Arts & Entertainment

Meet Eric Roth

From Gump to Munich to Button,
screenwriter finds human connections.

Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

F

rom the long-distance persistence
of Forrest Gump through the epic
yearning of The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button, the idea that one person
can have a profound effect on many lives
permeates the screenplays of three-time
Academy Award nominee Eric Roth.
The Jewish writer infuses his characters
with a palpable sense
of personal responsibil-
ity, but he's never high-
lighted moral conflict
to the degree he did in
the controversial script
for Steven Spielberg's
Munich.
"It was very compli-
Screenwriter
cated to write, very hard;
Eric Roth
it was a real balancing
act between trying to make it as real as
possible, but it had to have some kind of
entertainment value he recalls.
In devising their retribution against
the terrorists who planned the murder
of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic
Games, the Mossad "had decided inten-
tionally to do the most dramatic kind of
acts" like blowing up hotel rooms, Roth
notes. "They wanted people to know about
this; they wanted those who would follow
in [the terrorists'] footsteps to not do it.
They were sending a big message."

For moviemakers, Roth explains, "those
things lend themselves to great drama,
and they can even make genre things out
of them, set pieces like a Hitchcock thing.
It's always a balance: Are we now reveling
in the violence? So that became a whole
other issue."
Although plenty of critics and even
a few moviegoers found Forrest Gump
overly sentimental —notwithstanding
Roth's Oscar-winning script and Robert
Zemeckis' Oscar-winning direction — the
writer shrugged off the brickbats that
came his way. Not so with Munich.
"I was threatened a lot:' he confides.
"The FBI finally caught somebody who
was threatening to kill me. He was non-
Jewish, [and] he was just somebody who
was crazy. He was a total stalker. The
one that was most frightening to me was
someone erased my Wikipedia biography
and just wrote, 'Jew.' That one kind of
chilled me."
No such drama is likely to attend
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,
a human-scale epic re-imagined and
expanded from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short
story of a man who physically ages back-
ward. Roth relates Benjamin's life story
through the pages of a journal (replete
with letters and postcards) that a fading
elderly woman reveals to her adult daugh-
ter in a New Orleans hospital room as
Hurricane Katrina reaches landfall.
Roth's aged parents died during the

Brad Pitt stars as Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett is Daisy in The Curious
Case of Benjamin Button. The film is nominated for Golden Globes for Best

Picture-Drama, Best Screenplay (Roth), Best Lead Actor-Drama (Brad Pitt), Best

Director (David Fincher) and Best Original Score.

lengthy stretch he was working on the
screenplay, and he believes their passing
worked its way into the twin themes of
profound love and loss that underpin the
movie. But Button isn't tragic or even mel-
ancholy so much as bittersweet, for every
character enjoys a long, eventful life.
Benjamin, a perpetual outsider who's
well aware he's different from everybody
else — a metaphor for being Jewish,
though it's obscured by the casting of Brad
Pitt — partakes of numerous adventures
and finds the love of his life.
"I think there's a nice sort of human-
ism to the piece Roth muses. "It probably
resonates within myself because [while]
I'm certainly actively engaged in my own
life, my family, I'm sort of an observer.
I think writers are. [They] take note of
what's going on. I can be more active, but I
certainly speak through my writing."
In a nice touch, Tony Kushner (Angels
in America) hosted a couple of Benjamin

Button screenings in New York this month.
The playwright was brought in to rewrite
Munich — to Roth's chagrin, for no writer
appreciates having his work revamped
— but they ended up sharing the Oscar
nomination and becoming good friends.
A native New Yorker, Roth has lived
in Los Angeles for many years. He has
five children, all of whom identify as
Jewish, by his ex- and current wives. Roth
received his other Oscar nomination for
The Insider, the freighted true-life relation-
ship between Jewish 60 Minutes producer
Lowell Bergman and tobacco-industry
whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand. He just
finished adapting Jonathan Safran Foer's
bestselling novel Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close, about a young boy whose
father is killed on 9-11.

❑

The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button opens Thursday, Dec. 25.

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•ci

Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News

Bedtime Stories is

Chinese & A Movie

Here are four movies you and the
whole family might want to check
111111
As .11
, out over the Christmas holiday (right
RIO after filling up on egg rolls).
The animated film The Tale of
Despereaux, which opened last week,
is a modern fairy tale about a sickly
but plucky mouse named Despereaux
(and voiced by Matthew Broderick),
who lives in a castle and is befriend-
ed by a rat (voiced by Dustin
Hoffman), a princess and a servant
girl. The film's director is Gary Ross

(Pleasantville, Seabiscuit).
Opening Thursday, Dec. 25, are
three more family films.

B14

December 25 • 2008

Adam

Shankman

a comedy starring
Adam Sandler as
a hotel handyman
who tells his niece
and nephew lavish
bedtime tales that
magically begin to
become true. The
director is Adam

Shankman (Hairspray).
The Spirit is a big-budget fantasy
starring the handsome Gabriel Macht,
36, as a cop who returns from the
dead to fight crime. Based on a comic
book series by the late, great Will
Eisner, The Spirit co-stars Scarlett
Johansson as a femme fatale who is
allied with Macht's evil foe.
Marley and Me, a comedy about a

neurotic dog that co-stars Jennifer
Aniston and Owen Wilson, is directed
by David Frankel (The Devil Wears
Prada), the son of Max Frankel, the
famous New York Times journalist
and editor.

Buzzing Barbra

Chanukah is the time of miracles,
and an almost miracle happened
when President
George W. Bush
gave vocal political
opponent Barbra
Streisand, 66, a
kiss on the cheek
at a Dec. 8 White
House ceremony for
this year's Kennedy
Barbra
Center honorees for
Streisand

lifetime achievement in the arts.
A few hours after the White House
shindig, Streisand and the other hon-
orees were feted from the stage of
Washington's Kennedy Center. Queen
Latifah opened the stage tribute
to Streisand, saying, "She took the
stage like butter on a bagel." Then,
Broadway singing star Idina Menzel
(Wicked) and pop singer Beyonce
Knowles each belted out some
Streisand classics.
The other honorees are actor
Morgan Freeman, country singer
George Jones, choreographer Twyla
Tharp and rock musicians Pete
Townshend and Roger Daltrey of the
Who.
A tape of the stage tribute airs 9
p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 30, on CBS. Ei