Gary Ross Brought In to Rewrite 'Spider-Man 4'

To paraphrase George Clooney, if you can get Gary Ross for your movie, get Gary Ross for your movie. Clooney was referring to Don Cheadle when he said that on the set of Out of Sight, but it's just as true about the writer of Big and the writer-director of Dave, Pleasantville, and Seabiscuit. Gary Ross knows what he's doing. And now there's a legitimate reason to wait for what's next from Spider-Man 4, the film Ross was just hired by Sony to rewrite, according to Variety. Regular readers here know my big concern about the recent Transformers movie is that there's no story. A plot, sure, but the characters don't even interact, and only one has something close to a purpose. That's bad writing. It also afflicted Spider-Man 3. Gary Ross doesn't, as a general rule, write bad scripts. I'll forgive Lassie and Mr. Baseball, which were commissioned jobs and not his own stories from the beginning. He was hired help, and there were co-writers. Even last year's Despereaux was pretty good, though not truly his style. Then again, neither is Spider-Man, which like his only bad screenplays, isn't exactly "his" project. But Ross is one of the best at getting his characters from Point A to Point B without the skeleton of the story outline showing through. He's thorough and he gives the actors something to do. Maybe between the source material and the existing versions of the script he can make it work. I said just the other day that studios don't rewrite scripts because they're happy with what they've got, and Spidey has gone to three different writers now, with James Vanderbilt (Zodiac) hammering out the first draft, which was then handed over do David Lindsay-Abaire. There are several good reasons to pick Ross. For starters, even though the story will probably have the same characters and big finish, it will at least be filtered through his sensibilities. Maybe it only needs a little bit of help in the middle, who knows? Also, don't forget that Ross and Tobey Maguire have worked together on Pleasantville and Seabiscuit, and if Tobey's not happy with the script, Sony will make a call to appease its star. SocioFluid