We all know Tim Burton, but we should also talk about Caroline Thompson. The first movie she wrote was Edward Scissorhands, and helped Johnny Depp get cast by telling him Edward was based on her dog. Three years later, she wrote Nightmare Before Christmas in two weeks, one draft.

She met Tim Burton through her agency and within hours, they were already conspiring about how to bring a sketch he’d made as a teen to life. She was later hired for Nightmare, based on other drawings Tim had done, in part because she was living with/dating Danny freaking Elfman.

When she was working on the script for Nightmare, she felt very disconnected from the zombified mega babe that Tim had drawn Sally to be. So she reworked the character with Tim and director Henry Selick, basing Sally’s personality on herself and giving her a storyline of her own.

Just to clarify, while Caroline definitely deserves more credit, that doesn’t take away from Tim Burton’s work, either! He created the characters and wrote the story for what was meant to be a 45 min TV special (like The Grinch), but Disney wanted full length, so he hired a crew.

According to them, Danny was given Tim’s poem (after he fought for Disney to produce it for years) to create songs for it, which he showed to Caroline, who opted to write the script because she’d worked with Tim on “Edward”. Danny didn’t like her script, but Disney and Tim did.