Hilariously enough, Shapiro admits in his letter above that he got involved at first because he read that the Scientology centre was "a great place to pick up women", and it snowballed from there.
Before that, J.D. Shapiro, the first screenwriter was fired because the original studio (MGM) wanted to change his script too much (which he knew he would be a bad decision...). He practically disowned the film, and even decided to accept his Razzies.
This was the last movie Franchise Films helped finance. According to the lawsuit and federal investigation afterward, this studio made a living forcing movies to be severely under budget and taking the leftover as pure profit. In this case, the $75 million budget-film only got $44 million.
Just Plane Wrong: Oh, so many examples. Nothing should be working after about a millenium, it takes years, not weeks to learn to fly one, none of them have flight-suits and yet they're all stunt dogfighter material. On the positive side, they do mention that Harrier jets can hover.
