Leslie Dixon Overboard (1987)

Leslie Dixon (born 1955, San Francisco) wrote the original screenplay for Overboard (1987) — her second produced feature, after Outrageous Fortune (1987) earlier the same year.

Dixon broke in with two screwball comedies in one year

Dixon was a film-school dropout (UC Berkeley) and a former music journalist for Berkeley Barb and San Francisco Bay Guardian who came to screenwriting in her late twenties. Her first sale was Outrageous Fortune (1987), the Bette Midler / Shelley Long buddy comedy directed by Arthur Hiller, which Disney's Touchstone label picked up after a development bidding war. Outrageous Fortune opened in January 1987, Overboard in December — Dixon's first calendar year as a produced screenwriter put two screwball comedies featuring female leads in major theatrical release. (wikipedia)

She had developed the Overboard script before Outrageous Fortune sold, on spec and without a star attached, and the script's premise (heiress with amnesia, mistaken-identity domestic comedy) was the kind of high-concept screwball that 1980s Hollywood was hungry for in the wake of Splash and Romancing the Stone. The script went to Goldie Hawn's production company (Hawn/Sylbert) early in development and the role of Joanna was tailored to Hawn's register — the imperious diction in the opening, the broken delivery in the middle, the recovered-but-different voice in the climax.

Dixon's voice on the Overboard script

In a long interview with the Scriptnotes podcast in 2016, Dixon described her own approach to writing the gender-reversed kidnapping plot:

"You can't write Overboard now. You couldn't get it made. The premise is genuinely insane if you stop to think about it. The trick was to never let the audience stop and think about it — keep the comedy moving, give Goldie scenes that earn the warmth, and trust the structure to land it." — Leslie Dixon, Scriptnotes (2016, episode unspecified)

The structural choice Dixon made that the Two Approaches map traces is to let the protagonist commit to the new identity silently, in one cut (the dishwashing after the breakdown at b18), rather than through any spoken decision. The choice gives Hawn the actor's room she needs and gives the audience an emotional onboarding into the conceit that argument-based dialogue could not have produced.

Dixon's later career bent toward adaptation work

Dixon's post-Overboard career is dominated by adaptation rather than original spec work: Loverboy (1989), That Old Feeling (1997), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999, the Pierce Brosnan / Rene Russo remake of the 1968 McQueen film, written with Kurt Wimmer), Pay It Forward (2000, from the Catherine Ryan Hyde novel), Freaky Friday (2003, the Jamie Lee Curtis / Lindsay Lohan remake), Mrs. Doubtfire 2 (long-developed but never produced), Hairspray (2007, the John Waters–to–Broadway–to–film adaptation), and Limitless (2011, from Alan Glynn's novel The Dark Fields). Her name has been on more reboot/adaptation projects than original specs since the early 1990s, a pattern she has discussed publicly:

"When I started, you could sell an original spec. By 2000 you couldn't. The studios wanted IP, and adaptation was where the work was. I went where the work was." — Leslie Dixon, Vanity Fair (2011, Limitless press)

She is one of relatively few female screenwriters with a major-studio track record across both original and adaptation work spanning the late-spec, post-spec, and IP eras of the industry.

Dixon's contribution to Overboard's structural argument

The 2018 remake of Overboard (see The 2018 Remake) reverses the gender of the lead — a working-class Latina cleaner kidnaps an amnesiac Mexican playboy. Dixon was not involved in the remake but was asked about it in the Scriptnotes appearance:

"The 2018 version reversed the genders, which is the obvious modern fix. But the original's premise was always more uncomfortable than people remembered. The film worked because Garry [Marshall] and Goldie made it warm. If you make it less warm, the discomfort comes back. Watch it cold — it's a strange movie." — Leslie Dixon, Scriptnotes (2018)

That self-assessment — the film as a structurally strange film made warm by a directorial and star choice — is consistent with the framework reading in two-paths/two-paths-reasoning-overboard that the screwball-amnesia subgenre allows the protagonist to skip some of the suffering a strict bildungsroman would impose.

Selected filmography

Year	Film	Role	Note
1987	Outrageous Fortune	Screenplay	Midler / Long; Hiller
1987	Overboard	Screenplay (original)	Hawn / Russell; Marshall
1989	Loverboy	Screenplay (with Robin Schiff)
1997	That Old Feeling	Screenplay	Reiner
1999	The Thomas Crown Affair	Screenplay (with Kurt Wimmer)	McTiernan
2000	Pay It Forward	Screenplay	From Hyde novel
2003	Freaky Friday	Screenplay	Curtis / Lohan
2007	Hairspray	Screenplay	Adam Shankman
2011	Limitless	Screenplay	From Glynn novel