Clear and Present Danger’s screenplay passed through a gauntlet of heavyweight writers and a prickly author. John McTiernan had wanted to direct an adaptation after The Hunt for Red October, and John Milius produced an early, much more book-faithful draft that included set pieces and an ending markedly different from the final film. Milius later claimed his original ending — in which the villain Cortez comes to Washington to kill a national security official but is then killed in a mugging — was scrapped. After Tom Clancy publicly criticized the Patriot Games adaptation and grew wary of further changes to his material, Paramount made a large financial deal to secure his cooperation but still brought in Donald E. Stewart in March 1992 to reshape Milius’s draft to give Jack Ryan more screen time. When Clancy remained unsatisfied, Steven Zaillian undertook another rewrite. Milius was retained only as an action consultant on set. The result was a high-profile creative tug-of-war — director, novelist and multiple screenwriters each leaving their fingerprints on the script — that neatly illustrates how studio franchise filmmaking in the 1990s often meant grinding compromises between authors, auteurs and producers.
Preparing the daily feature…
AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1990s
Tom Clancy, John Milius and a Chain of Rewrites: Creative Feuds That Remade Jack Ryan
Clear and Present Danger (1994) / 1990s
Clear and Present Danger’s screenplay passed through a gauntlet of heavyweight writers and a prickly author. John McTiernan had wanted to direct an adaptation after The Hunt for Red October, and John Milius produced an early, much more book-faithful draft that included set pieces and an ending markedly different from the final film. Milius later claimed his original ending — in which the villain Cortez comes to Washington to kill a national security official but is then killed in a mugging — was scrapped. After Tom Clancy publicly criticized the Patriot Games adaptation and grew wary of further changes to his material, Paramount made a large financial deal to secure his cooperation but still brought in Donald E. Stewart in March 1992 to reshape Milius’s draft to give Jack Ryan more screen time. When Clancy remained unsatisfied, Steven Zaillian undertook another rewrite. Milius was retained only as an action consultant on set. The result was a high-profile creative tug-of-war — director, novelist and multiple screenwriters each leaving their fingerprints on the script — that neatly illustrates how studio franchise filmmaking in the 1990s often meant grinding compromises between authors, auteurs and producers.
The daily feature is taking an intermission. There’s still an entire archive to explore.