Michael Crichton is, by some measures, one of the most successful writers of all time. Not only were many of his books themselves massive hits, but oftentimes, they were turned into hits movies and TV shows. Crichton even had the number one show, movie, and book at the same time. That's impressive. He also penned the scripts for several movies in his day. Yet, he didn't pen the final script for 1993's "Jurassic Park," the biggest movie ever made based on one of his books.
Crichton wrote "Jurassic
Park" first as a movie before turning it into a book. That book quickly grabbed Hollywood's attention, with a bidding war ensuing over the rights to turn it into a movie. In the end, Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures won out, with Crichton collaborating with the "E.T." filmmaker to help turn his book into a major motion picture.
In Don Shay and Jody Duncan's official "The Making of Jurassic Park" book, Crichton explained the process of writing the initial script for the movie. "I knew it was going to be a very difficult picture to make," Crichton said. "Steven is arguably the most experienced and most successful director of these kinds of movies." The book itself was far too big to adapt directly, so it needed to be compressed. Spielberg explained what he liked best and least about the book, with Crichton scaling his novel down. A few weeks after the book was published and became a best seller, he turned in his first draft of the script. The only problem? It wasn't very good. As Crichton explained...
"Nobody was happy with it at all but Steven was great about it and he was really good at identifying what was wrong. I remember he said, 'The movie starts too fast.' And as soon as he said it, I knew he was right. It needed some version of what I had put in the book - a wind-up before the pitch - but I had gone right to the action and it didn't work. Then Steven suggested that we do it in forty-page chunks."
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Michael Crichton Helped Whip The Jurassic Park Script Into Shape - Before Leaving
At this stage, the team working on "Jurassic Park" was relatively small. Spielberg enlisted special effects guru Stan Winston to help bring the dinosaurs to life, with his frequent collaborator (and current head of Lucasfilm) Kathleen Kennedy on board as a producer. Taking the director's suggestion, Crichton broke the story down into chunks and things got moving in the right direction. As the author explained in the book:
"I wrote the first one in about a month and we met and sort of adjusted it - but it was clearly in the right direction. People were happy now and I had a sense of that. There were storyboards and sketches and stuff immediately-within weeks after he acquired the book and so I was able to do a lot of writing from those."
"I turned the second chunk in a month later and the final one in about two months after that," Crichton added. "It was hard for me to do, but it was a really good experience. Steven was amazing to work with -- intelligent and sane -- not at all like the movie business."
Crichton and Spielberg had a good working relationship and they were making progress. Be that as it may, much of Crichton's "Jurassic Park" script didn't actually make it to screen. That's because the author essentially volunteered to move on from the project.
Michael Crichton Was Ready To Move On From Jurassic Park
By this point, Crichton had literally spent years with his tale of genetically engineered dinosaurs, first as a movie, then as a book, and then as a movie for Spielberg. As he explained in the making of book, after turning in that draft, he'd pretty much had enough:
"From my point of view, I'd been lifting weights in my little office for however many years it was, trying to do an extremely difficult thing which was to make a dinosaur story that really worked, that wasn't One Million Years B.C. And I finally thought I had something. But I was so tired of the whole area that I didn't really want to do the screenplay. I was sick of Malcolm and I was sick of Grant and I was even sick of the dinosaurs. But I really felt that I knew the dimensions of the story. It was like a boat. Pull one part out and the water starts rushing in. Oops, don't do that! Do something else and the boat starts too fast or in the wrong direction. I had already made a lot of those mistakes in my earlier drafts and I felt I knew the pitfalls."
That's why Crichton did those early drafts, but it's also why he was happy to walk away. "I told Steven, 'I'll do a draft for you and cut it down to budgetable size; but then you're somebody else to polish the characters.' I think that sort surprised him, because writers never say, 'Get somebody else," he explained.
Ultimately, David Koepp was brought on to pen the version that made it to screen. This proved to be a wise decision as "Jurassic Park" became the highest-grossing movie of all time up to that point, eventually crossing the $1 billion mark globally thanks to subsequent re-releases. Meanwhile, Crichton continued to have a fruitful career, even collaborating with Spielberg on "E.R.," which became one of the biggest TV shows of the '90s.
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