Richard Kelly wrote a draft of this script, but it was rejected as being too dark for a children's movie. Though Kelly could have received a credit for this draft, he chose not to. Kelly's script diverged greatly from the story in the book. Among other changes, he made Stanley blond and blue-eyed, older, and named Kramer instead of Yelnats. The Kelly script was set in the future, in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where the outside world was presumably not much better than Camp Green Lake. Instead of having been wrongly convicted of stealing sneakers, Stanley had been sent to the camp because he euthanazed his radiation-sick little sister. The entire Kissin' Kate subplot was cut, and instead the inmates were digging to find a cache of weapons for the (now-male) warden and the military. The script that Andrew Davis eventually shot was written by the book's author, Louis Sachar.
