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"A Sound of Thunder" Movie This Summer
Syberghost writes "Ray Bradbury's classic short story "A Sound of Thunder" is being released thus summer as a movie. It's directed by Peter Hyams, who's done the time travel thing before, but it appears that some of the major characters from the Bradbury story aren't in the credits."
Here's what the Man himself has to say.
Quick summary: Story takes place in 2055 where time travel is possible and occurs on a daily, regulated basis. Time Safari Inc. offers hunting safaris to any point in the past. You pick an animal, they give you big guns, send you back in time and you shoot your animal dead. Hunters are kept on anti-gravity paths in order to prevent them from changing history through the so-called butterfly effect (stomping on a blade of grass may wipe out Texas in the future, etc.)
The actual story is simple. A hunter goes back on a T-Rex safari, panics and runs off the path. He kills a butterfly in the process. The safari returns and finds the future changed for the worse. The end.
The credits "story by" and "based on" are two entirely DIFFERENT credits, with different meanings. "Based on" means the script (or outline) is based on a story, novel, poem or other work that was pre-existing and (except in a few cases) was written for it's own sake, and not intended to be part of the process of making a movie. If I write a novel, even if I am hoping it will be turned into a movie, and a producer buys rights and someone else does all the writing form then on, I'd get a "based on" credit.
"Story by" means someone wrote the story for the screenplay under contract. I'll use ST: Next Gen as an example (I'd doing this because I came very close to selling to them and had essentially an open door to pitch to them until G.R. died and some things got reshuffled -- it's a TV show, not a movie, but the points are the same). When I pitched a story to Trek, if they bought it, they would likely pay me for the story. I'd write up a story (NOT a screenplay), broken down into acts to give the general outline of the story, along with some sense of the timing of the plot. If I'm lucky, and they think I can do it, THEN they'd offer me the chance to write the script. If you look at the credits on ST:TNG (and many TV shows), often there is a credit "Story by" -- that means that writer wrote the story, but (in most cases) someone else took that story (or outline) and actually wrote the script.
It'd be possible for one person (called Author) write a novel, a producer to buy rights, and assign a writer (called Adaptor) to write a story outline to base a script on, and to pay yet another writer (called ScreenWriter) to write the script. In true Hollywood style, they'd probably hire yet another writer (called Rewriter) to re-write the script (whether it needed or not). The credits would be something like:
Based on the novel by Author.
Story by Adaptor.
Written by
ScreenWriter
And
ReWriter
I can't remember for sure, but I think "&" was used to indicate to writers working together (like "Jane & John Doe") and "and" was used to distingiush between writers that worked on different drafts.
It's "Brooklyn Project" by William Tenn, aka Philip Klass, anthologized in "The Road to Science Fiction" Volume 1 or 2 or 3 (I forget which), and probably anthologized elsewhere.
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