INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

A few months back, I ran into my film/television writer friend, let’s call him Josh, during a work-related event.  I had just seen an article on Daily Variety about a movie that just got a decent director attached that sounded oddly like the screenplay Josh had written several years ago with his writing partner.  I asked him about it and he smiled and said that indeed the movie was theirs but that they’ve already been paid out and the studio had taken the concept and gotten new writers to do a rewrite.  He wasn’t even sure he was getting a credit once the movie was made. 

What does this mean?  How the hell did Josh and his writing partner get their authorship stripped?  Unlike the traditional sense of authorship, in the Entertainment industry, screenwriters do not retain authorship.  Screenwriters essentially sell the “authorship” of their screenplays to studios and allow them to be classified as for-hire employees and in exchange get a host of benefits and protections covered by the Writers Guild of America.   In order to be a part of a labor union to begin with, one must be an employee.   This applies not only in film but also in television.  If you are staffed on a television show, you are contractually bound, making your creative work, a property of the company’s.  In television, writers get producer credits so the majority of credits one sees (Supervising Producer, Executive Producer, Co-Executive Producer) on any one of his/her favorite television shows, indicate writers rather than producers. 

“Residuals” was a word that was thrown around a lot during end of last year’s writers’ strike.  How are residuals different from royalties?  They are essentially the same thing but the term royalty implies authorship.  Since the writer doesn’t retain authorship, the term “residual” was coined for purpose of differentiation.

News like the following seem like daily occurrences in the movie world:      

The latest on the movie HALO: The original script by Alex Garland (28 Days Later) has been rewritten by Ender’s Game screenwriter D.B. Weiss and will reportedly get another rewrite by Josh Olsen, scribe of A History of Violence. 

Terminator 4: Catwoman and Terminator 3 screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris completed a draft (or 80 page treatment depending on who you talk to) in 2004. David C. Wilson (Supernova) was brought on to do a total re-write based on their story.

It seems comical how many rewrites and writers a consequently pretty shitty movie goes through.  At the heart of the strike last year was the notion of “authorship” and I think, integrity.  I guess the writers can sleep better knowing they got a bigger cut of residuals but the fundamentally flawed bully-ish system is still very much in tact.