The official credit for the Crimson Tide screenplay was owned by Michael Schiffer (story by Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick). But the flavor, pizazz and cultural oomph came from three pinch-hitters — Robert Towne (the stateroom Von Clauzewitz scene), Quentin Tarantino (the references to Scotty and Star Trek warp speed and Kirby being the dominant artist of the Silver Surfer comic books) and Steven Zallian.

These three are the only ones I know about…there may have been others. But they primarily served as sauciers rather than heavy-lifting screenwriters.

“Don & Jerry: Go The Gay Way,” posted on 4.14.14: “In April of ’95 I did a hotel-room interview with producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer during the Crimson Tide junket.

“A few months earlier I’d laughed hard at Quentin Tarantino‘s ‘go the way way’ riff in Sleep With Me (’94), in which he discussed a struggling-with-homosexuality undercurrent in Top Gun. So I proposed to Don and Jerry that they should reach out to gay moviegoers by re-marketing all their films as secret gay movies that were fraught with homosexual themes and iconography (i.e., the phallic-shaped submarines in Tide).

“Bruckheimer froze with a grin on his face but Simpson smirked and kicked it around.

“When I asked them to sign my Crimson Tide script at the end of our chat, Simpson suggested that the gay subcurrent thing was more in my head than in their films.”