Miracle Surgery

By RICHARD CORLISS

Old hollywood joke: a movie executive at a story conference exclaims, "This is a great script! Who can we get to rewrite it?"

They are something more than typists, something less than geniuses. Their names are rarely on the picture, but they carry big clout. Their job is to fix something -- a character, some 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."

How's 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 Reeves. He wrote new characters to ride on the demon bus. He stayed on call throughout shooting and wrote dialogue for post-production looping. He got no screen credit, but when Speed opened to dynamite reviews and box office, he received an immense career boost. Whedon, 30, is now in Hawaii, rewriting Kevin Costner's aqua-epic Waterworld.

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 him co-author credit; Elaine May's consultation was a secret known only to all Hollywood.

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 closely to Sidney Howard's original screenplay and departed with $10,000 for a week's work.

These days the guns for hire are busier and wealthier than ever; the best ones get $100,000 or more a week. In a business of endless frets and hunches -- a business, as Towne notes, in which "very few people are good enough to be sure that they have it when they have it or they don't when they don't" -- it's reassuring to have a swat team of rewrite specialists around. As desperation forms like froth on the lips of a producer who has already spent $50 million on an action film with script problems, 1/500th of the budget can seem a small price to pay for a little peace of mind.

"Your job is not to drop a nuclear bomb," says Jeb Stuart, The Fugitive's 11th and final writer, whose own original script for Die Hard was rewritten by Steven deSouza. "You don't say, 'I think we should start over.' It's more like being the closer in baseball. You have your middle relievers who get you there, and then you come in with the bases loaded and Barry Bonds at the plate."

It can be fun, of a nervy sort, but rewriting is nobody's favorite job. "Screen doctoring is something I do with a lot of reluctance, even anger," says James Toback, a writer (Bugsy) and director (The Pick-up Artist), "but for a huge amount of money. When I'm approached I say, 'This is the price, take it or leave it,' and I make the price so high that I'd feel stupid turning it down. But my goal is not to make money but to make movies. I'd be depressed if I thought of my career as script doctor."

Some script doctors are GPs, ready to attend to any story malady; others are specialists, a job function foisted on them by the studios. In the '30s, recalled Preston Sturges, Hollywood's first significant writer-director, "writers worked in teams, like piano movers. It was generally believed by the powers down in front that a man who could write comedy could not write tragedy, that a man who could write forceful virile stuff could not handle the tender passages." That compartmentalizing obtains today, when deSouza is summoned for the action movies and Fisher, as she notes, is "frequently brought in to punch up 'the girl.' That's their phrase, not mine." Fisher playfully insists she prefers to be called "a script nurse. And I want the outfit too."

Rewriters are often called in for spot surgery. "If you read a script and think, 'Ah, I know just what this needs,' then it's satisfying in an almost mathematical way," says Rudnick. "But you could be wrong, and then they bring in five more people." Towne, who in one night wrote Marlon Brando's last scene with Al Pacino in The Godfather, knew he was there to serve the story. "If you want to use the Hippocratic analogy," he says, "you must adopt the first precept of Hippocrates, which is to do no harm. You try to extend the material, not to impose yourself on it." Or you can think of it as a game, and forget the high stakes. "Doctoring is connecting the dots," says Whedon. "They already have the story, the structure, the stunts. You have to make it track emotionally. In some ways it's easy: Here's the puzzle; put it together. But in the end, rewriting is harder than writing."

It's hard when the rewrite is scrapped or is cherry-picked for choice moments. On Always, says Ronald Bass (Rain Man, The Joy Luck Club), "Steven Spielberg didn't want to use the stuff I did except for one scene, where Holly Hunter and the ghost of Richard Dreyfuss dance without touching."

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. The memos take on an edgy tone."

In comes the script doctor. "They bring you in with the idea you're just going to do a nip and a tuck," Strick says. "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."

The funny thing is that, with all these smart people exerting all their energy fine-tuning characters and dialogue, most movies are still junk. Perhaps Sturges and the other great writers-turned-directors of his era had it right: one good writer's vision needs no revision. And perhaps Paul Rudnick was onto something when, for the small, independent film version of his off- Broadway play Jeffrey, he put into his contract that he would not be removed from the project. "I felt that I wasn't going to be paid studio money for this," he says, "so in return I wanted the protection of having the film be exclusively my work."

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."

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner and Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles