How About a Little Credit for the Real Writers Behind Films?

It is perhaps fitting that on Christmas Eve the Calendar Weekend cover story perpetuates the myth of the immaculate conception (“Acting, Producing and a Lot of Caring,” by Gene Seymour, Dec. 24).

The article--which details the creative input that the two lead actresses, Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts, had on the film “Stepmom”--makes no mention at all of the film’s principal creative “inputters,” the screenwriters. Only one of the five credited writers is mentioned, and that presumably only because he happens to be a producer. Reading the article, one gets the impression that the script simply floated down to the set and landed in Sarandon and Roberts’ laps, whereupon they hashed and rehashed, structured and restructured it, as they claim, until it was right.

Why can’t people, The Times included, understand that it is one thing to give notes and another thing actually to write. As Hemingway said, a writer is someone who writes, which means sitting down and actually doing it, not just talking about it, criticizing it, directing it or acting it. Roberts claims that when she was unhappy with a scene she would mention it to the director and in the morning, voila, new scenes would magically appear on the set? How did those scenes arrive? By camel? With frankincense and myrrh?

The Times’ ubiquitous movie trailer ads tell us that if we really want to know what’s happening in the movie business, we should read the Calendar section. If this article is any indication, we’d do better reading “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

PETER LEFCOURT, Los Angeles

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I saw the movie “You’ve Got Mail.” I enjoyed it immensely. I laughed, I even cried a little, but never once was I worried that there wouldn’t be a happy ending. I had already seen a movie called “The Shop Around the Corner.” I congratulate Nora Ephron on her clever, updated reworking of this enchanting tale, but I am more than a little bothered by the fact that although her name appears four separate times in the newspaper ad, there is no mention of Miklos Laszlo, the playwright of “Parfumerie,” the source material for Ephron’s movie.

Considering the fact that Ephron’s parents were, among other things, playwrights, I’m disappointed that she allowed this oversight. A teeny-tiny credit in the ad for a dead Hungarian playwright wouldn’t have sold any more tickets, but wouldn’t it have been the classy thing to do?

T.C. SMITH, Sherman Oaks