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LOS ANGELES _ With his Los Angeles-set police drama "Boomtown" surviving the cut and returning to NBC this fall, Graham Yost has finally moved beyond "Speed," the hit 1994 movie about a Los Angeles bus wired to explode, for which he has screenplay credit.

"Listen," says the Canadian-born writer/producer, "for years I was the `Bus Guy.' When we were doing (the HBO space-race miniseries) `From the Earth to the Moon' _ I didn't do that as a conscious decision to not be the `Bus Guy,' but it helped."

And besides, Yost admits that he didn't even write all of "Speed." "Joss Whedon wrote 98.9 percent of the dialogue," he says. "We were very much in sync, it's just that I didn't write the dialogue as well as he did.

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De Bont brought in Joss Whedon to rework the script by removing the glib retorts and making the character more earnest, per Reeves' suggestion. "I dealt with the LAPD before on Point Break, and the thing that came off is their concern for human life: 'We get the bad guys, and we get to save the good guys,'" he explains. "And with that basic tenet I began with Jack."

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A 3rd-generation sitcom writer (his earliest post-college job was turning out teleplays for the Nielsen juggernaut “Roseanne”), Whedon immediately demonstrated a highly marketable faculty for resonant comic storytelling, one by turns edgy and disarming. He soon evolved into one of Hollywood’s most sought-after script doctors, earning alluring sums to cure expensive projects like “Speed” (1994), “Toy Story” (1995) and “Twister” (1996) – but was often denied screen credit for his considerable labors.

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