The secret life of a trailblazer: when Quentin Tarantino rewrote a Michael Bay movie
It’s not even remotely harsh to say with a huge degree of certainty that Michael Bay will probably never find the screenplay to one of his movies in the running for an Academy Award. Still, he’s nonetheless captured dialogue polished by somebody with two of their own.
Even though Reservoir Dogs announced him as a singular new talent with a potentially massive future in front of them who ended up changing the face of American cinema as it reshaped itself in his image, it hardly turned Quentin Tarantino into an exorbitantly wealthy man overnight. Pulp Fiction definitely helped in that regard, but during his downtime the filmmaker found himself a number of side hustles that saw him lending his talents to a number of unlikely projects.
He famously handed True Romance and Natural Born Killers off to Tony Scott and Oliver Stone, respectively. However, what’s much lesser known are his uncredited contributions to the Rutger Hauer-fronted noir thriller Past Midnight, abysmal Saturday Night Live slapstick spinoff It’s Pat, Scott’s submarine thriller Crimson Tide with Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, and Bay’s bombastic blockbuster The Rock.
Calling the 1996 smash hit ‘Die Hard on Alcatraz’ is completely correct, but not really reflective of the film as a whole. In his first role since winning an Oscar for ‘Best Actor’, Nicolas Cage injected his dynamic eccentricities into the action genre, creating a crackling double-act with Sean Connery, who brought every ounce of his grizzled gravitas to the explosive two-hander.
The film boasts a number of memorable one-liners from Connery’s “Losers always whine about their best, winners go home and fuck the prom queen” to Cage’s “How in the name of Zeus’s butthole did you get out of your cell.” However, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which zingers Tarantino penned. It’s not something he’s ever spoken about at any great length, and The Rock, in general, was a screenwriting nightmare.
Although the script is credited to David Weisberg, Douglas S. Cook, and Mark Rosner, with the first two also receiving story credits, Jonathan Hensleigh was denied the chance to be listed among them by the Writers Guild of America, and the same applies to Aaron Sorkin. Bay protested the decision and fought particularly hard for Hensleigh to be given his dues, but the WGA was having none of it.
The Rock might very well be the finest film Bay has ever helmed, and a large part of it is down to the screenplay. The dialogue, character beats, and quips blow every single one of his subsequent flicks out of the water in a style befitting Bayhem. This makes a lot more sense, considering Tarantino and Sorkin were both involved at one stage of the process, with the pair of them firmly established as being among the most noteworthy, acclaimed, and widely imitated scribes of their generation.
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