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''I wasn't paid literally anywhere near millions of dollars,'' laughs Brooks. ''It's so wrong, it's not even close.'' Adds LaGravenese: ''It's nobody's business, but I will say this. Someone gets paid according to their experience and their credits. It has nothing to do with the color of your skin or your sex.''

Neither Winfrey nor Forte publicly answered Busia's charges of racism and financial inequity, but Forte states flatly that Busia's work was not seen by Demme, LaGravenese, or Brooks. ''When Oprah hired me, she mentioned there had been a previous draft,'' says LaGravenese, ''but she never gave it to me. That was it.'' Says Brooks: ''I never read her screenplay until arbitration.''

Busia maintains that virtually the entire shooting script was based on her screenplay's structure, entitling her to sole credit. She admitted that she didn't significantly change Morrison's structure or characters but cited small instances of verbatim language and identical short sequences from her original draft.

''If [the LaGravenese script] was the movie they shot, I would absolutely not have gone for credit,'' says Busia. ''But my screenplay and the shooting screenplay are almost exactly identical.''

Busia's script contains a sequence in which Sethe moves a bed and lifts a floorboard to get money hidden underneath — a moment that's not in the novel or LaGravenese's script but appears in the film. Brooks' script also quotes language from the book, used by Busia but not by LaGravenese, and Busia claims that Brooks' script compresses plot points from different parts of the novel in a way similar to her own version. Busia maintains that ''it is absolutely impossible that two people could come up with all those little details.''

But Brooks and LaGravenese chalk up similarities to the shared source material. ''Akosua, Richard, and I had all been faithful to the book,'' counters Brooks. ''Because of that, the story and characterizations were also from the book, and therefore similar.''

In fact, when given her examples, Brooks traces the genesis of each one to the book, LaGravenese's script, or his conversations with Demme. ''I can go through everything point by point,'' says Brooks. ''Which is only to support the truth — that I never read her screenplay.''

The Guild arbitration committee ruled that all three writers deserved credit and, in a separate decision, gave Busia coveted first billing. Now tempers began to flare on the other side. According to Brooks and LaGravenese, Busia got credit even though none of her script was used.

''The guidelines favor the original screenwriter for an original production,'' says LaGravenese. ''The problem is that those same guidelines are used when it comes to adaptation — which doesn't make sense, because the original writer for an adaptation is the novelist. There needs to be some aesthetic judgment. Where does craft come into it — the ability to translate a book to a screenplay that can be made into a film? Just taking a book and putting it into screenplay format...allows anyone, even a nonprofessional, to get credit.''


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