How Do Writing Credits Work in Hollywood?
By: Max Borg
Tags: Writing, Writers Guild Of America, Film, Screenwriting

What do the screenwriting credits on a major motion picture actually mean?

Credit: Warner Bros.

A few weeks ago, Netflix released Mank, David Fincher’s tribute to Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who collaborated with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane. The authorship of that film has been a controversial subject for decades, and Fincher’s movie opts for the (erroneous) notion that Mankiewicz was the sole writer, with Welles hogging credit.

Interestingly, Mank itself is credited exclusively to the director’s father, the late Jack Fincher (whose viewpoint was inspired by Pauline Kael’s discredited essay Raising Kane), but it has been reported that some revisions — perhaps by producer Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump in 1995 — occurred before filming. Of course, said revisions were, most likely, not substantial enough to warrant any additional credit, as per the WGA system. But how does that system work?

The Writers Guild of America

What is currently known as the Writers Guild of America (itself split in two sections, East and West) originally began as the Screen Writers Guild, as mentioned in Mank (with the protagonist mocking the lack of an apostrophe). They represent film and TV writers in matters such as contracts, compensation, health insurance and pension plans.

The Guild also has sole discretion as to who receives the definitive writing credit on motion pictures and TV episodes. This is important for a number of reasons, chiefly because being credited affects the writer’s status and income: uncredited writers are not entitled to additional compensation such as residuals.

When it comes to films, the procedure works thusly (all rules mentioned henceforth are from the Screen Credits Manual): the studio or production company is required to inform all writers who have worked on a specific project about their predecessors and/or successors. This is mainly for big-budget projects, which typically go through multiple iterations, sometimes over several years (the original draft of Gemini Man, a film released in 2019, dates back to 1997).

Credit: Paramount Pictures

Writers are also asked to inform colleagues if they’re working on the same project, register their contract with the Guild and keep all relevant material attesting to their contributions, should they be requested in cases of credit dispute. Once the film has been completed, the studio or production company must send copies of the final shooting draft to all participating writers and a tentative credit notice to the Guild.

At this point, the proposed credits can be accepted or rejected, with the latter case leading to arbitration. A writer can also choose to withdraw their name voluntarily, prior to the submission of the tentative notice, for personal reasons (Christopher McQuarrie, who was offered a shared screenplay credit on the first X-Men film, asked to have his name removed because he didn’t think his contribution was substantial enough).

Even if the writers do not object to the proposed credits, the Guild reserves the right to do so, and in some cases arbitration is triggered automatically, most notably when a “production executive” (i.e. the director or a producer) asks for a shared writing credit.

Arbitration

If arbitration is required, a three-person panel is called upon to rule on the matter. Said panel consists of three Guild members, whose identities are kept secret to insure fair proceedings, and each of them receives all relevant materials pertaining to the dispute: all drafts of the script, any source material as defined by the WGA, and written statements in which the concerned writers make their case for receiving official credit.

Per official WGA rules, no more than two writers or writing teams (two or three writers who worked together, separated by an ampersand, and considered a single writer for the purposes of credit) may share a screenplay credit, barring exceptions that are decided via arbitration (such as Spider-Man: Homecoming being credited to three teams of two writers each).

Credit: Sony Pictures

If the screenplay is original, the first writer must have contributed at least 33% to the final shooting draft in order to be credited, while any subsequent writer must have contributed at least 50% (or more than 50% in the case of a production executive). If it’s an adaptation, each writer’s contribution must account for at least 33% of the final draft. Additionally, for original screenplays, the first writer is entitled, at the very least, to a “Story by” credit, per Guild rules.

Once the final credits have been decided upon, the arbiters must also determine the order in which writers are credited: generally, this means they are listed in order of importance; if the arbiters can’t come to an agreement, or they deem that each writer contributed equally, the credits are chronological. An example of this is Batman Begins: David Goyer was the original writer working on the project, but Christopher Nolan is listed first, meaning his contribution was considered more substantial.

The Guild’s decision is final (although appeals are possible), and participating writers are generally asked not to discuss their involvement in a project or claim authorship prior to arbitration (or after, in the case of writers who did not receive credit).

James Gunn is the first credited writer on Guardians of the Galaxy, meaning his contribution was deemed greater than that of original scribe Nicole Perlman. Credit: The Walt Disney Company

Despite this, it is commonly known that, especially for major studio releases, more writers worked on them than are listed in the credits: the aforementioned Gemini Man, for example, is attributed to three screenwriters, even though at least five other people are said to have worked on it, based on various reports published in the trades over the course of the film’s long development process.

Similarly, X-Men has a single credited screenwriter (plus a shared “Story by” credit), but it is widely accepted that at least a dozen people contributed to the final draft, including Joss Whedon (who has openly discussed his two scenes that remained in the finished film) and Christopher McQuarrie, who voluntarily turned down an official credit and thus, according to The Hollywood Reporter, was deprived of at least one million dollars’ worth of residuals in the first year after the film’s release (the same figure has been estimated for Ed Solomon, who also took his name off the film even though it’s been suggested he and McQuarrie wrote most of it).

Notable Disputes

While most of these situations are settled amicably (writers are invited to reach an agreement amongst themselves before resorting to arbitration), there are times when the results of credit disputes are not to everyone’s liking. The status of the first writer, for instance, has often been deemed controversial when it comes to adaptations.

David Mamet, for example, publicly vowed never to work on another project where he wasn’t the sole writer after two consecutive arbitrations for Wag the Dog and Ronin. In both cases he was brought in for rewrites, and in both cases the respective directors — Barry Levinson and John Frankenheimer — claimed he should have retained sole screenplay credit, with a story credit for J.D. Zeik, who wrote the original draft of Ronin.

In the latter case, Zeik’s lawyers asked if Mamet would be willing to forfeit a formal credit, since the original writer was at the start of his career and could use the prestige that comes with being the only credited author of the script. Mamet refused, and was credited under a pseudonym (since a fake name doesn’t affect residuals). Ironically, Mamet himself was later rewritten, when he was unavailable for revisions on Hannibal due to a scheduling conflict, with Steven Zaillian writing the lion’s share of the final shooting draft.

Credit: Universal Pictures

A reasoning similar to Zeik’s is behind the final credits on Speed: originally, the Keanu Reeves vehicle was going to be attributed to both Graham Yost, who wrote the original draft, and Joss Whedon, who revised most of the dialogue and made at least one significant plot change. Yost, who has since regretted the decision, asked for arbitration because he thought having sole credit would look better on his CV, and Whedon’s name was left out of the final version (due to dialogue-centric rewrites generally having less weight in such cases).

Then there’s at least one dispute that led to one of the concerned parties resigning from the Guild in protest. This was due to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which originally left out Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni even though, according to the director, not one word of the previous draft — by Alex Cox and Tod Davies — remained in the actual film. The decision was reversed on appeal, but Gilliam chose to resign from the WGA due to the arbitration process, which he claimed took longer than writing the script.

A decade later, George Clooney was denied credit on his third directorial feature, Leatherheads, which he claims to have completely overhauled (the screwball comedy structure was reportedly 100% Clooney). While he had no issue with the original writers being credited, he resented not being listed alongside them, since the final draft was largely his (a claim supported by his producing partner Grant Heslov, who read all versions of the script during its development).

As a result, he changed his Guild status from “active” to “financial core”, meaning he still pays membership fees and retains health and pension plans, but is not allowed to vote in any WGA-related matters. Clooney’s decision, which is irreversible, was due to the fact that quitting the Guild altogether, like Gilliam did, would have impacted any future writing gigs with studios that have an agreement with the WGA.

But perhaps the most fascinating dispute is the one pertaining to the Expendables franchise. Per the credits of the first film, David Callaham is listed as sole author of the story and co-author of the screenplay, alongside director/star Sylvester Stallone. This was the result of arbitration, due to alleged similarities between the final draft, initially credited only to Stallone, and Callaham’s script Barrow, also an ensemble movie about mercenaries.

Credit: LionsGate

Because of this, Callaham is considered the creator of the entire franchise (the sequels contain the mention “Based on characters by”), and is therefore entitled to additional payments for any sequels and spin-offs, regardless of his active participation in said films. When this became a concrete issue after the release of the second film, the production company sued Callaham and the WGA for fraud, in an attempt to have the credits altered.

Unfortunately for them, another writer called Marcus Webb had already alleged in 2011 that both Barrow and The Expendables ripped off a previous script he had written. Stallone’s lawyers pointed out that Barrow predated the other script, thus exposing the contradiction at the heart of the other dispute: at the time of the original arbitration, Stallone stated that he had read Barrow but not used it as a direct inspiration; in the Webb case, he claimed to have retained the structure of Callaham’s script while making other changes.

As of now, the credits of the three Expendables films still mention Callaham.

The Curious Case of Animation

Animation is a whole other can of worms, in that it’s not under WGA jurisdiction at all. This is why Toy Story has five credited screenwriters, or you’ll see credits like “Additional writing by” for films like The Little Mermaid and Inside Out. The downside comes with projects such as Disney’s live-action remakes of their animated films: due to this loophole, they are under no legal obligation to credit the original writers (although they usually do) or compensate them, as pointed out by Terry Rossio when the teaser for the remake was released in late 2018.

In Conclusion

Unless it’s animation, or the product of an established writer-director (Quentin Tarantino, Aaron Sorkin, Paul Thomas Anderson, et cetera), the official credits on a major Hollywood project are unlikely to tell us the whole story, sometimes in the most paradoxical way: to this day, for example, we cannot be sure as to who actually worked on National Lampoon’s European Vacation, because although John Hughes is one of two credited screenwriters, he claimed to not have had anything to do with it at all, aside from being the creator of the original characters. Basically, as they say in a famous John Ford movie, it’s often a case of “print[ing] the legend”.