William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (1973) and Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (1987)
“Unadaptable” is a word that gets attached to a lot of books, and usually for good reason. For most books—pretty much all, really—the quality is derived from the skill of the writing more than the twists of the story. Just because a director replicates every narrative beat of a literary masterpiece, that doesn’t mean the result is a cinematic one.
Those who are only familiar with The Princess Bride through Rob Reiner’s beloved family film may be surprised to learn that translating the source material was difficult, even though author William Goldman was adapting his own work. Goldman (whose adaptation of Misery opened on Broadway in November, his first produced script since Dreamcatcher 12 years ago) not only had to capture the delicate whimsy of his book’s central story, a playfully teasing adventure yarn, but deal with the sophisticated literary device he had used to develop his themes. Remove the device and the entire story takes on less resonance; the book is about storytelling, not just the story being told.
Getting to the actual plot of The Princess Bride—that is, the tale of Buttercup, Inigo Montoya, and the Dread Pirate Robert—requires a bit of setup. In Goldman’s telling, he first encountered Bride—which he credits as the work of one Simon Morgenstern; the book purports to be Goldman’s “good parts version” of Morgenstern’s epic—as a 10-year-old child. While Goldman suffered from pneumonia, his father would read him the book, which swiftly became the boy’s favorite, sparking a lifelong love of stories and storytelling. He even credits the book’s “Cliffs Of Insanity” sequence with inspiring a similar scene in his Butch Cassidy And the Sundance Kid.
According to the book, when Goldman’s own son turns 10, he decides to continue the tradition, procuring a hard-to-find copy for a present. When the lad gets bored after chapter one, Goldman actually reads the book for the first time and realizes how much his dad had skipped over. He pitches an abridgment to his publisher, a reprinting that he will sculpt and shape. This edited manuscript is what makes up the bulk of the book, though Goldman frequently pops in with notations to explain what he’s cut and why, as well as to comment on “Morgenstern” and the man’s stylistic choices.
This framing device is extremely convincing, and the uninitiated will have no problem taking it at face value. Goldman mentions working on Sundance, and the fact that he makes himself unsympathetic—flirting with a buxom starlet while on the phone with his wife, mocking his son’s obesity (“paint him yellow, he’d mop up for the school sumo team”)—only adds to the sense of verisimilitude.
But Sundance aside, this device is entirely fictional. Morgenstern never existed; the “abridgment” structure and notations are pure literary inventions.
The gimmick is the book’s purpose for being. Goldman isn’t just telling an adventure story—and a pretty good one—he’s considering why the genre’s themes appeal to all ages as well as sending up the conventions and weaknesses of the category as a whole. As anyone who has slogged through Ivanhoe can attest, romantic literature can get bogged down in detail. Here, Goldman makes a big show of cutting pages that deal with dull ritual and descriptions of royal opulence. (He adds that the excised sections have been hailed as marvelous satire by Florinian scholars—that is, fictional studiers of the fantasy world he created.) Buttercup’s Baby, the start of an alleged sequel that comes bundled with modern printings, begins with the death of a beloved character. After starting the story with such a grab, Goldman immediately pipes in to say he despises the beginning for how it dismisses the character’s fans for the sake of an exciting start, a hilariously transparent method of having it both ways.
This is a hard trick for a film to duplicate, and that the filmmakers attempted it at all is almost as surprising as the fact that they were mostly successful in doing so.
In the film adaptation, Goldman’s first inspiration was to roll his two stylistic conceits into one, creating a framing story wherein a grandfather (Peter Falk) reads Morgenstern’s book to his grandson (Fred Savage), who’s sick in bed. While this story doesn’t really have a payoff (compared to the similarly structured The Neverending Story), it preserves the idea of the book sparking a child’s imagination. Savage’s character goes from playing video games to being open to the ideals of “true love and high adventure” that Goldman originally put down. The familial back-and-forth also serves as the kind of commentary Goldman made in the book’s notations. Where the Goldman-the-author complained at the scale of Morgenstern’s dullness, Savage is annoyed at being read “a kissing book,” and wants to know when it’s going to get good.