A script doctor is a writer or playwright hired by a film, television, or theatre production company to rewrite an existing script or improve specific aspects of it, including structure, characterization, dialogue, pacing, themes, and other elements.[1]
Script doctors generally do their work uncredited for a variety of commercial and artistic reasons.[examples needed][1][2][3] They are usually brought in for scripts that have been almost "green-lit"[4] during the development and pre-production phases of a film to address specific issues with the script, as identified by the financiers, production team, and cast.[5]
To receive credit, the Writers Guild of America screenwriting credit system requires a second screenwriter to contribute more than 50 percent of an original screenplay or 33 percent of an adaptation.[5] Uncredited screenwriters are not eligible to win the Academy Award or the Writers Guild of America Award.
Many screenwriters have done uncredited work on screenplays:
Currently [Fisher] works in that great uncredited Hollywood profession of script doctor—or, as Fisher calls it, script nurse.
She [Elaine May] then became a script doctor, one of a small group of writers who are paid handsome fees by studios to do uncredited work on a script.
A writer hired to 'spruce up' or 'fix' a script, usually by inserting jokes or otherwise adding some 'juice'. These highly paid writers are often hired by studios for brief periods of employment, most often to work on scripts that are very close to being 'green-lit'.
He became a Hollywood screenwriter from 1926, valued highly for his contemporary, idiomatic, and vivid prose, and as a ruthless and effective 'script doctor', having a hand in many films noir for which he was uncredited...
Tom Mankiewicz, a screenwriter and premier script doctor...
Spielberg said, in an 2005 interview with Empire magazine, 'Tom is pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue [in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade].'
On the other hand, it doesn't hurt that Sleepy Hollow's script—credited to Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven)—received a stealthy stem-to-stern overhaul from Shakespeare in Love's Oscar-winning screenwriter Tom Stoppard.
Consider that Whedon, an A-list screenwriter and script doctor...