It all started with the screenplay for The Sixth Sense.
On July 22, a low-profile Los Angeles tabloid suddenly dropped a bombshell: The Sixth Sense wasn't written by Simon Westeros. The real writer was Bruce Joel Rubin, the credited screenwriter of Scream.
The article viciously accused Simon of stealing someone else's work. If Westeros wasn't the true author, all the recent "He can see dead people" speculation was obviously nonsense.
Simon freely admitted he'd taken ideas that weren't originally his, just from a source the original creators hadn't even realized existed yet. The tabloid's story, however, twisted reality completely, stripping Simon of any involvement and handing full credit to Rubin, who had merely fleshed out Simon's detailed outlines.
With The Sixth Sense nearing $120 million in three weeks and suffocating everything else at the box office, the rest of Hollywood was desperate for negative headlines. The article became a lit fuse.
Someone fanned the flames, and the media latched on.
Bruce Joel Rubin was the first target.
Had he firmly denied it from the start, the story probably would have died. He didn't.
The reason, ultimately, was money.
Current projections put The Sixth Sense at $250–300 million domestic, potentially $600 million worldwide. That kind of global haul meant massive ancillary revenue, video, TV rights, everything.
If Rubin had signed a standard WGA deal, he'd be in line for millions in residuals.
But he hadn't.
Of the three-picture deal he'd signed with Daenerys, only Ghost followed full WGA terms. Scream and The Sixth Sense fell under a staff writer contract: $2,000 a week as an in-house screenwriter. Each script took him roughly ten weeks, $20,000 total per film.
For his level at the time, it wasn't stingy.
And after Scream's success despite whispers that the idea came from Simon, Rubin had vaulted into the top tier of screenwriters, an opportunity many veterans never saw.
Under the contract, as a staff writer, he had no residual rights. It was a common studio workaround to skirt WGA minimums and save money. Most majors kept in-house writers who worked from executive outlines or other sources. Even guild members often signed away backend on those deals.
So why didn't the WGA crack down?
They didn't, unless someone complained.
The guild was powerful and strike-happy, but if both sides were willing and no member filed a grievance, they stayed out of it.
It wasn't just writers. SAG and DGA had similar loopholes.
Spielberg had been publicly called out for tightfisted pay, often requiring actors to waive guild residuals to cut costs.
But Hollywood had another universal truth:
When a movie unexpectedly exploded, the fights over money were guaranteed.
Profit splits, plagiarism claims, accusations of hidden profits every blockbuster from Jaws and Star Wars in the seventies to Top Gun and Rain Man in recent years had been hit by the curse.
For The Sixth Sense, even $100 million might not have rattled Rubin. After Scream, he'd turned down the sequel for bigger offers elsewhere and never griped about his original pay.
A potential $600 million global monster, however, tipped the scales.
The resentment had likely been building since Scream.
So when the tabloid story broke, Rubin didn't immediately deny it as Daenerys asked. Instead, he played coy with the press while quietly demanding compensation from the studio, claiming authorship of both Scream and The Sixth Sense and asking, without apology, for $5 million.
Simon was furious.
Another person refusing to honor a contract and trying to strong-arm him.
Simon took contracts seriously. With Pulp Fiction, Orion had pocketed at least $100 million profit on $300+ million worldwide; he'd received only his agreed $15+ million share. He'd never complained.
He still owed Disney one film. Breaching would cost a few million pocket change compared to his profits but he had no intention of doing it.
He honored deals.
Daenerys, meanwhile, kept getting burned by people who didn't.
Simon had no interest in compromising. Everything was in writing, meetings documented. They'd win in court.
But Amy persuaded him: negative publicity could hurt The Sixth Sense's momentum. Reluctantly, he agreed to a private settlement. Rubin knew a public fight would favor Daenerys. After negotiations, they settled on $2 million.
Yet the tree desired stillness, but the wind would not cease.
Just as settlement neared, the Writers Guild already on poor terms with Daenerys jumped in, announcing a public investigation into the studio's practice of signing guild members to non-guild contracts.
In Hollywood, even top writers moonlighted as script doctors quick lucrative gigs, no credit, no residuals, no blame.
Full uncredited rewrites happened too. In the original timeline, the Farrelly brothers weren't the real writers of Dumb and Dumber; John Hughes had done the first draft.
Things stayed quiet until someone made them loud.
After last year's bitter strike and perhaps with outside encouragement the WGA was eager to make an example of Daenerys. They demanded full cooperation or threatened to blacklist the studio, no guild writer could work for them.
Last year's strike damage was still fresh. The guild targeting Daenerys alone was a threat Simon couldn't ignore.
If it came to the worst, unprepared projects would grind to a halt. Fall TV season loomed. Missing delivery deadlines without writers would crater their TV division and trigger massive network penalties.
With quiet resolution impossible, Daenerys dropped the private settlement and went public, cooperating with the investigation while releasing full details to the press.
For both Scream and The Sixth Sense, Simon had provided exhaustive outlines and privately discussed details with Rubin. Rubin's personal contributions were minimal; his job was expanding Simon's vision into full scripts.
Outlines, meeting notes, everything was documented.
Once exposed, any reasonable person could see the truth.
Santa Monica.
Friday, July 28.
Simon had cleared his morning of Batman post-production and come straight to his office at headquarters.
Amy entered while he reviewed last week's box-office report.
July 21 had seen only one wide release: Orion's low-budget comedy UHF, about a struggling TV station, similar to Fox's Broadcast News from two years earlier.
UHF wasn't so lucky. 1,295 screens, $3.52 million opening barely a blip against The Sixth Sense and even trailing The Bodyguard's eighth-week $5.07 million.
This week, in its fourth frame, The Sixth Sense finally saw a steeper drop 19% but still added $31.06 million. Cumulative: $150.02 million. Untouchable.
Lethal Weapon 2 and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids held second and third.
Licence to Kill, released July 14, had posted the worst inflation-adjusted domestic opening in Bond history: $13.03 million. This week down 39% to $7.83 million two-week total $20.86 million, half of The Sixth Sense's fourth-week haul.
Bond still made most of its money overseas and had never lost money, but a projected $30-something million domestic fell far short of expectations.
Simon recalled that in the original timeline, the disappointment plus legal wrangling had delayed the next Bond six years, until 1995, with Pierce Brosnan taking over.
Amy sat opposite him, waited until he looked up, then said, "WGA just picked up files on Scream and The Sixth Sense. And MGM, they'd backed off suing over Rain Man called again. Tone's changed. Lawsuit's probably coming."
Simon kept his hand on the report. "What do you think this is really about?"
Amy shook her head. "Hard to say. Someone's definitely gunning for us, but it may not be just one studio riding the wave. We handed them the opening. MGM's just being opportunistic."
Simon picked up a pencil, eyes returning to the numbers. He'd been thinking the same thing.
And his conclusion matched hers.