Paul Thomas Anderson’s unmade action movie: “The best script I’ve ever read”
Paul Thomas Anderson had a very good 2025. His tenth feature film, One Battle After Another, was released to near-universal acclaim.
It was the movie on everybody’s lips when it first came out, with praise coming in for everything from its acting to its themes to its music. It won four awards at the Golden Globes and is expected to do very well at the upcoming Academy Awards. So well, in fact, that many predict that it will finally deliver Anderson his first ‘Best Director’ prize.
OBAA (as nobody calls it) also marked PTA’s (as some people call him) first foray into the world of action cinema. He’d tackled a host of genres prior to this: coming of age, romantic comedy, neo-noir, historical epic, but never an out-and-out action romp. This could have been different, though.
Karyn Rachtman is a Hollywood music supervisor who’s been behind some seriously big films. Her biggest win might just be landing the rights for Quentin Tarantino to use Stealer’s Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ in Reservoir Dogs. She also teamed up with Anderson early on in his career, which is when she dropped this surprising revelation.
Yes, Punch-Drink Love, the wacky ‘anti-romance’ drama that proved to the world that Adam Sandler wasn’t completely useless, was originally going to be an action movie. A write-up in Dazed reveals that the first draft of the script also featured characters called Barry and Lena, much like the finished product. Instead of a nervous toilet plunger salesman, Barry is a criminal doing odd jobs for a vicious gangster.
Anderson knocked the script together in 1993, when he was just 23. Reservoir Dogs had landed the year before, so it’s pretty clear where the spark came from. Some of the character names carry over, and a fair few lines of dialogue show up in both versions too, including a grim bit where Barry talks about caving in his lover’s face with a sledgehammer.
Punch-Drunk Love came out in 2002, and Anderson had already made three movies and had had almost a decade to think about his initial screenplay. Whether he figured that style of writing was now passe or just didn’t like the idea anymore, he went with the version we know and love today.
While it’s interesting to imagine what PTA’s take on a Tarantino movie would look like, we can all agree that it wouldn’t have been worth sacrificing such a brilliant film for. Knuckle Sandwich and its evolution to becoming Punch-Drunk Love is a textbook example of how creative ideas change over time.
No idea is ever truly wasted; it’s just waiting for the right moment to make itself known.
