'Traffic' And 'Syriana' Writer Stephen Gaghan Rewrote M. Night Shyamalan's 'One Thousand A.E.'

Briefly: M. Night Shyamalan isn't messing around with the preparation for his next film, the sci-fi feature One Thousand A.E. (Or the execs at Sony and Overbrook Entertainment aren't messing around.) The film is set to star Will and Jaden Smith as " a father and son who crash-land on Earth one thousand years after mankind has abandoned the planet. The crash leaves the elder Smith badly injured, and it's up to the boy to find help in what is now a strange and dangerous place."

While Shyamalan is known for writing his own films, even The Last Airbender, this new project started with a script by Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli) which Shyamalan rewrote. Then Stephen Gaghan, who wrote Traffic and wrote and directed Syriana, stepped in to "get the script in shooting shape." Now he's likely to continue fine-tuning the script before the film shoots in February.  Shyamalan's scripts have increasingly become the major shortcoming in his work, so with any luck the revisions by Gaghan will result in a film that is a lot more successful as a story than the last few movies from the director. [Variety]