The Steven Spielberg movie disowned by its writers: “We didn’t want to be responsible”
Most people would be thrilled to be associated with a Steven Spielberg movie. He is one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time, and even the most tenuous affiliation could make a career and earn you bragging rights for the rest of your life. Over the decades, Spielberg has gone from being a wunderkind director pioneering the art of the blockbuster to one of the industry’s most respected elder statesmen.
Although he’s earned 23 Oscar nominations, Spielberg isn’t universally adored, though. Two screenwriters who worked on an early version of one of his films were so annoyed with the end result that they were glad when their names were dropped from the credits. As far as they’re concerned, the whole thing was a source of personal pain.
David Webb Peoples, who co-wrote the screenplays for Blade Runner, Unforgiven, and 12 Monkeys, to name a few, began adapting a nonfiction book called Vengeance into a screenplay sometime in the 1990s. Written by George Jonas, the book chronicles the Israeli plot to assassinate the members of the Palestinian Black September group that carried out the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics in Munich.
Peoples wrote the screenplay with his wife, Janet Peoples, who had also co-written 12 Monkeys. At some point, however, the script changed hands and was altered by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner. In 2005, it was turned into Spielberg’s movie Munich, starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, and Cierán Hinds.
In a 2024 interview with Closely Observed Frames, Peoples talked about how challenging it is to be a screenwriter and have your work altered beyond recognition by others. Munich was a particular sorrow. “We have never watched the movie,” he said. “We read the subsequent scripts that were written, and we were disappointed in them. We felt they had taken our story exactly as we’d adapted it from the book.”
They deserved to keep their writing credit given the similarities between scripts, he said, but ultimately, he believed that their omission was for the best. “We were relieved not to have a credit on it because we didn’t want to be responsible for some of what we read in the subsequent drafts, which didn’t sound like the kind of world that we had created,” he concluded.
Peoples didn’t clarify exactly what had been changed from their original script. The film proved to be controversial with some commentators, as anything pertaining to Israel and Palestinian relations is bound to be. Zionists condemned the fact that the avenging Israelis were shown to express doubt over their actions, while others criticised the film for not portraying the Lillehammer affair, in which the Israelis murdered an innocent man because they mistook him for one of the Black September attackers.
Ultimately, however, Munich was well-received by critics and earned five Oscar nominations, including, ironically enough, for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’. Despite having scripted some of the most beloved films of the past four decades, Peoples has only ever been nominated for one Oscar, for 12 Monkeys.
