Unexpected screenwriters

Cafe Society
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As a junkie movie credit reader (I was staying through the credits long before there were post-credit and inter-credit scenes), I notice screenwriters. Often I use the information to track down other movies I ythink I might like. But sometimes the screenwriters are surprising, either because they later got famous (often in another context) or the movie (or TV show) is outside their usual milieu, or you just didn’t expect it.

Mario Puzo – Superman and Superman II What was the author of The Godfather and other gangster books doing writing a comic book hero?

Erich Segal – Years before he wrote the book Love Story (and the book and screenplay of the sequel), he was co-writer of Yellow Submarine, the trippy Beatles animated movie

James Clavell – I’m still surprised when I see his name on The Great Escape, although he’d already written King Rat about another WWII POW camp by then. But he also wrote a lot of other screenplays and teleplays, including two episodes of Man Into Space and The Satan Bug

Roald Dahl – He wrote the original script for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Okay, he was a friend of Ian Fleming’s, but does that qualify a childrens’ book author to write adult spy flicks? He wrote a piece for Playboy on how he came to write the screenplay.

William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett – It’s not often a Nobel prize winner for literature and a Golden Age science fiction/fantasy writer team up on a screenplay. They co-wrote The Big Sleep (so if you liked The Big Lebowski, you have them to thank, partly) Both of them wrote lots of other screenplays, which still amazes me. In particular, Brackett wrote the original screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. One of the few times a Golden Age author wrote part of the lineage of a blockbuster SF./fantasy movie.

Harlan Ellison – he’s written of of scripts, especially for TV., but generally for science fiction (Star Trek, Outer Limits, Masters of Science Fiction, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) or “cult” TV (Burke’s Law, Man from U.N.C.L.E.). But he also wrote an episode of The Flying Nun Really. Of course, he signed it “Cordwainer Bird”

Anyone else?

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J. Michael Straczynski, who’s best-known for creating and writing science fiction TV (Babylon 5, Sense8), did a lot of other TV writing/editing/producing in the 1980s, prior to Babylon 5. He wrote for several animated kids’ shows (He-Man, She-Ra, The Real Ghostbusters), as well as for prime-time dramas (Jake and the Fatman, Murder She Wrote).

IMO, Brackett is a big reason why The Empire Strikes Back is probably the best of the Star Wars films.

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Peter Sagal, host of “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” wrote a screenplay about the Cuban Revolution - it eventually was made, much altered as “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights”

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Noah Baumbach had a scriptwriting credit on Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.

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From the same writer as Breaking Bad and X-Files…

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A little help here. I’m not familiar with Mr. Baumbach. You ought to give a little background

Heck, I even explained who Leigh Brackett was.

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My apologies - he’s the writer/director of Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale, and other naturalistic, indie-esque dramedies about grown-up themes. (Not the first writer you’d think of for a zany animated children’s film about talking animals.)

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Also, speaking of Golden Age sci-fi writers: Ray Bradbury co-wrote the screenplay for the 1956 film adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which starred Gregory Peck.

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The answer to all questions is money.

S. J. Perelman, the humorist, went to Hollywood to write for the Marx Brothers, but won an Oscar for Around the World in Eighty Days.

Similarly, Marx Brothers writer Irving Brecher wrote the drippy nostalgic musical Meet Me in St. Louis and got an Oscar nomination for it.

Gore Vidal wrote an episode of the tv series Janet Dean, Registered Nurse.

F. Scott Fitzgerald got assigned to many lousy pictures, but his worst fiasco was Winter Carnival, based on the real thing at Dartmouth. He and Budd Schulberg were sent there to write the script. His drunken behavior got them both fired. Schulberg later wrote an incredible novel, The Disenchanted, about the experience. (Schulberg is probably the lost great writer of the 1940-1950s.)

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Oh, I forgot to mention, Roald Dahl did the screenplay for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, too – another Ian Fleming story. But, heck, I can easily believe him writing that one.

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While I was looking up Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (and learned, as you did, that it was Dahl), I also learned that Earl Hamner, who became well-known in the 1970s for writing and creating the TV series The Waltons, had apparently written an earlier, unproduced screenplay for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, based on Fleming’s book.

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Well, Ray Bradbury teamed up with John Huston to write the screenplay to Moby Dick.

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Great minds think alike. :wink:

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George R.R. Martin wrote for that Beauty and the Beast TV show with Linda Hamilton, I think.

Tony Gilroy, who wrote Michael Clayton and the Bourne movies…also wrote The Cutting Edge, that movie about the ice skate and the hockey player.

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It still blows my mind that Sylvester Stallone wrote “Rocky”.

(Sylvester Stallone is a notable action movie star.)

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Film critic Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay for the critically panned Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

One of the stars of that film, Michael Blodgett, went on to co-write the screenplay for Turner and Hooch.

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Puppeteer Shari Lewis co-wrote “The Lights of Zetar” episode of Star Trek (original series) with her husband.

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Suzanne Collins, author of the grim, post-apocalyptic dystopia The Hunger Games and its sequels, wrote several episodes of the peaceful, idyllic children’s animated series Little Bear.

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Lars von Trier, best known for gritty experimental dramas, wrote and directed an episode of the “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-esque comedy series Klovn.

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Aldous Huxley, best known for the novel Brave New World, wrote the screenplays for the 1940s adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Later, Walt Disney commissioned him to adapt Alice in Wonderland as a live-action/animation hybrid, but the script was never produced. Apparently most of it was destroyed in a house fire, but portions of the script still exist.