b2 for qale: how Gore and Terry say that Lone Ranger was written
Posted by
charlie (aka chris)
Jul 8 '13, 15:49
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Film Journal International: You mentioned to our sister publication The Hollywood Reporter that in 2010�with The Lone Ranger having been an off-again/on-again project for Jerry Bruckheimer and others for almost a decade�Johnny Depp sent you a photo of himself dressed as Tonto and you subsequently wrote a story outline. Is that what your Pirates of the Caribbean collaborators Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio worked from [as the original Lone Ranger screenwriters; the screen story and screenplay are credited both to that duo and to Revolutionary Road's Justin Haythe]?
Gore Verbinski: No. So here's how it went. In 2006, Rossio and Elliott and I were making Pirates 2 [Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest] and they were interested in writing The Lone Ranger. Sony had the rights. They talked to Jerry, Jerry talked to me, I talked to Ted and Terry. I pitched it to Johnny as a way of playing Tonto and doing a kind of Sancho Panza take on the Don Quixote story. And Ted and Terry were like, "No, no, that's not the version we wanted. That's not what we were talking about. We want to do something different." So we kind of went our separate ways and I went off to do Rango and they did some more "Pirate" movies. And they wrote a few drafts and I think that's where the werewolf stuff came from and all these other things that people talked about. [Bruckheimer told THR in 2011, "We cut a sequence involving a coyote attack�supernatural coyotes�"]
Armie Hammer: [Those supernatural elements were] before I came in, so for me it's always been Justin's script.
Verbinski: In 2010, Johnny showed me an image of himself dressed up with a bird on his head and said, "Will you come back? We have no story." And I said, "Yeah, but the only version I want to do is if you're the storyteller. I'm sure what everybody's struggling with is that this is probably incredibly miscast because you've got Johnny Depp playing the sidekick, and to me the way to make him relevant and frankly to make a more interesting story is to have [Tonto] tell it."
So when I started again officially, I went back to what I had originally conceived, which was to tell it from Tonto's perspective, and then hired Justin Haythe. I came in in 2010 with Justin and started from scratch. Rossio and Elliott were only involved in that sort of early phase that we didn't use anything from.
FJI: They still have writing credit on the film, so I imagine something was used.
Verbinski: I think that's the [Writers] Guild. I mean, they always protect the first writers. To their own credit, Rossio and Elliott have to share credit on Pirates [of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the first film in the series]� There wasn't really, in my opinion, anything left.
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Gore (as quoted in the article) is incorrect -- on both counts.
What's telling is his contention that the original writers on Pirates -- Stuart Beattie and Jay Wolpert -- contributed nothing to the first Pirates movie. Not the case. I suspect, as time passes, Gore is going to be pretty embarrassed he put forth that narrative.
We have a lot in the film. But it is *definitely* the case that the Lone Ranger movie you will see is far more the work of Gore and Justin than Ted and I.
Justin was the writer on set, and it's definitely his movie, along with Gore and Johnny.
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Actually ... now that I think about it, it would be a fascinating case study, to compare our original Lone Ranger drafts with the final shooting screenplay, and get people's opinions on whether the various scenes, story elements, characters and character designs, plot turns, action sequences, themes, images, and selections from the original material, which we wrote and are present in the final film, warrant the credit given -- both co-story and co-screenplay.
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