“Pop quiz, hotshot!” It’s one of the vital memorable strains from psycho terrorist Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) within the film that actually put Keanu Reeves on the map as an A-list main man and motion hero. However the humorous factor about 1994’s Velocity is that nobody appears to have the ability to pin down whom to credit score for these three phrases which have lived on virtually three many years after they have been first spoken on display. The story behind who truly wrote the screenplay is an enchanting one as a result of there’s a lot uncertainty surrounding it, and there are two fairly well-known Hollywood commodities on the heart of the controversy.
One is author/director/producer Joss Whedon, who penned Buffy the Vampire Slayer just a few years earlier than he bought his arms on Velocity and would later go on to write down and direct the primary two Avengers motion pictures. The opposite is Graham Yost, a well-respected screenwriter/producer who most lately created the AppleTV+ hit Silo and has written different motion movies like Arduous Rain and Damaged Arrow. Each of those guys labored the screenplay for Velocity, however nobody appears to have the ability to make an outright declare as to who deserves the credit score for the completed movie. That apparently hasn’t set properly with Whedon within the years since.
For years earlier than Sandra Bullock bought behind the wheel of that metropolis bus and needed to maintain the speedometer above 50 miles per hour to stop it from exploding, Yost was placing his blood, sweat, and tears into creating characters like Bullock’s Annie Porter, Reeves’s SWAT stud Jack Traven, and the madman bomber Howard Payne. Nobody appears to dispute that the characters and thrust of the exhilarating story have been first drawn up by Yost, who wrote the preliminary drafts of the film. So, one would most likely be appropriate in arguing that he deserves the writing credit score for his sensible concept that ended up making over $283 million on the field workplace. (And, for the file, Yost is the credited author on the movie.) However sadly for Yost, Whedon, and any cinephiles studying this with some curiosity in such issues, it’s not that easy. It by no means is in Hollywood, is it? Yost planted his flag with the Author’s Guild of America for the writing credit score, and it was given to him. However that didn’t go over very properly with Whedon, who was additionally introduced in to work on the script.
Joss Whedon has been largely out of the highlight for the final a number of years as allegations of inappropriate conduct first surfaced in 2021 from two of the actresses on Buffy, Charisma Carpenter and Michelle Trachtenberg. However he lately resurfaced on the podcast 50 MPH to set the story straight (no less than from his perspective) on what went down with the Velocity script and the way the pages ultimately made their approach to the display. The issues began when Whedon was known as in to make some modifications to the script. Yost was quoted in The Hollywood Reporter as saying, “The place issues went dangerous between us is when he didn’t get any credit score. It was like he was blaming me. I used to be like, ‘That’s the WGA; in fact I’m going to write down a letter saying I deserve sole credit score. I sat with that factor for years, that’s my child. You probably did nice work, however they not enable the “extra dialogue” credit score.’”
Whedon, in fact, sees issues in another way and bought into his emotions on the matter throughout his podcast look. “He (Yost) was like, ‘You’d have performed the identical factor.’ That actually upset me. As a result of it’s not true. And I lived lengthy sufficient to seek out out it wasn’t true. My subsequent factor was Toy Story and [then-Pixar chief] John Lasseter was like, ‘I believe the important thing animators ought to get screenplay credit score,’ and I used to be like, ‘Hell yeah.’ So I used to be like, ‘Oh good, as a result of I might have hated to have came upon that was true. I don’t like taking credit score for issues I haven’t performed. … It’s OK, [not getting credit] doesn’t trouble me anymore. There are plenty of issues on the market which might be mine that I care rather more about.” It might not trouble him now, however on the time of the dispute, Whedon took his declare all the best way as much as the WGA board and requested that they mediate the disagreement between the 2 writers and provides him a writing credit score. He was in the end denied as a result of the WGA was not awarding extra writing credit on the time. Neither was Paul Attanasio, one other author who briefly labored on the movie, and who a number of fifty MPH thinks might have provide you with the “Pop quiz, hotshot!” line, although Attanasio couldn’t affirm.
One of many issues that Whedon was tasked with doing was fleshing out what sort of man Reeves’s SWAT group chief Jack Traven would come throughout as on display. He was scuffling with how he needed to painting Reeves’ character till he had a dialogue with the John Wick actor concerning the analysis Reeves had performed into SWAT group members in preparation for the position in. Whedon recalled his alternate with the star that completely modified his mindset on the character, saying “[Reeves] talked about [doing research for the role by hanging out] with the SWAT guys and the way they have been unfailingly well mannered. [He said that] they’re solely about defusing the scenario, they name all people ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am.’ It was like click on — that was it. I perceive this character now. My tackle it was that he wasn’t a scorching shot, he was a lateral thinker. He was going to do what felt proper and have an odd strategy to it, however usually talking, it might work out. That ‘sir or ma’am’ gave me a lot, as a result of bluster [in action movie heroes] was the order of the day and this was the alternative.” Whedon additionally stated that Reeves stated, “I don’t need to pull my gun.” Whedon responded, “I don’t need you to both, however you sort of need to. [The studio is] not going to allow you to not pull your gun.”
It’s extraordinarily uncommon that you simply see a scenario like this the place two separate writers appear to have a respectable declare to the credit score. And, in accordance with that Hollywood Reporter article, there are numerous who labored on the movie who nonetheless profess that 90% of what audiences ended up seeing in theaters was due to Whedon and the key retooling he did to the script. On the similar time, how do you deny accolades to Yost, who got here up with each the story and the characters that Whedon apparently improved upon and chiseled into the precise sculpture that’s the final 90s cinema thrill trip? The one factor we are able to say for certain is that Velocity wouldn’t be the film it’s immediately with out the contributions of each writers.