COUNTERPUNCH LETTERS : Words to Live By: Credits Are Important

As Calendar’s Morning Report of July 19 noted, the Writers Guild of America is conducting a referendum among its members over whether to revise the credit determination process to decide which writers’ names are listed on your favorite TV show or splashed across the silver screen of your local multiplex.

Besides the writers’ mothers, should anybody care who gets the credit?

Frankly, yes.

Writers (and their agents) care about these things, because their careers depend on whether their names are attached to hit shows or movies. Their mortgage holders care, because writers’ bank balances depend on whether they receive residuals from reruns and royalties on the sale of videocassettes of their work, and only those writers whose names appear on-screen receive those royalties and residuals.

And you the viewer/moviegoer should care, because--surprise--the actors don’t make up that witty, sparkling dialogue that makes you laugh and makes you cry, and directors don’t improvise the scenes and the dramatic structure of the stories that make you root for the hero and sit on the edge of your seat and cheer when the bad guys meet their deserved bad ends and the hero and heroine kiss.

And much as the cineastes and critics would have you believe the director is the Supreme Visionary on a film, it is actually the writer who first asks, “What if . . . ?,” conceiving the idea for a new story and who all alone faces the blank screen of his or her computer and actually figures out how to tell the story.

Sometimes the most praised visuals of a film aren’t created by the director or cinematographer, but by the writer long before production begins. On the pages of the script.

And writers want and need the credit for doing all that.

More than half the time, there’s no problem--there’s only one writer or writing team who wrote the movie or TV show, so there’s no debate who wrote it.

The problem occurs when more than one writer has been hired to work on a script. At some point in their careers, every writer will rewrite another writer’s original script (much to the chagrin of the original writer, who thinks the initial script was a damn fine job, thank you very much).

But whether it’s from the insecurities of a network or a studio or a star, whether it’s from a director’s differing vision or whether it’s from a writer’s inability to take a terrific premise and turn it into a shootable, playable script, another writer is hired to make changes.

The problem has been that under the guild’s current rules for determining writing credits, writers who rewrote other writers’ scripts haven’t been getting credit, haven’t been getting royalties and haven’t been getting residuals, even if they wrote a lot of what you see on the screen (up to 67% of an original screenplay could have been written by other writers, and the first writer winds up with sole credit on the screen). Which a lot of writers think is unfair.

And under the current rules, if writers are also the producer or director of the picture, they have to rewrite more of the script than if they were only a writer in order to get writing credit. Which a lot of writers also think is unfair.

Which is why the guild is considering reforming its credit determination process. Everybody else who works on a picture, including the people who sweep the sound stage at the end of the day, gets their name on the screen. The only ones who don’t are writers who rewrite other writers.

Writers like getting credit for the work they’ve done. And not getting the blame for work they didn’t do.

But why should you care whose name is up on the screen?

Do you care who wrote that wonderful book you just read? Or that great play you saw last week? You’ll probably buy another one of the author’s books, or see another one of the playwright’s plays.

So you should care who wrote that great movie or TV show you enjoyed. Because as much as you love your favorite stars, when you watch them in a badly written show or movie, you don’t love them as much.

Paying attention to who wrote the movies/shows that you love guarantees that you’ll have a better time.

Which is why everyone should care about writing credits.

Not just our mothers.