Akiva Goldsman arrived at the door of producer Brian Grazer in 1998 with one purpose. "I went there," the screenwriter says, "to beg."
Goldsman, who had enjoyed a steady ascension in Hollywood for years, was coming off a string of films that had badly battered his reputation. He had produced and written the forgettable dud "Lost in Space" -- and far worse, he had written the screenplay that would become the 1997 bomb "Batman & Robin," one of the most savagely disliked movies of the decade.
Given that history of burnt popcorn, Goldsman seemed like the least qualified writer in Hollywood to take on the task of adapting Sylvia Nasar's "A Beautiful Mind" for the screen, but that's the job he sought when he visited Grazer at the offices of Imagine Films. Shockingly, he got the gig, and the eventual film, about physicist John Nash and his slippery hold on reality, would win four Academy Awards, including best adapted screenplay for Goldsman, best director for Ron Howard and best picture.
"It was a profound experience for all of us involved," Goldsman recently recalled. "And I cannot overestimate what it meant for my career at that point."
The breakthrough put Goldsman in a lofty strata in Hollywood, and his screenwriting credits would include blockbusters such as "The Da Vinci Code," "Angels & Demons," "I Am Legend" and "I, Robot." And now, a decade after seeking a bit of largesse from Grazer, Goldsman is undertaking a new career path behind the camera.
He recently directed the season premiere of the Fox series "Fringe" and is now lining up his feature-film directorial debut. And despite having written what is perhaps the most reviled comic-book movie adaptation of all time, he's aggressively pursuing his childhood love of superheroes as the producer of five movies based on Marvel or DC comic books.
On closer inspection, comic-book fantasy and dark psychology are the touchstone themes of Goldsman's career. It's a tandem that might make a therapist smirk or reach for their notepad, and the same goes for the 47-year-old's memories of his childhood. The writer is the son of child psychologists Mira Rothenberg and S. Tev Golds- man, and the nature of his youth was a key reason that Grazer used the writer for "A Beautiful Mind."
