Originally published May 10, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1486

Let us now consider the strange case of Akiva Goldsman.

I have never met Akiva Goldsman. I doubt he knows me from a hole in the ground. Well, actually, okay, that’s not entirely true. I mean, if you had me standing next to a hole in the ground and asked Akiva Goldsman, “Okay, which one is Peter David and which one is a hole in the ground,” I’d say the odds are pretty good that he could probably differentiate between the two, if for no other reason than holes in the ground very rarely have names. My point—and there is one buried in the foregoing somewhere—is that I doubt I’m anywhere on his radar.

However, Akiva Goldsman made my life very miserable for a time. For as any fan will tell you, Goldsman was the (and I use the term loosely) writer of Batman Forever. It was a supremely ghastly script. Although it was not as ghastly as Batman and Robin, a film that as near as I was able to determine was produced for the sole purpose of making Batman Forever look like Citizen Kane.

I shall never forget attending the special sneak preview for Batman and Robin, arranged for DC Comics personnel. The cringing, the gasps, the moans, the guys calling out “Feed me, Seymour” when Poison Ivy’s plant showed up. But the single moment that made the biggest impression upon me was when Batman whipped out his personalized charge card, and Denny O’Neil (sitting two rows back) let out a howl of agony that would have rivaled anything one might have heard while cruising any of the circles of Hell.

So that was Batman and Robin. But Batman Forever was my personal little nightmare because I did the novelization of it.

I learned to hate the screenwriting of Akiva Goldsman during that time with a fiery passion that burned hotter than a thousand suns. The wretchedness of the dialogue, the preposterous sequences. Me, I knew I was writing a novel that comic book fans might pick up on the strength of my name, and I had to find ways to make the abominable script palatable to those very discerning critics.

So I did everything I could, used every trick at my disposal, to make the lousy script readable as a novel. No matter how absurd, no matter how “un-Batman” a line of dialogue might have been, I did everything I could to try and justify why Batman (or Robin) might say it.

As for the plot holes, well… I admit that every screenplay I’ve ever novelized had some holes in it. Movies are told in a sort of visual shorthand, but when you’re converting one to a novel, it’s more problematic. Audiences are more likely to accept a development on screen because, well, they’re seeing it, and seeing is believing. Or they’re willing to let themselves be carried along by the pace set by the director. The classic example is when Indiana Jones says he’s going to find a way to follow the Nazi truck carrying the Lost Ark. When asked how, he replies, “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.” Next thing you know, bang, he’s on horseback and off we go. Can’t really do that in a book. Well, you can, but it makes for a weak read.

But geez, Batman Forever had plot holes you could drive a Nazi truck through. So as I encountered them, I found ways to fix them. I’d come up with all sorts of scenes to fill the gaps. Unfortunately, as I was doing that, they were busy filming the movie and apparently encountering the same plot holes. Next thing I knew, I was getting faxed new script pages with the plot holes “fixed,” except invariably they were slapdash one or two sentence patches. But I had to use them, because they were “official.” So I’d have to dump the work I’d done and substitute material I felt was inferior. This happened constantly while I was writing it, and it made me so crazed that I swore off novelizations for a good long time (although the worst novelizing experience I ever heard of was Warren Beatty’s apparently going out of his way to drive poor Max Allan Collins nuts when Al was novelizing Dick Tracy.)

And let’s not even get into Lost in Space, except to say that Bill Mumy could blow out his nose a better script than Goldsman produced (and a better performance as an adult Will Robinson than the guy they hired could turn out on his best day.)

So you understand that, however much antipathy you guys might feel for Goldsman’s work, I have far more personal reasons to think that Akiva Goldsman, if faced with a paper bag, would be hard put to write his way out of it.

With all that…when he won the Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, I had one reaction and one reaction only: “Wow. Turns out the guy really can write.” It was a similar reaction I had to when Jennifer Connelly—she who was a block of wood in Labyrinth and single-handedly sucked the life out of every scene she was in during The Rocketeer—somehow developed acting chops enough to win Best Supporting.

I suppose part of it stems from my personal fantasy that someday I might win some big, major mainstream award. And all those people who think they have me pegged, who think they know exactly what I’m capable of writing and no more than that, will suddenly say, “Wow, we underestimated him. He’s the real deal.” So naturally I reacted the way that I envisioned others would react.

Well, apparently not. Apparently my fantasy is more than that; it’s a pipe dream. Witness reactions from around the net:

“Akiva Goldsman wrote Batman and Robin and can never be forgiven for that.”

“I expect the Apocalypse to be upon us any day now.”

“Lost in Space is the centerpiece of my Abiding Hate for Akiva Goldsman.”

“(Saying) ‘Academy Award-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman’… makes me want to vomit…”

“Total hack, who just happened to be on the right film at the right time. Sad, sad, sad.”

“I can’t believe one of the highest prizes for writing in ANY medium went to this guy.”

Interestingly, in the January/February 2002 issue of Creative Screenwriting, Goldsman was asked, “How do the vehemently negative Internet reactions to Batman and Robin affect you?” His reply, in part:

“You know, it’s disheartening. I stopped going on the Internet. It’s too discouraging… I encourage tremendously people’s opportunity to say and write what they want; I find the anonymity of it disheartening at times. People should have a voice and responsibility for that voice. I wish them well. But I never think that somebody sitting there, condemning something with that kind of vitriol, is particularly sophisticated. No one has loved Neal Adams’s Batman or Frank Miller’s Batman more than I. I was a comic collector, long before some of these people knew who Batman was. I’m proud of what worked about Batman Forever and proud of the work on Batman and Robin. No, I don’t think the movie works entirely, but I hope for people to be wiser about it.”

And he went on to say…

“It was very startling the first time I logged online to find people I don’t know wanting me dead… It’s a very unpleasant experience. I’m not interested in emotionally violent strangers. There’s enough difficulty in the world.”

I wonder what his reaction would have been to discover that his achievement not only failed to get him cred with his detractors, but only seemed to inflame them more. Well, perhaps when you win the Academy Award, you officially don’t have to care anymore.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

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