Working in 1983 as a special correspondent for the now defunct TV-Cable Week magazine, Straczynski first encountered the story of Christine Collins and her son from a Los Angeles City Hall contact. Over the ensuing years he kept researching the story, but never felt he was ready to tackle it. Out of television writing for several years and practically blacklisted in the industry because he was considered difficult to work with, he returned to researching and then finally writing the story in 2006. Almost all of the film's script was drawn from thousands of pages of documentation. His first draft became the shooting script; it was his first film screenplay to be produced. Ron Howard had intended to direct the film, but scheduling conflicts led to his replacement by Eastwood. Howard and his Imagine Entertainment partner Brian Grazer produced "Changeling" alongside Malpaso Productions' Robert Lorenz and Eastwood. Universal Pictures financed and distributed the film.