Calling Cyrano to the film set

Top moviemaking talent enjoy a variety of hands-on helpers: personal assistants, drivers, chefs, hairstylists, costumers and even yoga coaches. Now there’s an increasingly popular benefit for A-list actors and even some leading directors -- the personal screenwriter.

When Will Ferrell was cast in “Bewitched,” he brought along Adam McKay, who has been writing funny bits with the actor since their “Saturday Night Live” days. Some of the dialogue in Adam Sandler’s “The Longest Yard” was rewritten by his longtime go-to scribe, Tim Herlihy, who also collaborated with Sandler on TV’s “SNL” and the comedies “Billy Madison,” “Happy Gilmore” and “The Wedding Singer.” And filmmaker Sydney Pollack, as has been his custom for four decades, turned to “Three Days of the Condor” screenwriter David Rayfiel to polish the script for his new drama “The Interpreter.”

While these kind of personal writers may be well-known inside Hollywood, they often toil in public obscurity -- neither McKay nor Herlihy nor Rayfiel received a screenwriting credit on these recent movies. Don’t shed any tears, though. Even without screen credit, top rewrite artists can bank more than $250,000 a week for script revisions and frequently can stay on a movie for months at a time.

But what may be great for the star may not be great for the movie. The personal screenwriter perk has the potential to gum up production with compulsory revisions, alienate the film’s original writer and leave audiences feeling as if they’ve heard the same dialogue again and again.

If the line “You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth” sounds at all familiar, it’s because Pollack has used that bit of dialogue written by Rayfiel in no fewer than four movies: “The Slender Thread,” “This Property Is Condemned,” “Three Days of the Condor” and this spring in “The Interpreter.”

Producers and studio executives complain that the personal writer for a director or actor can not only bloat a film’s budget but also slow production to a crawl, with screenplay tinkering yielding new pages throughout production, as has happened on the upcoming “Fun With Dick and Jane.” And screenwriters whose scripts are being massaged often petition the Writers Guild of America to have the new writer left off the film’s final credits.

But no matter how much tsoris these artist-screenwriter relationships may generate, they are tolerated -- and even encouraged -- because the results are usually profitable, even if “Bewitched” opened to just modest business last weekend, grossing $20.1 million. What’s more, the practice keeps the talent happy and is a boon for writers who worry about scrounging up new work.

“It’s a great arrangement for any screenwriter to be associated with an actor who trusts you,” says screenwriter Jim Herzfeld, whose “Meet the Parents” script was fine-tuned during production by Ben Stiller’s preferred screenwriter, John Hamburg. “Every screenwriter wishes he had an A-list actor who considers him ‘his guy’ and kept him steadily employed on the actor’s projects.”

Writer-director collaborations are nearly as old as the talkies. Robert Riskin penned many of Frank Capra’s most famous films, including “It Happened One Night,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” and “You Can’t Take It With You.” Jules Furthman wrote several Howard Hawks movies, among them the classics “The Big Sleep,” “Rio Bravo” and “To Have and Have Not,” while Samson Raphaelson wrote Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner” and “Trouble in Paradise.”

The contemporary twist isn’t that it’s an actor, not a director, who comes with a writer attached. The real difference is that these screenwriters are summoned to recast someone else’s script rather than fashioning a story from scratch.

McKay came in to rework Nora and Delia Ephron’s “Bewitched” screenplay, while Akiva Goldsman, who frequently joins forces with actor Russell Crowe and director Ron Howard, tinkered with scripts for Crowe’s “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” and Howard’s “The Missing.” Robert Towne has been called upon for several Tom Cruise movies, including his “Mission: Impossible” films. Steve Oedekerk has revamped, without credit, scripts for director Tom Shadyac, including “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” and “Liar Liar.”

“He is for me the best comedy mind in the business,” Shadyac says of Oedekerk, with whom he has spent many recent days writing a sequel to Shadyac’s hit comedy “Bruce Almighty,” on which Oedekerk shared screenplay credit. “I know I’ll be OK without Steve, but I feel so much better when Steve is at least looking over my shoulder on a movie. He has an ability to spot stuff you just miss.”

Treading carefully

The politics of hiring a favored writer can be dicey. Calling in your own screenwriter to polish another person’s completed script isn’t that different from showing up at a catered dinner party with your own main course. It’s not entirely voluntary, either. On “Bewitched,” Ferrell’s representatives said the actor would be more likely to do the movie if McKay was hired to do rewrites. Studios hiring Pollack know full well that Rayfiel will likely end up on the payroll.

Ferrell says his wanting McKay to polish the “Bewitched” screenplay “definitely could have been” a problem for the Ephrons, who jointly had revised the “Bewitched” script for Nora to direct. “Luckily for us, Nora could not have been more open to it,” Ferrell says. “But I was slightly fearful of her reaction.”

McKay says that while he planned to work only for a few weeks on the film, he stayed around until its completion, and even wrote lines for costars Steve Carell and Heather Burns.

But earlier writers on “Bewitched” petitioned the Writers Guild of America to adjudicate the final screen credits. Despite the support of the Ephrons and “Bewitched” producer Columbia Pictures, McKay was not awarded any credit in the arbitration.

“Their credit determination process is so hideous,” McKay says of the WGA. “I was livid, really mad for about seven days. And then I said, ‘Screw it.’ ”

While it certainly makes some A-list actors feel more comfortable, bringing in a specific writer can also actually improve a film’s commercial and critical prospects. Even though Susannah Grant received the sole “Erin Brockovich” screenplay credit, Oscar winner Julia Roberts privately credited (the uncredited) writer Richard LaGravenese’s rewrites. Herzfeld, Hamburg and Stiller’s “Meet the Fockers” collaboration yielded the highest-grossing live-action comedy ever; Herzfeld and Hamburg received a shared screenplay credit on both “Parents” and “Fockers.”

Goldsman’s writing on “A Beautiful Mind” led to Academy Awards for best picture, best adapted screenplay for Goldsman and best director for Howard. Goldsman teamed with Howard and Crowe on “Cinderella Man” and is writing the upcoming “The Da Vinci Code” for Howard.

“The more you work with someone, the better you work together,” Goldsman says of teaming with Howard and Crowe. “There is nothing more difficult than learning to work with another person. And nothing more gratifying. So why would you want to abandon that?”

In earlier teamings with Howard and Crowe, Goldsman would sit in on script readings, reworking dialogue after the actor read it aloud. “It’s a fantastic process, and I’m stunned that it doesn’t exist on all movies,” Goldsman says. “We don’t think the script is finished until we do this. Just because something reads well doesn’t mean you’ve thoroughly examined it.”

A few personal writers were discovered through unusual avenues. Director Robert Altman was so impressed by a short story written by Anne Rapp that he put her under a screenwriting contract for three fruitful years. In their time together, they made the TV series “Gun” and the feature films “Cookie’s Fortune” and “Dr. T and the Women,” the latter based on a Rapp short story.

Working with Altman instead of on her own, Rapp says, “is the difference between a runaway train and molasses. He gets movies made. And he doesn’t hire anyone in a creative position he doesn’t trust 100% ... [which] makes you reach out there and take a risk.”

Like other writer-actor and writer-director pairings, Rapp says she and Altman benefit from a relationship that invites creative debates without bruised feelings. Rapp says she might pitch 10 ideas to Altman, but even if he bit on only one, “I would walk out feeling I was the best writer on the planet. That’s what writing is about: You don’t get everything right the first time.”

Rapp, feeling she and Altman needed to “stretch their wings,” parted ways with the director in 2000. Rapp didn’t get a movie made during the five-year hiatus, but they have recently reunited and are now reworking the 1997 documentary “Hands on a Hardbody,” which follows a marathon competition to win a pickup truck, into a drama for Altman to direct.

Some of the actor-writer bonds date back years. Writer Judd Apatow’s relationship with Jim Carrey was cemented when the comedian hired Apatow to write bits for him while he was on “In Living Color.” Sandler and Herlihy (along with Sandler’s producing partner, Jack Giarraputo) were college roommates at New York University.

A time-tested alliance

Few -- if any -- personal screenwriter relationships have lasted as long as the one between Pollack and Rayfiel, which dates to 1962, when Pollack staged a revival of Rayfiel’s play “P.S. 193”

For a while, the Pollack-Rayfiel alliance also included actor Robert Redford, who acted in “Havana,” “The Electric Horseman,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Way We Were,” “This Property Is Condemned” and “Jeremiah Johnson,” all of which Pollack directed and Rayfiel either wrote or rewrote, the latter usually without credit.

“In those days, I thought I would write everything, Sydney would direct everything and Robert would act in everything,” Rayfiel says.

His work with Pollack proved more enduring, though, and preceding his uncredited rewrites on “The Interpreter,” Rayfiel had credits on the director’s “Sabrina” and “The Firm.”

Rayfiel defended Pollack’s repeated use of his “not getting caught” line of dialogue, saying that only “11 people remember hearing it” and that it’s merely a homage. “The French do it all the time,” Rayfiel says.

“We are not alike, but we are complementary,” Rayfiel says of working with the director. “There’s something he doesn’t have that I have, and there’s certainly some things he has that I don’t have. And we seriously try not to make any mistakes together.”

A more important challenge for personal writers is making audiences giggle; it’s no coincidence that almost all of the actors who use a particular writer are comedians. When Ferrell and McKay work on a script, they’ll bat around ideas until they can make the other laugh, even if the jokes don’t at first seem that funny.

While on “Saturday Night Live,” the two cooked up a skit about a salesman named Bill Brasky. “Everybody hated it except us, but we got it on the show,” McKay says. “I wish I could say I was more of a unique individual. But if Will likes it, I like it.”

Adds Ferrell: “We have gotten into a few drunken wrestling matches, but it never feels like any of our decisions come down to life or death.”

More recently, the two teamed to make “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” and sold their race car comedy “Talladega Nights” to Columbia Pictures in a pricey bidding war.

“I just think in general it’s not a bad thing to have a pair of outside eyes look at something you are working on,” Ferrell says. “It can just spark something. I just felt that while I loved the premise [of “Bewitched”], Adam knows my voice and would see a lot of opportunities to exploit that.”

Sometimes the biggest mistake a director or actor can make is not calling in his rewrite guy. Shadyac says he didn’t show Oedekerk “Dragonfly,” one of the director’s rare flops, until after the film was finished.

“I wished,” Shadyac says, “we had invited him earlier.”

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John Horn can be contacted at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.