It’s no secret that getting Good Will Hunting made back in the ‘90s was quite a journey for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And now, a viral post has reminded fans how the duo made sure Hollywood executives were taking their work seriously.
For context, the script for the 1997 movie began as a 40-page assignment Matt submitted for a Harvard University class. After realizing the story had serious potential, Matt recruited the help of his best buddy, Ben, and the pair completed the script while living together in Los Angeles.
Once the script was done, Matt and Ben’s next job was to find the right people to get it made — with the caveat that they would also get to star in it as Will and Chuckie.
As the story goes, production company Castle Rock Entertainment initially bought the rights to the script. However, executives had some concerns about aspects of the story, and they ultimately asked Ben and Matt to rework the script, which brings us to the recently resurfaced information.
On July 9, an X user shared a screenshot from a 2019 Screen Rant article recalling that Matt and Ben wrote fake sex scenes into the script while shopping it around Hollywood.
The post on X has more than 43,000 likes, and while it might sound hard to believe that Matt and Ben purposefully incorporated fake scenes into the script while desperately trying to get it made, the pair actually did it for a very good reason. Allow me to explain.
After Castle Rock requested a rewrite, Matt and Ben got to work changing the story. However, when the duo turned in the revised scripts, they grew suspicious that executives at the company weren’t even reading them properly.
“We were so frustrated that Castle Rock wasn’t reading the script, so we felt like we had to develop this test,” Ben recalled during an interview with Boston magazine in 2013. “We started writing in screen direction like, ‘Sean talks to Will and unloads his conscience.’ And then: ‘Will takes a moment and then gives Sean a soulful look and leans in and starts blowing him.’”
According to the duo, the sexual moments between characters made such little sense in the story that it helped them to quickly figure out which executives were actually reading the script based on whether or not they commented on the random sex scenes.
Eventually, Harvey Weinstein received the script, and he quickly noticed that the sex scenes seemed out of place. This confirmed to Matt and Ben that he’d actually read the story properly, and the rest is history.
They handed the script over to Miramax, which distributed the film in 1997. The following year, Matt and Ben won the Oscar for Best Screenplay — and after all that, you can’t say they didn’t earn it.
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