In 2010, screenwriter Ron Friedman consigned many scripts and reference material from his days writing for Sunbow Productions in the mid-80s, to be sold by Heritage Auctions. A group effort by fans, coordinated by Jim Sorenson, saw 31 Transformers TV scripts, briefing binders and the second script for The Transformers The Movie bought up, scanned and made available online.
One item that eluded this endeavour was Friedman's first script for the Movie. Completed in February 1985 and rejected by Griffin-Bacal, who supplied a new outline for Friedman to make a second attempt, before Flint Dille was called in to make heavy re-writes as production commenced.
In Autumn 2020, former Sunbow producer Flint Dille was in the process of clearing out his storage, finding many items from his decades-long writing career. One such item displayed online on October 9th was a second copy of that first Movie script. Most likely in Flint's possession as reference for his and Creative Director Jay Bacal's own unsuccessful attempt at writing a Transformers movie: The Secret Of Cybertron.
The following month, Jim Sorenson flew out to LA in order to scan as many of Flint's written works from his Sunbow days before they were auctioned off. On November 2nd, he scanned this script and sent the digital files to me for merging and OCR.
The script was used as the basis for a panel presentation at TFNation 2022, hosted by Jim Sorenson and Chris McFeely, that summarised the plot and featured fanart intepretations from a quartet of artists.
Now, fourteen years since it was first seen, nearly three years since a second chance emerged and a full year since the story was revealed to the world, the Sunbow Marvel Archive is proud to present the very first script for The Transformers The Movie (link to Movie page)
