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
