Writers Guild general counsel Tony Segall said "a ton" of writers and their representatives have been calling with questions, perhaps because most of them have never been through a strike before. Roughly two-thirds of the membership were not in the guild during the 1988 strike.
While studios routinely start production without a finished script, no one wants to take that chance in this climate, so there is a rush to lock down scripts in completely finished form before the WGA contract runs out.
"Given what's at stake and the [time] we have left, our writers on every project are working under inhuman amounts of pressure," said Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who is producing "G.I. Joe," Paramount Pictures' would-be tent-pole movie for summer 2009, which as of last week hadn't even been officially greenlighted.
In September, the "G.I. Joe" team hired "Collateral" scribe Stuart Beattie to begin a total overhaul of the script. Beattie turned in his first draft by the beginning of October and is now busily working on a second set of revisions, which are due back to Paramount on Oct. 31.
"G.I Joe" is hardly the only potential 2009 blockbuster rushing to meet the strike deadline. Oscar winner Paul Haggis is plowing through James Bond 22. Since Oct. 1, Oscar nominee Scott Frank has been holed up with director Shawn Levy trying to pound out a shootable version of "Night at the Museum 2." For the last two weeks, Billy Ray has been polishing up "State of Play," a political thriller starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton that has already passed through the hands of "The Kingdom's" Matthew Carnahan, "The Bourne Identity's" Tony Gilroy and "The Queen's" Peter Morgan.
Just last week, 20th Century Fox issued an announcement that the studio was laying claim to May 1, 2009, as the release date for its big-budget sci-fi spinoff "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" starring Hugh Jackman. This was just days after it issued an urgent SOS to the major agencies looking for a quick rewrite person. Another 2009 movie recently looking for polishes was "Four Christmases," the Vince Vaughn-Reese Witherspoon holiday yarn. The studios pay top "script doctors" $250,000 to $300,000 per week to polish screenplays.
According to one top agent, almost every studio has at least two films on the schedule that will have trouble meeting the accelerated deadline. As one studio production topper noted, "We're exposed on two movies that aren't ready, but we don't have any guns to our heads. Most of our scripts are in solid shape; it's not a mad scramble." He declined to enumerate the problem films.
