LARRY LASKER

Although I grew up with parents in the movie business, I always intended to make a career in medicine. After college I returned to work with the doctor I had worked for during summer vacations, but started spending more and more time hanging out at the American Film Institute, where my brother Albert (now Alex) was enrolled, attending seminars and screenings and crewing for student films, until the doctor finally suggested I seemed more interested in movies than medicine and maybe I should get that out of my system...

I worked as a prop man for a while and then landed a job as a script reader with United Artists, a job my brother had vacated to write his first screenplay, and I read so many lousy scripts with fancy names attached to them I finally decided I could do at least as badly myself and quit after a year and a half to write one with my college friend Walter Parkes. I had seen a TV show about Stephen Hawking and was fascinated by the idea that one day he might figure out the unified field theory but, due to his condition, wouldn't be able to communicate it to anyone. This suggested he needed someone to mentor, who could understand him, and this in turn suggested the character of a troubled kid who was was too smart for his environment.

When I was a reader, I learned that executives almost never read anything themselves, they read "coverage', the 2 or 3 pages we readers write to summarize scripts ‐‐ and even the 15‐ or 20‐page "treatments" writers submit for script proposals. So when we left the offices of an executive we had hoped to pitch our idea to but his assistant said was too busy to meet with us, I left a 2 1/2 page "coverage" of our idea on his vacant desk. He called us in the next day and we had our deal, which included several months of intensive research into the worlds of science and technology, visits to the Rand Corporation and Stanford Research Institute and Xerox PARC. This was when we discovered that a kid, alone in his bedroom, could access virtually any facility in the world through what was in 1979 still only for hobbyists, a home computer. He could think he was playing some new game from a computer‐games company, but in reality, he had hacked into the simulations system of NORAD.

WarGames opened in 1983 and was the closing night film at the Cannes Film Festival, and our script was nominated by the Academy for Best Original Screenplay. Walter and I made five movies together, including Awakenings, which we produced and was nominated for Best Picture in 1990 (as well as Best Screenplay by Steve Zaillian and Best Actor for Robert De Niro), and Sneakers, in 1992, with a cast that included Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Sidney Poitier, and River Phoenix.