Give writing credit where it is due
The Credits Review Committee, a dedicated group of feature and television writers with widely varied backgrounds and career perspectives, has come forward with four excellent proposals. The Committee's efforts have received little attention in the community, but ballots are in the mail, and their proposals all deserve your vote.
The Committee's most important advance, Proposal #4, begins with a new, expanded notice provision. If this proposal is approved, you must receive written notification, in advance, if a producer or director is writing simultaneously with you and/or claims to have created literary material before you started writing.
If the producer or director fails to provide that notice and a copy of the prior literary material, the Committee would exclude any such prior or simultaneous writing from the credit arbitration. No more surprise (back-dated?) drafts suddenly coming out of the drawer. No more working with the producer or director, only to find out later that he/she has been "writing" behind you.
The Committee's clear intention is that, in order for producers and directors to be considered for writing credit, they must announce that they are seeking credit, and they must show you what they've already written. This is fair.
Proposal #4 then goes on to eliminate the higher Percentage Requirements imposed by the Credits Manual on writing directors and producers (referred to in the Manual as "Production Executives"). This is the easiest and most obvious step toward a more rational, logical and consistent process of determining credits.
Instead of continuing to demonize directors and producers, the Committee has recognized that more and more "real writers" are directing and/or producing their own screenplays. The current system punishes and alienates these writers by holding them to more stringent rules than their fellow writers. This is wrong.
The Credit Manual's "guiding principle" is that "writing credits should be a true and accurate statement of authorship." Whether a writer also produces and/or directs is irrelevant to "true authorship." As long as the notice requirements described above are followed, there's no longer any reasonable justification for denying a writer credit just because he or she has also served as a producer or director.
A few naysayers among you insist on mischaracterizing the Committee's proposals, and Proposal #4 in particular, as benefiting "powerful writers" at the expense of "weak writers," or as "shifting power from the first writer to subsequent writers." There is no truth or logic to these accusations.
Ironically, the status quo is most harmful to first writers, who, more often than rewriters, have the leverage to attach themselves as producers and/or directors, but are reluctant to jeopardize their writing credit by having to meet higher Percentage Requirements if they are rewritten. And if you still believe that writing producers and directors make wholesale changes solely for the purpose of stealing credit (does this ever really happen?), consider that the existing rules only create an incentive for them to make more changes.
Please don't allow these discussions to become politicized with personal attacks on the Committee or with misguided rhetoric in defense of the original writer. The Credits Review Committee is cautiously and conservatively attempting to strengthen a Guild that represents all writers. And there is nothing in any of the Committee's proposals that would adversely affect the highly protected status of the first writer of an original screenplay, who still gets sole "Written By" credit unless a subsequent writer contributes 50% to the final shooting script.
Enough infighting and name-calling. You will never change the way the outside world treats you by manipulating or misrepresenting your own credits. A system that aspires to anything other than an objective reflection of "true authorship" will only continue to distract, divide and disaffect the membership. Meanwhile, the studios, unopposed by a unified Guild, will continue to pursue rollbacks in the form of free rewrites and one-step deals, and continue to reject the contractual codification of your dignity and creative rights with the age-old refrain, "We don't do that for writers."
As someone who has spent decades fighting to raise the stature of screenwriters, I strongly believe that a system which discriminates against a substantial segment of its membership and, in doing so, tends to misrepresent writing credits, is a system which, at its core, reduces the stature of screenwriters. I urge you to support all of the Credit Review Committee's proposals.
Alan Wertheimer is an attorney with Armstrong Hirsch Jackoway Tyerman & Wertheimer. He was an Arbitrator under the 1981 WGA MBA. In 1999, with a handful of prominent screenwriters, Alan negotiated the landmark deal at Columbia Pictures, where all writers who meet certain criteria now receive a very favorably defined percentage of gross, rather than net profits.
