After all the
Scream 4 rewrite hysteria last year, something in the timeline just wasn’t adding up for us. Kevin Williamson was out the door before shooting even began, and once it did, his replacement, executive producer Ehren Kruger was firmly embedded. Towards the tail-end of the shoot, revisions were still being written with the pagecount blowing out to 140 pages, requiring an extension of the schedule and the addition of six actresses to film the latest material. However Kruger had already been long gone for
Transformers 3, also shooting in Michigan. Double duty might have been possible, but highly unlikely in our opinion. His sole writer status on the robo threequel meant extensive work for him during that movie’s shooting over several months.
Then there is also the weekend of additional photography earlier this year, never attributed to any hired gun. Those extended scare scenes certainly weren’t improvised, so there had to be at least a third writer on board. Who was the phantom scribe?
While attending press junket activities this week,
Assignment X quoted director Wes Craven shedding positive light on the rewrites, in the process naming the other writer as…
…Wes Craven.
“I’m very pleased with the movie and how the script turned out,” said Craven. “It was a result of Kevin’s master script and Ehren did a decent amount of work on specific scenes. I wrote sections of the film myself, but it’s very much Kevin’s concept and over-arching framework of the film.”
Now this isn’t surprising. The veteran director contributed to the ever-evolving
Scream 3 screenplay in 1999, along with writers Kruger and Laeta Kalogridis. Craven has such a reputation as the genre’s master director that many forget he’s a writer too, having scripted the majority of his directorial output up until
Scream in 1996.
Any polishing by Wes Craven on
Scream 4 can only mean the storyline’s consistency has been assured – after Williamson, Craven himself is the longest and closely invested in the saga and its characters.
