It has taken a long time for “Wonder Woman” to hit the big screen, but as the nearly unanimous positive reviews confirm, Warner Bros. got it right. But it wasn’t easy to get here, and producer Charles Roven reveals just how crazy — and kind of absurd — the whole development process was.
Chatting with Collider, Roven breaks down the process that saw multiple writers tackle the script, and how director Patty Jenkins, despite writing on the finished product, didn’t wind up getting a screenplay credit.
“Really early on, before Patty came on the project, we put our toe in the water with two writers. They took completely different approaches to the material — one was the Crimean War and one was World War I, but a completely different World War I experience. We had quite a Writers Guild arbitration with a number of writers because we had a lot of writers, and then there were the preceding writers and the other incarnations of the development of ‘Wonder Woman.’ But for our ‘Wonder Woman, ‘ we didn’t like the ultimate take on those scripts, even though they’re talented guys, and Zack [Snyder] and Allan Heinberg then collaborated on a story,” he said. “We had a different director on at that time, and that director — which was OK’d by the studio — brought a number of writers on. We had more writers working with — everybody had knowledge because you can’t do it with the Writers Guild without telling everybody what you’re doing and everybody has to be OK— but we had more writers working at the same time than I’ve ever done. In the history of all the movies that I’ve done, it never worked out that way before.”
Basically, there were a whole lot of pens in the mix, and essentially, WGA’s rules prevented Jenkins, who basically took the script over the finish line, from getting any credit.
“While there are things that most of [the other writers] contributed that are in the script, there wasn’t anybody who ended up making such a contribution that they were able to get a credit. A guy by the name of Jason Fuchs got the third position in the ‘Story By’ so it’s Zack Snyder, Allan Heinberg, and Jason Fuchs, but Allan Heinberg got the full screenplay credit. Even though after he wasn’t able to finish working — he had to go back to the TV series that he was working on — [DC Films head] Geoff Johns and Patty did a tremendous amount of collaboration,” Roven added. “But again based on the rules they weren’t allowed to get any credit, but they did a lot of writing that stuck. So that’s the long-winded version of the answer being that we had a basic arc of a story, but scene to scene it really came together when Patty got involved.”
Roven credits Jenkins for the “great use of Diana’s naiveté from living such a sheltered life on Themyscira,” which leads to much of the film’s fish out of water elements, the humor, and underscoring Wonder Woman being out of step wit the world she’s thrown into.
So, just remember, when you see a bunch of dudes’ names roll by on the story and screenplay credits, Jenkins deserves just as much to be mentioned. “Wonder Woman” opens tomorrow.