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Bo Goldman, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter, Dies at 90
He was a struggling writer when he won an Academy Award for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He won another for “Melvin and Howard.”
Bo Goldman, one of Hollywood’s most admired screenwriters, who took home 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 death. He did not specify a cause.
Mr. Goldman was struggling to make a living as a writer until the director Milos Forman saw the script he had written for a project called “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 screen.
The resulting movie, which starred Jack Nicholson as a rebellious new patient who disrupts a psychiatric ward, came out in 1975 and was a career maker. Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, who shared screenwriting credit, won the Oscar for best screenplay adapted from other material; the movie was also named best picture and earned Oscars for Mr. Forman, Mr. Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, who played the fierce Nurse Ratched.
“Even then I hung my head,” Mr. Goldman wrote in a 1981 essay for The New York Times about the insecurities of a writer’s life. “After all, I had adapted somebody else’s work; was it really mine?”
It may not have helped that Mr. Kesey denounced the adaptation.
If that doubt had nagged him, it had certainly been dispelled when his original screenplay for “Melvin and Howard” (1980) won him his second Oscar, this time for best screenplay written directly for the screen. That movie was based on the story of Melvin Dummar, a Utah gas station owner who claimed that Howard Hughes, in a handwritten will, had left him a share of his vast fortune.
Vincent Canby, writing in The Times, called it “a satiric expression of the American Dream in the closing years of the 20th century.” The New York Film Critics Circle gave Mr. Goldman its best-screenplay award. (The film’s director, Jonathan Demme, also won. But the organization named “Ordinary People” and not “Melvin and Howard” the best movie of the year.)
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