CINEMA: Miracle Surgery

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.