The Original ‘Twister’ Is a Stealth Remake of a Classic Comedy

This week sees the release of Twisters, the second entry in the Twister saga that no one really wanted or needed. I mean, the first movie came out so long ago that audiences were positively blown away at the sight of a CGI cow flying through the air, as if it were something from Avatar or a train pulling into a train station.

While the co-writer of Twister, the late Michael Crichton, may have gone to great lengths to create the plot lines for novels like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and The Great Train Robbery, for the tornado-based blockbuster he admitted that he borrowed heavily from a TV documentary and a classic screwball comedy.

Reportedly, Crichton became “fascinated” with tornadoes after seeing them discussed in an episode of NOVA, the long-running PBS science show. But while he and his wife Anne-Marie Martin, who co-wrote Twister, discussed the possibility of writing a movie about scientists chasing tornadoes for “years,” they weren’t able to come up with a story. (And Crichton couldn’t simply have the tornado scientists murder a bunch of rare apes with lasers, because he’d already covered that territory with Congo.) 

Then Martin had an idea: Why not borrow from a screwball comedy? Specifically, she suggested taking inspiration from His Girl Friday, and crafting Twister as “a love triangle taking place amid great stress.”

"As soon as I heard the idea, I saw the whole picture," Crichton claimed.

His Girl Friday is, of course, the 1940 Howard Hawks film starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as a newspaper editor and his newly-engaged journalist ex investigating a murder. Adapted from the play The Front Page, which had already been turned into a movie by that point, His Girl Friday memorably turned the story of two heterosexual dudes into a romantic comedy. It’s mostly remembered for Grant and Russell’s chemistry, and its effortless rat-a-tat dialogue, which was presumably more realistic in an era when everybody had a gallon of coffee followed by a carton of cigarettes for breakfast. 

Twister does employ a similar setup, albeit gender-swapping the leads (it’s Bill Paxton who has a fiancée) and setting the story in the world of storm-chasers. Also it’s way less funny. Crichton and Martin wrote the screenplay by acting out the roles, improvising their dialogue and jotting down what they came up with.

The reason why we know so much about the writing of Twister is because Crichton was forced to divulge his process under oath, following a lawsuit that accused the author and his wife of plagiarizing a screenplay called Catch the Wind. 

The jury ultimately sided with Crichton and Martin after deliberating for just two hours. And since most everyone involved with His Girl Friday was dead by that point, he probably assumed he was in the clear on that front. 

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