Paul Thomas Anderson Did an Uncredited Rewrite on This Bonkers Mafia Comedy

Even for the most extraordinary filmmakers, mercenary work is necessary to get your foot in the industry and pay the bills. Script doctoring, uncredited contributions from screenwriters on a film that needs extra polishing, is a fundamental practice in the Hollywood studio system that still goes unnoticed—by design, after all. There are plenty of examples of this over the years, going back to Golden Age Hollywood when renowned novelists were brought in to punch up middling genre pictures. However, the most curious cases of uncredited rewrites come when the text completely differs from the script doctor’s tone, such as Quentin Tarantino‘s work on It’s Pat and M. Night Shyamalan‘s work on She’s All That.

According to longtime Saturday Night Live cast member Chris Kattan in his autobiography, his wild mafia comedy Corky Romano featured uncredited contributions by none other than Paul Thomas Anderson, whose latest film, One Battle After Another, is one of the cinematic events of the year. This revelation makes no sense, but in the grand scheme of things, the 2001 film was strangely in the director’s wheelhouse.

Paul Thomas Anderson Allegedly Rewrote ‘Corky Romano’

The extension of a script doctor’s contributions to a film can vary. Sometimes writers are brought in to add some spice to the dialogue or adjust one particular scene, but in the most drastic cases, they overhaul the entire script. Screenwriters and directors like Carrie Fisher, Joss Whedon, Frank Darabont, and Scott Frank had prolific careers as script doctors alone. It emphasizes the collaborative nature of filmmaking, so much so that The Godfather, shorthand for the peak of cinema as an art form, saw uncredited work by Robert Towne. According to Ridley Scott, Anderson was called on to perform rewrites on Napoleonat the behest of its star and frequent PTA collaborator, Joaquin Phoenix.

Back when the long-running sketch comedy series launched movie stars, comedies inspired by Saturday Night Live skits were prevalent in the 1990s. The NBC series was a farm system for rising comedy stars. When performers thrived on television, they usually reprised beloved characters on the big screen or received original star vehicles. Chris Kattan, a cast member from 1996 to 2003, was best known as one-half of the recurring sketch alongside Will Ferrell, “The Roxbury Guys,” which paved the way for the 1998 film, A Night at the Roxbury. Three years later, the frequent impressionist received a plum role as the titular character in Corky Romano, a mob-set comedy about a veterinarian convinced by his crime family to infiltrate the FBI to steal evidence incriminating his father, Pops (Peter Falk).

In his 2019 autobiography, Baby Don’t Hurt Me, Kattan claimed that Paul Thomas Anderson, hot off the critical adoration of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, did uncredited rewrites on the Corky Romano script.Richard LaGravenese of The Fisher King and Behind the Candelabra fame also allegedly punched up the script to this critically derided film directed by Rob Pritts and written by (according to the credits, that is) David Garrett and Jason Ward. Kattan quipped, “If only I could tell every critic who gave Corky a bad review, ‘Oh yeah? Well, Paul Thomas Anderson helped write it, dickhead!'” He wrote that Anderson “offered to help,” suggesting that the prestigious director did this out of passion or the goodwill of his heart.

Does this added knowledge retroactively boost Corky Romano‘s artistic value? Well, not exactly. There’s no getting around the glaring shortcomings of this nonsensical and often exhausting movie. For all its bombast, it fails to stand out from the pack of other mafia comedies, such as Jane Austen’s Mafia! and Analyze This, a subgenre that was surprisingly prolific in the late ’90s and early aughts. Corky Romano has the potential to emerge as a reclaimed gonzo cult classic similar to Freddy Got Fingered, but it ultimately lacks any cinematic panache to even warrant any ironic love. Like Tom Green‘s lone directorial effort, Corky Romano‘s existence within the studio system is baffling and a curiosity of an era of film where these bonkers comedies were mainstream.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Relationship to ‘Saturday Night Live’ and Comedy

Paul Thomas Anderson has neither confirmed nor addressed his involvement in Corky Romano, and based on its critical standing, it’s probably best for him to plead the fifth. Two decades later, it actually wasn’t that out of character for Anderson to help out with the script for a broad comedy starring an SNL alum, as he once directed a short film for the sketch series in 2000 starringBen Affleck. Along with the humorous nature of his movies, Anderson has always been close to the SNL family, as he first unlocked Adam Sandler‘s dramatic chops in Punch-Drunk Love and entered a long-term relationship with Maya Rudolph, who have four children together.

There’s something refreshing about P.T. Anderson being a prestigious auteur without any pretentiousness or self-consciousness about his body of work. Nothing is beneath the man who has directed some of the finest films of the last 30 years—not even Corky Romano.