The streets were slick with rain on April 13, 2012, when Damon Lindelof climbed the winding road to Brad Pitt’s hillside estate, overlooking Los Angeles. The 40-year-old Lindelof, a screenwriter and a creator of the hit show Lost, had been summoned by his agent to meet Pitt to talk about *World War Z—*the star’s film based on the 2006 Max Brooks novel—whose release later that year would be delayed. For months, Hollywood gossips had whispered about Pitt’s troubled zombie thriller. Key executives were fired. The movie was over-budget. There were rumors that Pitt, who both produced and starred in the film, had stopped speaking to the director, Marc Forster.

Lindelof told his agent when he called, “I should see something, read a script.”

“No, they just want to meet you cold,” the agent replied.

“They” referred to Pitt and his colleagues from Plan B Entertainment, the actor’s 11-year-old production company. A week earlier Pitt’s respected right hand, Dede Gardner, had called Lindelof to give him a heads-up. “Don’t be nervous or stressed out,” she said of meeting her boss. The morning of the meeting Lindelof received an e-mail asking what kind of coffee he wanted from Starbucks. Arriving at about two P.M., he was escorted to Pitt’s office, a sparsely furnished room with large windows, four chairs, and a table overlooking a parking area and swaying trees. There, Pitt and a grande soy latte were waiting.

“He took me through how excited he was when he read the book, what was exciting for him, the geopolitical aspect of it,” Lindelof said, recounting the meeting over tea at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica on a sunny Tuesday in January. He said Pitt explained, “ ‘But when we started working on the script, a lot of that stuff had to fall away for the story to come together. We started shooting the thing before we locked down how it was going to end up, and it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to.’

“My sense of it was he was taking responsibility,” Lindelof went on. Pitt asked him to watch a recent edit. “The thing we really need right now is someone who is not burdened by all the history that this thing is inheriting, who can see what we’ve got and tell us how to get to where we need to get,” the actor said. Two weeks later, Lindelof was seated in Screening Room 5 on the Paramount lot, where he watched a 72-minute edit of World War Z. The ending was abrupt, an incoherent montage of footage smashed together. But there was something else about the movie gnawing at him when the lights came up.

Where was the other 50 minutes?

“It’s a Zombie Movie”

This year’s crop of big-budget blockbusters have seen more than their share of drama. Disney’s The Lone Ranger was shuttered in pre-production after the original budget soared to nearly $250 million, forcing Johnny Depp and others to defer their fees. 47 Ronin, starring Keanu Reeves as an outcast turned samurai, was delayed a year as its cost reportedly ballooned to $225 million—from $175 million—because of the fumbling of a novice director. And who could forget last summer’s expensive mishaps, Disney’s $250 million John Carter and Universal’s $220 million Battleship? But no movie has gotten more tongues wagging than World War Z, Brad Pitt’s first foray as the star and producer of his own potential franchise, which, one could argue, he has avoided in his career like a zombie plague.