Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman was “startled” when he heard that Vatican cardinals were condemning his next picture, the hotly anticipated film version of “The Da Vinci Code.” “I was concerned,” he muses, “and then I realized that the Vatican doesn’t like condoms either, and a lot of people buy those.”
If the 43-year-old scribe sounds insouciant, he has reason to be. At least 50 million people have read the novel, and awareness of the Ron Howard film, opening in the U.S. on Friday and starring Tom Hanks as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, can’t get higher.
For those who’ve been insulated from the pop-culture machine since the 2003 debut of Dan Brown’s book, the inferno of controversy stems from Brown’s novel–yes, novel–postulating that Jesus and Mary Magdalene actually married–and that the Catholic Church has been covering this up ever since. The murder of Louvre museum curator Jacques Sauniere–one of the guardians of this secret–plunges Langdon and the beauteous French cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) into a thriller.
The film’s distributor, Sony, did its best to keep the film shrouded in mystery, forgoing the usual media run-up in favor of an unveiling at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s a tactic usually employed by studios to try to hide stinkers. But Goldsman says it was a strategy decided upon before the film was edited, “which was to try to diminish the ability of people to indicate prerelease what was different from the book. Part of what is intriguing is the ability to go and experience that yourself.”
There are few screenwriters as commercially successful as Goldsman, churning out popcorn entertainment as fast as he can type–everything from his early oeuvre of Grishams (“The Client” and “A Time to Kill”) and Batmans (“Batman Forever” and “Batman & Robin”) to his more recent Ron Howard canon of “A Beautiful Mind” (for which he won his Academy Award), “Cinderella Man” and, now, “Da Vinci.”
And that doesn’t include the other half of the Goldsman empire–the hit movies he merely produces, such as “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “Constantine” and “Starsky & Hutch” (as well as this past weekend’s less-than-stellar “Poseidon”).
Goldsman follows what seems to be the classic rule book on how to become a successful Hollywood screenwriter. He swears by screenwriting guru Robert McKee, eschews writing original scripts, and worships at the altar of the three-act structure.
“The screenplays I write are formally very predictable,” Goldsman says. “They’re essentially the one-page version of a clothing dummy. They have two legs, a middle, two arms and a head. I can dress them up pretty on a good day, but the structure is simple, and I like that.”
Of course, these screenwriting dictums work only if you have talent both for words and people. “He’s really character-oriented,” says Howard, who considers Goldsman his go-to guy. “He blends plot with characters in a really effective way. He creates a kind of density that I appreciate.”
When Goldsman first read “The Da Vinci Code,” it wasn’t a best seller, merely an interesting galley floating around Hollywood. That had changed by the time he and Howard sat down with Brown more than a year later in a hotel room at the Toronto Four Seasons. “There were two cultures staring across the table at each other,” recalls Goldman. “We were the movie. He was the novel . . . . He [was thinking,] I’m sure, that our agenda was just to change everything.”
The sides came together over, of all things, codes. Brown was pleased to find out that the pair was fascinated by the use of such mysteries in the book and that Howard wanted to add more codes to the film (which he’s done). The ice was broken, so much so that Brown hung around the set “a good third of the time,” says Goldsman.
Goldsman’s first script was 1994’s “Silent Fall,” about an autistic boy who is the only witness to his parents’ double murder, and he’s the first to say that his debut in Hollywood was charmed. And then came the dark years–“Batman & Robin,” perhaps best known for George Clooney’s plastic nipples and codpiece, and “Lost in Space,” both of which were reviled.
Recalls Goldsman, describing the experience of really, really bad reviews: “It’s an out-of-body kind of humiliation. It’s that feeling you have in high school but multiplied by a power of about a zillion.”
When he read the galleys of “A Beautiful Mind,” he asked Warner Bros. to buy the book for him, but the studio refused. When Brian Grazer bought it for Universal, Goldsman–who grew up in Brooklyn in a group home for emotionally disturbed children, which was run by his psychologist parents–begged for the job.
“If I couldn’t write this … then I shouldn’t be writing. `A Beautiful Mind’ became my excuse for telling that story,” says Goldsman, the story of mental illness as he knew it. “Sylvia Nasar didn’t actually write about John’s internal life. John didn’t participate in the biography. The movie’s utter fiction except for the truth of John’s character arc.”
Undoubtedly, the most striking aspects of “A Beautiful Mind” are Nash’s visions. They’re introduced to the audience as real people and only later revealed to be figments of Nash’s addled imagination.
“It’s an attempt to simulate the experience of schizophrenia for the audience,” Goldsman said. “Really, it’s an attempt to pull the rug out from the eyes of the viewer and not to see madness from the outside in.”
Goldsman’s matter-of-fact reflection comes several years after the film’s debut, when critics roundly attacked it for whitewashing alleged anti-Semitism and homosexuality from Nash’s life and for billing the story as true when in fact there were many omissions.
One reason “Da Vinci Code” has sparked so much heated debate is that some readers are confused by Brown’s deft weaving of supposed facts into the fictional narrative.
While fans of the book dissect where fact and fiction diverge, Goldsman says he’s one for whom the “truth” in books or movies has never had any special allure. “When I see something is a `true story,’ that doesn’t pull me. I’m missing that gear that says, `I want to see that.’ If I know that nobody is going to fly . . . if there’s no magic possible, I’m less interested.”
