Failure Allowed Him to Find Success as a Screenwriter

What drives an artist? Bo Goldman ’53 — a screenwriter who counted two Academy Awards among his honors and wrote the screenplay for the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — chose to attend Princeton because of the Triangle Club, which had a reputation as a great incubator for talent on the stage and screen. He treated writing for Triangle as his true major and McCarter Theatre, Triangle’s home, as his true university.

“I was a terrible student,” he later said. “I spent my whole life there in McCarter Theatre in Princeton. I was asked to leave a number of times. But somehow, I muddled through.”

When he graduated, he wrote to every established artist he could think of, trying to apprentice himself to one of them — which, as usually happens, led nowhere. You can’t study your way into connections. “I wrote Oscar Hammerstein, asking if I could somehow be a kind of archivist for him or file his work or something like that,” he said. “And he said the place had already been taken by the son of a neighbor — his name was Stephen Sondheim.”

Even at that young age, Goldman was intimately familiar with failure. The son of a retail baron who lost everything in the Great Depression, he grew up in the ruins of his father’s former splendor — in a palatial apartment, broke — watching his father torment himself over his downfall. “I always had a bit too much of the street in me,” he said on The Dick Cavett Show in 1981. “But in my case, that street was Park Avenue.”

But he kept grinding along. He patched together one job after another in the basement of show business, including the CBS mailroom, while working at night on a musical based on Pride and Prejudice. The musical hit Broadway — and tanked. “I was lucky enough to get this show on, I was 26, on Broadway, that was a big thing to people, even though it wasn’t successful,” he said. “But then I was 10 years trying to put the next one on, and it was just impossible.”

In 1975, the director Miloš Forman, who had read one of Goldman’s scripts, asked him to take a swing at a project that several other writers had attempted without success: a screenplay of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Goldman remembered reading the novel when he was younger and not thinking much of it, but on a reread, he realized he now understood it in a new way. His Princeton classmates had risen to become executives and law partners, and he envied their place in the establishment while wanting nothing of their establishment lives.

He saw the merciless Nurse Ratched as, so to speak, what happens to Princetonians after graduation, and the rebellious Randle McMurphy as a wide-eyed freshman: “She stood for everything that every yearning person in high school or college wanted to do with their life, that’s what blocks them.”

Goldman earned $8,000 for his screenplay. The film made $163 million, won him his first Oscar, and brought a cascade of other writing projects, including Scent of a Woman, The Rose, and Melvin and Howard, which won him another Oscar. He later said of his screenplays, naming characters from these films, “They’re always about outsiders, really. There’s something, weirdly, a kind of kinship between McMurphy and Melvin and Slade and the Rose — they’re all losers, to some degree, who somehow have the right idea about what life is.”

We may never understand the artistic drive that kept Goldman going. But failure wound up being the best thing that could have happened to his art. Art gave him the urge to say something, but failure gave him something to say. All his life, Goldman remembered a line from the letter he received from Hammerstein: “If anything can stop you, Mr. Goldman, it will. And if nothing can stop you, it won’t.”