W. D. Richter Invasion of the Body Snatchers

W. D. Richter (Walter Duch Richter, born 1945) wrote the screenplay for Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), adapting Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers.

Richter and Kaufman were pursued for the same film without knowing it

Producer Robert H. Solo approached Richter to write the adaptation while separately approaching Philip Kaufman (in Body Snatchers, as director) to direct. The two men were already acquainted but were unaware they were both being courted for the same project — a detail Richter returns to in interviews about how the collaboration began. (starburst, wikipedia)

Richter wrote the first draft in about four weeks, racing a WGA strike

Richter drafted the screenplay under a pending Writers Guild strike deadline — roughly four weeks, without an outline — and set the story initially in a small-town context before Kaufman pushed the relocation to San Francisco. (starburst)

Before Body Snatchers Richter had come out of Dartmouth (English, 1968) and USC's film program, breaking in with the horror-comedy Slither (1973). He was in his early thirties when Solo handed him Finney. (wikipedia, imdb)

Richter rewrote pages days ahead of the camera

The decision to move the story from a small town to San Francisco was made late in preproduction. Richter was on location through the shoot, rewriting to accommodate the city as the film discovered it.

"When the decision was made at the last possible minute to move the story from a small town to San Francisco proper, he was rewriting the script nonstop, often only days ahead of scenes being shot." — paraphrased in Starburst Magazine summarizing a W. D. Richter interview

The rolling rewrite is visible in the finished film: San Francisco is not a generic backdrop but a set of specific neighborhoods — Telegraph Hill, the Embarcadero, the Financial District — each used for a different stage of the paranoia. See San Francisco as Setting.

Richter framed the story as the cost of complacency

Richter has described the film's intent in flat sociological terms rather than horror-movie ones:

"Richter and Kaufman wanted to make a movie about the consequences of complacency in the face of a mindless mob bent on relentlessly and mercilessly crowding out diversity, tolerating only conformity." — paraphrased in Starburst Magazine summarizing a W. D. Richter interview

That framing — not Cold War anti-Communism, not anti-McCarthyism, but the failure of a self-satisfied culture to recognize what is eating it — is the Richter-Kaufman rewrite of Finney. Daniel Robichaud, writing at Considering Stories, assessed the result:

"A clever screenplay, well-orchestrated and overflowing with characters and scenes that wring every ounce of dread from the concept." — Daniel Robichaud, Considering Stories (2020)

Brian Eggert, in his definitive essay on the film, credited the screenplay's specificity of place as its deepest structural achievement:

"Kaufman and Richter utilize their specific setting so that everything onscreen feels awakened from its familiar slumber." — Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review (2018)

See Themes and Analysis (Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Richter's sensibility shaped the film's comic intelligence

Adam Nayman, writing for Reverse Shot, identified a quality in the screenplay that distinguishes it from typical genre writing — a wisecracking self-awareness that coexists with genuine dread:

"Richter's famously wiseacre sensibility." — Adam Nayman, Reverse Shot

That sensibility is visible in Richter's casting suggestions (Leonard Nimoy as a pop-psychology guru is a joke and a threat simultaneously), in the dialogue's dry humor under pressure, and in structural gags like the Yojimbo homage. The film is funny in ways that make the horror worse, not lighter.

Jim Knipfel, writing for Den of Geek, noted that Kaufman — working from Richter's script — accomplished something rare in remake history:

"He was able to reinsert a good deal of the humor and humanity that had been excised from Siegel's film." — Jim Knipfel, Den of Geek

The humor is Richter's contribution; the humanity is shared between Richter and Kaufman. Together they built a film where the audience cares enough about the characters that the ending's betrayal has real weight.

Richter kept the ending

The ending of the film — Sutherland's Matthew Bennell, converted, pointing and screaming at Nancy — was known to only three people on the production: Kaufman, Solo, and Richter. The choice to replace Finney's upbeat finale with total defeat is Kaufman's decision, but it lives in Richter's script. See The Ending (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and The Pod Scream.

Richter and Kaufman made the film recklessly and fearlessly

Looking back on the production decades later, Richter described the mood of the collaboration in terms that explain why the film feels unguarded where most studio horror is cautious:

"We all made this thing kind of recklessly and fearlessly and it's really connected with a certain constituency." — W. D. Richter, Film Buff Online (2016)

The Den of Geek retrospective credited the screenplay's structural achievement — it deconstructs its source material and rebuilds it:

"Director Philip Kaufman surprised the hell out of me, crafting an intelligent, beautifully shot and darkly atmospheric film." — Jim Knipfel, Den of Geek

The intelligence Knipfel identifies is largely a screenplay quality. Richter's script provides the bones — the escalating paranoia, the rotating betrayals, the precise use of San Francisco's geography — that Kaufman's direction then fills with texture.

Kaufman, in the same spirit, recalled the environment that allowed the film to end the way it does:

"Those were great days of filmmaking. There was a freedom that filmmakers had that certain studio heads understood. We took a chance." — Philip Kaufman, The Hollywood Reporter (2018)

Richter wrote for genre directors who wanted literate genre

Richter's career sits alongside a specific class of 1970s–80s genre picture: films that take pulp premises seriously enough to rewrite the rules. Slither (1973) is a caper picture. Nickelodeon (1976), co-written with Peter Bogdanovich, is a silent-film-era comedy. Dracula (1979) for John Badham is a Romantic rather than a Gothic Dracula. Big Trouble in Little China (1986) for John Carpenter is a comic Chinese-mythology action picture that Richter rewrote from an earlier draft. His one feature as director, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), is the most concentrated expression of his voice — a comedy-adventure film that pretends to be the eighth installment in an existing franchise.

Richter as screenwriter, 1973–1991

Year	Film	Role
1973	Slither	Screenwriter
1976	Nickelodeon	Co-screenwriter
1978	Invasion of the Body Snatchers	Screenwriter
1978	Dracula	Screenwriter
1984	The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai	Director
1986	Big Trouble in Little China	Screenwriter (adaptation)
1991	Late for Dinner	Director