Eric Roth chuckles into his bristly silver beard when I refer to him as the new kid on the block, but that doesn’t make it any less true. His debut play, an adaptation of the 1952 western High Noon, is about to receive its world premiere, and the fact that he turned 80 last year is neither here nor there. “Maybe I’m the old new kid on the block,” he concedes from his home in Los Angeles. His baseball cap bears a picture of a typewriter, as though there could be any doubt that he has writing on the brain.
Admittedly, Roth is more experienced than the typical first-timer. Behind him lies not so much a hinterland of a career as an imposing mountain range, all of it in movies. He won an Oscar in 1995 for writing Forrest Gump: he’s the one you can credit (or blame) for lines such as: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
