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The Princess Bride is a charming, perfectly rendered treatment of William Goldman's enchanting and witty fairytale. The movie works so well because Goldman is both a brilliant novelist, and an equally brilliant screenwriter. He's written the screenplays for many successful movies, such as Marathon Man, and tells all about his career as a screenplay writer in his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade.

It's rare when a book's novelist also writes the screenplay but when the novelist is William Goldman you'd be crazy to go with anyone else. And Goldman did his usual superb job on the screenplay for The Princess Bride.

Incidentally, Goldman publicly stated that The Princess Bride was based on a book by S.Morganstern, that had been read to Goldman as a child by his father. This was just a story Goldman concocted to add to the humor, and human interest, of his story. Every word in The Princess Bride is Goldman's, and there is no S. Morganstern.

Goldman is well-known for his sparkling dialog and the film adaptation of The Princess Bride is full of great examples of it. Even the most casual conversations between Goldman's characters sparkle with wry humor, wit, and often understatement.

Rob Reiner, the film's director did an excellent job too of bringing out the best of Goldman's material. His budget was a mere 16 million dollars - small even by the standards back when the film was shot - and perhaps this helped him restrain any directorial urges he may have felt to use special effects that may have obscured Goldman's simple and poignant fairy tale.

In The Princess Bride we have a book to film adaptation that is as true to the book as it is possible to make it, thanks to the screen-writing skill of its author, one of the best screen-writers in the history of cinema.

Learn more about this author, David Riel.
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