Agent—Arnold Stiefel, 9200 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069.

CAREER: Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS-TV), New York, NY, associate producer of television program Playhouse 90, 1958-60; National Educational Television (NET-TV; now WNET-TV), New York, NY, writer and producer of television program NET Playhouse, 1970-71, writer and producer of television program Theatre in America, 1972-74; screenwriter, 1974—. Military service: U.S. Army, 1954-56; became sergeant.

MEMBER: Writers Guild of America, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Dramatists Guild, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

AWARDS, HONORS: Academy Award for best screenplay from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1976, for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and 1981, for Melvin and Howard; screen award for best screenplay from Writers Guild of America, 1976, for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and 1981, for Melvin and Howard; Film Critics award, 1981, for Melvin and Howard; American Film Institute poll named One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest among the ten best films of all time; Golden Globe Award for best screenplay, 1992, for Scent of a Woman.

WRITINGS:

SCREENPLAYS

(With Lawrence Hauben) One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (adapted from the novel of the same title by Ken Kesey), United Artists, 1974.

(With Bill Kerby) The Rose, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1979.

Melvin and Howard, Universal Pictures, 1980.

Shoot the Moon, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 1982.

Little Nikita, Columbia/Tristar, 1988.

Scent of a Woman, Universal Pictures, 1992.

(With Ken Lipper, Paul Schrader, and Nicholas Pileggi) City Hall, Columbia Pictures, 1996.

(With Ron Osborn, Jeff Reno, and Kevin Wade) Meet Joe Black, Universal Pictures, 1998.

Imaging Nathan (also titled Children of Angelsl), Universal, 1999.

(With William D. Wittliff) The Perfect Storm, Warner, 2000.

Lyricist, with Glenn Paxton, of First Impressions (twoact musical; based on Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice), first produced on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre, March, 1959, and with Glenn Paxton, of "Hurrah, Boys, Hurrah," a Civil War musical, as yet unpublished and unproduced. Contributor of articles to the New York Times.

SIDELIGHTS: Bo Goldman began his career as an associate producer for Playhouse 90 on CBS-TV. When he turned to writing, first with lyrics for the 1959 Broadway musical First Impressions, little did he know what lay ahead. Goldman achieved commercial and critical success with his 1975 first motion picture screenplay, an adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, for which he earned an Academy Award in 1976 for best screenplay. Goldman went on to create a handful of other motion pictures. In addition to the Academy Award-winning Melvin and Howard, he wrote Scent of a Woman, City Hall, and Meet Joe Black. At the turn of the millennium, Goldman was one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood, earning a million dollars per film, and in demand as both a screenwriter and script doctor.

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest the film features Jack Nicholson in the role of McMurphy, a rebellious convict who feigns insanity in order to get transferred out of prison and into a mental hospital. Having outwitted the authorities, McMurphy becomes a psychiatric case study at the state mental institution, where he anticipates a comfortable stay. Instead, he encounters a formidable enemy in the character of Nurse Ratched, whose cold domination of the other patients provokes McMurphy's temper and fuels his rebellion. He becomes a liberating force in the ward, turning "daily group therapy sessions from a mass of groveling psychic surrender into a screaming strike for civil rights," observed Newsweek critic Jack Kroll. McMurphy's stunts—including a party he organizes, complete with prostitutes and liquor—come to an end when, in his final confrontation with Nurse Ratched, he nearly strangles the woman to death. A lobotomy is then performed on McMurphy, after which he dies at the hands of one his fellow patients who suffocates the hero in an act of mercy.

Evaluating Goldman's screen adaptation of Kesey's 1962 novel, New Yorker's Pauline Kael wrote: "The movie is much less theatrical than the romantic, strong-arming book, yet it keeps you attentive, stimulated, up." Stanley Kauffmann remarked in the New Republic that "even Kesey didn't go as far as the film script does in its . . . implications that mental trouble is a kind of health, in its simplistic (and weary) allegory of the mental hospital as the world with the patients as the People struggling against Authority, the mental staff." Kroll disagreed, however, calling Cuckoo's Nest a "well-made film that flares at times into incandescence but lacks ultimately the novel's passion, insight and complexity."

Goldman followed One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest with The Rose, his 1979 screenplay about an emotionally drained female performer who reacts against the pressures of fame in a series of impulsive—and ultimately self-destructive—acts. The film, according to the New York Times's Janet Maslin, "takes the form of a crazy flashback": Rose kidnaps her chauffeur and parades through homosexual nightclubs and men's bathhouses, displaying what Maslin called "her feistiness," a quality that "emerges as one of [the character's] most lovable attributes." These incidents, however, signal the heroine's increasing sense of desperation, culminating in a suicidal heroin overdose. "For the first time in a backstage story we get a sense of just how physically tough the entertainment business really is," wrote Gene Siskel in the Chicago Tribune. "At its heart," the reviewer added, The Rose is "a routine show biz saga of the lonely life at the top of the heap. It perpetuates the myth that a successful female entertainer must be a hard woman who's unlucky in love." Maslin remarked that the film has "so many finely drawn episodes, so much brittle, raunchy humor. . . . The Rose has an earnest, affecting character at its core. Even at its most preposterous, it never feels like a fraud."

Goldman derived the premise for his 1980 screenplay, Melvin and Howard, from milkman Melvin Dummar's real-life claim that he rescued and befriended millionaire Howard Hughes, for which he was subsequently included in Hughes's will. The validity of the will was questioned, however, and it was never admitted to probate. The movie begins with Hughes racing his motorcycle across the Nevada desert. He has an accident, after which Dummar finds the injured man alongside the interstate. Unaware of the millionaire's identity, Dummar drives him to Las Vegas and eight years later, after Hughes's death, a will naming Dummar as beneficiary surfaces. According to New Statesman critic John Coleman, the film depicts Dummar as "a candid, largely uncomprehending but ever hopeful hick" in his plight as an average citizen struggling to live the American dream. "Goldman has tried to imagine what might have imprinted the encounter on Hughes's mind and persuaded him to become the silent benefactor" of Dummar—"a humble obscurity full of high hopes and prone to repeated failure," wrote Gary Arnold in the Washington Post. And, Kael proclaimed Melvin and Howard an "almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination," adding that the film's dialogue "is as near perfection as script dialogue gets—it's always funny, without any cackling."

Shoot the Moon, heralded by Kael as "a movie about separating that is perhaps the most revealing American movie of the era," contains touches of humor that recall Goldman's earlier screenplays. The 1982 film focuses on Faith and George Dunlap and the disintegration of their fifteen-year marriage. Buffeted between their parents' marital problems are the Dunlaps' four school-age daughters, who serve to illustrate not only the traumatic effects of the family situation, but who also provide levity—and what Kauffmann termed "emotional relief." New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby called Shoot the Moon a "domestic comedy of sometimes terrifying implications, not about dolts but intelligent, thinking beings." Kael also hailed it as "a modern movie in terms of its consciousness, and in its assumption that the members of the movie audience, like the readers of modern fiction, share in that consciousness." Moreover, Rolling Stone's Michael Sragow lauded the work, dubbing it "the most complex, poetic, and moving study of an American marriage ever filmed."

Scent of a Woman, which Entertainment Weekly's Owen Glieberman described as "an epic picaresque in the tradition of Rain Man," with a "pleasingly literate script," follows the story of an aging and blind former military man, Frank Slade. Slade, played by Al Pacino, plans to commit suicide after enjoying a last fling, in the company of his aide, the prep school student Charley, who has been hired to assist him. On the other end of the spectrum, Commonweal reviewer Richard Alleva found the screenplay predictable, as Slade and Charley help each other resolve their conflicts. He dubbed the film simply a vehicle for Al Pacino, which in his view is "the fundamental reason why it's such a lousy script." Whatever its supposed flaws, the script garnered a Golden Globe award for Goldman and an Academy Award for Pacino.

Goldman was was one four writers to work on the screenplay of the 1996 motion picture City Hall, starring Al Pacino as New York mayor John Pappas. In what Time's Richard Corliss described as a "cluttered drama that imagines a Faustian battle between Pappas and his deputy mayor Kevin Calhoun" (played by John Cusack), the action revolves around the political fallout of an accidental shooting of a six-year-old black boy during a shoot-out between police and a drug dealer. Several reviewers remarked that while the film had all the ingredients of success, it did not quite cohere. For example, Newsweek writer Jack Kroll suggested that the film suffers from "the classic Hollywood too-many-cooks disease" and cited lack of tension as the film's main flaw. "Goldman and [director] Becker are in love with moral ambiguity," Kroll contended; "they caress it rather than dramatize it." Calling City Hall "neither a nostalgic valentine to machine politics nor a truly incisive exploration of urban political power," Cineaste's Leonard Quart determined it to be "an uneasy hybrid . . . [whose] ambitious evocation of urban political maneuverings and operations is subsumed by a convoluted, confusing political thriller with little dramatic tension or payoff." Quart continued, "It's a film which contains many strong, pointed scenes, both authentic and revelatory, about the nature of the political process. . . . But the film never quite comes together, being overall much more flaccid and conventional than its few powerful scenes and subtle, knowing depictions of what it means to be an urban politician." What tension that exists, according to New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann, comes from "an attempt to explore political truths and obeisance to the attention span of today's audience." Kauffmann compared City Hall to the popular television drama Law and Order, and although he found the film mostly successful in its ability to draw in the viewer, he called the ending implausible.

The 1998 film Meet Joe Black, based loosely on the 1920s stage play Death Takes a Holiday, stars Brad Pitt as Death (a.k.a. Joe Black) and Anthony Hopkins as the media mogul whose time is up. When Joe falls in love with the mogul's daughter, the father gains the time he needs to put his media empire into safe care. Meet Joe Black was not a success at the box office, and several reviewers cited the film's excessive length and one-dimensional characters among its weaknesses. At YourWorld, Glenn Sequeira took a balanced approach in his criticism, remarking, "Some scenes were very powerful . . . other scenes cried out Monty Python." While Peter Travers of Rolling Stone quipped, "Meet Joe Black is a movie about death that stubbornly refuses to come to life," Sequeira concluded: "The movie has some merit, but would have benefited both from some consistency and judicious editing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1979; February 13, 1981; February 9, 1982.

Cineaste, spring, 1996, Leonard Quart, review of City Hall, pp. 44-45.

Cinema (London, England), August, 1982.

City Limits (London, England), June 11, 1982, interview.

Commonweal, March 12, 1993, Richard Alleva, review of Scent of a Woman, pp. 12-13.

Cosmopolitan, February, 1993, Guy Flatley, review of Scent of a Woman, p. 14.

Entertainment, December 18, 1992, Owen Glieberman, review of Scent of a Woman, p. 42.

Film Comment, March-April, 1982.

Films (London, England), July, 1982.

Nation, November 29, 1975.

National Review, June 12, 1981; February 15, 1993, John Simon, review of Scent of a Woman, pp. 54-55.

New Republic, December 13, 1975; February 3, 1982; January 25, 1993, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Scent of a Woman, p. 29; March 18, 1996, Stanley Kauffmann, review of City Hall, p. 28; December 7, 1998, "Stanley Kauffman on Films: In the Midst of Life."

New Statesman, May 15, 1981.

Newsweek, November 24, 1975; January 25, 1982; December 28, 1992, David Ansen, review of Scent of a Woman, pp. 56-57; February 19, 1996, Jack Kroll, review of City Hall, p. 68.

New York, December 14, 1992, David Denby, review of Scent of a Woman, p. 89.

New Yorker, December 1, 1975; October 13, 1980; February 18, 1982; December 28, 1992, Terrence Rafferty, review of Scent of a Woman, pp. 198-199; February 19, 1996, Terrence Rafferty, review of City Hall, p. 99.

New York Times, November 20, 1975; November 25, 1975; December 21, 1975; November 7, 1979; May 20, 1981; January 22, 1982; May 20, 1983; March 18, 1988, Walter Goodman, review of Little Nikita, p. C26(L); December 23, 1992, Janet Maslin, review of Scent of a Woman, p. C9(L); February 25, 1993, Bernard Weinraub, "A Screenwriter Profits from His Years of Pain," p. C15(L); August 14, 1998, James Sterngold, "Death and Life," review of Meet Joe Black, p. E9; April 2, 1999, Janet Maslin, review of Meet Joe Black, p. E31; March 18, 2001, Jamie Malanowski, "Shaping Words into an Oscar: Six Writers Who Did," p. AR15(L).

People, April 18, 1988, Peter Travers, review of Little Nikita, p. 10.

Premiere, December, 1998, review of Meet Joe Black, p. 82.

Rolling Stone, March 18, 1982.

Saturday Review, January 10, 1976.

Stereo Review, July, 1999, Sol Louis Siegel, review of Meet Joe Black, p. 113.

Teen People, November, 1998, review of Meet Joe Black, p. 1.

Time, December 1, 1975; February 1, 1982; December 28, 1992, Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss, review of Scent of a Woman, p. 65; February 19, 1996, Richard Corliss, review of City Hall, p. 64.

Time South Pacific, March 22, 1999, "Death Be Not Proud," review of Meet Joe Black, p. 64.

Us, February, 1993, Lawrence Frascella, review of Scent of a Woman, pp. 89-90.

Variety, December 21, 1992, Todd McCarthy, review of Scent of a Woman, p. 61.

Wall Street Journal, January 7, 1993, Julie Salamon, review of Scent of a Woman, p. A12.

Washington Post, February 13, 1981; July 11, 1982.

ONLINE

Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter,http://www.editorsguild.com/ (September-October, 1995), "Helping Evolve the Script: An Interview with Bo Goldman."

Rolling Stone,http://www.rollingstone.com/ (August 8, 2003), Peter Travers, review of Meet Joe Black.

YourWorld,http://movies.yourworld.com/ (August 8, 2003), Glenn Sequeira, review of Meet Joe Black.*