Near the top of the A-list of Hollywood screenwriters, Steven Zaillian has also proved a capable director, first with his highly-praised debut "Searching for Bobby Fischer" (1993) and later with his sophomore effort "A Civil Action" (1998), an important legal drama which opened to mostly favorable reviews. The opinions of those who didn't like the latter seemed to validate Zaillian's initial fears about boiling down a 1200-page manuscript into a sensible script. "It was a wonderful book, but what was troubling about it for a movie was the sheer length of it, the number of characters, and it
