Saturday, January 10, 2004

Credit Where It's Due

According to this article in The New York Times (which you may have to register to read), the end credits for The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King run 9 minutes and 33 seconds. They don't say how many names that involves but the previous Lord of the Rings movie (with apparently a shorter crawl) had 559 names.

This doesn't matter to a lot of people since they aren't going to sit through them, anyway. Theaters may even like it since it helps clear the place out and lets the crew get an early start at sweeping up the Raisinets boxes. But it raises a big issue for uncredited writers.

As you probably know, a lot of movies, especially action flicks and comedies, employ more writers than are listed on the screen. The first Flintstones movie allegedly had more than 30. A lot of folks who get hired to write movies now just automatically presume that someone, or perhaps many someones will follow them.

The Writers Guild of America has the sole power to determine the screen credits on a movie. (Quick aside: In my travels through the entertainment biz, I occasionally encounter someone who's involved in a potential movie in some capacity and though not a screenwriter, says they've been promised a writing credit or will demand one. They're not going to actually write in the accepted sense but they're going to make suggestions and they think they can negotiate a writing credit. If I have the energy, I explain to them that except on a non-Guild film, the studio cannot guarantee them a writing credit. The WGA can always arbitrate and award the credit to the person or persons they decide actually wrote the film. And while that arbitration process is flawed in some ways, it never awards screen credit to anyone who didn't actually produce a script.)

Back when the WGA won jurisdiction over screen credits, it became customary for them to attempt to limit them to two names or in extreme cases, three. The thinking was that (a) more names than that devalued the role of all screenwriters on a film and (b) keeping it down to two or three names might induce studios to keep it down to two or three writers, minimizing how often our work was rewritten by others. Obviously, the latter hasn't worked as intended and some writers are happy about this. They figure more writers being hired to rewrite means more writers being hired, period. But let's turn our attention to that first reason.

That it was more dignified for writers not to be part of a huge list was the thinking back when movie credits were 20 or 30 names. There was usually one credit for Make-Up and it went to the head of the department, not to the 25 folks who actually did the make-up. The head of the Special Effects division got the one credit for Special Effects, regardless of how many guys actually did the work. So it didn't seem that ignoble for someone to write a large chunk of a movie and not get his or her name on it. Most of the people who worked on the movie didn't get their names on it.

Today, most of them do...all 40 Make-Up people, all 348 guys who made the Special Effects happen, the caterer, the insurance broker, the insurance broker's secretary, the security guards, the guys who drove the Craft Services truck to the set, the people who loaded the crullers onto the Craft Services truck...

...but not the guy who wrote 20% of the movie. His name is nowhere to be seen.

Several times, I've been asked to serve on WGA committees that will explore how the credits guidelines might be revised. I would sooner put some vital body part in a drill press. Even opening the floor to discussion gets some writers so angry that flecks of foam begin appearing on their computer monitors and they accuse those who want to change things of being traitors and idiots and sell-outs and...you know, all those things Ann Coulter calls Democrats. I don't need that in my life. Still, I can't help but wonder aloud if now that credits credit almost everyone, it isn't far more ignoble to say that writing a large chunk of a movie still doesn't deserve even cursory recognition. Aren't we now saying that writing 20% of the movie is less important than doing 2% of the wardrobe handling?

The more I think about it, the more I think the whole concept of what screen credits mean has changed, and that it's nuts for the WGA to cling to the perspective of 1946. But I don't expect it to be changed. Not without some serious bloodshed within the Guild.

• Posted at 10:13 PM · LINK

Decision 2004

About the time O.J. Simpson was arrested, I made what was probably a brilliant decision. I make so few that I remember them all. I decided not to follow the case for a while. I could see that the scenario had the potential to be all-consuming, offering up an excess of entertainment and frustrating emotion, to the point of being a major impediment to my work. Later on, it became exactly that...but by joining it "in progress," I minimized the number of months of my life that it was a distraction. I am starting to feel I should do much the same thing regarding the upcoming presidential election.

One of my greatest criticisms of what we loosely call "The Media" is its need to fill hours and column inches even when they really don't have anything to say. The News has always been like this but now, with Internet and cable news channels competing as they do, it's really become a matter of how to take a one-minute news item, stretch it for a couple days, make it sound exciting, and bridge the days when there's nothing at all new to report. The last couple of weeks, most of what I've read about the Iowa Caucuses and Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich's pie charts has been in that category. It looks like news, it sounds like news...but it isn't news. News is about things that matter.

Here is a hunch based, like all good hunches, on just about nothing. One of my most vivid memories of those few years when I followed the Dodgers was when the trailing team would suddenly tie the score and Sportscaster Supreme Vin Scully would yell, "And it's a brand-new ball game!" The fact that one team was ahead or behind for the early innings had suddenly become irrelevant. It sometimes became irrelevant in the bottom of the ninth. All that had gone before has perhaps been entertaining but none of it had anything to do with which team would ultimately win the game. I have a feeling that the '04 presidential race is going to be like that; not that it will tie but that the real contest, the one that will determine who wins, will hinge on events and actions and economic indicators that have not yet occurred and cannot possibly be predicted. It will have nothing to do with what John Kerry said about Dick Gephardt at the Iowa Caucuses.

I expect to support the Democratic nominee unless it's Joe Lieberman, in which case I'll be too busy packing to move to Canada. I also expect that between now and Election Day, the news will be a roller coaster for all who insist on following it. Bush will be beatable. Then he will be unbeatable again. Then he will look highly beatable. Then we'll hear that he already has the ballot boxes stuffed and/or Osama squirreled away for a late October Surprise...and so on. That's what would be best for the newsfolks, so that's how the news will be. It's not that I don't care about the election. It's just that I have the feeling I could ignore it all, pick up the story a few weeks after the conventions and not miss much except that roller coaster.

I won't be able to do that, of course. I don't have the will power. But at least months from now, I'll be able to post a message linking back to this one and say, "I wish I'd listened to myself."

• Posted at 6:13 PM · LINK

A Cartoonist's Cartoonist

Back in '99, my pal Art Spiegelman wrote a good and important essay for The New Yorker on Jack Cole and his greatest creation, Plastic Man. It eventually evolved in a must-own book but if you don't own the book, you can still read the original article.

• Posted at 2:47 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's Woody Allen writing about...well, does it really matter? It's Woody Allen.

• Posted at 2:15 PM · LINK