Let's not forget his Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay. All of these things helped to elevate McQuarrie to a God like status among wanna-be screenwriter's surfing the Internet abyss. When we find out who Soze is, the story will reveal its true self. The narrative ws told after the fact, Verbal was making it up as he went along. In the past twenty years or so, I've probably written a couple of dozen scripts.
Many writers bang out four or five scripts a year.
Patrick Sheane Duncan has written over eighty in the last twenty years. This is not a new thing. Long before personal computers were even an idea, screenwriter Lindsley Parsons Sr. wrote Desert Trail for John Wayne in five hours back in 1935. You write your ass off. Let me tell you a story about a movie I wrote in five days.