Intriguing ‘Mind’ Nearly Passed Ron Howard By

If 2000’s holiday blockbuster “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas” hadn’t eaten up a lot of Ron Howard’s time, the veteran director might never have made “A Beautiful Mind.”

This look at the career of mathematician and Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash Jr. didn’t come under Howard’s stewardship until late in the process. It was his longtime partner at Imagine Entertainment, Brian Grazer, who first saw its potential and brought it into the fold.

“I knew about it and was intrigued by the story,” Howard says. “But it was Brian’s project, and we never get in each other’s way. A project that Brian had nurtured I would never co-opt and try to control.”

Early on, Grazer did ask his friend and partner if he was interested. But Howard was still immersed in bringing Dr. Seuss’ crabby Christmas antihero to the big screen and had to take a pass. “But I told him, if it gets to the point that I could make the production start as early as another director, then I’d like to be able to consider doing it.

“Fortunately, after several flirtations with other directors and a few false starts, it was still available to me [once ‘Grinch’ was done]. So I took the script, re-read it, and about 36 hours later said yes.”

The Christmas Day release “A Beautiful Mind” is considered an Oscar contender (it’s been nominated for six Golden Globes), and some critics have called it the best movie of Howard’s career.

That’s saying something, considering he’s already been responsible for “Splash,” “Parenthood,” “Cocoon” and “Apollo 13.” But “A Beautiful Mind,” with its myriad twists, turns and misdirections, brings something new to Howard’s work. To say more about the plot would spoil the host of pleasant, expertly crafted surprises awaiting audiences; suffice it to say that, in the case of Nash, whose struggle with mental illness continues to this day, his life was rarely everything he believed it to be.

“It definitely packs more surprises, more twists, than any of my movies,” Howard says. “But what really attracted me was the unusual nature of his journey, the power of his journey and the idea that it offers, in a very dramatic, fascinating, even suspenseful way, real insight into this guy’s life. And not only into his mental illness, but also his genius, and the subculture of the academic elite.”

Howard’s work on “A Beautiful Mind” further validates a career decision he made nearly 25 years ago. A favorite of audiences since he was 5 years old and began his run as Opie on TV’s “The Andy Griffith Show,” Howard had nearly two decades of acting experience under his belt before directing his first movie. On television, he’d also appeared as the wholesome Richie Cunningham on “Happy Days”; in the movies, his credits included everything from “The Music Man” and “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” to “The Shootist” and “American Graffiti.”

Even while working alongside Griffith, “I had a lot of curiosity” about filmmaking, he says. “I didn’t ask a lot of questions, but people were always showing me things. I was looking through the camera, I was learning about lenses, learning about sound, talking to the directors--talking to them, as I got older, about why they chose the camera angles they chose. It was, no question, a great learning ground.”

His first commercial release as a director was “Grand Theft Auto” (1977). Produced by the legendary Roger Corman, whose low-budget films helped launch the careers of directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, it convinced Howard that becoming a director was more than just what-ifs.

“Professionally, our wrap party on that film was one of the highlights of my life,” he explains, “not because I was finished, but because I realized when it was over that I had enjoyed the experience of directing a film even more than I thought I would. I thought that, this dream of mine, I was right to have this dream.”

Five years later, he directed “Night Shift,” a comedy with his “Happy Days” co-star Henry Winkler and Michael Keaton as entrepreneurs who turn a morgue into a brothel. That film was his first hit; 1984’s “Splash,” with Tom Hanks as a fruit wholesaler and Darryl Hannah as the mermaid he falls in love with, was his first smash.

Since then, outside of the occasional Griffith or “Happy Days” reunion, Howard has left acting behind. Last fall’s “Grinch” proved his biggest financial success; “A Beautiful Mind” should prove his most aesthetically successful work--even more so than 1995’s “Apollo 13,” which earned Howard a Directors Guild of America award as the year’s top director.

Perhaps Howard will receive the Oscar recognition he’s so far been denied; even when he was cited by the DGA for “Apollo 13,” he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar--a strange oversight, given that many of the same people vote for the two awards.

And though he’s too smart to count on anything, he’s ready to embrace an Oscar nomination, should it come his way.

“Everybody wants their films to be appreciated and respected at every level,” he says. “Of course, I hope ‘A Beautiful Mind’ is accepted in that way. I wish I’d been nominated and won for ‘Apollo 13.’ I’d be lying if I didn’t say that. But I don’t know what factors go into what is an impossible choice to begin with. It’s never [comparing] apples to apples anyway--God knows what colors those choices.”

The subject of Oscars and Ron Howard, however, raises an interesting issue. Howard isn’t the only successful director whose background is primarily as an actor on TV sitcoms--both Rob Reiner (“All in the Family”) and Penny Marshall (“Laverne & Shirley”) come to mind. Both have directed films that have received multiple Oscar nominations. Neither has been nominated as best director either.

So what gives? Is there some sort of conspiracy afoot, to withhold Oscar recognition from sitcom-stars-turned-directors?

“It’s hard for me to believe that could exist, but ain’t it ironic?” Howard says with a laugh. “I kind of have to wear a bemused grin and scratch my head. But I feel too good about the work I have done; I know I could have been a legitimate candidate a few times.”

To put things in perspective, Howard recalls the heady days after the release of “Cocoon” in 1985, when he was nominated for his first DGA award. Campaigning heavily for award recognition, he showed up pretty much everywhere, hitting the talk-show circuit, even serving as host of NBC’s “Friday Night Videos.” But when the Oscar nominations were announced, he hadn’t made the cut. Among those who did was legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, for “Ran.”

“But then,” Howard relates with a grin, “as a friend told me, ‘Akira Kurosawa does not host ‘Friday Night Videos.’”

Chris Kaltenbach writes for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.