Mr. Tally Man

Ted Tally is a Yale-educated playwright who made the jump to cinema with his 1990 adaptation of the novel White Palace into a romance starring Susan Sarandon and James Spader. But it was his next adaptation, The Silence of the Lambs, that would make him a name almost as big as Thomas Harris, the author of the book, and showed audiences that he could write material that could scare the daylights out of anyone.

The first Hannibal Lecter novel, Red Dragon, had been adapted into a lesser-known film called Manhunter in 1986, so no one was champing at the bit for another cannibalistic serial killer flick. However, screenwriter Ted Tally convinced them that this story wasn't about Lecter as much as it was about the young FBI trainee, Clarice Starling. (Source.)

Good idea.

Adapting a 300-page novel into a 120-page screenplay requires some tough cuts to be made. So, like Lecter fileting a security guard, Tally selected certain parts of Harris's novel to be removed, like a subplot involving Jack Crawford's wife, or a confrontation between Clarice and Senator Martin. It had to be Clarice's story, through and through (source).

Tally found Lambs sequel Hannibal "sleazy" and passed on that screenplay. But he did return with a new version of Red Dragon in 2002 and also adapted All the Pretty Horses (2000) from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name.