I stumbled upon the site News in Film when looking up the whole, sordid history of Ridley Scott's Robin Hood and they have a great breakdown of the nonsense. It's stories like this that make you realize why writers aren't particularly fond of their treatment in Hollywood.

The basic rundown of the story is this:

- Universal buys the script "Nottingham", a revisionist tale in which The Sheriff of Nottingham is the good guy.
- Russell Crowe signs on, even though he's apparently not interested in making the script.
- Ridley Scott signs on even though he thinks the script is "terrible".
- Scott and Crowe make a standard origin story and openly bash the original script, even taking issue with the title.

This story strikes me as particularly insane because the main players (Crowe and Scott) never seemed to actually like any element of the script besides Robin Hood. I know that there are examples of directors taking a premise of a script and completely rewriting it (like "Hancock" or "Three Kings") but this seems rather exceptional because it's not like the subject was one that Crowe and Scott couldn't have just done themselves. Maybe they just thought that this film had momentum and would be easier to change than to actually start their own project from scratch. Also, the studio would pay for the re-writes so it wasn't like Scott would have to commission a script on his own.

On the bright side, the original writers got paid seven figures but having your screenplay get thrown away and then bashed has to hurt.