That's Showbiz, BabyExposing all the weird, expensive, political, ego-driven stuff that happens behind the scenes before and after films and TV series hit the screens.
Vote up the most entertaining stories about filmmakers that wrote their scripts on the fly.
Most movie fans are aware that films routinely go through multiple rounds of rewrites before they enter production. In some cases, studios and producers can bring in dozens of writers for new takes on a concept, some of whom are credited, some of whom are not. However, movie productions do have a finite amount of time, and it's also common for films to enter production without a completed script.
In more recent years, especially during the era of the blockbuster film and the rise of sequels, the demand for more movies has created shorter timelines. That means movies like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest get far less time in the screenplay phase than Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearldid.
However, the idea of movies beginning production without a fully completed script isn't new, either. For decades, directors have had to go to set without finished scripts. In some cases, this dooms the production, leading to reshoots or even completely changed endings. But sometimes these movies turn out to be huge hits anyway.
Here are 12 movies that began filming while they were still writing the script.
Richard Linklater's 2014 experimental slice-of-life drama Boyhood is one of the rare films that intentionally went into production without a completed script.
The film is meant to convey a boy's entire adolescence. To achieve this, it was filmed over the course of 12 years. Linklater broke the story up into segments and filmed them a year apart. This gave him a year to consider how to advance the story, and a year for his star Ellar Coltrane to age.
In an interview with Indiewire, Linklater explained how he and the actors created the story together:
I knew the structure. Like, I knew the last shot of the movie eleven years ago, let’s say. But I was playing off everything that was happening in front of me, collaborating with Ethan [Hawke] with Patricia [Arquette] and the kids, who, as they matured, they become even more collaborative. It was always this open process and anybody could contribute.
Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic Jawsdefined both horror movies and blockbuster films for decades to come, but it's easy to forget that it started out as a quick cash-in adaptation of Peter Benchley's novel of the same name.
After purchasing the rights to the novel, Universal put the movie into production as fast as possible, starting in May 1974. Spielberg's vision differed considerably from Benchley's novel, with the director preferring a simplified story about a shark menacing a New England town, without the novel's multiple subplots.
Benchley left the production after three drafts and was replaced by TV comedy writer Carl Gottlieb, who was brought in to give the film a lighter touch. Spielberg continued revising the script throughout production, bringing in screenwriter John Milius to contribute scenes like the iconic USS Indianapolis speech.
According to Richard Dreyfuss, who played Matt Hooper, “We started the film without a script, without a cast and without a shark.”
Iron Man is arguably the most important movie in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, a series of big-budget superhero films that have since netted more than $25 billion at the worldwide box office. But production on this first entry in the super-franchise wasn't entirely smooth.
As star Jeff Bridges explained in an interview with InContention (via Gizmodo),Paramount and Marvel prematurely set a a release date and were confident that the script would be ready at that time. "They had no script, man," Bridges said. He continued:
They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn't know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, "You got any ideas?" Meanwhile the crew is tapping their foot on the stage waiting for us to come on.
While Bridges found the experience irritating, he eventually decided to treat the $186 million production like a student film. The result speaks for itself.
The 1992 science-fiction film Alien 3 had a lot working against it. It was directed by David Fincher, who would go on to direct classics like Fight Club and Seven, but at the time had only directed music videos for Madonna. According to an anonymous British crew member, they were four months into the production before the script was complete, and Fincher still hadn't signed on yet.
At that point, not only was the script incomplete, but fundamental details like the alien's appearance were still undecided. The crew member said:
At the end of the film, there were still lots of shots that hadn’t been done, with all the things that had been left out being vitally important to the story. In fact, from where I was standing, at one point it looked as though they were seriously thinking about writing the whole thing off. Perhaps that would have been for the best...
Four years after his classic Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder turned in yet another critical and financial success with his class comedy Sabrina, which starred Audrey Hepburn as the daughter of a chauffeur and a young woman torn between two brothers, played by William Holden and Humphrey Bogart.
As he did with Sunset Boulevard, Wilder began production without a finished script. Often, screenwriter Ernest Lehman would write scenes in the morning to be filmed that afternoon. This frustrated Bogart, who already thought he was miscast in his role. It's even said that Billy Wilder asked Audrey Hepburn to fake an illness to buy him more time to finish a scene.
It's rare for a screenplay to be filmed without undergoing multiple rewrites, and that's true even for masterpieces like David Lean's 1962 WWI film Lawrence of Arabia.
The first draft of Lawrence was written by Planet of the Apes screenwriter Michael Wilson, but Lean wasn't satisfied and scrapped it. Then, playwright Beverly Cross did an uncredited rewrite before Lean finally brought in Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons) for a wholesale rewrite.
However, Bolt had just been jailed at an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. Producer Sam Spiegel had to bail Bolt out of jail, requiring him to sign a "recognizance of good behavior."
