X-Men Movie Script Credit

By: Smilin' Jack Ruby
Date: Wednesday, July 05, 2000

Rumors are starting to break about the reasons behind the final credit for the X-Men movie script, so I wanted to try and straighten it out by giving a more accurate look at the emerging story. According to the Writers Guild of America, the credits on X-Men will read: 'Screenplay by David Hayter,' and 'Story by Tom DeSanto and Bryan Singer.' Christopher McQuarrie and Ed Solomon will not have their names on the project, which isn't the best news for 20th Century Fox, who surely would have preferred having the writers of The Usual Suspects and Men in Black in their corner.

The mysterious David Hayter is an actor with a short history of B-movies (including the straight-to-video gem Drive) who worked as a production assistant on X-Men. His claim to the screenwriting credit is that he wrote the final version of the shooting script, based on production notes given by producer Tom DeSanto and director Bryan Singer, which he then incorporated into the script. Sounds pretty bogus, huh? A huge project like X-Men attributes its screenplaywhich has had such names as James Schamus, Ed Solomon, Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven), Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), John Logan, and Christopher McQuarrie on it at one time or anotherto the one man who filled in the spaces on the shooting draft? It's an unlikely occurrence for a number of reasons, but under a particular set of circumstances it can happen.

When I questioned a producer about this, I was told of times during a shoot when a director or producer would just write one word or so like 'weak' on a draft next to a few lines of dialogue and hand this off to someone to fix. That's a rather extreme case, but say Singer wrote a couple of script notes and Hayter incorporated them. Then Singer and/or DeSanto want Hayter to receive credit. They would submit a tentative credit to the various writers who worked on the script and to the Writers Guild of America.

Of course, the WGA has a process designed to prevent note-takers from cheating writers out of credit. If any writer involved objects to the producer's proposed credit, the matter goes into arbitration, and the various drafts are all sent out to three anonymous members of the union. They then compare the actual film to the drafts and make their decision by seeing how much of each writer's contribution made it into the final product.

The rumor that Christopher McQuarrie and Ed Solomon 'took their names off' the project probably comes from the way arbitration is initiated. Basically, if you don't want credit, you don't have to initiate an arbitration. This is one of the reasons Joss Whedon had previously publicly stated that his name would not be in the credits, as nothing he wrote made it into the cut being released in a couple of weeks. If McQuarrie, Solomon, et al, felt the same way, they may not have wanted to fight for a credit, either.


However, there is one small glitch in this plan. When a producer or director wants a credit, or when they want to assign a 'story by' credit, then an arbitration is mandatory, whether or not any writers asks for one (the theory being that production executives could use their clout to prevent writers from fighting with them over credits). So whether or not any other writer wanted to dispute the proposed credit, the matter had to go to the WGA for a final determination.

The rules are heavily weighted in favor of the first writer on a project (the one who 'created something from nothing,' as members of the Guild like to say); a subsequent writers must contribute not just revised dialogue but new scenes and material in order just to earn a co-credit. Hayter would theoretically have to have written something like two-thirds or three-quarters of the final script to secure solo credit. Those must have been some pretty wild notes from Singer.

An interesting scenario was posited by DailyRadar.com, which went so far as to suggest that the reason the Hayter draft is so close to the actual film is that Hayter sat on the set and recorded what was being shot verbatim. The 'draft' he then had, scene by scene and line by line, was more of a transcript than a shooting script and, of course, matched up with the final film. In a case like this, it would be up to the other writers, at a pre-arbitration hearing, to object to the validity of the drafts to be considered by the arbiters; there is also a Policy Review Board hearing, where writers can make an appeal if they believe the process has not been properly followed. But if Solomon and McQuarrie, like Whedon, were past caring, they might have let it slide.

We've heard nothing except how many times the script was re-worked, and if it changed on the set it is possible that Hayter's draft could be the closest to the final cut. Does he deserve sole credit? That's what the Guild has decided. Does this mean that a number of other writers are getting screwed? Not if they don't want credit.

What this would say about X-Men is two-fold. Typically, when someone wants his name off a project, it means the movie's a turkey. In some cases, it can just mean that it's nothing like what was originally wrtten. Remember, the Epstein brothers (who wrote Casablanca) spent years talking trash about the movie and how much better their original draft was. This new revelation, if confirmed, just might mean that what the actors and everyone else have been saying is true: it's Bryan Singer and Tom DeSanto's movie and no one else's.

Until the dust has settled, after the movie has come out and gone away, I doubt the participants will be talking about this, but when they do it will hopefully paint a better picture of what happened and also provide a unique vantage point into how the WGA deals with matters such as these.