A Nearly Beautiful Mind
The film about love and madness that you didn't get to see.
By Anne Thompson
Love conquers schizophrenia--that was the crux of the matter for director Ron Howard. When a young man with a brilliant career succumbs to paranoid madness, the love of the person closest to him saves him from life in a mental ward. Although it sounds familiar, that story never made it to the screen. Written by Chris Gerolmo (Mississippi Burning), Laws of Madness was based on the unpublished autobiography of Michael Laudor, a schizophrenic who pushed past his delusions with the help of his father and earned a law degree from Yale. Imagine Entertainment bought the rights to Laudor's story in 1996, with Howard developing several drafts before passing the reins to Gerolmo.
The screenwriter included the narrative device of playing the first act of the story as though Laudor's paranoid delusions are real. The script attracted Brad Pitt to star, and Universal Studios, Gerolmo says, approved a $50 million budget. Then on June 17, 1998, tragedy struck. Laudor, a lawyer in his mid-30s, stabbed his pregnant fiancée with a knife, killing both mother and unborn child. "I didn't want to give up on it," Gerolmo says, "but it was no longer a story of a guy overcoming affliction." Meanwhile, Imagine had been monitoring a potentially competitive project, Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind, about mathematician John Nash, and snapped up the option in August 1998. One feature of Akiva Goldsman's script is the way that Nash's schizophrenic hallucinations are played out as though they are real. Imagine producer Brian Grazer worked on the narrative device with Goldsman and was adamant that the writer fool audiences into believing Nash's delusions.
When asked if the filmmakers had borrowed the device from Gerolmo, Grazer replies, "Gerolmo doesn't deserve any credit. They are two different movies with two different themes about two different people. Akiva had the idea of living through an alternate reality. It's impossible to explore the world of mental illness [without it]." A DVD of A Beautiful Mind lies unopened on Gerolmo's coffee table. "I haven't been able to watch it," he says. "I hear how similar it is. I assumed Nash's [story] would veer into very different terrain. Until this came out, I still believed that down the road, I would make Laws. I'm sad I'll never get to."
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