I just recieved William Goldman’s The Princess Bride in the mail today from a certain online bookseller. I know it was made into a cult-hit movie starring Andre the Giant, among others, and I went on the internet looking for information on the book and film, when I stumbled onto this.
Now I know that S. Morgernstern doesn’t exist. But according to this, neither does William Goldman! Apparently, he’s really University of Chicago economics grad students. Now, I find this hard to believe, since that would mean a bunch of U of Chi students also wrote Marathon Man and Butch Cassidy (then again, it would explain the screenplay to Jurassic Park III.
The main thing is that both the introduction and main story are an attack on paper money, saying we should stick to gold and silver. It also mentions The Wizard of Oz was similar, saying we should change from gold to silver, and that Uncle Cece covered the Oz thing in one of his columns.
Is this Tom Fitzgerald guy insane, or does William Goldman not really exist, and the story mean what he says it means?
I should mention my own opinion: When I first read the thing, I thought that the whole idea was inconceivable, but that word may not mean what I think it means.
I think Tom Fitzgerald is being satirical. The Writers’ Guild would not look kindly upon a screenwriter allowing his name to be used as a credit for others. Having William Goldman listed as your screenwriter is fairly prestigious. I’m sure he made a nice sum of money on the film. Do you think he would have given any of it to some grad students in economics?
William Goldman came out with a new edition of the “Princess Bride” in 1998. As he told reviewers, the book is a satire on fairy tales.
The new edition has one chapter of the sequel “Buttercup’s Baby”
It is worth noting that the William Goldman of the introduction to The Princess Brinde dosen’t exisit–he is as much of a charecter as Morgernstern. The fact that he shares a name with the author of the book is just there to confuse you.
About the Wizard and the bimetallists, some people have spent lots of efforts looking for parallels to the populist silver movement of the late 1890s, but it’s just not believable that Baum would have written something like this. AndCecil has a column on the subject.
Actually, in my macroecomics class as a freshman a few years back, we actually watched the Princess Bride and wrote a report on it’s economic implications. I don’t think the movie was specially chosen, however, as the whole point was that anything can be tied to economics.
Why would it have anything to do with a screenplay written by Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor? William Goldman was not involved with any of the Jurassic Park movies in any capacity.
My mistake. I read in a Goldman bibliography that the wrote the screenplay or co-wrote to JPIII. I was just having a little fun- I actually liked the movie.