David S. Ward

The story of the script for The Sting is one of those awesome underdog, feel-good stories…kind of like The Sting itself.

For starters, the writer David S. Ward had written the script and submitted it to Hollywood Studios after finishing school, but the poor thing had gone straight into a slush pile filled with scripts that no one ever planned on picking up.

But that's when a young go-getter named Rob Cohen (now director of movies like The Fast and the Furious) came on the scene.

From the moment he saw it, Cohen knew The Sting was a winner. And his faith would end up paying off, since the screenplay to The Sting would end up winning its writer David S. Ward the Best Screenplay prize at the Academy Awards.

Unfortunately, Ward's follow-up efforts weren't able to recapture the same magic and Ward faded from public attention for a while. But Ward would end up having the last laugh, as he would later write the smash hit baseball comedy Major League. This movie put him back on the map and he went on to have another huge screenplay success with Sleepless in Seattle in 1993.