Word: whedon
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...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...
...They say it's two weeks' work on one character. Four months later, you're still on the picture." While on the job, you must be, in the words of talent agent Jeremy Zimmer, "an artist, a technician and a diplomat" -- jobs that may be mutually exclusive. The trick, Whedon says, is to "know how to please people without turning work into junk...
Writers with the same creative guarantee as directors? Nah, it'll never work. Attend to this New Hollywood joke, from Joss Whedon: "They switch directors because something is very wrong. They switch writers because it's Tuesday...
Screenplay by JOHN WHEDON...