William Goldman, in his book,"Which Lie Did I Tell" says that he did some "doctoring" on the script, then goes on to say that he basically rewrote the whole thing. The original draft focused on Damon's character being so smart that the government wanted to recruit him and chased him around. In the Hollywood Foreign Press interview of the the two, right after they accepted their Oscar, the two were asked how they felt; Ben said that he felt like Milli Vanilli, for a split second you see a look of fear run across Matt's face, then everyone laughs and Matt followed suit. For me that's a strange answer for Ben to give. Most would assume that he'd say Cinderella, yet he chose to go with a signing group who was notoriously known as being a fake. Strangely you can't find this clip ANYWHERE, the PR boys did well in hiding this. Another piece of strange things that Ben said is in the April 2002 Details Magazine article "... I don't want to sit here and pretend that everything's great, that I'm some sort of enlightened person. I have a lot of struggles, I'm conflicted, I think about things, I wake up in the middle of the night, I have regrets, I'm very insecure." What are his regrets? The fact that his career sky rocketed because of a script that he and Matt are perceived to have written but what was actually shown on screen truthfully isn't theirs? Granted, a lot of people have claim the work of others as their own and have made a career out of it; but should this be true, that what was on screen wasn't the actual script Matt and Ben wrote, than that's a fraud. Goldman goes on in his book to say that the original plan was to say these two wrote it and to latter reveal the truth, but the buzz about the two was so good that Weinstein chose to go in another direction with the origins of the script. My argument is this, what else have they written? Yeah yeah, acting (if your hot) pays more; but a writer always writes. A writer has more than one script, regardless how much the difference in money between acting and writing is, a true writer has at least three more scripts sitting on the shelf. So why haven't they written more? And adapting a novel into a script doesn't count. In an adaptation you are not coming up with a story from your own imagination, all the hard work has been done for you, it's now your job to make the pieces fit into a movie. I know that this hasn't answered your question, and you may never get the full answer, but hopefully it helps in your search.