Alejandro Iñárritu, Alex Dinelaris, Armando Bó, Nicolás Giacobone

Okay. Just who, exactly, came up with this one?

A washed-up movie star? A guy who hates Broadway? A woman who just really, really likes tracking shots?

The answer is, strangely, "none of the above."

The main man behind the movie's script is definitely Alejandro Iñárritu, but because he did double duty as a director (and so is covered in our Director section) we're going to focus on his three cohorts…starting with Alex Dinelaris.

A playwright and friend of Iñárritu's, Dinelaris went from some seriously humble beginning (like, sleeping-in-a-full-bathtub-for-warmth kind of humble) to initial playwright success to writing a screenplay about a play for Iñárritu…to winning the dang Academy Award. (Source)

Dinelaris worked with the Argentinian cousins Armando Bó and Nicolás Giacobone to help bring Iñárritu's original vision to life. Apparently this "original vision" was the idea of a man meditating in his underwear while levitating a few feet about his floor—so comparing this to the sprawling theatrical and media criticism and personal drama that Birdman became, we'd say the script came a long way.

Bó and Giacobone both had little experience within the American movie industry—although Bó had been working in various advertising jobs since a young age—but each of the three screenwriters had worked with Iñárritu on previous movies. In fact, after Birdman the three have taken to producing and writing on the TV series The One Percent (directed by Iñárritu, of course).

But judging from what they've achieved so far, they're not even remotely finished.