David Zelag Goodman, a prolific screenwriter who, with Sam Peckinpah, wrote “Straw Dogs” and was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the romantic comedy “Lovers and Other Strangers,” died on Monday in Oakland, Calif. He was 81.

The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurological disorder, his wife, Marjorie Goodman, said.

Mr. Goodman’s most memorable work involved converting a Gordon Williams novel, “The Siege of Trencher’s Farm,” into the psychological thriller “Straw Dogs” (1971). The film starred Dustin Hoffman as an American mathematician pushed to violence by marauding hooligans at his adopted British home. A remake was released this year.