David Z Goodman

David Z Goodman, who died on September 26 aged 81, wrote the screenplay for the controversial thriller Straw Dogs (1971), one of the great banned films of the 1970s, which revealed rural Britain to be just as brutal as the mean streets of downtown America.

Starring Dustin Hoffman as an American mathematician living with his British wife (the then unknown Susan George) in a fictional village in Cornwall, Straw Dogs marked a watershed in the way sexual violence is depicted in the cinema. Because it featured two disturbing and graphic rape scenes, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) only agreed to its uncut release on video some 30 years later.

David Zelag Goodman (right) with Sam Peckinpah

 

Goodman's screenplay depicted a middle-class couple besieged by a sexually ravening gang of yokels. Though based on The Siege Of Trencher's Farm, a 1969 novel by the Scottish author Gordon Williams, the director, Sam Peckinpah, ordered Goodman to write in some controversial scenes that do not occur in the original.

"They've added a rape scene, an act of buggery and lots of violence," Williams complained.

"Mr Williams has a penchant for his own work," Peckinpah retorted. "I don't."

When Peckinpah, who urged more violence than Goodman cared for, was advised by the BBFC's newly-installed secretary, Stephen Murphy, to make some changes, he produced a final cut (approved for theatrical release) in which Susan George's character appeared to enjoy being violated. Fleet Street erupted. Thirteen reviewers wrote to The Times, condemning Straw Dogs for being "dubious in its intention [and] excessive in its effect".

The notice that most upset Goodman was written by the American Pauline Kael. In an otherwise positive review, Kael concluded that Peckinpah had made "the first American film that is a fascist work of art".
All this caused enormous controversy, bracketing the film alongside The Devils, Family Life and A Clockwork Orange (all also released in 1971) in terms of its sexually violent content. Uncut, Straw Dogs was not approved for release on video in Britain until 2002.
David Zelag Goodman was born on January 15 1930 in New York. His orthodox Jewish parents wanted him to become a rabbi, sending him to a yeshiva to be trained. But at 18 he became totally secular, took a degree in English at Queens' College, studied Drama at Yale University, and became a playwright.
In 1954, when he was 24, Goodman's anti-war drama High Named Today was produced off-Broadway, The New York Times reviewer hailing him an "original" and "talented" writer.
His film breakthrough came in England in 1959, at the Bray studios in Berkshire, with the script for the Hammer adventure film Stranglers of Bombay. During the 1960s he wrote American television episodes of The Untouchables, Combat! and Mr Broadway.
For Hollywood Goodman scripted the mystery thriller Man on a Swing (1974), starring Cliff Robertson, and Farewell, My Lovely (1975), a remake of the Raymond Chandler story starring Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe.
His first venture into science fiction, Logan's Run (1976), starring Michael York, was the result of Goodman being brought in after several other writers had failed to deliver; in the end he earned sole credit for the script.
As a "script doctor" Goodman demonstrated a knack of quickly identifying screenplay flaws, as when Sherry Lansing brought him in to work on the thriller Fatal Attraction. According to his friend, the film and television producer Zev Braun, Goodman said to Lansing of the Glenn Close character: "You can't let her off the hook. You should kill her. Let's drown her!"
Braun worked with Goodman on Freedom Road, a 1979 miniseries with Muhammad Ali and Kris Kristofferson. With Braun as co-writer, Goodman also scripted Cover, the story of the poisoning of the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, which is currently in pre-production.
Goodman's work has lasted: Monte Walsh was remade in 2003 as a television film; a remake of Straw Dogs was released a fortnight ago; and a remake of Logan's Run is in production at Warner Bros.
David Zelag Goodman is survived by Marjorie, his London-born wife of 61 years, and their daughter, Professor Kevis Goodman, a scholar of British Romanticism who teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley.