Akiva Goldsman Biography

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 involved specifically 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 much-anticipated film version, receiving mixed reviews for his work.

Life and career

Akiva Goldsman was born in New York City, on July 7, 1962, to Tev Goldsman, a therapist, and Mira Rothenberg, a child psychologist. 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. After graduation, Goldsman studied creative writing at New York University. He began writing screenplays, and in 1994, he wrote the screenplay that would become the film Silent Fall. Afterward, director Joel Schumacher hired Goldsman to write The Client.

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.

In 2009, he signed on to produce the film adaptation of the British television series Primeval, alongside Emily Cummins and Kerry Foster. In August 2009, Goldsman signed on as a producer on the 20th Century Fox Fantastic Four reboot.

Goldsman is set to produce Mr. & Mrs. Jones, a prequel to the 2005 film Mr. & Mrs. Smith, for Regency Enterprises. On April 6, 2010, it was announced that he will produce a PG-13 remake of the Troma cult film The Toxic Avenger.

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".

In October 2010, Warner Bros. Pictures and Goldsman's production company Weed Road acquired the spec script for Dark Moon, a space drama from The Fourth Kind scribe Olatunde Osunsanmi. Goldsman will act as producer for the film which Osunsanmi will direct.

Goldsman will produce the Ryan Gosling-starring remake of Logan's Run, with screenwriter Andrew Baldwin and director Nicolas Winding Refn, for Warner Bros. Pictures.

On March 8, 2012, Goldsman was hired by Warner Bros. to develop Archaia Entertainment's comicbook mini-series Lucid into a possible film franchise. Goldsman would also serve as producer alongside Zachery Quinto. This is the second deal Goldsman and Warner Bros. have done with Archaia Entertainment, they are fostering the animated feature Bolivar, a dinosaur-fable based on the upcoming book by Sean Rubin. Kealan O'Rourke is penning the screenplay and is also set to direct the film.

Goldsman is producing 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 persevering a 2005 Afghanistan, on a mission to kill a terrorist leader. The movie stars Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster and Taylor Kitsch, and is expected to begin principal photography in Fall 2012.

Goldsman will make his feature film directing debut with Winter's Tale, an on-screen adaption of the Mark Helprin novel. Goldsman had worked the past seven years on developing the project with Warner Bros. Pictures, finally getting a green light on the script (which he wrote). The principal cast consist of Will Smith, William Hurt, Russell Crowe, Colin Farrell, and Jessica Brown Findlay.

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". 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.

Filmography

Year	Film	Credit	Notes
1994	The Client	writer
	Silent Fall	writer
1995	Batman Forever	writer	co-wrote with Lee Batchler and Janet Scott Batchler
1996	A Time to Kill	writer
1997	Batman & Robin	writer
1998	Lost in Space	producer, writer
	Practical Magic	writer
1999	Deep Blue Sea	producer
2001	A Beautiful Mind	writer	Won Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay
2004	Starsky & Hutch	producer
	Mindhunters	producer
	I, Robot	writer	co-wrote with Jeff Vintar
2005	Constantine	producer
	Cinderella Man	writer	co-wrote with Cliff Hollingsworth
	Mr. & Mrs. Smith	producer
2006	I'm Reed Fish	executive producer
	Poseidon	producer
	The Da Vinci Code	writer
2007	The Cure	executive producer	TV pilot
	I Am Legend	producer, writer
2008	Hancock	producer
2009	Angels & Demons	writer	co-wrote with David Koepp
	Kings	director	TV series
2009"present	Fringe	consulting producer, writer, director	TV series
2010	The Losers	producer
	Fair Game	producer
	Jonah Hex	producer
	Paranormal Activity 2	executive producer
2011	Paranormal Activity 3	executive producer
2012	Paranormal Activity 4	executive producer
2013	Lone Survivor	producer
2014	Winter's Tale	writer, director, producer