Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman was "startled" when he heard that Vatican cardinals were condemning his next picture, the hotly anticipated film version of "The Da Vinci Code." "Then I was concerned," he muses, "and then I realized that the Vatican doesn't like condoms either, and a lot of people buy those."

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"I'm the guy who wrote the screenplay that every single person has read the book of. That's a lot of people going, 'Let me tell what I imagined…."

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He follows what seems to be the classic rule book on how to become a successful Hollywood screenwriter. He swears by screenwriting guru Robert McKee, eschews writing original scripts, and worships at the altar of the three-act structure. "The screenplays I write are formally very predictable," Goldsman says. "They're essentially the one-page version of a clothing dummy. They have two legs, a middle, two arms and a head. I can dress them up pretty on a good day, but the structure is simple, and I like that."

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When Goldsman first read "The Da Vinci Code," it wasn't a bestseller, merely an interesting galley floating around Hollywood. That had changed by the time he and Howard sat down with Brown more than a year later in a hotel room at the Toronto Four Seasons. "There were two cultures staring across the table at each other," recalls Goldman. "We were the movie. He was the novel…. He [was thinking,] I'm sure, that our agenda was just to change everything." Adding to the intrigue is that Brown had written his own version of the script, which no one to this day has seen.

The sides came together over, of all things, codes. Brown was pleased to find out that the pair was fascinated by the use of such mysteries in the book and that Howard wanted to add more codes to the film (which he's done). The ice was broken, so much so that Brown hung around the set "a good third of the time," says Goldsman.