Inside the Mind of Matt Damon

A few years ago, Charlie Kauffman wrote a screenplay called Being John Malkovich. By entering a secret portal, anybody could live inside the head of John Malkovich - before being tossed off by the Jersey Turnpike.

Now, anyone - including you - can get inside the head of Matt Damon. Well, the collective heads of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who got an Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting.

One of the first screenplays I read, as an aspiring screenwriter, was Good Will Hunting, the shooting script made available to bookstores around the country.

I don't know what the original looked like. Production scripts are, by their nature, contaminated with lots of little changes, particularly the director's fingerprints covering up the readability of the spec script with all those camera directions.

So be it.

Good Will Hunting is a great read. Famously written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, this is the script they came up with on their now-famous drive to California to make it in the movie biz. At its weakest, it plays a bit like an after-school special, but mostly, it's a great story about friends, success and about what really matters.

At M.I.T., physics professor, Gerald Lambeau, has laid down the gauntlet - with a set of mathematical problems that should stump his best students and challenge them to prove themselves. Each time, however, an anonymous source comes forward, answers the problem with exacting proofs and then slips back into the shadows.

When it turns out the smartest kid at M.I.T. is a janitor, Lambeau gets involved. As it is, this janitor, Will Hunting, is a little punk from South Boston (a Southie) whose gang of ruffians are in and out of jail all the time, as they drift from adventure to misdventure on a weekly basis.

And when Lambeau goes looking, Will is already in jail for resisting arrest. Having punched his arresting officer, he's due to serve time until Lambeau steps forward and gets the judge to release him to his custody. There are two conditions: (1) Will has to work closely with the professor, to explore and improve his mathematical skills; and (2) Will has to see a counselor for anger management.

Given a choice between jail and door number two, Will embarks upon this new adventure, which gives us a chance to figure out what makes Will tick. Lambeau, who is a bit of an elitist, trots out a series of "experts in the field," all of whom give up when Will not only proves he's smarter than they - but meaner to boot.

The only guy left is Sean Maguire, an old colleague from Lambeau's early days. They had parted company long ago, when Lambeau went on to a distinguished career, while Maguire ended up teaching psychology at a community college. It wasn't a difference in talent. Maguire's wife died, and with her went Maguire's ambitions.

Lambeau calls on him mostly because the boy is a Southie, which is what Maguire is. Lambeau thinks one Southie might connect with the other, maybe even understand why these Southies are such disappointments.

The script, as originally written (as far as we can tell from a production script) is funnier than the resulting movie. There are great scenes in the original script that were cut from the film, either because of language or to preserve a tone that the resulting film wanted. Director Gus Van Sant got a lot of mileage from the film, and maybe his strategy paid off, since the resulting film did so well. Still, I like the script better than the film. The script is earthier, more straight forward, and has a better pace than the film, which liked to revel in those photographic moments when somebody cues the orchestra and we are invited to sigh together.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck won Oscars for the script. It's that good.

If there's anything I don't like about the script, it's the level of detail that went into the scene descriptions. This script, like those of Richard Price, has a tendency to talk too much about the scenery, which slows down the reading. But the action and dialogue are first rate. Any time you can tell a story and create such memorable characters, you're doing something right.

I would recommend this script to those studying the craft of screenwriting, as well as to anyone who saw the film but wondered if there was anything that got lost in the shuffle. I'm not a huge fan of Gus Van Sant, whose shot-for-shot remake of Psycho will go down in history as one of the most mysteriously stupid moves any director could have made. Still, life is about passions. Mine are no less baffling to others. C'est la vie.

The best thing about Good Will Hunting is its ability to move the material beyond the sensational and to say something about real life. We'd all like to be baby geniuses like Will Hunting. Who wouldn't want to remember everything he or she had read, and to bust the chicken McNuggets of Harvard know-it-alls at will? But Will is a character haunted by demons of his own. The real success or failure of the story is in Will's choices in handling that monkey on his back.

That's an issue we can all sink our teeth into. I like how Will's behavior is as much motivated by the "family" he has created with his little tribe of Southies. I also liked the dialogue between two professors, and the distance between them in terms of what matters most. Finally, I thought Maguire's insight, in dealing with Will, was most refreshing for those seeking a leg-up, either in dealing with prodigies or the older men and women "of wisdom" in dealing with the younger generation.

Each has something to offer to the great debate, which is a point not lost in this story. There's also an interesting dialogue between Will, who has a mighty chip on his shoulder, and Skylar, who wants to have a relationship with Will, but finds it hard because of his chip. Her willingness to relate to will, and her sense of confusion and hurt when he pushes her away (and judges her out of feelings of fear and resentment) is a good observation, and one strangely precocious for a story written by two guys fresh out of college.