Good Will Hunting

Good Will Hunting started as homework. Matt Damon wrote it for a Harvard playwriting class, turning in about forty pages instead of the one-act his professor asked for, and only one scene from that draft, Will and Sean's first meeting, survived to the screen verbatim. He left school for a role in Geronimo, took the script to Los Angeles, and asked his childhood friend Ben Affleck to work on it with him. Their first version was a thriller: a self-taught genius from South Boston chased around the city by NSA agents, because the two of them assumed a film needed an action subplot to sell.

Castle Rock bought it for $600,000 in November 1994. Rob Reiner and then William Goldman told them to cut the thriller, and sixty pages of NSA plot came out. After a year of rewrites the writers suspected the executives had stopped reading, so they slipped in scenes of Will and his therapist having oral sex; nobody mentioned them. When Castle Rock put the film into turnaround, Kevin Smith, who had directed Affleck in Mallrats, took the script to Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein asked them to remove the fake scenes, proof that he had read it, and in the fall of 1995 Miramax bought it for $1 million.

Getting it made took Robin Williams. He cut his fee from around $20 million to $5 million for a share of the gross above $60 million, a deal Miramax accepted because it did not think the film would earn that much. Gus Van Sant, the writers' choice all along, shot it in nine weeks from April 1997, Toronto standing in for interiors and Boston for the rest. Williams improvised the film's last line, "Son of a bitch stole my line."

A record Miramax test screening moved the release up to December 5, 1997, a week ahead of Titanic. The counterprogramming worked: $138 million domestic, $225.9 million worldwide, Miramax's biggest domestic hit to that point, and the seventh-highest gross of the year. Of nine Oscar nominations it won two, Best Supporting Actor for Williams and Best Original Screenplay for Affleck and Damon, while Elliott Smith's "Miss Misery" was nominated for Best Original Song. Rumors that Goldman had really written it persisted long enough to become a 2003 play, Matt & Ben; Goldman denied it in his memoir.