System Is Still Needed to Protect Screenwriters in Hollywood : Original Writer Is the Priority

With all the ink spilled lately over who should or shouldn’t get screenwriting credit--such as “Professionals Deserve the ‘Contributing Writer’ Credit” (Calendar, June 10)--no one has yet explained why writers are so protective of the first writer on a project.

The first and least significant reason is political. Writers are the most disposable commodity in Hollywood. All of us are familiar with Dump the Writer, a game played by producers, directors, stars, TV executives, studio heads and development people when they can’t get the writer to change the ending or they can’t get the script they want out of the script the writer wants or what they wanted ruined the original script. In some cases, getting fired off a project is a badge of honor.

The Writers Guild voted overwhelmingly last spring to uphold its policy of protecting the first writer partially because we hope that making it harder to get credit for rewriting someone else’s script will discourage the practice of replacing writers on a whim. But there is something deeper behind the guild’s position.

Now this needs a caveat: I am talking about original screenplays--not the screenplays based on novels or plays or television shows. There the original writer is acknowledged.

The question of authorship in any screenplay or teleplay is more complicated because screen and teleplays are written to be interpreted by a whole series of artists--from the producer, director and actors to the lighting technician and makeup person. Unlike a playwright, however, the author of a screenplay generally doesn’t get to see other productions of his work. Most people perceive the screenplay to be the finished movie.

I had a friend who was enduring getting his first screenplay produced and managed to stick it out through the very end of the process by adopting the attitude that if anyone wanted to know what the movie he had written was they should read his third draft. Everything else was written to get the movie made.

However, had he not written the first draft, no movie would have been made at all. The story evolved . . . the dialogue was tailored to specific actors . . . there were new scenes . . . the setting influenced tone . . . but the basics did not change. It was still a sweet comic story about Bennie and Joon, two mentally disabled people who fall in love with each other, and how the girl’s brother--whose life had stopped when he took over her care--reacted. That was the original idea that inspired all the subsequent activity. And that never changed.

Every newspaper reporter, every English teacher and every poet knows the importance of getting the lead, developing a thesis or finding the generating image. It is an idea--a germ that contains the beginning, middle and end of a story--that propels the writer through the process. It is a source of creativity and truly good ones are very hard to come by.

Now whatever it is about this original idea--the coherence of its vision, the passion, the sheer delight of playing it out--it makes people do odd things like lay down huge sums of money, rent cameras and go off into the desert to shoot, and ask big actors to work for scale. But whatever is written after that first draft--including what the writer writes--is interpretive. Sure, it’s creative or funnier or more inventive--but it used the first idea as a springboard. And the first idea came to the first writer from out of his head. Probably while sitting alone in his room banging said head against his typewriter keys.

I’ve been on both sides of the question of credit--I’ve rewritten and I’ve been rewritten. I’ve arbitrated and been arbitrated. And it’s only served to convince me that no matter how much work it takes to fix a flawed or dull screenplay or to take it through production, it is not the same as the terribly frightening and lonely act of coming up with the first story and turning it into a first draft. We writers need to protect that--at least among ourselves. Otherwise we would lose the courage to write.