“Top Scribes Reap Rewriter Riches”
Interesting article in Variety last week (subscription required):
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.
Ah, script doctors:
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.
Those are literally some of the biggest names in screenwriting.
Another production topper explains that spending big on late-stage revisions is a necessity.
“Once a movie is greenlit, you’re no longer spending development dollars, so it’s not speculative spending,” the exec says. “You’re now making an investment on making this the best movie it can be. And at that point in the process, that last 10% of the script is the most important.”
Bet you didn’t know there different kinds of dollars: There’s development dollars, which is “speculative spending,” then there’s production dollars which are worth even more, sort of like U.S. to Canadian dollars, I guess.
“You have a director, a studio head and an actor who are all freaked out when you come on to a project for a couple of weeks of work,” said one busy rewriter. “Their careers are on the line, and they’re looking to you to save this f — -ing thing.”
Furthermore, the writer said that a two-week $500,000 gig can often turn into six weeks or even two months.
“I’ve never turned it in and said, ‘Good luck with that. Bye,” the scribe explains. “It’s not like it’s two weeks and you can go to Europe for rest of the year. I’m on call. And they will call you constantly. And I’ll always do the extra work because you never want to burn out a studio.”
Manager-producer JC Spink likened it to a high-wire act. “For that kind of money, you have to be able to close consistently,” he explains. “You don’t get many strikes for that kind of money.”
The big salaries. The hotel suites. The enormous pressure. The life of a script doctor.