Ed Solomon

Ed Solomon has given us some of the weirdest comedies to ever come out of Hollywood. His is the mind that gave us both Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. He also adapted Super Mario Bros. for the screen. Say what you will about that film—every other video game fan already has—but it was at least crazy original.

Although we're sure Charlie's Angels and Now You See Me have their fan bases (anyone? anyone?), Men in Black is arguably the screenplay Solomon's best remembered for. But the screenplay underwent some major transformations from page to final product.

The script's rough draft feels like a completely different story. It shares a lot of elements with the movie we watched in the theaters, but comparing the two feels like time-traveling to visit your parents in their teenage years. Technically they're the same and yet they're wholly different. Some examples of these differences include:

• Mikey was not supposed to leave Nazca until he erased the lines in the sand. Kay doesn't neuralyze Dee after the Mickey bungle either, but the elder agent is later devoured by an alien.
• Jay was a cadet for the Secret Service before being enlisted to the Men in Black. It is also made very clear he lost his family young, something the film glosses over.
• The story traveled around to Texas, Virginia, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.
• Dr. Laurel Weaver was a college professor who studied insects and discovers aliens through her research.
• Zed had an assistant named Dave who could move so fast he could get you what you wanted before you asked. Kind of like the Radar O' Reilly of the Men in Black.
• The Bug was named Yaz. His camouflage was much more convincing, and his goal was to exterminate humans from the planet. It ate Kay way earlier in the story and later ate Jay as well, who found his grumpy partner in the alien's gut. They blasted their way out together (source).

Various rewrites to the script happened after this earlier draft and even during filming. The filmmakers added more aliens, a more climatic fight at the end, and centralized the plot in New York. Pretty typical for a Hollywood script. Changes come about naturally as part of the process: Actors can ad lib lines and situations can be rewritten to meet the unforeseen limitations or changes that arise on the day of the shoot.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld was still fiddling with the script while in post-production and ultimately changed the entire story. The script they filmed originally had three alien races revolving around the Galaxy plot. The Baltians and the Arquillians were at war over the Galaxy, and the Bugs decided to steal the Galaxy to keep the war going. Sonnenfeld felt the plot could be simpler and decided to remove the Baltians.

He was able to do this because the three scenes pivotal to this plot—the restaurant scene, the Frank scene, and the MiB observation screen—were easy to manipulate in post-production. For example, originally in the restaurant scene, the tall alien was a Baltian, but since both aliens were speaking an alien language, Sonnenfeld simply altered the subtitles.

For the Frank scene, he was able to put any words in the Pug's mouth that he wanted thanks to the magic of computers. And he simply revised the information on the Men in Black screen from what was originally conceived. Some fancy editing with the footage of the live actors, and presto, you've just erased an entire alien race from existence… which sounds terrifying when typed out like that.

With all these changes, you'd think there'd be little of Solomon's script actually on the screen, but that's not entirely true. While the plot may not be recognizable and the characters offer split personalities between the drafts, the humor and dedication to oddballery remain consistent from rough draft to final film. That joke about Jay's third-grade teacher being from a moon of Jupiter is in the rough draft, as is Kay's gruff, blasé attitude toward all the strange happenings.

Solomon's script may not have been the end product, but it gave Men in Black a great foundation upon which the other artists and technicians built.