So the studio, Columbia, and the producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, did what they do at times like these: They called in the specialists, the high-priced script doctors meant to breathe life into dying scripts. Studios and producers are willing to pay -- $200,000 to $300,000 a week for Oscar winners or nominees and others considered to be in the top echelon of the business -- for those who can furiously tap out pages in as short a time as possible.

It was John Lee Hancock, a charming Texan who'd just made his directorial debut with the critical and commercial hit "The Rookie," who got the call from Columbia studio chief Amy Pascal. Hancock, who'd worked on a King Arthur project for Bruckheimer, had a few weeks to kill while he waited to see if Disney was going to greenlight his next directorial effort, "The Alamo." Within days, he was meeting with the various executives, talking to Bay and Bruckheimer and, ultimately, selling Smith on the script, which had already gone through the typewriters of a bevy of writers, among them writer-director Ron Shelton and "Permanent Midnight" author-screenwriter Jerry Stahl. Hancock, who's best known for an earnest but unsentimental Americana, isn't the first writer one would think of to pen a sarcastic urban comedy. "I'm not known as funny," he admits with a chuckle, but his task here was to make the script less simplistic. Feverishly sending in pages as soon as they popped out of his printer, he added subplots and gave each protagonist a secret.

"We added more conflict. Will and Martin are terrifically funny, but you can't just count on sticking them in a car and they'll be funny. You need to set them up," he says.

"It's a really different kind of writing because time is so of the essence," he adds. "You have to have a little of a gunslinger attitude. 'I'm coming to town and I'm killing the bad guys and then I'll leave and I won't take any of your women.' You can't upset the apple cart of production."