Universal Changes "Mind" Plan
By Carl DiOrio
Variety 10/5/01

Another day, another holiday re-slotting.

The new Russell Crowe movie "A Beautiful Mind" will open in a limited number of theaters on Christmas Day before going wide on Jan. 4. The Universal Pictures film was originally set for a wide release on Christmas Day.

The announcement follows by two days Sony's decision to schedule its high-profile "Ali" biopic, starring Will Smith, for a wide Christmas bow. But Universal insisted the Sony move did not change its "Mind."

"It did make it a more crowded environment," Universal distribution president Nikki Rocco allowed. "But we were talking about this plan three weeks ago. It's common practice for us to fine-tune our release plans."

"Mind" is based on the true story of a Nobel Prize-winning genius who develops schizophrenia. Jennifer Connelly and Ed Harris co-star.

Universal will release Ron Howard-directed "Mind" in nine to 12 markets on Dec. 25, Rocco said. That makes "Ali" the sole wide bow on Christmas day, a Tuesday; however, the pre-holiday weekend has at least five pictures set for wide debuts.

A Beautiful Mind
Movieline (October 2001)

Remember Shine, the true story of a brilliant young pianist who descended into schizophrenia and obscurity and, with the crucial emotional support of a smart, caring woman, emerged into functionality and fame later in life? It won a Best Actor Oscar for then unknown Geoffrey Rush, and got picture, directing and screenwriting nominations (among others) as well. This yearâs A Beautiful Mind is the true story of a brilliant young mathematician, John Forbes Nash Jr., who descended into schizophrenia and obscurity, and, with the crucial emotional support of a smart, caring woman, emerged into functionality and fame later in life (he won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994). The star of this film is no unknown, of course ö itâs last yearâs Best Actor Oscar winner Russell Crowe. Having won a gold statuette for playing A Beautiful Body, itâs savvy of Crowe to take on A Beautiful Mind. In real life, Crowe may not seem the most likely bloke to cast as someone who advanced "game theory" in contemporary mathematical economic models, but he is, in fact, brilliant at creating the intelligent surface under which deep, unreachable waters roil. He was nominated for doing just that in The Insider. Ron Howard may not strike everyone as the director to guide Crowe to his third Best Actor nomination, particularly in this kind of insular story, but go take another look at what he did with Apollo 13. Not many directors could have so enthrallingly conveyed what the hell three guys all dressed alike and crammed in a teeny, metallic space full of buttons and dials were doing inside their heads to save their lives. Nashâs emotional shepherd is played by Jennifer Connelly, whoâs been easy to underestimate ever since her days as a precociously gorgeous teen, but has grittily persevered and sunk her teeth into challenges like Requiem for a Dream. With luck, sheâs a perfect Best Supporting Actress nomination in the making. Part of the luck she (along with everyone else on this project) is going to need is for screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, whoâs been properly lambasted for writing Batman & Robin, to rise above his TV-movie mentality and keep this material as smart as it needs to be. A few gooey moves in the name of accessibility and the whole deal goes down the toilet. (Thanks to Ruth)

Mindful of Survival
By Glenn Whipp
c. 2001 Los Angeles Daily News (9/8/01)

Russell Crowe was still having bad dreams about making his new movie ãA Beautiful Mindä long after filming had ended and the Oscar-winning actor had returned to his ranch in Australia. Director Ron Howard faced his own nightmare: How do you make a movie about something as abstract as mathematics and turn it into a compelling film?

Of course, it helps to have a great story, and Akiva Goldsmanâs screenplay about the life of mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. has been a hot read around town for years. Nash developed trailblazing scientific formulas in the 1950s before suffering from schizophrenia. He recovered, however, and went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work.

ãItâs kind of a survival story with the pursuit of a balance between the mind and the heart at its center,ä Howard says. ãJohn Nash has lived through and continues to live through an amazing journey. These mathematicians really are artists in the ultimate sense of the word.ä

Crowe began work on the film 36 hours after winning an Oscar for "Gladiator." The actor brought his usual intensity to the set, but Howard expresses nothing but admiration for his leading man. Howard says Crowe never complained about nightmares, but heâs not exactly surprised to hear the news. ãHe gives every scene his all and doesnât go for the easy choices,ä Howard says. ãAnd this character is so difficult and challenging, a very complicated man who was constantly trying to break into the unknown. Getting inside that mind was not an easy thing to do.ä

A Beautiful Mind
Entertainment Weekly, August 24-31, 2001

"The story of a man's journey through genius, madness, and triumph."

DON'T WANT TO SCARE READERS AWAY," SAYS [Ron] Howard, "but the mind is almost a character in this movie." The noggin in question is the brilliant, tormented one belonging to schizophrenic Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., a role Tom Cruise flirted with before it ultimately went to Crowe. Connelly (Requiem for a Dream) costars as Nash's steadfast wife, Alicia, while Harris appears as a CIA operative looking to exploit Nash's genius for code-breaking purposes.

"I read his work," says Connelly, a former student at both Stanford and Yale, of deciphering Nash's writings on game theory. "Or tried to." But nothing prepared her for the intensity of the three-month shoot in New York and New Jersey. "There was one incredibly emotional scene that we ended up shooting for about three days," she says. "So it was that level of complete panic and fear and rage and anger and sadness over three days. Then I'd come home and get on the floor and do Play-Doh [with my 4-year-old son] for hours. It was my counterbalance."

Crowe, who went home to Australia when shooting ended, is still feeling the aftereffects. "He and I have been e-mailing"' says Howard. "The other day I said, 'I hope you're getting some rest.' He e-mailed back and said, 'Yeah, it's beautiful here. And my bad dreams have stopped."' Still, on the set the Oscarwinning actor did his best to lighten the atmosphere, particularly when filming his Nobel acceptance scene. "Here he is in his prosthetic makeup looking 65 years old, making this very emotional speech, but in between takes he's telling these off-color Australian jokes," says Howard. "Finally at about two in the morning when we really needed the crowd to react, he pulled out his Oscar from a paper bag. And it worked!" (Film opens Dec. 25)

A Portrait of John Forbes Nash Jr.'s Shattered Brilliance
By Nina Darton
The New York Times, June 3, 2001

PRINCETON, N.J. -- ON a fine spring day, with the Princeton campus in fragrant, pastel bloom, John Forbes Nash Jr., winner of the 1994 Nobel in economic science, is making his daily rounds. He spends the morning at home, working on computations for an article he is hoping to publish. About noon, he stops in at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he eats lunch and talks shop with some colleagues at the math table. Finally, in the late afternoon, he enters his campus office at Fine Hall, the mathematics building, where he is meeting a reporter for an interview.

He has come a long way from the time when, known as "The Phantom of Fine Hall," his feet bare, his hair long and dirty, his teeth worn down to stumps, he haunted this building in a bizarre caricature of an academic life, corralling students, ranting about religious prophecies, finding empty classrooms and scrawling formulas on the blackboards.

The remarkable journey of the boy genius who sank into paranoid schizophrenia for 30 years and then emerged to win the Nobel Prize for work completed before his breakdown is the subject of "A Beautiful Mind," a film being directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe as Mr. Nash and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Alicia.

The title is taken from a 1998 biography of Mr. Nash by Sylvia Nasar, a former reporter for The New York Times, but the filmmakers are quick to point out that the movie is not a literal biography. Instead, they say, they used Mr. Nash's story as inspiration for a broader attempt to depict the process and ravages of mental illness and to find a visual analogy for it.

"The film uses the architecture of Nash's life in the broadest possible sense," said Akiva Goldsman, the screenwriter. "We hit landmarks -- genius, marriage, Nobel prize, illness -- and that became the frame on which to hang dramatic anecdotes that I'd like to believe are true to the spirit of John and Alicia's lives. It is certainly not factual and never pretends to be. Most of the things that happen in the movie didn't happen in John's life."

Mr. Howard and his partner in Imagine Entertainment, the producer Brian Grazer, had long been interested in developing a film about mental illness; they had shepherded two previous projects on the subject to the script stage. But they felt that they had never solved the inherent dramatic problem of the material: how to take the mystery of the human mind and make it visually and dramatically compelling; how to create images for things that are intellectual and potentially static and at the same time present a human story that transcends these obstacles.

Mr. Goldsman's script met the challenge with strong characterizations and a powerful love story at its center. It also employs twists and surprises. Most important, it tries to present mental illness in a way that doesn't allow viewers to keep it at arms' length; the aim is to draw them into the experience from Mr. Nash's point of view.

Mr. Howard's interest in mental illness began with a childhood trauma. When he was an 8-year-old star on "The Andy Griffith Show" in the early 1960's, he witnessed the sudden mental collapse of a guest actor while the camera was rolling. "He was sitting in a chair, doing his dialogue," Mr. Howard said on the set at St. Marks Church in the East Village during a recent break from shooting. "Within a few moments he wasn't making sense, and by the time people realized he needed help, he was on the floor in the fetal position. It was one of the most extraordinary, intense, terrifying things I ever witnessed."

For Mr. Grazer, the lure of the project was the chance to explore the connection between madness and genius and, ultimately, to present a story of human survival and triumph. But the triumph is not of the usual Hollywood variety; here, it is subtle and complex. "The triumph isn't that he beat schizophrenia, because he didn't," Mr. Grazer said. "The triumph isn't that he won the Nobel -- it's a great thing, but it isn't the singular triumph. The triumph is that his mind, his soul, his spirit, his intelligence, all of that survived against the will of the madness of schizophrenia. He was still able to engage."

The principals involved in the film express a respect for Mr. Nash and his wife bordering on awe. It's easy to see why. The story of his rapid ascent and devastating decline is the stuff of classical tragedy. At his height, he was brilliant, handsome, arrogant, a luminous star in Princton's renowned mathematics department. At his lowest point, deeply delusional, he was repeatedly hospitalized against his will. Finally, living with Alicia, who had divorced him in desperation and then took him in when, with no place to go, he begged her to protect him, he spent his days wandering the streets of Princeton, impoverished, paranoid, laughed at by the neighborhood children, sheltered not only by Alicia but also by the mathematical community.

"She was unemployed, on welfare, raising their kid, nonetheless still young and beautiful and hoping to pick up her life again," said Ms. Nasar, who, though not involved with the film, occasionally visits the set at locations throughout New York and New Jersey. "But she could not bear to turn him away, so she took him in. And this is a big part of this script, and I think that's right. Because that's why this guy survived, because people like that usually don't survive." The Nashes, who never remarried, have remained together.

Mr. Nash's behavior seemed odd right from the beginning. To his colleagues in Princeton's elite graduate program in 1948, the personality of this loner was more an indication of brilliance than of potential madness. He entered Princeton with a one- line recommendation from his college adviser: "This man is a genius." Within 14 months, he had produced the Nash Equilibrium, the paper on game theory that won him the Nobel in economic science almost half a century later. (He shared the prize with John C. Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten.) Yet, according to Ms. Nasar, Mr. Nash's reputation rests not just on game theory but also on his work in pure mathematics, for which there is no Nobel Prize. "What he won the Nobel for is the most trivial thing he ever did," one mathematician told her.

He was drawn to problems that other mathematicians thought unsolvable and in some cases actually solved them. "He just went ahead and did it," Ms. Nasar said, "and to have that kind of inner certainty is a little crazy. It's also a certain level of genius."

Although Mr. Goldsman had never met Mr. Nash before he wrote the script, the character he created after reading "A Beautiful Mind" is surprisingly similar to the John Nash whom Ms. Nasar came to know. "The kind of mono-dimensional involvement in mathematics, the dry sense of humor, this incredible self- confidence which could at times appear to be arrogance, the complete focus on things and ideas instead of people, the social isolation ÷ all this is reflected in the script," she said.

But only a hint of all that is reflected in a conversation with the John Nash of today. At 72, Mr. Nash is still handsome but thinner and more delicate-looking than he appears in photographs as a youth. He gives an impression of sweetness, even innocence, far from the brash, competitive young man described in the book. He speaks softly and articulately, answering questions in a straightforward way. He is willing to talk about his years of mental illness but admits that his memory is limited.

His memory is sufficient, however, to cast some light into the obscure corridors of a schizophrenic's mind. He rationally explains his system of delusions like an interpreter from a distant planet. He also tries to explain the process of his recovery. In the early, florid years of his illness, he says, he was hospitalized, under supervision and taking medication. He responded in the sense that his symptoms abated, he says, but it was not until years later, in the late 1980's, when the illness slowly and mysteriously began to retreat without medication, that he began to make real progress.

"Before, I was behaving rationally for short periods and I was renouncing my delusions, but I always went back to them," he said. "It's only by a gradual process that I escaped from them more philosophically, like escaping from a cult."

It would seem that these observations would be useful to Russell Crowe, who has the difficult job of portraying Mr. Nash from the time he entered Princeton at 19 through his deterioration and eventual recovery in his 60's. But Mr. Crowe has refrained from interviewing Mr. Nash, although he did run into him on the set one day and observed him informally, engaging him in a short chat and offering him a cup of tea.

Mr. Crowe has tried to immerse himself in the character in other ways: he examined what few early photographs of Mr. Nash exist, and he listened to taped interviews with Mr. Nash and with patients with similar disorders. He relied heavily on Ms. Nasar's biography. "She wrote that his way of speaking was `ornamental and Olympian,' for example," he said. "I tended to grab onto lines like that."

Although he has not visited any mental hospitals to observe schizophrenic patients, he said, he believes that such a field trip would be unnecessary under his present circumstances. "I'm staying in New York City," he says. "I go for a walk every Sunday and I do my research."

At first glance, Mr. Crowe's brash Aussie persona seems incompatible with the gentle, polite and soft-spoken John Nash of today. Intelligent, thoughtful, witty and articulate, Mr. Crowe is also abrupt, impatient and self-confident to the point of arrogance. He tries to control the conversation by both asking and answering his own questions ÷ a job he does very well. His manner, however, is not so far from that of the young John Nash, the cocky, overbearing mathematical star Ms. Nasar describes.

Mr. Crowe says bridging the chasm between the elderly Mr. Nash we see today and the youthful one he portrays is one of his major challenges. Comparing this role to his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Jeffrey S. Wigand, the tobacco industry whistle-blower in "The Insider," Mr. Crowe notes that with Mr. Wigand, whose story took place only a few years before the making of the film, he had a model on which to base his character.

"I had so much evidence staring me in the face," he said. "Wigand was slightly overweight, he had hair of this shape, he parted it this way, he always wore glasses like this, this is how his hands moved when he talked. I couldn't step away from that."

But John Nash is different. "We don't have footage of Nash as a young man. We don't know what his voice sounded like before medicine and illness and old age. I've had to assume so much of the physicality as a younger man that if I zero in on him too much as he is now, I will be playing him post disease, and post 30 years of trauma."

So, like Mr. Goldsman and Mr. Howard, Mr. Crowe is using Mr. Nash as an inspiration rather than a template. Noticing that Mr. Nash has beautiful, graceful hands, for example, Mr. Crowe let his own nails grow and concentrated on the way his character uses his fingers. For him, the physicality of the disease is grounded in Mr. Nash's hands.

In the end, it may be that the artists who take inspiration from someone's life come as close to getting it right as the historians who document it. As Mr. Goldsman said, referring to the liberties he took in writing the screenplay: "There's a tendency to think that's an audacious thing to do. It's really a humble thing to do. How do you tell the truth about a life?"ÊÊ(© Copyright The New York Times, 2001)

Fairleigh Dickinson University Becomes Setting for Russell Crowe Film
By James A. Duffy
Daily Record (Morristown, NJ)
April 28, 2001

Florham Park Campus selected because of Vanderbilt Mansion

Fresh from his Oscar-winning role as a general who became a slave, who became a gladiator, Russell Crowe is now playing a bisexual paranoid schizophrenic who wins a Nobel Prize.

Filming for "A Beautiful Mind" began last month in New York, and crews were at Princeton University before arriving at the Florham Park campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University this week.

Ron Howard, director of the $40-million movie, chose the local site because of its Vanderbilt Mansion, long the centerpiece of the campus. The 100-room Georgian-style masterpiece was built in 1897 and replicated a wing in Henry VIIIâs Hampton Court. It boasts Italian marble interior decorations and a ballroom and drawing room now used for meetings and special events.

Howard, who directed "Backdraft" and "Apollo 13" among others, chose the red-brick home because it most replicates the Massachusetts governorâs mansion, where a large party scene in the film takes place.

"It has sort of made the campus momentarily into a different place," said Jane Harvey, an FDU spokeswoman.

Although some film students were able to help around the closed set during the two days of shooting Thursday and Friday, extras in the film include those already in the industry, who signed up in February, Harvey said.

Cyrel Lauz, an FDU sophomore, said he made a point of walking by the set but didnât see anyone famous although he did see some of the extras. "They were wearing tuxedos, and big flowing skirts, like you wear to the prom," Lauz said.

Students werenât overly excited about the action on campus but most thought it was "pretty cool," he said.

The film, which also stars Ed Harris, Judd Hirsch, Christopher Plummer and Jennifer Connelly is the true story of John Forbes Nash Jr., played by Crowe.

A 21-year-old Princeton graduate student in 1950, Nash formulated a theorem that enabled the arcane field of game theory to become an important influence in modern economics and political science. He seemed poised for even greater success, but in 1959 he was institutionalized and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Nash had a varied sexual life as well, which included intense relationships with men, an arrest for indecent exposure in a menâs restroom and the fathering of a child out of wedlock.

The film, due in theatres Dec. 14, will focus on Nashâs relationship with his wife and the path his life took from success to mental illness to recovery. For his pioneering work, he eventually won the Nobel Prize on Oct. 11, 1994.

(Thanks to Lisa)

Elite Students Are Crazy About Crowe
By Pal Grandal
Film magazine (Norway), March 29, 2001

Women students at Princeton University do whatever it takes to get a glimpse of their gladiator Russell Crowe.

The fresh Oscar winner Russell Crowe has arrived Princeton University in New Jersey to make his new film "A Beautiful Mind", the story about the schizophrenic math genius John Forbes Nash.

Crowe's arrival has caused a state of chaos among the female students at the elite university. Many have volunteered to wash the film set, yes, they'll do anything to get a glimpse of their idol.

To say that some of the girls are, er, enthusiastic, is like saying the second World War was a small fist fight, says one of the students to Peoplenews. The luckiest students are seemingly the theater students, because many of them have gotten jobs as production assistants on the film. Another student also says that the plastic-cups Crowe drinks of have become an object of trading among the women.

(Translation by and thanks to Astrid)