Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid nominated), and Best Actress for Katharine Ross, among others. William Goldman won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. In 2003, the film was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The Academy Film Archive preserved "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in 1998. The film inspired the television series "Alias Smith and Jones", starring Pete Duel and Ben Murphy as outlaws trying to earn an amnesty. A parody titled "Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid" was published in "MAD". It was illustrated by
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid says he wrote the story as an original screenplay because he did not want to do the research to make it authentic as a novel. Goldman later stated: The whole reason I wrote the ... thing, there is that famous line that Scott Fitzgerald wrote, who was one of my heroes, "There are no second acts in American lives." When I read about Cassidy and Longbaugh and the superposse coming after them—that's phenomenal material. They ran to South America and lived there for eight years and that was what thrilled me: they had a second act. They were more legendary