Why does anyone want to be a screenwriter? It is the most difficult job in the
business. Facing a blinking cursor and a blank screen is much tougher than
interpreting that screenplay. And for this arduous work, the screenwriter is
compensated less than the producers, director, and stars: It is pretty rare for even an
A-list writer to get any kind of big-money profit participation on a film, while it is de
rigueur for those in the aforementioned categories. And, unlike the other artists who
work on films — and in most other art forms — it is common and even pro forma to
replace a screenwriter on a studio project. While book editors probably have given
notes to e.e. cummings and Norman Mailer, I doubt anyone ever rewrote them. I
can’t imagine that after Bruce Springsteen sent Columbia Records the songs for Born
to Run, an executive said to him, “That’s great Boss, or, eh, The Boss, but we think it
best to hand these over to John Fogerty and let him do a pass on them.” Dalí, Rodin,
and Chopin would probably be aghast to learn of how motion picture scripts are
developed. On a big-budget film, it is not uncommon for six or more writers to have
worked on the screenplay, including the director and a friend of the star who is
brought in just to work on his character’s dialogue. After 27 years working in this
industry, I’ve heard many writers complain about unjust situations or how a movie
could have been better had their work made it to the screen, but not about the actual
experience of being rewritten or rewriting someone else. So in search of illumination
on the topic, I decided to ask a group of four top script writers — David Koepp
(Jurassic Park, Spider-Man), Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen), Jeff
Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal), and Andy Walker (Se7en, Sleepy
Hollow) — for their thoughts on the curiously standard procedure of swapping
writers on movies.

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