Word: script
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...dialogue, a plot perplex -- that the moguls think is broken. And to fix it quick. "When you're staring down the gun barrel of a release date," says Robert Towne, whose uncredited work on Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather and other films has made him chief surgeon in the Script Doctors' Clinic, fixing a film amounts to "grace under fire...
...this for pressure? A major studio release is due to start shooting in two weeks, and you've been assigned to rewrite it. That was the lucky predicament Joss Whedon found himself in with a script called, appropriately, Speed. It had, Whedon admits, "a great premise: a bomb on a bus, and if it goes under 50 miles an hour, it blows up." What it needed, he says, was "a gussying up of the plot and a total overhaul of characters and motivation." In two weeks Whedon turned the original bad guy (Jeff Daniels) into the buddy of hero Keanu...
Thus, with only one credited screenplay (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Whedon joins a legendary legion of rewriters. And legion they are, for doctoring is the rule more than the exception. Only three of the 37 scribes who gagged up The Flintstones movie received credit. Paul Rudnick wrote the original script for Sister Act and the final version of The Addams Family, but his name was on neither film. Carrie Fisher did a polish on Sister Act, but her work was anonymous, as it was on Hook, Made in America and Lethal Weapon 3. On Wolf, Wesley Strick's surgery earned...
...Script doctors have been in demand since the late '20s, when Hollywood made pictures talk. The industry still feeds on lore about how some films' most indelible scenes -- say, the final words of A Star Is Born ("Mrs. Norman Maine") or Casablanca ("Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship") -- were the last-minute inspirations of uncredited writers or producers. Or about how David O. Selznick, in the middle of making Gone With the Wind, closed down production and asked writer Ben Hecht to save the picture. Hecht cobbled a few scenes, urged Selznick to adhere more...
Strick took over Wolf from novelist Jim Harrison, and Batman Returns from the brilliant Daniel Waters (Heathers). "Sometimes I feel like a burglar," says Strick. "It's like being invited to someone's house for a week and rifling through their drawers. Being assigned to rewrite a script by a really good writer, you may think that all you're doing is taking this wonderfully idiosyncratic thing and homogenizing it into a 'Hollywood' movie. But sometimes, after two or three years and three or four rewrites, the original writer can get ground down and fed up. Personalities can get flinty...