In 1985 he was chosen to be the head writer and associate producer of a comedy/variety show (San Diego's Passion) involving more than 100 actors, writers, musicians, and dancers. In 1986 he wrote a teleplay that was optioned for Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. However, the program was cancelled before the script could be produced, so Golden rewrote it as the short story "Common Time", which became a semi-finalist in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contest. An augmented version of the story was published many years later in the U.S. magazine Brutarian, as well as publications in Romania, Greece, Canada, and England.
