A bit from the Scream book:
When Scream 4 was released, Williamson explained that he came up
with the idea for the film by partly recycling the idea he and Plec had
originally come up with for Scream 3. He had always planned to return
to Woodsboro; he just needed to find out where the surviving characters
were today to really come up with the plot. Once he had that figured out,
the writer pitched the idea to Weinstein. He was sold immediately.
Even so, Weinstein hadn’t changed, and things quickly got off to a
rocky start. Along with Williamson, he enlisted Craven and Kruger to
write drafts for the film, but he didn’t tell any of the men that the others
were working on competing scripts.
“Bob was gambling. He was throwing a million dollars here, a million
dollars here, a million dollars here to get the script out of those three.
Maybe somebody else,” Maddalena recalled. “Bob had a lot of writers at
the same time, that didn’t know about each other, working on it. There
was a lot of fighting and it was bloody. I think Wes wrote a draft. Ehren
Kruger wrote a draft. Kevin wrote a draft. And they didn’t know about
each other.”
After all of the fights and issues that had ensued on the previous
projects, there was one person who was more than happy to jump off of
the Weinstein merry-go-round. Plec, now busy with The Vampire Diaries
over at the CW, wasn’t involved in the making of Scream 4.
“It’s so funny because I read Kevin’s first draft, I think. Then he’s, like,
Bob has so many notes. Bob wants to change this; Bob wants to change
that. Bob wants to do that different,” Plec said. “I was like, Oh, I’m not
going down this road again. So, I just let him suffer with it while I kept the
doors open at Vampire Diaries.”
Officially, Williamson was the one who would get credit for writing
the script. Kruger, however, received a producing credit on the film. As
with Scream 3 the filmmakers were plagued with the script constantly
being in flux throughout Scream 4’s production. In fact, some who worked
on the film say the script issues were even worse this time around.
“I remember more script problems in [Scream 4] than I do in any of
them. I don’t remember massive rewrites during the filming of [Scream
3],” Mastandrea said about the experience. He adds, “When you don’t
have a script or a story, it’s hard for a movie to be successful. I didn’t have
great hopes for it because of that. But, obviously, I want everything I do
to succeed.”
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