Friday, July 06, 2007

Proper Credits for Transformers

I have noticed some web articles and posts referring to me as "the" screenwriter of Transformers. This is patently wrong, and I wish to correct it as soon as possible.

I am "one of the screenwriters of Transformers." I wrote the first draft, and Alex and Bob came in and did the heavy production lifting with Michael Bay (they worked with him on The Island, before). My job was to be first guy on -- the geek who broke a thirty year franchise mythos into a comprehensible 110 page plot, cook up characters and character relationships (Sam and Bumblebee friendship, etc.), and do the geek stuff like coming up with a chunk of spiffy fights/images. One draft, I then buggered off back to Shibumi.

Alex and Bob are responsible for pretty much all the dialogue, introduced a whackload of original characters involved in the plots I didn't come up with, as well as re-fit my guys into what wound up being their finished story. They're responsible for feel and pacing of the finished movie, and they did a helluva job. They were on-set, and did hand in-hand development with the director all the way through post. They had to turn my unfilmable -- and it was simply unfilmable unless you spent $250 million on production -- draft into one shootable at $150 million. This grueling work is why they have a "screenplay" and "story by" credit, while I have a "story by" credit.

I always get pissed when I'm pegged as "the screenwriter of Catwoman" when I was one of about ten. So it's not fair to correct that one to shift blame and let this mistake, which may inadvertently take credit from two very hard-working guys, stand.

Once the weekend is over, we can have a nice general chat -- without going into contract-breaking details -- about what some of the differences in the story are, and how they were executed, and put this process in context for the spec monkeys. Overall, though, I will say that working for the fine folk at Dreamworks on this project was as pleasant as every other experience I've had there.

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