M. Night Shyamalan rewrote “Someone Like You” and many (including one of his actresses) are discovering it now

We didn’t see this turning point coming, and look, we’ve had the tracks right under our noses all this time. The same year that his Hollywood blockbuster, ‘The Sixth Sense’ was released, M. Night Shyamalan co-wrote the script for another very different blockbuster of the late 1990s, the romantic comedy for teenagers ‘Someone like you’. turns out Shyamalan was involved in writing the film, although it is not listed in its credits, and many are finding out about it now..

The information recently went viral on Twitter, where a user shared a screenshot of the film’s credits with the commentary “How did 23 years go by without knowing it?”. The tweet spread quickly and reached one of the film’s actresses, Gabrielle Union, who retweeted it, confessing that she didn’t know either: “I was in this movie and I had no idea”said the actress, who played Katie in the film with Rachael Leigh Cook and Freddie Prinze Jr. Union’s tweet also went viral and served to reveal a lot of information they didn’t know after more than two decades of acquaintance with Shyamalan.

I was IN this movie and I had no idea? https://t.co/NudcEmaooE

? Gabrielle Union (@itsgabrielleu) September 6, 2022

Everything has an explanation, of course. Before his career as a director took off with “The Sixth Sense” or “The Protected”, the famous Indian director worked as a “screenwriter” in Hollywood and helped rewrite the dialogue and plot of “Someone Like You”, shortly thereafter, by the way, co-writing the screenplay for another film far removed from the one we usually find in his cinema, ‘Stuart Little’. Although in that case, Shyamalan appears in the credits.

According to ComicBook.com, Shyamalan has long confirmed his work on Someone Like You, but it wasn’t clear to what extent he contributed to the script. Although it was initially rumored that he simply added a few touches to refine the film, the director himself claimed to have rewritten the entire project as “ghost writer”.

What is a script doctor?

The figure of the screenwriter is very recurrent in Hollywood and his work consists in retouching existing scripts to improve some aspects, such as the narrative structure, the characterization of the characters or the dialogues. His work is usually not recognized in the credits as it is allegedly done in secret.

One of Hollywood’s most famous and sought-after screenwriters was Carrie Fisher., who has participated in the rewriting of films such as ‘Hook (Captain Hook)’, ‘The Ideal Boy’ and ‘Lethal Weapon 3’ among many others. Other famous screenwriters would be Donald Glover or Noah Baumbach, Joss Whedon or Judd Apatow, who at some point in their careers helped improve films from the shadows.