Whenever a playwright’s last name becomes an adjective, it’s a pretty clear sign that we the audience have learned what to expect. Terse and incantatory and a bit end-timesy? Beckettian. Terse and sinister and pause-ridden? Pinteresque.
The unfailingly erudite, epigrammatic, idea-juggling wizardry of Tom Stoppard conditioned theatergoers to expect the Stoppardian starting with his career-making debut, 1966’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”
This quality earned Stoppard, who died Nov. 29 at the age of 88, screenwriting credits from directors looking to crack the codes of such fellow highbrows as Leo Tolstoy (“Anna Karenina”), Vladimir Nabokov (“Despair”) and Graham Greene (“The Human Factor”). He won an Academy Award in 1999 for putting words into the mouths of both William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe in “Shakespeare in Love.”
But he also helped provide dialogue for the likes of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Indiana Jones and Ichabod Crane in a far less conspicuous capacity. Stoppard’s sporadic (and lucrative) forays into the world of Hollywood blockbusters rarely yielded official credits, but he soon joined the likes of David Mamet, Elaine May and Robert Towne as heavyweights who were perfectly willing to roll up their sleeves and answer the time-honored Hollywood cry “Get me rewrite!”
The first of these came after Stoppard had collaborated with Steven Spielberg on the 1987 film “Empire of the Sun.” Spielberg tapped him to give “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” a bit more heart — but not too much. “It was an emotional story, but I didn’t want to get sentimental,” Spielberg told Empire magazine in a 2006 oral history. “And it gave Tom Stoppard, who was uncredited, a lot to write. Tom is pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue.”
A side-by-side comparison of Stoppard’s “Last Crusade” screenplay with an earlier one from Jeffrey Boam, the credited screenwriter, unearths further changes. Stoppard (who was credited pseudonymously as Barry Watson) cuts several superfluous characters and introduces the audience-pleasing role of Jones’s father, played by Sean Connery, 23 pages earlier. According to the performance-based pay structure that the Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee dug up in an “Indiana Jones” memo, his rewrite earned him nearly $2 million.
Spielberg ultimately relied on Stoppard for years afterward as an unofficial sounding board, describing him as “a consistent blessing-in-disguise in my career.” This role included faxing Spielberg a few new lines during the filming of “Schindler’s List”; collaborating for several weeks on a doomed cartoon adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats”; and describing a climactic speech in the 1989 tear-jerker “Always” as “(a) soapy … (b) obscure … (c) illogical … (d) untrue … (e) bad writing … (f) pseudo-poetical meaninglessness.”
At one point in the early 1990s, Stoppard earned $500,000 for a five-week stretch polishing various projects for Universal Pictures. (Marc Norman’s “Shakespeare in Love” was one script he came across in the Universal pipeline, envisioned at the time as a Julia Roberts vehicle. Stoppard and Norman would share the Academy Award for their combined efforts almost a decade later.) Additional rewriting responsibilities ranged from “Hook” to “Sleepy Hollow” to “The Bourne Ultimatum.” He seemed to have a particular fondness for dog movies, contributing to both “Beethoven” and “102 Dalmatians.”
All this while also writing “Arcadia” and “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia” and several other towering works of theater. It’s no wonder he couldn’t always remember his contributions. When Stoppard was in rehearsals for a 2014 Broadway revival of “The Real Thing” starring Ewan McGregor, a Time Out interviewer reminded Stoppard that he had earlier worked with his leading man on “Revenge of the Sith,” the third of George Lucas’s “Star Wars” prequels. Stoppard, who said “I interfered with George’s script in a mild way” when describing his role on “Sith,” clearly hadn’t given the project much thought in the intervening decade. “I wonder if he got to say anything I wrote,” Stoppard said of McGregor. “I must ask him.”
One reason script doctors are paid so well is for their discretion, their willingness to take the money and let other writers get the glory. But Andrew Kevin Walker, the lone credited screenwriter on “Sleepy Hollow,” took his stealth collaboration in stride when the Guardian newspaper reported on it in 1999. “If you’re going to be rewritten by anybody,” Walker said, “Stoppard’s the one.”
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