Essay About Victim Of A Whisper Campaign And John Nash

Beautiful Mind
Beautiful Mind
LOS ANGELES, March 15 — John Nash says he is not an anti-Semite. He says he
is not a homosexual. Nor, he says, did he try to conceal any of his
deficiencies as a father or any humiliating episodes in an attempt to
glamorize his life.
To combat those rumors, Mr. Nash, a Nobel laureate whose triumph over
schizophrenia is chronicled in the Oscar-nominated film “A Beautiful Mind,”
feels obliged to go on national television: he will appear on Sundays
edition of “60 Minutes.” Some in the film industry say he is actually the
victim of a whisper campaign whose aim is to scuttle the movies Oscar
hopes, a phenomenon they say has become increasingly common in the intense
competition for Academy Awards.
“This may not be the worst year in Oscar history, but its pretty low,” said
Pete Hammond, a film historian and consultant for American Movie Classics.
“To accuse the subject of a film of being anti-Semitic when you know that a
lot of the people who will be voting on the Oscars are Jewish, well, thats
really down and dirty.”
The whisper campaigns, which reach a peak during Oscar balloting, are
fueled, the films supporters say, by the Internet, by a fascination with
tabloid-type scandals and by the rise of private Oscar strategists hired by
the studios.
But even in that context, the campaign against “A Beautiful Mind” has struck
many in Hollywood as particularly brutal.
“Its getting nastier,” Mr. Hammond said. “Its like a political campaign
now. You get these so-called Oscar consultants who go out there thinking,
What kind of dirt can we dig up?”
The reports so upset Sylvia Nasar, a former economics reporter for The New
York Times and the author of the book (also titled “A Beautiful Mind”) on
which the movie was based, that she published a commentary in The Los
Angeles Times on Wednesday defending Mr. Nash and excoriating journalists
who, she said, “invented facts about Nash and his wife, Alicia.”
For example, the reports about adultery, she noted, ignore information in
her book that makes it clear that an affair that led to the birth of Mr.
Nashs first son was over by the time he married Alicia Larde.
And a letter that a newspaper cited, saying that it revealed him to be a
“rabid anti-Semite,” was written, she said, after his doctors had diagnosed
his condition as paranoid schizophrenia and when he “also believed himself
to be Job, a slave in chains, the emperor of Antarctica and a messiah . . .
Reports about the portrayal of Mr. Nash in “A Beautiful Mind” appeared in
December and January on the Web on gossip sites like Matt Drudges
www.drudgereport.com, and in various newspaper gossip columns, as well as in
some of the films reviews, including one in The New York Times; more
reports appeared later in The Hollywood Reporter and from The Associated
Press, among other sources. Some simply pointed out that the films
director, Ron Howard, and its screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, had strayed from