FIVE WRITERS WHO DISOWNED THE MOVIES THEY WROTE
Screenwriting for movies is a weird job. Even though the screenwriter is the person conceiving the blueprint for what a movie is going to be, they really don’t have much say over the finished product. In fact, there was a well known Hollywood screenwriter in the 1990s who insisted that he wanted written on his gravestone - “I did it their way”. Another defined the movie writing process as “one person writing the script and 100 people being brought on to fuck it up.” Sometimes, this is true. Other times, those 100 people can make the screenwriter look better than they actually are.
But today we’re sticking with the negative. Here are five times screenwriters have thought their work was compromised and, as a result, have gone on to disown it.
5: 50 SHADES OF GREY
Screenwriter Kelly Marcel said she was "heartbroken" by the writing process on Fifty Shades of Grey and has still not seen the finished movie. When Marcel handed in her script, she said studio bosses were positive. But the book’s author EL James was not enamoured.
"Erika was like, 'This isn't what I want it to be and I don't think this is the film the fans are looking for'," she said. "My heart really was broken by that process, I really mean it. I don't say it out of any kind of bitterness or anger or anything like that. I just don't feel like I can watch it without feeling some pain about how different it is to what I initially wrote."
Award winning playwright Patrick Marber was hired to re-work Marcel’s script. Not sure what happened there, but according to sources, he hasn’t bothered to see the movie either.
The screenplay for the sequel Fifty Shades Darker was written by EL James’s husband - television writer Niall Leonard. Leonard must’ve been more sympatico with James’s vision because he was also hired to write the third film - Fifty Shades Darker.
4: ASSASSINS
The first produced screenplay by the Wachowskis was Assassins, a 1995 action film starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, and Julianne Moore.
The Wachowskis sold the script to Warner Bros in 1994 as part of a three picture deal, which included the screenplays to Bound andThe Matrix. However, before Assassins went into production, the movie was rewritten by screenwriter Brian Helgeland to make it more of a traditional action movie and develop a love story between Stallone and Moore's characters.
The Wachowskis were so unhappy with the finished product that they asked the Writers Guild of America to remove their names from the title credits. The WGA denied the request.
3: SISTER ACT
The 1992 Whoopi Goldberg comedy Sister Act was written by “Joseph Howard”. But Joseph Howard doesn’t exist. Playwright and novelist Paul Rudnick initially developed Sister Act in the late 1980s as a satire of wholesome 1960s musicals like The Singing Nun.
Disney bought Rudnick's treatment with the idea of Bette Midler starring in it. When Midler passed, Disney executives had the script reworked by over a half-dozen screenwriters until it turned into the exact movie it was supposed to satirise.
Rudnick asked Disney if he could be credited with a pseudonym. Disney agreed, pending approval of the name.
Rudnick takes up the story: “I first suggested R. Chasuble, after Reverend Chasuble, the priest in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The Disney executive was skeptical. I came up with “Screenplay by Goofy.” He wasn’t amused. So I joined the first name of a character from a story I’d written to my brother’s middle name and arrived at the blandly inoffensive ‘Joseph Howard’. This was rubber-stamped by the studio, even though it sounds like the name of someone who helped found the Mormon Church.”
Rudnick has never watched the movie.
2: M*A*S*H
Ring Lardner Jr is credited with writing the screenplay for the classic 1970 Korean War comedy M*A*S*H, based on the novel by Richard Hooker about a medical unit that uses humour to help them through the hell of war.
But Lardner’s problem was that director Robert Altman encouraged his cast to chuck out the written dialogue and improvise. The result was similar to what would become the Curb Your Enthusiasm model in which the story provides the framework and the cast provide the hilarious dialogue. Lardner was furious the actors didn’t say the words he’d written for them, but the film was a runaway hit and he was later only too happy to accept the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
1: NATURAL BORN KILLERS
Quentin Tarantino wrote Natural Born Killers while he was still working at Video Archives on Manhattan Beach, California. The movie, about two mass-murderers-on-the-run, came out of a burst of writing activity for Tarantino, which also includedTrue Romance and Reservoir Dogs. Back then, Tarantino called the film Mickey and Mallory and sold it to Oliver Stone for $10,000. The script was heavily revised by Stone, along with screenwriter David Veloz and associate producer Richard Rutowski, with Tarantino ending up with just a story credit.
Tarantino went to see the movie in a theatre when it was first released and walked out soon after it started.
Now you can buy his original script, which has been published in book form, for $26.90 on Amazon.