The meteoric career of movie screenwriter Kevin Williamson, whose 1996 megahit horror film Scream won him instant wealth and celebrity, is the latest of the rags-to-riches tales which have always fueled the image of Hollywood as the epitome of the American dream. Williamson, the man Time has dubbed "the Bard of Gen-Y," was just another unemployed, unknown "wanna be" when in a rush of creative inspiration one momentous long weekend he hit upon an idea that forever changed his life. "[My] phone was about to be turned off. I didn't have enough money to buy a new ink cartridge for my printer," Williamson recalled in a 1997 interview with Pat Broeske of Writer's Digest. Then Williamson conjured up the outline for a trilogy of scary movies about a group of hip teenagers, most of whom end up as victims of a brutal psychopath. Two weeks later, he had completed a...