Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid "Bonnie and Clyde. ..." we don't believe it, and we walk out of the theater wondering what happened to that great movie we were seeing until an hour ago." The Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay #11 on its list of 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written. Over time, major American movie reviewers have been widely favorable. Rotten Tomatoes, a film review aggregator, gives 89% "Certified fresh" favorable score based on 46 reviews with an average score of 8.2/10, the site's critical consensus reads With its iconic pairing of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, jaunty screenplay and Burt Bacharach score,
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