Beautiful Mind

LOS ANGELES, March 15 вЂ" 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 Sunday's

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 movie's 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 it's 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, that's

really down and dirty."

The whisper campaigns, which reach a peak during Oscar balloting, are

fueled, the film's 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.

"It's getting nastier," Mr. Hammond said. "It's 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.

Nash's 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 Drudge's

www.drudgereport.com, and in various newspaper gossip columns, as well as in

some of the film's 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 film's

director, Ron Howard, and its screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, had strayed from

the facts of Mr. Nash's life.

Among the charges were that Mr. Nash's early affair was airbrushed from the

story and that his frequent close relationships with male friends were also

missing (though Ms. Nasar wrote that none of her interviews turned up

evidence of homosexual relations). The reports also said that major

characters and incidents were invented and that the manner in which he

received the Nobel in economic science after nearly three decades of

debilitating schizophrenia was romanticized to provide a rousing climax for

the film.

The filmmakers responded that they knew that they had taken liberties. But

they did so, they said, with the approval of both Mr. Nash and Ms. Nasar.

Indeed, they said, the movie's structure is a calculated attempt to fool the

audience into sharing some of Mr. Nash's schizophrenic delusions.

"There is nothing that someone with this disease does that doesn't make

sense to them," Mr. Goldsman said. "To reflect that for the audience, I had

to convince the audience that what they were seeing was real and then rob

them of it."

When The Los Angeles Times reported that a representative for Miramax Films

had called