Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Rewrite Man
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.alisonmacor.com/
CITY: Austin
STATE: TX
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http://www.alisonmacor.com/bio.html
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LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2009037453
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PERSONAL
Born December 8, 1966; married; children: one son.
EDUCATION:University of Notre Dame, B.A.; University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Film historian and freelance writer, 1994–. Formerly taught at Austin Community College, Austin Museum of Art, Texas State University, and University of Texas at Austin; public speaker.
AWARDS:Peter C. Rollins Book of the Year Award, Southwest Popular Culture Association, 2012, for Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas.
WRITINGS
Past film critic, Austin American-Statesman and Austin Chronicle. Contributor to other periodicals, including Humanities Texas, Modern Luxury Houston, and Texas Monthly.
SIDELIGHTS
Alison Macor has been a film historian and freelance writer ever since she arrived in Austin, Texas in 1994. She has also been an unabashed cheerleader for her adopted hometown. Macor, a transplant from New Jersey via Indiana, was surprised to learn how much the Austin area had to offer. During the twenty-plus years that she taught at local colleges, Macor took advantage of the cultural opportunities around her: theater, art, and music. According to her interview at Houston Culture Map, she believes it was the ambience of the free and easy music scene that originally drew the filmmakers to the city.
Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids
Macor had been publishing articles on the Austin film scene for several years when she realized that no one had written a full-length history of Austin as a filmmakers’ mecca. In her introduction to Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Macor writes that the radio, film, and television department at the University of Texas, founded in 1965 to train professionals for production crews, was rapidly gaining a reputation for excellence. The Texas Film Commission, founded in 1971, worked hard to promote the city as a prime location for filming and production facilities. Eventually Austin acquired such a level of preeminence that professionals from all over the state wanted their names to be included in the Austin section of the state production directory.
The author arranges her history film by film, beginning with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974 and ending with Spy Kids in 2001. Ten chapters are filled with behind-the-scenes stories based on interviews with more than one hundred writers, directors, stars, and crew members from Quentin Tarantino and George Lucas to Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke. Macon strived to “let the quotes speak for themselves,” she commented on the Houston Culture Map website.
Rewrite Man
By the 1990s it was almost possible to build a successful career without ever leaving the city. Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren is the story of a writer who worked behind the scenes until his untimely death from cancer in 1990 at the age of forty-four, and he worked almost exclusively from Austin. Skaaren was one of the script doctors; the very small number of writers whose work can make or break a blockbuster film. He became one of the most highly paid screenwriters of his day, yet his name is hardly known outside the film industry. Macor stumbled across his story by accident years after his death and decided that he deserved greater public recognition.
Skaaren was only twenty-five years old when he helmed the fledgling Texas Film Commission in 1971. He worked on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a few years later and went on to a high-paying career. He was the mostly unsung hero whose work on troubled scripts led to the success of films like Fire with Fire, Beetlejuice, and the Tim Burton-directed version of Batman. The role of the “rewrite man” is typically a closely guarded secret in the film industry, with the allocation of screen credit determined by hard-fought arbitration battles. Skaaren made substantial contributions to the final script for the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun, yet his only official recognition was credit as “associate producer.”
Macor describes the lengths to which Skaaren was driven in order to receive formal recognition for his work. She had access to the writer’s personal archive at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, which included his private journals, sound recordings, memoranda, and other correspondence. What she discovered was “muscular, macho stuff,” she told Sean L. Malin in an article for the Austin Chronicle. A Publishers Weekly commentator mentioned that Macor “provides as much granular detail as one could want.” Malin wrote: “Under her empathic aegis, Skaaren’s legacy … may yet regain some of the acknowledgment he was denied by an untimely passing.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Austin Chronicle, June 2, 2017, Sean L. Malin, “Keeper of the Third Coast.”
Publishers Weekly, January 23, 2017, review of Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren, p. 69.
ONLINE
Alison Macor Website, http://www.alisonmacor.com (October 25, 2017).
Austin Chronicle Online, https://www.austinchronicle.com/ (June 2, 2017), Sean L. Malin, “Alison Macor Tells the Tale of Austin’s Greatest Rewrite Man.”
Houston Culture Map, http://houston.culturemap.com/ (July 13, 2010), author interview.
My Statesman, http://www.mystatesman.com/ (June 3, 2017), Joe Gross, author interview.
Alison Macor
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Biography
Stephanie Friedman Photography
Alison Macor is the author of Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren (2017, UT Press) and Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas (UT Press), which won the 2012 Peter C. Rollins Book of the Year Award from the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association. She holds a PhD in film history and taught for more than 20 years at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas State University, Austin Community College, and the Austin Museum of Art. Alison is also a freelance writer and ghostwriter who lives in Austin, TX with her husband and son.
I am the author of the newly released Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren (University of Texas Press), a Publishers Weekly Staff Pick. My first book, Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas (2010, UT Press), won the 2012 Peter C. Rollins Book Award and was a finalist for book of the year awards given by the Writers’ League of Texas and ForeWord Reviews. I have a Ph.D. in film history and have taught at the University of Texas and Texas State University. Since 1994, I’ve been a freelance writer and editor serving clients as varied as Texas Monthly, Vogue Knitting, Thomson Reuters, and the Austin Film Society.
Experience:
I write compelling copy whether I’m profiling a celebrity, spotlighting a new product, or exploring a holiday tradition. I’ve followed filmmakers to Sundance and shadowed top breast cancer surgeons and trial lawyers. I’m fascinated by other people’s stories and love the challenge of capturing each subject’s unique voice.
Freelance Writer and Editor
1994-present
Areas of expertise include creative writing, ghostwriting, content marketing writing, copywriting, proofreading, indexing, research, content editing, and manuscript consultation. Clients have included Texas Monthly, Texas Monthly Custom Publishing (Scott & White, My Texas H-E-B, etc.), Northstar Travel Media, Modern Luxury Houston, Humanities Texas, Allyn & Bacon, and University Press of Kentucky, to name a few.
Experience
Self-employed
Writer
Company Name Self-employed
Dates Employed Aug 1994 – Present Employment Duration 23 yrs 3 mos
Education
The University of Texas at Austin
Degree Name Ph.D.
University of Notre Dame
Degree Name Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)
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Alison Macor Tells the Tale of Austin’s Greatest Rewrite Man
New book delves into the career of Top Gun script doctor Warren Skaaren
BY SEAN L. MALIN, FRI., JUNE 2, 2017
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Alison Macor at the former home of Warren Skaaren (Photo by John Anderson)
To those who fantasized that moving to Austin would be an entryway into its tight but legendarily supportive clique of filmmakers, the writer Alison Macor has become the go-to historian.
For her 2010 book, Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas, Macor interviewed virtually every industry luminary (Hooper, Linklater, Rodriguez) who lived or worked in the area. The complex web of collaborations she ultimately wove together, which won her the 2011 Peter C. Rollins Book Award, inscribed our mythic local culture into the annals of film history. No book before or since has crafted a better researched (or more dramatic) narrative around our regional cinema.
Macor's new book, Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren (out now from UT Press), takes a more individualized approach. Author and subject never met: It was only after learning about his premature death from bone cancer in 1990 that Macor came to understand that Skaaren, a screenwriter and script doctor, "must be a big deal."
In fact, it was during research for Chainsaws that Macor "discovered" Skaaren's expansive personal archive: a veritable goldmine of audio recordings, Hollywood memorabilia, and emotional, self-reflective journals. "I thought, 'What is this? This is fascinating.' Here is this <
In his 44 years, Macor explains, Skaaren experienced a meteoric rise, beginning as the first executive director of the Texas Film Commission in 1970, and culminating with lucrative script-doctoring work on several of the most successful films ever, including Top Gun, Beetlejuice, and Batman (the good one). He became confidant and collaborator to the likes of Tom Cruise, Michael Douglas, and Jack Nicholson. Yet despite these outrageous successes, Skaaren remains largely unknown, and his name unpronounceable: "He called himself 'Scare-en,' so that's what I'm going with," laughs Macor.
A former film critic for the Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman, Macor has spent years portraying the city as a hub of mutualistic productivity. Skaaren seemed to put a human face to that ideal, divided as he was by powerful ambitions and an equally questing soul: "He was a guy that was doing what a lot of people wanted to do: making a living as a screenwriter while living here in Austin." His friend Bill Broyles, recalls Macor, considered him a "Wizard of Oz-type character," who "worked his ass off" and "prepared all the time" for bigger and better things.
While Rewrite Man is far from hagiography, it does fuse affectionate biographical anecdotes like Broyles' with archival research in an effort to combat Skaaren's somewhat egregious anonymity. Macor observes rather accurately that "script-doctoring, for the most part, is kept so hidden – people don't talk about it. I really wanted to shine a light on that, because in grad school and in film studies, it is still about the 'Great Directors.'"
To that end, Macor dives an extraordinary depth into the strenuous and often humiliating battles Skaaren fought for his work. <
More importantly for the historian, Rewrite Man seeks to throw a distinctive proverbial wrench into popular tales of Hollywood glitz and glamour. "Warren's work – and by extension his whole archive and what he had saved – gives you another window into these movies which are so familiar to us. It creates the story of that time. That's really what I wanted to write about."
Alison Macor will be speaking and signing her book, Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren, at BookPeople Sunday, June 4, 2pm. See www.bookpeople.com/event for more info.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 2, 2017 with the headline: Keeper of the Third Coast
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KEYWORDS FOR THIS STORY
Alison Macor, Warren Skaaren, Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren
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Alison Macor’s ‘Rewrite Man’ celebrates the great Warren Skaaren
INSIGHT-AND-BOOKS By Joe Gross - American-Statesman Staff 0
Behind the scenes photograph of Warren Skaaren and Tom Cruise during the filming of “Top Gun,” 1985. Contributed by Harry Ransom Center (unidentified photographer)
Posted: 12:00 a.m. Saturday, June 03, 2017
Patton Oswalt has a bit about his lack of interest in movies with vague titles such as “Something’s Gotta Give” and how “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” might be the best movie title of all time as it tells you exactly what is going on. And he’s correct.
Which is to say that if the late Austin screenwriter Warren Skaaren had done nothing else but come up with the title “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” his place in movie history would be secure.
But he did a lot more than that.
A campus leader as a Rice undergrad, Skaaren was all of 25 when he proposed the state’s film commission; then-Gov. Preston Smith made him the Texas Film Commission’s executive director in 1971. As leader, he shepherded dozens of films that shot in the state.
He started his high-end movie career after working on “Texas Chain Saw,” working on scripts such as “Fire With Fire” (1986), “Beverly Hills Cop II” (1987), “Beetlejuice” (1988) and “Batman” (1989). He worked on, but did not get a writing credit for, “Top Gun” (1986), as well as several unproduced screenplays. He did it all from Austin, not Hollywood.
And yet, his place in movie history is ambiguous. As has been pointed out many times, death is a terrific career move if you are a pop musician but a terrible career move if you’re in the movie business. When Skaaren, a rising star in the script doctoring game, died of cancer at the age of 44 in 1990, he had barely begun what may very well have been an extraordinary career in the dog-eat-dog world of 1980s high-concept, studio-driven filmmaking, a creatively exhausting process if ever there was one.
Now his name is barely known.
Which meant that Austin film scholar Alison Macor’s work was cut out for her when she started working on “Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren,” out this month from UT Press.
Macor first encountered Skaaren when she was working on her previous book, the essential “Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas.” Skaaren’s papers at UT’s Harry Ransom Center and what she saw blew her away.
“I had no idea who he was, and when I started reading, I was like, ‘Wow, who is this guy?’” Macor said. Seven or so years ago, she dove into Skaaren’s archive and started researching his singular career.
“I would talk to people who knew Skaaren personally, and they kind of looked at me blankly when I told them I wanted to write a lot about his role (as a script doctor),” Macor said, “as if to say, ‘THAT’S why you want to write this book?’ His friends saw him as this Renaissance man, which isn’t wrong, but I come at this from a film history point of view, and there was all this material that really showed us the path on how this stuff worked.”
“This stuff” is one of the book’s most important themes: Skaaren’s relationship to credit regarding the screenplays he worked on. Productions often go through a process of arbitration with the Writer’s Guild of America in order to determine how story and screenplay credits should appear in a movie. “Screenplay by,” “Story by,” “Based on,” “Suggested by”… all of these phrases mean certain things, and careers can rise and fall depending on how credit is allocated.
In the book’s most extreme example, Skaaren worked heavily on the script for “Top Gun,” only to be denied screen credit after a gnarly arbitration process. One learns in “Rewrite Man” that Skaaren was a crucial part of that movie’s success — he humanized the arrogant Maverick (Tom Cruise), made Kelly McGillis a flight instructor and came up with the whole “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” thing. It’s touches such as these that helped make Cruise the biggest movie star on the planet, and nobody knows that Skaaren worked on it.
“When you go into the papers,” Macor said of the Ransom Center archive, “it’s not just his papers but memos from other people to other people that (Skaaren) was cc’d on. And it gives you a very good sense of how involved he was. And it is a process that can seem awfully arbitrary and that is not the sort of thing you learn in screenwriting class, which is a shame because arbitration is part of a reality screenwriters face.”
Skaaren ended up with an associate producer credit, which made him a fair amount of money over time. “And as one executive said,” Macor said, “‘Everybody in this town who matters knows you made that film,’ and he was rewarded in other ways.”
Macor said she was a little hesitant to dive into Skaaren’s life because he worked on development-heavy, high-concept, too-many-cooks blockbusters, the kind of producer-driven fare that ran exactly counter to the auteurist world of 1970s cinema. At Paramount, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer made some of the most critically reviled moneymakers of their age; Skaaren had a good relationship with this studio. (Indeed, it was so good, and Skaaren’s demeanor was so calm and insightful in the face of producer panic and creative insecurity, that Skaaren was offered an executive gig at the studio, a job he declined.)
“It’s a period that tends to get written off easily,” Macor said, “yet for most moviegoers, it was what going to the movies was about during that time. We tend to be so shorthand the way we talk about films and who gets credit for making them, and here was somebody who was in the mix in these films and kept really great records about it. You read this stuff and you realized that the littlest things change scenes, which change the movie, which can change how it is received.”
Skaaren also had a vibrant friendship with Tim Burton, who was all of 25 when he met the older Skaaren as Burton was looking for his next movie after “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” The two became buds, and the collaboration yielded Skaaren’s improvements to “Beetlejuice” and crucial work on “Batman” a year or so later — Skaaren’s Joker was a pop nihilist at a time when the world knew him as Cesar Romero.
And yet, there was so much more to Skaaren. Macor says there was lots of debate as to what Skaaren’s career would have looked like had he lived longer. “Some friends thought he would abandon screenwriting for something else, some thought he would eventually leave Austin,” Macor said. “Nobody is completely sure what would have happened.”
‘REWRITE MAN: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren’
Alison Macor will read from, discuss and sign “Rewrite Man” (UT Press, $35) at 2 p.m. Sunday at BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd., as part of the Statesman Selects series. The speaking portion of this event is free and open to the public.
Warren Skaaren. Contributed by Harry Ransom Center (unidentified photographer)“Rewrite Man” is out this month.Film scholar Alison Macor first learned of Warren Skaaren when she was working on her book “Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas.” Contributed by Jason Groupp Photography
About the Author
JOE GROSS Joe Gross writes about movies, books, music and popular culture for the Austin American-Statesman.
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TEXAS AS THE THIRD COAST
"Where the cool kids were": Alison Macor examines the Austin film scene
By Joe Leydon
7.13.10 | 5:08 am
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Alison Macor wrote the book on the Austin film industry.
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Macor's book goes inside a surprising scene.
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Robert Rodriguez has a sense of humor, but it's a lot different than Mike Judge's.
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Matthew McConaughey knows the Austin party scene too. Photo by Timothy Norris Courtesy of Passion of the Weiss
Alison Macor wrote the book on indie moviemakers and moviemaking in Austin — literally — and now she’s coming to Houston to tell us all about it.
In her provocatively titled Chainsaws, Slackers and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas, Macor – a freelance writer and former film critic for the Austin Chronicle and Austin American-Statesman — offers a fascinating account of the state capital’s improbable development as a “Third Coast” production center, culled from dozens of interviews with homegrown talents, acclimated transplants and frequent visitors such as Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, Mike Judge, Quentin Tarantino, Matthew McConaughey, Tim McCanlies and George Lucas.
The book offers entertaining anecdotes — and revealing stories behind the stories — about the making of Linklater’s Slacker, Dazed and Confused and The Newton Boys, Rodriguez’s El Mariachi and Spy Kids, McCanlies’ Dancer, Texas Pop. 81, Mike Judge’s Office Space and, of course, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But wait, there’s more: Macor also details the storied production of The Whole Shootin’ Match (1979), a seminal filmed-in-Austin indie directed by the late Eagle Pennell.
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Macor will discuss Chainsaws, Slackers and Spy Kids during a free presentation at 6:30 pm Tuesday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Following the event, she’ll hang around for a book signing and reception at MFAH. But since we couldn’t wait to hear what she has to say, we called her at home in Austin to get a preview of the program.
CultureMap: This seems like such an obvious subject for a book. Are you surprised no one beat you to the punch?
Alison Macor: A little bit. But maybe it’s because people thought it had already been done. I had been writing about Austin film for about seven years when I first started thinking about doing this book. And at the time, I was sort of aware that nothing like this had been done. But I was surprised to find so many people were telling me, “Oh, that’s been done already.” Because it really hadn’t. I guess people presumed it had, and simply assumed they just hadn’t seen it yet.
CM: What do you think there is about the overall vibe in Austin that has made it so hospitable for filmmakers?
AM: Well, I realized pretty early on that I was going to have to know a little bit more about Austin’s history, going back to when it was first founded. So I checked out this book called To Wear a City’s Crown: The Beginnings of Urban Grown in Texas. It was written in the late 1960s, by an author named Kenneth Wheeler, and it talks about all the big cities in Texas. And Wheeler sort of argues that their personalities were all pretty much set from the beginning.
He describes Austin as — well, while cities like San Antonio were trying to get the railroad, the people in Austin were sort of like, “Eh, if it comes, it comes. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” I thought it was incredibly fascinating that this kind of laid-back quality that so many people associate with Austin — especially after Slacker came out — was there right from the start.
So there’s that, plus the University of Texas is here, it’s the state capital, and there’s the music scene. The music scene really is part of that same laid-back vibe. In fact, a lot of the people who came here and later got involved with film were drawn here by music. Like, you know, the South By Southwest Film Festival grew out of the music festival.
You have all of this, and there are all these different arts communities — music, film, art, theater — that appeal to people. I grew up in New Jersey, and went to undergraduate school in Indiana. And it was a real culture shock when I came here for grad school (in 1994). You see, I grew up right outside New York City, so I knew the vibe of a big city, and wanted something like that. Only a little bit smaller. And that’s what you get here.
CM: The funny thing is, even though you’ve got all these filmmakers from the same place — sometimes even working in the same place with, presumably, the same influences — they’re as dissimilar as the various auteurs of the French New Wave.
AM: Yeah, it surprises me that you have so many filmmakers who are so different. There’s a big difference among people like Robert Rodriguez and Mike Judge and Richard Linklater. They each have a sense of humor in their work. But they’re different senses of humor. That’s amazing to me, and refreshing at the same time, that we’re not constantly seeing the same Austin stories over and over again.
CM: Near the start of his book The Kid Stays in the Picture, producer Robert Evans wrote: “There are three sides to every story — my side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.” How did you deal with that problem while reconciling different accounts of the same events?
AM: Well, one of the other books I read pretty early on to prepare myself for this project was The Studio, by John Gregory Dunne. And I really liked the way Dunne sort of <
And I also wanted to capture everybody’s unique voice. Like Quentin Tarantino. His actual inflection and syntax is so him that I wanted to get that in there as accurately as possible.
CM: Finally, have you ever detected any … any … well, any jealousy on the part of people in Dallas and Houston film communities because all the attention Austin gets?
AM: Yeah. In fact, I got that even back when I was reviewing. And whenever I interviewed a filmmaker who was based in either city — especially in the late ‘90s, when Austin was sort of heading toward its peak. The thing is, Houston certainly has SWAMP and other resources for independent or up-and-coming filmmakers. And Dallas, I’ve always felt is a more commercially oriented place.
But you know, when I was researching the book, it seemed to me like the bulk of the work, the actual production work, that enables people to make a living in the film industry, year after year, was being done in Dallas and Houston back in the 1980s. And I remember asking Rick Linklater in one of our interviews: “Why did you come here? You were based in Houston in the ‘80s, you knew other stuff was going on.”
And for him, it was a bunch of things. Number one, of course, was his wanting to get into UT, to get into the film program. But he also thought of moving to San Francisco at one point — and he just saw Austin as a similar place, in terms of culture and feel.
It’s funny: I talked with someone who worked with the Texas Film Commission back in the ‘90s, and she said that even back then, she was already getting phone calls from people who wanted to be listed in the production manual. But even if they were based in Houston or Dallas — they wanted to be listed in the Austin section. Because they felt people who were looking for production crews — they were looking in Austin first. That’s where the cool kids were.
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Senior Editor - The Joint Commission - Oak Brook.NEXT JOB
Staff Pick: 'Rewrite Man' by Alison Macor
By Everett Jones | Apr 21, 2017
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A year ago, I wrote a staff pick for a book about the movie production designer William Cameron Menzies, recommending it partly just for diverging from the normal pattern of Hollywood biographies only being about actors or directors. Alison Macor’s Rewrite Man, out next month from University of Texas Press, deserves a spotlight for the same reason: giving a careful, thoughtful account of the career of somebody essential to the creation of films many watch and enjoy, but not accorded the same adulation by fans or journalists as brand-name celebrities. For this book, the subject is writer Warren Skaaren, who had risen to the top of his profession by the time of his early death from bone cancer in 1990 at age 44. Skaaren specialized in a particular subset of screenwriting, highly prized in his industry but often invisible to the rest of the world, as a script doctor, someone called in to fix problematic screenplays. The handful of screenwriters famous in their own right tend to have well-defined styles and subjects, but Skaaren’s function was refining and developing other people’s ideas. Macor lays out his contributions to the hits Top Gun, Beetlejuice, and Batman, creating an admiring portrait of a writer who didn’t fit our preferred model for a creative artist—that of a single, autonomous author—but brought dedication and ingenuity to his work all the same.
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10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507495225970 1/1
Print Marked Items
Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of
Screenwriter Warren Skaaren
Publishers Weekly.
264.4 (Jan. 23, 2017): p69.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren
Alison Macor. Univ. of Texas, $35 (272p) ISBN 978-0-292-75945-9
In this biography, Macor (Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas)
<
clear on his legacy since his 1990 death from cancer. Macor walks readers through her subject's childhood
and his leading role, as an undergraduate, in a successful Rice University protest that led to the resignation
of a new president who had been selected without student input. After graduation, he landed a job as a
program analyst for Texas governor Preston Smith, a position that led to his becoming the state's film
commissioner, and his involvement in the movie industry. The bulk of the book details his role in the
creation of numerous successful films, including Batman, Beetlejuice, and Top Gun, and his battles to get
his contributions to the filmed scripts formally recognized. Skaaren's skill and efficiency--he rewrote Top
Gun in just 10 days--became legendary, and Macor explains how the changes he made to characterizations
improved them. Unfortunately, Macor provides less clarity about how Skaaren's efforts shaped the way
screenwriters are treated today, missing an opportunity to make a larger statement about Hollywood's oftoverlooked
writers. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p.
69+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714211&it=r&asid=173113b631edfa85e5a2130e5871fa83.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479714211