Oscar Overview

My deepest heartfelt gratitude goes
out to all my wonderful friends,
customers and supporters in wishing
everyone the very best of good
Health and Happiness in the
Celebration of Passover.

BEAUTIFUL MIND

a hundred other things," in order to
make people understand the suffering
the disease entails, said Goldsman.
"Everything else fell by the wayside."
Goldsman believes that Drudge,
and those who give credence to his
report, "are trying to exploit our cul-
tural self-protectiveness. We're being
manipulated because we're Jewish."
In this year's Academy Awards race,
there are few clear-cut favorites in the
major categories.

The Jewish People have always been
staunch supporters of good will to
people of all race, color and creed,
and I join with them in prayers for
a world of peace among all mankind.

e'tk,

West Bloomfield & Detroit

4189 ORCII1RD LAKE : yr' PO \ TI 1C TIZ MIL IN WEST BLOOMFIELD

(248) 865-0000

Open 7 Days a Week for Lunch & Dinner

Marty and Karen Wilk
and their Employees

Most Sincerely

Extend Wishes To Our
Customers and Friends
For The Utmost
In Health and Happiness

May everyone rejoice
on this Passover
Festiva( so Freedom

ww.theexcaliber.com

28875 Franklin Rd. at Northwestern & 12 Mile Southfield, MI • (248) 358-3355

a

Restaurant

Italian, Greek & American Cuisine

Ha Passover!

00

3/22
2002

78

I

L

9:

l e second
r y$6enotrers3anodffgfeotrth
Buyfoan

Salads, pizza, sandwiches and ribs for 2 excluded.

Expires: April 30, 2002
One coupon per table
mw. sm. mom mom - mom mom

Farmington Hills • Corner of Grand River & Haggerty Road

from page 75

I

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship
of the Ring leads with 13 nominations,
while A Beautiful Mind, nominated
for best picture, director, actor
(Russell Crowe as Nash), and screen-
play based on previously published
material, is tied with Moulin Rouge
with eight nominations.
"The decidedly nasty nature of this
year's subterranean Oscar campaign
— which in some quarters has taken
on the tone of a brutal political cam-
paign — has been a frequent topic of
conversation," notes the Hollywood
Reporter. "There have always been
whisper campaigns directed against
films, but this year the whispers seem
to have turned into shouts."
This cutthroat competition, said
Stacey Snider, chairman of Universal
Pictures, is responsible for the attacks on
her studio's Beautiful Mind
"The timing of these latest missives
and their orchestration has to be cal-
culated. It can't be inadvertent," she
told the Hollywood Reporter.
Goldsman agreed that it was odd that
the anti-Semitic quotes are being discov-
ered just now, "after the book has been
out for five years and the movie has been
playing in theaters for 11 weeks."
Prominent film critic Roger Ebert,
appearing on the Howard Stern show,
labeled the Drudge charges as a smear
campaign by a contending movie try-
ing to discredit A Beautiful Mind.
"I don't think that item just appeared
on the Drudge Report," said Ebert.
"Someone had to have leaked it."
To Goldsman, 40, the theme of the
film strikes close to home. Both his
mother, a Holocaust survivor, and
father are psychotherapists who ran a
group home for autistic and schizo-
phrenic children at their Brooklyn
Heights residence. The youths were
young Akiva's playmates.
From that perspective, the picture is
a tribute to his parents and to the
children he grew up with.
Anyone who would exploit the suf-
fering of schizophrenics to garner
some easy headlines, said Goldsman,
"should be ashamed of himself." ❑

SCREENWRITER

from page 75

"I was the new, gawky kid with a
big nose and limbs everywhere," he
recalls. "I started hearing slurs with
the word `Jew.'" The anti-Semitism
proved so troubling that his family
packed up and moved to New Jersey
six months later.
Eventually Festinger went off to
film school at New York University,
though his practical screenwriting
education began after he discovered
"Killings" as an HBO reader in 1992.
After unsuccessfully begging execu-
tives to make the movie, he covertly
wrote his own script but was so green
he neglected to first secure the rights
to Dubus' story.
Over the next six years, he hooked
up with producer Graham Leader,
rewrote the screenplay and went
through several directors — while
braving a bizarre existential crisis. The
problem was that Festinger, a self-pro-
fessed "not so great standup comic,"
was constantly mistaken for the most
famous comedian in the world.
"People were always stopping me or
yelling, 'Jerry,"' he says with a roll of
his eyes. "My Seinfeld nightmare cul-
minated when I entered a Regis 6-
Kathy Lee contest where I found
myself in a room with six other
Seinfelds." (Festinger didn't win.)
In 1997, he was working at
Citibank, feeling like his life was over,
when Field, an actor hoping to make
his directorial debut with Bedroom,
tracked him down. Festinger says
Maine resident Field was able to deep-
en the story's emotional subtext while
keeping his structure and key scenes
intact.
Field, who completed the script
while starring in Stanley Kubrick's
Eyes Wide Shut, said, "Without Rob,
there would have been no movie. He
was passionate about the story, and I
was passionate about the story and I
see our work as coexisting in the place
where it was necessary to make this
film."
Both men were rewarded when the
movie earned rave reviews upon its
release in November 2001.
Since then, Festinger's life has been
more Horatio Alger than Woody
Allen: He has a high-profile Jackie
Gleason project, a publicist and an
Oscar nod — though he seemed a tad
daunted by the media frenzy at the
nominees' luncheon. "It's been great
to have the Gleason film to distract
me from all this," he says. "When
you're writing, you just feel like some
idiot in a room, trying to make the
scene work." ❑