Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick always intended to get a celebrity cameo into their zombie comedy ZOMBIELAND. That was a great idea, since it resulted in the awesome Bill Murray cameo (which led to another awesome Bill Murray cameo in ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP), but Murray was down the list of options. When Reese and Wernick wrote the first draft of ZOMBIELAND, the celebrity they envisioned their characters bumping into was Patrick Swayze.
Sadly, Swayze was diagnosed with cancer before they had the chance to make an offer to him. So the writers wrote around dozen alternative cameo scenes for the likes of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Kevin Bacon, Mark Hamill, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Joe Pesci, and Matthew McConaughey.
Now that everything is on lockdown, Rheese and Wernick have decided to start sharing ZOMBIELAND script pages online, starting with what they had written for a Swayze cameo. Just like the Murray cameo had nods to GHOSTBUSTERS and GARFIELD, the Swayze cameo would have been packed with references to his career, including music from DIRTY DANCING, clips from ROAD HOUSE, and the potter's wheel from GHOST.
It's a lot of fun to read these pages and imagine how the Swayze cameo would have played out. So give this script excerpt a look in the tweets embedded below. And keep in mind, "Tallahassee was originally named Albuquerque. Columbus, Flagstaff. And Little Rock was Stillwater."
— Paul Wernick (@paulwernick) March 19, 2020
— Paul Wernick (@paulwernick) March 19, 2020
— Paul Wernick (@paulwernick) March 19, 2020
— Paul Wernick (@paulwernick) March 19, 2020
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