Eric Roth

Though he emerged directly from film school to become a professional screenwriter, Eric Roth spent the first half of his career struggling to find his footing. After two box office duds in the late-1970s, Roth waited another nine years for his next credited project, "Suspect" (1987), which itself suffered from a lack of audience interest. It was not until his Oscar-winning adaptation of "Forrest Gump" (1994) that Roth began to emerge as a prominent Hollywood scribe. But his career almost took a turn toward disaster with his next film, "The Postman" (1997), a sci-fi epic that proved to be almost ruinous for all involved, especially Roth, who had, up to that point, a trail of failures and only one success. Things began an upward trajectory that rarely wavered off course when he wrote the excellent drama, "The Insider" (1999), which earned critical kudos for its complex and richly developed tale about a real-life whistleblower who risks everything to tell the truth about the tobacco industry. Ever since that film, Roth churned out scripts for several more notable films - including "Munich" (2005) and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008) - which finally helped land him on secure ground while becoming one of the most highly sought-after screenwriters working in Hollywood.