The beleaguered Hollywood screenwriter has rarely reached the upper pay echelons achieved by other studio talent categories.
The best-paid ranks of legendary A-list screenwriters William Goldman (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”), Robert Towne (“Chinatown’), Steve Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) and Aaron Sorkin (“A Social Network”) still never commanded the exorbitant fees that actors and directors do. The paydays of the likes of “Pirates” scribes Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio or “X-Men” writer Simon Kinberg are also not public knowledge; studios pay many top rewriters and polishers huge weekly rates. Writer Buck Henry bought a house on his weekly salary (rumored to add up to about $3 million) for his open-ended stay through producer-star Warren Beatty’s runaway “Town and Country” production.
Back in the heyday of the speculative script market, the fantasy was to write a fabulously commercial original script and auction it in a bidding war for a fortune. Millionaires were made overnight. Go Into the Story, the official blog of the Blacklist, ran “Iron Man 3” writer-director Shane Black’s claim that he was the highest paid screenwriter ever. He was paid a massive $4 million for his 1996 spec script “The Long Kiss
Goodnight.”
Related Stories
But that was when there was a demand for original screenplays. Nowadays,
only the animation and comedy genres traffic in the realm of the
original. That’s one reason why Pixar boasts such a stellar track
record–when they’re not doing sequels. (Count me among the folks
disappointed by formulaic prequel “Monsters University,” which appeals
more young and male than any Pixar movie to date, even “Cars 2,” which
also played for older males.)
Post-2008 recession and homevideo declines, as studios start to
cut back their development teams, script auctions are rare. Somehow
email has killed the romance of the hand delivered weekend read. And
writers now are paid less than ever. The bank accounts of show creators like Larry David (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) and the power of the showrunner on a series like “Game of Thrones” are yet another force driving writers away from Hollywood and toward television.
In the March 2013 issue, Vanity
Fair recounts a history of the spec script era and asks if they could ever rise again:
“In
1995, 173 specs were sold. In 2010 the number was 55, roughly where it
had stood for at least half a decade. What killed the spec market? To a
great extent the same force that has upended so much of the industry:
technology.”
Go Into the Story follows up with Celebrity Net Worth’s top ten list of the most expensive screenplays of all time. (The
list only includes nine titles, because one of the projects — 2006’s
“The Pink Panther” — was in fact a deal made with Steve Martin to
re-write the project, as opposed to a spec.) Have they left anything
out?
9. A Knight’s Tale – $2.5M (made in 2001, written by Brian Helgeland)
8. Mozart and the Whale – $2.75M (made in 2005, written by Ronald Bass)
7. Medicine Man – $3M (made in 1992, written by Tom Schulman and Sally Robinson)
6. Basic Instinct – $3M (made in 1992, written by Joe Eszterhas)
5. EuroTrip – $4M (made in 2004, written by Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer)
4. Talladega Nights – $4M (made in 2006, written by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay)
3. Panic Room – $4M (made in 2002, written by David Koepp)
2. The Long Kiss Goodnight – $4M (made in 1996, written by Shane Black)
1. Deja Vu – $5M (made in 2006, written by Bill Marsilii and “Pirates” scribe Terry Rossio)
