Rewriting Respect into the Script

Last spring, during the frenzied week of the Cannes International Film Festival, screenwriter John Richards was on his way to a party celebrating the premiere of “Nurse Betty.”

The movie had received a 10-minute standing ovation, and later that week, Richards and co-writer James Flamberg would earn a best screenplay award. But when Richards arrived at the party’s roped-off VIP section, a guard blocked his entry. No one had thought to give him a pass for it.

“I wasn’t allowed to enter even though I had written the movie,” Richards said Thursday, laughing at the memory. As it happened, actor Greg Kinnear gave Richards his invitation and was admitted on his own recognizance.

Just another minor indignity, perhaps, for a working Hollywood screenwriter. But as marathon contract talks stagger on this week between the Writers Guild of America and the studios, Richards’ anecdote illustrates one of the stickiest, least tangible issues on the bargaining table: respect.

Not surprisingly, the current contract talks are largely about monetary matters. Among other demands, writers are asking for higher residual payments when their work is shown on multiple media formats and pay-TV channels. They’re also attempting to boost minimum pay scales by 3% to 4% annually.

But many film and TV writers say they’re equally concerned with changing a decades-old Hollywood hierarchy they believe keeps them on the fringes of power, input and creative control--and subjected to slights both large and small.

“These are not vanity issues,” said Ron Bass, a member of the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America West, whose credits include “Rain Man” and “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” “Writers want to be able to do their jobs. There are contributions to be made on the set and in post-production.”

At least since the advent of talking films, Hollywood writers’ horror stories about being treated as second-class citizens have abounded. Novelist, screenwriter and script doctor David Freeman (“Street Smart”) said that when agents call writers back, it’s always from their cars. With directors, it’s always from their desks.

Although studio executives are known for coddling marquee actors and directors, Freeman said pitch meetings with screenwriters always are canceled and rescheduled two or three times. An assistant will call, said Freeman, and say “We never do this, but . . . .”

One time, Freeman said, he found out he’d been fired from a project when an assistant called and said, “Hey, when are you going to get your stuff out of this office?”

Meeting with a famous director on another occasion, he got a blunt reminder of his place on the Hollywood food chain. “We had done the coffee and the Perrier, and he called his secretary to bring him a cigar. She came in with a box. He took one, said thanks and closed the box. Never occurred to him to offer me one. Why would it? I was ‘just the writer.’ ”

Marc Norman, who co-wrote the multiple-Oscar-winning “Shakespeare in Love” with Tom Stoppard, said, “There has always been a kind of natural conflict between the people who conceive the movies and the people who make them.”

“I’ve always thought the relationship just began really badly, that back in the ‘30s when sound came in and studios had to figure out what the actors would say, they hired a bunch of East Coast playwrights who were kind of contemptuous of the field,” Norman said. “They saw it as a way to make a lot of money by ripping off these semiliterate West Coast people. They let the studio people know that, and they were offended. This kind of disdain for writers is part of that old wound.”

But Norman said that today things are different, and that people who write for the movies and television generally want to be in Hollywood and make it their life’s work. “They think films are the great American novel or the chance to so some great national work,” he said. “What I see in the strike is that more than ever before, writers are trying to portray themselves as a body of professionals. It’s trying to create a new mind set in the studios.”

While negotiators have been mum during contract talks, there were indications Thursday that writers might have won some concessions. It was not clear, however, whether progress had been made on the potpourri of issues collectively known as “preferred practices” that have spurred the writers’ nonmonetary demands.

Respect is hard to quantify in cold cash. It involves recognition from one’s peers. A seat at the table when key artistic decisions are made. The chance to affix one’s name to a small piece of pop-culture history.

Among concessions the guild has been seeking are the right to watch “dailies” (scenes shot that day), to be allowed on movie sets during production and to attend premieres and be included in press junkets that promote new films.

Writers also are challenging “possessory credits” that allow directors to label movies “A film by” so-and-so. The Guild contends that this practice downplays writers’ contributions and belies the collaborative nature of movie-making. The Guild has proposed tightening standards for issuing possessory credits and limiting their total number.

The 12,000-member Directors Guild of America has countered that the Writers Guild’s proposals could hamstring a director’s ability to deliver products “on time, on budget and within his or her creative vision.”

In the best cases, movie making is a collaborative art, said director Donald Petrie (“Miss Congeniality”) and six other films. In making “Miss Congeniality,” he said he appreciated having writer Marc Lawrence on the set “to bandy about ideas.”

Petrie defended directors’ use of possessory credit because they make all the final decisions. “Ultimately, it has to come down to the one interpreting the piece--that’s the director,” he said.

“If you took the written words off a script, what you have is a book. You can tear the pages off, the audience can pay 10 bucks and read the movie. That person [the writer] is not making the choice of casting, location, whether to shoot it with a long lens or a wide lens.”

In credits, he said he prefers to use “A Donald Petrie film” as opposed to “A film by Donald Petrie” because the latter seems to suggest authorship. “I don’t want to imply I wrote it,” he said.

Bass conceded that writers occasionally have been known to come on sets and be disruptive during production. “I have some sympathy for the director needing to know that what goes on on the set is in the service of the movie,” he said. “There have been all kinds of hurt feelings over the years. I’ve heard lots of stories that are very valid.”

Typically, a screenwriter’s work is considered finished once production starts. Subsequently, a script might be rewritten one, two or dozens of times, with directors and star actors making additional revisions.

“He [the screenwriter] has sweated the bullets, and then along comes someone with a slightly different vision who asks the writer to take a hike,” said Eric Roth, who wrote the screenplays for “Forrest Gump” and “The Insider.” “It comes down to slights that may not seem important to anyone else.”

Those hurt the most, Roth said, often are writers who come up with the initial story idea, then get dumped.

Richards offered a similar perspective. “When you go to the set, even the makeup people know you don’t matter,” he said. “You can tell by how they greet you. And in a sense, they’re right: They’re working on the set, and you’re not. Your work is done.”

“You can’t legislate respect,” he continued. “And the system is not going to change because it’s deeply entrenched, and the minute writers allow themselves to be rewritten and to rewrite others, the respect is starting to go down. . . . If you really want control, direct or write novels.”

Almost every writer that Oscar-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (“Ghost”) knows has a painful story of watching others in the movie-making process take over or take credit for his creation.

Rubin said he is still bitter about being ignored a few years ago after another screenplay, on which he’d spent a year, was rewritten by another writer. Rubin received screen credit for the film, which he did not want to name, but he said, “Nobody called me to say the movie was going into production. I never heard the reading of the script. I wasn’t invited to the set to watch the movie being made. By force of my own effort, I went to the preview. I was an Oscar-winning screenwriter. You’d think there would be some level of common courtesy and respect. That doesn’t occur, and you wonder why.”

At the Oscars, writers are rarely acknowledged by other winners who worked on the same film. “They’re thanking the director, the studio as though this film just materialized out of thin air, or the director shaped the movie out of the cosmos,” Rubin said.

He has heard directors justify taking credit by saying they’re the only one who’s stayed with the movie from beginning to end. “I said, ‘Wait a minute. I spent 10 years thinking, dreaming about it, breathing it in and out, giving birth to characters, ideas, trying it this way and that way. There’s no one around. Just you. You failing. You figuring it out.”

So disgusted with the process, Rubin directed the movie of his own screenplay, “My Life.” He thinks Hollywood should work like Broadway where the writer might not receive as much money but does receive an ownership position. “They can’t change a word of the author’s words without his permission. A director comes in to interpret his vision.”

Realistically, though, he doesn’t believe that will happen. “There’s so much money invested in a movie,” he said, “they don’t want to give that power to a writer.”

Norman said his and Stoppard’s “Shakespeare in Love” screenplay, in which even Shakespeare suffers the indignities of an unknown writer, was based on his career working in movies. Several jokes in the film, such as a long list of contributors on the playbill of “Romeo and Juliet,” were put in to appeal to other screenwriters, he said. In one scene, the play’s financier asks who Shakespeare is. “Nobody,” replies the producer. “Just the author.”

Even on that film, Norman said, he had to fight to preserve his vision of the screenplay. “It’s just not enough to be a writer. You have to write and defend it.”

Not all writers are disrespected, Norman added. “When you’re talking to people who have written hit movies, you won’t find a lot of complaints because they have fulfilled the needs of the studio. The studio treats them with respect. It’s people who are not known as blockbuster writers--because they’re too young, or not had the luck--who tend to be treated as very replaceable, like surly children who have to be disregarded.” Even those at the top might feel the occasional put-down.

David Mamet has told a story about a writer getting a phone call from a Hollywood producer about a screenplay.

“What a script!” the producer raved. The first script-reading was sensational, the producer went on. The room had been “electric.”

“There’s only one problem.”

“What?” the writer said.

“Jack doesn’t like the plot.”