Bo Goldman, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter, Dies at 90

Bo Goldman, certainly one of Hollywood’s most admired screenwriters, who took house Oscars for his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “Melvin and Howard” (1980), died on Tuesday in Helendale, Calif. He was 90.

A son-in-law, the director Todd Field, confirmed the dying. He didn’t specify a trigger.

Mr. Goldman was struggling to make a residing as a author till the director Milos Forman noticed the script he had written for a undertaking referred to as “Shoot the Moon” — his first screenplay — and, impressed, invited him to take a crack at adapting Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for the display.

The ensuing film, which starred Jack Nicholson as a rebellious new affected person who disrupts a psychiatric ward, got here out in 1975 and was a profession maker. Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, who shared screenwriting credit score, received the Oscar for greatest screenplay tailored from different materials; the film was additionally named greatest image and earned Oscars for Mr. Forman, Mr. Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, who performed the fierce Nurse Ratched.

“Even then I hung my head,” Mr. Goldman wrote in a 1981 essay for The New York Times in regards to the insecurities of a author’s life. “After all, I had adapted somebody else’s work; was it really mine?”

It might not have helped that Mr. Kesey denounced the difference.

If that doubt had nagged him, it had definitely been dispelled when his authentic screenplay for “Melvin and Howard” (1980) received him his second Oscar, this time for greatest screenplay written immediately for the display. That film was primarily based on the story of Melvin Dummar, a Utah gasoline station proprietor who claimed that Howard Hughes, in a handwritten will, had left him a share of his huge fortune.

Vincent Canby, writing in The Times, referred to as it “a satiric expression of the American Dream in the closing years of the 20th century.” The New York Film Critics Circle named it the perfect film of the 12 months and gave Mr. Goldman its best-screenplay award.

Mr. Goldman labored with the director Martin Brest on two movies, “Scent of a Woman” (1992) and “Meet Joe Black” (1998).

“People call him the screenwriter’s screenwriter,” Mr. Brest stated in a telephone interview. “I called him the man with the X-ray ears, because he had a pitch-perfect recall of the nuances of a comment that someone made to someone 50 years prior — he could reproduce the tone, and the reason he remembered it is because the tone told the whole story.”

Mr. Goldman would draw on these recollections to form characters, as he did for “Scent of a Woman,” the story of a blind retired Army officer and the prep-school scholar employed to maintain him, for which he acquired one other Oscar nomination. Al Pacino performed the blind man; Mr. Goldman informed The Times that he borrowed elements of his father, certainly one of his brothers and his Army first sergeant in writing the half.

Mr. Brest stated that Mr. Goldman was an adept collaborator, not solely with different screenwriters but additionally with administrators and others concerned within the moviemaking course of.

“He thought of himself as a filmmaker rather than a writer,” he stated. “He was part of the creation of a film.”

Mr. Brest recalled that for “Scent of a Woman,” which was primarily based on an Italian film, “Profumo di Donna,” he and Mr. Goldman started by simply having lengthy, meandering chats.

“Finally I said to him, ‘We’ve been talking for two weeks and having the greatest time, but shouldn’t we get to work?’” Mr. Brest recalled. “And he said that Mike Nichols told him, ‘The digressions are the work, or part of the work.’”

Sure sufficient, a lot of what they’d talked about — childhood recollections, individuals they’d identified — ended up being mirrored within the script.

Robert Spencer Goldman was born on Sept. 10, 1932, in New York City. His mom, Lillian (Levy) Goldman, was a millinery mannequin, and his father, Julian, operated Julian Goldman Stores, a clothes chain that had 42 shops in 11 states at one level however was derailed by the Depression. Four months earlier than Mr. Goldman was born, the corporate filed for chapter.

“I was the son of this kind of displaced merchant prince,” Mr. Goldman informed The Times in 1993.

Though the household fell on laborious instances, Mr. Goldman was capable of attend Phillips Exeter Academy after which Princeton, the place he earned a bachelor’s diploma in 1953.

At Princeton, he participated in exhibits of the Princeton Triangle Club, a university theater troupe. “I learned how to write there,” he stated in an oral historical past recorded in 2000 for the Writers Guild Foundation.

While writing for the school newspaper as Bob Goldman, a typesetter unintentionally left off the second “b” in his identify. Mr. Goldman favored it and later legally modified his identify to Bo.

After three years within the Army — he was stationed within the Marshall Islands, the place assessments of nuclear bombs have been being performed — he grew to become an assistant to Jule Styne, the composer. He additionally wrote introductory patter and different tidbits for reside tv applications.

He aspired to a playwriting profession and earned a Broadway credit score in 1959 as one of many lyricists for “First Impressions,” a musical primarily based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that Mr. Styne’s firm produced. The present had a starry solid that included Farley Granger, Polly Bergen and Hermione Gingold, nevertheless it lasted solely 92 performances.

Mr. Goldman continued working in tv, together with as a script editor and affiliate producer on the anthology sequence “Playhouse 90.” But success as a author proved elusive.

He had married Mabel Rathbun Ashforth in 1954, they usually finally had six youngsters. He credited her with maintaining the household afloat within the lean years by opening a nursery college of their house after which operating a meals retailer referred to as Loaves and Fishes in Sagaponack, N.Y., on Long Island.

He stated that on this interval — the late Nineteen Sixties and early ’70s — he noticed households of his contemporaries falling aside and was moved to write down his first screenplay, “Shoot the Moon,” a couple of marriage in disaster due to the husband’s affair. It received many admirers — together with Mr. Forman — however no producers needed to make it as a result of, Mr. Goldman typically stated, the story struck too near house for them.

After his success with “Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Rose” (1979) and “Melvin and Howard,” nevertheless, “Shoot the Moon” lastly did get made, by the director Alan Parker in 1982. Diane Keaton and Albert Finney, because the struggling couple, have been each nominated for Golden Globe Awards.

Mr. Goldman’s different screenwriting credit embody “The Flamingo Kid” (1984), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “City Hall” (1996).

In 2017, when New York journal requested working screenwriters to debate the greatest screenwriters of all time, Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) singled out Mr. Goldman’s “audacious originality, his understanding of social mores, his ironic sense of humor, and his outright anger at being human, and all with his soft-spoken grace and eloquent simplicity.”

Mr. Goldman lived in Rockport, Maine. His spouse died in 2017. A son, Jesse, died in 1981. He is survived by one other son, Justin Ashforth; 4 daughters, Mia Goldman, Amy Goldman, Diana Rathbun and Serena Rathbun; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Mr. Brest stated Mr. Goldman was capable of create memorable characters by way of small particulars.

“His remembrance of nuances, things that people don’t know they’re revealing but that reveal volumes — that was his art form,” he stated.

He additionally stated he has typically repeated one thing Mr. Goldman as soon as informed him: “Your life,” Mr. Goldman stated, “is what’s not in the obituary.”