Beyond the Sea (film) west conducted arbitration through the scripts that had been written since Barry Levinson developed the film at Warner Bros. in 1987. Lewis Colick, James Toback and Tom Epperson disassociated themselves for credit by the WGA. The Guild justified credit to Lewis Colick, who wrote the first draft of "The Bobby Darin Story" in 1987, and Kevin Spacey. Actor-writer Jeffrey Meek believed he should have deserved credit; he was paid $85,000 of a promised $125,000 to settle his claim to have performed writing services. Spacey said Meek was "not a hired writer" on "Beyond the Sea". "He turned in a draft,
Beyond the Sea (film) "The Shipping News", was hired to write a new draft for "Beyond the Sea". Epperson's script included Darin's penchant for orgies after his divorce with Sandra Dee. Spacey, finding the Epperson script to be overtly dark and morbid, began to rewrite "Beyond the Sea", incorporating info from the 1987 Lewis Colick script. Spacey acknowledged he portrayed Darin in an exaggeratedly sympathetic way, and decided not to centrally depict the darker side of Darin's life. "The other scripts made Bobby [Darin] a rather unlikable figure," he explained. "I was not interested in making a conventional biopic, as you can see from