Special Coverage The Photo IssueThe Must List2008 Fall TV2008 Fall Movies2008 Fall Music
Page 3 of 6

Scream 2, and, for that matter, Scream 3, were part of the plan from the beginning. Says Weinstein: ''This is not the classic case of going 'Wow, we made a lotta money, can we make another one quick?' We always saw this as a trilogy of movies. It's like George Lucas' plan for Star Wars, only here we're dealing with a knife-wielding killer in a mask.''

Having the idea for a sequel, however, is a lot different from having the script, especially with Miramax pushing to get it out so quickly. And with Scream's raging success, Williamson was suddenly on everybody's hot list (''The last time we saw anyone like him,'' Weinstein says, ''it was Quentin Tarantino'').

Virtually every project Williamson had ever considered was suddenly getting greenlighted: I Know What You Did Last Summergot produced by Sony (which capitalized on Williamson's name by advertising it as being ''from the creator of Scream''; the ads were pulled when Miramax threatened a lawsuit, but the film was No. 1 for three weeks running). Williamson's pilot for the series Dawson's Creek got picked up by The WB network, and Miramax scooped up his early dark-comedy screenplay Killing Mrs. Tingle from turnaround. With nearly $20 million worth of new writing assignments, three weeks — the writing window Miramax gave Williamson — seemed too short a time for him to turn around a Scream sequel.

''The Miramax mafia basically came down to North Carolina where we were shooting Dawson's Creek,'' he says. ''They came to harass me, and to make sure I wasn't going to eat, sleep, or breathe anything other than the plot of Scream 2.''

And what about that Scream 2 plot?

Though it's been guarded more tightly than the secret formula for Peach Snapple, we do know this: A prominent black actress gets killed in the first 10 minutes, a la Drew Barrymore's Jiffy Pop scene in Scream. Williamson himself makes an on-screen appearance. Tori Spelling makes a cameo in Stab — a movie-within-a-movie based on the best-selling book by Scream's gore-happy reporter Gale Weathers. And Campbell survives at least until the last scene.

Good luck, though, trying to get any more plot info than that. To maintain the suspense, every cast and crew member had to sign confidentiality agreements; scripts were printed on dark brown paper with red lines through the text so they couldn't be photocopied, and scenes were distributed in installments and filmed out of order.

Even that wasn't good enough.

''As soon as Kevin's first 40 pages came in,'' Craven says, ''they went out almost immediately onto the Internet. So all that was blown and we had to go into rewrites.''

Perhaps that explains the paranoia around the set on this particular evening in Pasadena. Consider this exchange with O'Connell:

EW: Are you the killer, Jerry?

O'CONNELL: [Cautiously] I play one of many interesting characters who may or may not be the one.

EW: What's it like to have fake blood poured on you?


Page 3 of 6