Slices from Dj's life

“A Beautiful Mind” makes it the Top10 list of many. The movie is indeed great. Director Ron Howard has done a marvelous job and then theres stellar acting by Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly.

I have the habit of searching for information and trivia related to a movie after I finish watching it (esp. if it were based on true incidents). What follows is what I got from Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Forbes Nash. The movie is quite biased and taken such a way that the audience feels sympathetic towards John Nash. It doesn’t tell us that:

• John Nash fathered an out-of-wedlock son with a Boston nurse.
• He had made numerous anti-Semitic comments during his period of extreme mental illness, most of which linked Jews and world Communism.
• Nash had recurring liaisons with other men.
• He shared the Nobel Prize with Reinhard Selten and János Harsányi.
• Nash blamed Alicia for twice committing him to a mental institution and the copule had divorced in 1962.
• More can be read in detail here.

Matt Drudge says the movie makers thought that including Nash’s homosexual experiences would hurt ‘A Beautiful Mind’ at the box office.

And finally, the speech he gives at the Nobel Prize Ceremony. It never happened.

I’ve always believed in numbers, in the equations and logics that lead to reason, but after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, what truly is logic, who decides reason, my quest has taken me through the physical and metaphysical, the delusional, and back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life, it is only in the mysterious equation of love, that any logical reasons can be found, I am only here tonight because of you, you are the reason I am, you are all my reasons. Thank you.

The only speech he gave was at a party at Princeton. Sylvia Nasar mentions:

He was not inclined to give speeches, he said, but he had three things to say. First, he hoped that getting the Nobel would improve his credit rating because he really wanted a credit card. Second, he said that one is supposed to say that one is glad he is sharing the prize, but he wished he had won the whole thing because he really needed the money badly. Third, Nash said that he had won for game theory and that he felt that game theory was like string theory, a subject of great intrinsic intellectual interest that the world wishes to imagine can be of some utility. He said it with enough skepticism in his voice to make it funny.

Well, its true that if any of the above were actually included in the movie, it’d have lost its charm. I pay my respect to Alicia Nash.

Tags: movies

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