John Milius famously dunked the original draft and rewrote Evel Knievel’s voice — and the script became part of Knievel’s own mythmaking

Bizarre & Myths3/5 wildness

John Milius famously dunked the original draft and rewrote Evel Knievel’s voice — and the script became part of Knievel’s own mythmaking

John Milius / Evel Knievel (1971 film) / 1970s

George Hamilton disliked the original screenplay by Alan Caillou and in 1970 hired young hotshot John Milius for a modest $5,000 to "write some lines." Milius tells a vivid production anecdote: he read Caillou’s draft at Hamilton’s Palm Springs house, found it unbearable, literally threw it into the swimming pool and — after submerging the waterlogged script — wrote a fresh screenplay from scratch. That rewrite recast Knievel as a mythic "last gladiator," a larger‑than‑life figure who blurts lines that Evel would later begin to borrow for himself. Milius later reflected that the film didn't sanitize the real man; it simply made his braggadocio cinematic, and then life aped art as Knievel adopted movie lines into his public persona. The anecdote sits at the intersection of Hollywood folklore and the porous line between biopic and biography: a writer destroying a script in a pool became part of the film’s creation myth and helped forge a persona that escaped the set and entered Knievel’s real life.