Once upon a time, the ultimate Hollywood ambition was to direct. Nowadays, clients are more likely to tell their reps: “What I really want to do is polish scripts."
For Hollywood's dozen or so top-tier script doctors, that means commanding $250,000- $300,000 a week, being booked months in advance and keeping their efforts largely cloaked in anonymity.
Script rewrites have been part of the filmmaking process since the days when Irving Thalberg kept a stable of scribes competing for his affections at MGM. But in recent years, the trend of tapping the industry's most expensive writers to polish studio pictures has become a high-end cottage industry as the majors increasingly bank on tentpoles and seek the extra bit of insurance that comes from getting the second (or third, or fourth) opinion of writers they trust.
And it's not just studio execs. Stars such as Will Smith, Matt Damon and Vince Vaughn have their go-to writers who are brought in, at some point, on virtually all of their projects.
The current crop of in-demand rewriters is mostly male and differ in their levels of experience. Some have Oscars, which usually brings a salary bump. All are paid handsomely for polishes. David Koepp, Hollywood's reigning top-paid scribe for penning such scripts as “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and “War of the Worlds," also leads a pack of script surgeons that includes John August, Jamie Vanderbilt, Aline Brosh McKenna, Steve Zaillian, Scott Frank, Akiva Goldsman, Brian Helgeland, Simon Kinberg, Dana Fox, Eric Roth, Gary Ross, John Logan, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, Paul Attanasio, Allan Loeb, Aaron Sorkin, Susannah Grant and Ron Bass.
The downside, of course, is that so many hands on a screenplay can leave the voice of a picture disjointed at best and schizophrenic at worst. The results of test screenings and focus groups play a big part in driving the urgency for last-minute rewrites on pics that have already reached the post-production stage. And while even A-list screenwriters have had to endure rewrites, there's a hush-hush aspect to these jobs that makes the whole issue something that few in the creative community want to address. (A number of writers contacted for this story declined to speak for the record, as did numerous studio execs and talent reps.)
“This current system is broken," says one lit manager. “You have your midlevel writer responsible for most of the screenplay, and then the studio pays a ton of money for someone else to come in and own it, and it doesn't make for a cohesive thing."
For top-shelf scribes, however, the rewrite market is a welcome growth area at a time when film and TV salaries are getting slashed and studios are cutting back on their development spending and release slates. For the lucky few, it's steady work that's outrageously lucrative.
For Hollywood's dozen or so top-tier script doctors, that means commanding $250,000- $300,000 a week, being booked months in advance and keeping their efforts largely cloaked in anonymity.
Script rewrites have been part of the filmmaking process since the days when Irving Thalberg kept a stable of scribes competing for his affections at MGM. But in recent years, the trend of tapping the industry's most expensive writers to polish studio pictures has become a high-end cottage industry as the majors increasingly bank on tentpoles and seek the extra bit of insurance that comes from getting the second (or third, or fourth) opinion of writers they trust.
And it's not just studio execs. Stars such as Will Smith, Matt Damon and Vince Vaughn have their go-to writers who are brought in, at some point, on virtually all of their projects.
The current crop of in-demand rewriters is mostly male and differ in their levels of experience. Some have Oscars, which usually brings a salary bump. All are paid handsomely for polishes. David Koepp, Hollywood's reigning top-paid scribe for penning such scripts as “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and “War of the Worlds," also leads a pack of script surgeons that includes John August, Jamie Vanderbilt, Aline Brosh McKenna, Steve Zaillian, Scott Frank, Akiva Goldsman, Brian Helgeland, Simon Kinberg, Dana Fox, Eric Roth, Gary Ross, John Logan, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, Paul Attanasio, Allan Loeb, Aaron Sorkin, Susannah Grant and Ron Bass.
The downside, of course, is that so many hands on a screenplay can leave the voice of a picture disjointed at best and schizophrenic at worst. The results of test screenings and focus groups play a big part in driving the urgency for last-minute rewrites on pics that have already reached the post-production stage. And while even A-list screenwriters have had to endure rewrites, there's a hush-hush aspect to these jobs that makes the whole issue something that few in the creative community want to address. (A number of writers contacted for this story declined to speak for the record, as did numerous studio execs and talent reps.)
“This current system is broken," says one lit manager. “You have your midlevel writer responsible for most of the screenplay, and then the studio pays a ton of money for someone else to come in and own it, and it doesn't make for a cohesive thing."
For top-shelf scribes, however, the rewrite market is a welcome growth area at a time when film and TV salaries are getting slashed and studios are cutting back on their development spending and release slates. For the lucky few, it's steady work that's outrageously lucrative.
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