Akiva Goldsman

Akiva Goldsman
Goldsman at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles, May 2011
Born	(1962-07-07) July 7, 1962 New York City
Occupation	Director, producer, writer
Years active	1994–present
Spouse(s)	Rebecca Spikings (?–2010; her death)

Akiva J. Goldsman (born July 7, 1962) from Manhattan, New York is an American film and television writer, director, and producer.

He received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the 2001 film, A Beautiful Mind, which also won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Goldsman has been exclusively involved with Hollywood films. His filmography also includes the films Batman Forever and its sequel Batman & Robin, I Am Legend and Cinderella Man and numerous rewrites both credited and uncredited. In 2006 Goldsman re-teamed with A Beautiful Mind director Ron Howard for a high profile project, adapting Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code for Howard's film version, receiving mixed reviews for his work.

Life and career

Akiva Goldsman was born on July 7, 1962 in New York City, the son of Tev Goldsman, a therapist, and Mira Rothenberg, a child psychologist.^[1] His family is Jewish. Both parents ran a group home for emotionally disturbed children. Goldsman's parents were occupied with their work, and Goldsman said, "By the time I was 10 or 12, I realized they had taken my parents away from me. I wanted nothing more to do with that world. I wanted to be a writer. I had a fantasy that someday I'd see my name on a book." In 1983, Goldsman attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.^[2] After graduation, Goldsman studied creative writing at New York University and began writing screenplays.

In 1994, he wrote the screenplay that would become the film Silent Fall.^[1] Afterward, director Joel Schumacher hired Goldsman to write The Client.^[2] In the late 1990s, Akiva Goldsman wrote screenplays for A Time to Kill and Batman & Robin, which were considered subpar quality and got him nominated for the Golden Raspberry Awards. Goldsman came to the realization, "I sort of got lost. I was writing away from what I knew. It's a little like a cat chasing its tail. Once you start making movies that are less than satisfying, you start to lose your opportunity to make the satisfying ones. People are not serving them up to you, saying, 'You're the guy we want for this.'" Goldsman appealed to producer Brian Grazer to write the screenplay for A Beautiful Mind and ultimately won an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay. The star of A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe, later invited Goldsman and director Ron Howard to film Cinderella Man, and Goldsman wrote the film's screenplay.^[3]

Goldsman has a production company at Warner Bros. called Weed Road Pictures. On April 6, 2010, it was announced that he will produce a PG-13 remake of the Troma cult film The Toxic Avenger.^[4] On September 8, 2010, it was announced that he would write the first season of the television series based on the novels of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. The project is currently in "development hell".^[5]

Goldsman produced the Universal Pictures feature Lone Survivor, from writer/director Peter Berg, based on the book, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, by Marcus Luttrell. It tells the story of Luttrell's Navy SEAL team in 2005 Afghanistan, on a mission to kill a terrorist leader. The movie starred Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster and Taylor Kitsch, and was released in 2013.^[6]

Goldsman made his feature film directing debut with Winter's Tale, a film adaption of the Mark Helprin novel. Goldsman worked for seven years on developing the project with Warner Bros. Pictures, finally getting a green light on the script (which he wrote). The principal cast consisted of Colin Farrell, Russell Crowe, Jessica Brown Findlay, Jennifer Connelly, Will Smith and William Hurt.^[7] The film was released on February 14, 2014. 2015 direct the Horror thriller film Stephanie,^[8] with Frank Grillo in the leading role.^[9]

Fringe

In 2008, Goldsman joined the first season crew of the FOX horror/mystery series Fringe, as writer, director, and consulting producer. The first episode Goldsman directed and wrote was "Bad Dreams".^[10][11] In its fifth season, Goldsman remained a consulting producer. Episodes he contributed to included:

• "Bad Dreams" (01.17)
• "The Road Not Taken" (01.19) (executive producer Jeff Pinkner and supervising producer J.R. Orci co-wrote a teleplay based on a story by Goldsman)
• "There's More Than One of Everything" (01.20) (co-executive producer J.H. Wyman and Pinkner co-wrote a teleplay based on a story by Goldsman and executive producer Bryan Burk)
• "A New Day in the Old Town" (02.01) (co-written by co-creator J.J. Abrams)
• "Peter" (02.16) (co-showrunners Jeff Pinkner, J.H. Wyman, and supervising producer Josh Singer co-wrote a teleplay based on a story by Pinkner, Goldsman, Singer, and Wyman)
• "Brown Betty" (02.20) (co-written by Wyman and Pinkner)
• "Over There (Part 1)" (02.22) (co-written with Pinkner and Wyman)
• "Over There (Part 2)" (02.23) (co-written by Pinkner and Wyman)
• "Subject 13" (03.15) (co-written with Wyman and Pinkner)
• "Stowaway" (03.17) (Danielle Dispaltro wrote a teleplay based on a story Pinkner, Goldsman, and Wyman)
• "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" (03.19) (Wyman and Pinkner co-wrote a teleplay based on a story by Wyman, Goldsman, and Pinkner)
• "The Day We Died" (03.22) (Pinkner and Wyman co-wrote a teleplay based on a story Goldsman, Pinkner, and Wyman)
• "Neither Here Nor There" (04.01) (Wyman and Pinkner co-wrote a teleplay based on a story Wyman, Goldsman, and Pinkner)
• "Subject 9" (04.04) (co-written by Wyman and Pinkner)
• "Making Angels" (04.11) (co-written with Wyman and Pinkner)
• "Nothing as It Seems" (04.16) (co-written with Pinkner)
• "Letters of Transit" (04.19) (co-written by Wyman and Pinkner)
• "Brave New World (Part 1)" (04.21) (co-written by Wyman and Pinkner)
• "Brave New World (Part 2)" (04.22) (co-written with Wyman and Pinkner)

Personal life

Goldsman's second wife, film producer Rebecca Spikings-Goldsman, died of a heart attack on July 6, 2010, at the age of 42.^[12] Rebecca was the daughter of producer Barry Spikings.

Filmography

References

Further reading

• Thane, Christopher (November 1999). "Swimming with sharks". Fade In (Fade in Publishing Group Inc) 5 (3): 17. 
• Divine, Christian (January 2002). "Peace of mind". Creative Screenwriting (Inside Information Group, Ltd) 9 (1): 69, 71–74. 
• Fleming, Michael (June 2006). "Good as Goldsman". Fade In (Fade in Publishing Group Inc) 9 (2): [50]–52. 

External links

• Akiva Goldsman at the Internet Movie Database