It's well known that scripts are often tweaked by script gurus after it’s written, sometimes to appease a star or director, or sometimes just to prop up a shoddy script. These are the script doctors.
The process happens to varying degrees on most studio “tent pole” films, from the 32 writers who contributed to “The Flintstones,” perhaps the most notorious writer pile-up of the last decade, to the 17 on “Charlie’s Angels” to this summer’s spectacle “Spider-Man.” That film featured a rare solo writing credit for David Koepp, and uncredited writing primarily by Oscar winner Alvin Sargent (“Ordinary People”) and a smidgen by “Con Air’s” Scott Rosenberg, who cheerfully admits that most of his work, “a kind of 'Bonfire of the Vanities’ approach,” was left out of the movie. […]
Hmm, usually a plethora of script doctors is a bad sign, but I’m told that Spider-Man turned out pretty well (I haven’t seen it yet).
wd