Upon second viewing, M. Night Shyamalan's surprise She's All That twist becomes much less interesting
Recently the world found itself reeling from the revelation that M. Night Shyamalan had supposedly ghostwritten the 1999 high-school comedy She’s All That—a surprise that no one saw coming despite it being clearly telegraphed a decade earlier, when Shyamalan explicitly said as much. However, as with all Shyamalan twists, the dramatic effect becomes notably lessened upon repeated viewing: Salon notes that the officially credited screenwriter of She’s All That, R. Lee Fleming, refuted Shyamalan’s claims on Twitter, saying it was “only in his mind.” Then, before we could even consider the possibility that we all exist only in M. Night Shyamalan’s mind, and whether this explains why so many of our conversations seem so stilted and unnatural, Fleming deleted his tweet, his only remaining allusion to the whole imbroglio a retweeted Mark Twain quote—one that, as of press time, M. Night Shyamalan had not yet claimed as his own.
While neither Fleming or Shyamalan has sought to clarify things any further than this, a couple other people claiming to have knowledge of the situation have also attempted to set the record straight. Over at The Mary Sue, a commenter who definitely appears to be former Miramax executive Jack Lechner says the truth is Shyamalan did “an uncredited rewrite on the [Fleming] script, and a very good one that got the movie green-lit.” And, as The Huffington Post picked up, screenwriter Brian Duffield passed along the apparently common industry knowledge that Shyamalan is believed to have only “touched up Kevin Pollack’s [sic] scenes”—presumably suggesting that Pollak should be terrible at Jeopardy! to symbolize that, in life, no one really has the answers, and also that he’s secretly an alien the whole time. Watch it again and you’ll see.