"For Akiva Goldsman, a beautiful turnaround"

A nifty LA Times feature on Sunday re screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. Here's an excerpt:

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."

If you pay attention to the careers of screenwriters, you see this a lot, where their lives seem to emulate the travails and joys of a Protagonist in a story. Goldsman had achieved success. Then 'deconstructed' due to Lost in Space and the abysmal Batman & Robin. Then he lands A Beautiful Mind and is 'reconstructed' into an Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Who knows what more twists and turns lie ahead in his career.

I'm reminded of a feature on Goldsman in the WGA journal "Written By" around the time A Beautiful Mind came out. When Goldsman read Nash's biography, he immediately saw that Nash's life laid out in perfect three-act structure:

* Genius
* Madness
* Redemption

What if you look at your life and consider what act you're in? Where are you in your hero / heroine's journey?

Re A Beautiful Mind, check out the trailer and you can see in the broad perimeters of the narrative what Goldsman saw when he first read the book: