Uncommon Valor and the Screenplay That Disappeared

A Hit Arrives — and a Trend Is Born

When Uncommon Valor opened in theaters on December 16, 1983, it was immediately embraced as both a commercial hit and a cultural corrective. Gene Hackman was praised for his granite-solid performance, Patrick Swayze emerged as a rising star, and the film joined a growing wave of early-’80s movies determined to reshape how Americans viewed the Vietnam War.

Rather than portraying Vietnam as a national failure, films like Uncommon Valor reframed it as a conflict still unresolved — a war whose heroes were unfinished, whose emotional debts remained unpaid.

But behind the film’s success sat a buried Hollywood dispute, one that rarely surfaces in discussions of the movie. It involved a man whose name appears in the credits, but whose role in shaping the film’s very existence remains deeply contested.

That man was Wings Hauser.

Wings Hauser and the Story That Wouldn’t Let Go

By the early 1980s, Hauser was a busy character actor, carving out a reputation in low-budget genre films and grindhouse fare. He was working steadily, but he wanted more than to be remembered as a face audiences recognized but couldn’t name. Hauser wanted to write.

The idea that would become Uncommon Valor came from a deeply personal place. A close friend, Gary Dickerson, had returned from Vietnam haunted by stories of soldiers left behind — POWs and MIAs whose fates remained unresolved long after the war officially ended. As public attention around the POW/MIA movement intensified, Hauser found his way into the emotional core of a story about veterans returning not for glory, but for closure.

“I saw that he had left something behind in Viet Nam and that triggered the whole thing… the MIA and the POW situation… will be the excuse to go back to Nam and get the POWs, but what they’re really going back for is their own clarity and their own integrity.”

Hauser spent roughly eighteen months writing and researching the screenplay. By 1982, he sold the project to Paramount Pictures.

Paramount, Milius, and the Rewrite Machine

Paramount immediately recognized the potential. The story offered patriotism, masculine camaraderie, and large-scale action — all filtered through unresolved trauma. The studio paired the project with producer John Milius and director Ted Kotcheff, fresh off First Blood.

Milius was already a towering Hollywood figure. Loud, unpredictable, and famously opinionated, he had also become one of the industry’s most trusted script doctors. By the early ’80s, Milius had enough power at Paramount to reshape projects internally.

According to Hauser, Milius handed the screenplay off to Joe Gayton for rewrites, overseeing substantial changes as the film moved toward production. When Uncommon Valor reached theaters, Hauser discovered he no longer had screenplay credit. Instead, the film listed:

Story by: Wings Hauser

Screenplay by: Joe Gayton

Hauser objected and took the matter to the Writers Guild of America.

How WGA Arbitration Works — and Why Hauser Lost

When multiple writers contribute to a film, the WGA oversees credit arbitration. Three anonymous guild members compare all drafts against the final shooting script. For original screenplays, the first writer is guaranteed at least story credit, but screenplay by credit depends on how much of the final structure, scenes, dialogue, and narrative remains from that original draft.

The arbitration details are confidential, but the ruling was clear: Hauser’s material did not meet the threshold required for screenplay credit.

Hauser never accepted the outcome.

“I actually wrote it and lost the credit in arbitration to John Milius and Joe Gayton… John Milius is a scumbag right-wing bastard… The guy who got the credit — he was a punk!”

The comments are raw, angry, and deeply personal — and they reflect how devastating credit disputes can be for writers fighting for recognition.

Conflicting Accounts and an Uncomfortable Gray Area

Adding further complexity is a contradictory version of events preserved in Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences production notes. According to AMPAS, Hauser conceived the story and commissioned Joe Gayton to write the screenplay before licensing the project to Paramount.

That account clashes directly with Hauser’s claim that he wrote the screenplay himself and that Gayton was brought in later by Milius. The truth likely lives somewhere between those two narratives, shaped by rewrites, studio influence, and shifting power dynamics.

What is clear is that Joe Gayton had no previous produced screenplays at the time. Uncommon Valor was his first. He wouldn’t receive another screenplay credit for nearly a decade. That fact doesn’t prove Hauser’s accusations — but it does make the outcome feel, at the very least, uneasy.

What Remains

There is no public evidence that Paramount or Milius manipulated the arbitration process, and Hauser himself never formally alleged interference. The WGA followed its established procedures. By their rules, Hauser kept story credit because he originated the idea — and lost screenplay credit because the final film was deemed to rely primarily on later drafts.

Yet the emotional truth lingers.

Uncommon Valor remains a defining entry in the 1980s Vietnam film cycle — a movie about men trying to reclaim something left behind. Behind the scenes, Wings Hauser was fighting a similar battle: to reclaim authorship of a story that came from his own unfinished war.

That irony, like the film itself, refuses to fade.

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