Talk:WGA screenwriting credit system/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Daniel Case (talk · contribs) 03:57, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

This has been sitting here for entirely too long. I will be printing it out, going through it with a red pen, doing a light copyedit as I usually do, and then getting back in a few days or so with a review. Daniel Case (talk) 03:57, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Alright. It's been ten days and a copy edit, on top of five months in the GAN queue. Time for my verdict. I would have probably done this sooner but the census is keeping me very busy.

Doing this review is sort of strange, because I can remember way back when this was the main page featured article a little over 15 years ago, around the time I began editing ... wooooooowwwww! I never would have imagined then that I'd be doing this someday.

And that's sort of a good starting point for my review. The current version of the article is better than the one that was gold-starred so long ago, better than the version on the main page. It's amazing to see what we accepted as the best the community could produce back then.

But our standards have gone up too. And while I don't think anyone would seriously claim it's still an FA in its present form, I also regretfully do not think it yet reaches the GA standard as well. So this article is a ❌.

Primarily because I think it could go into more depth about the subject. I read this and I would like to know more about the backstory, what's in the second section. I don't know how deep you've dug, but I suspect there's more to the story. Were there any specific abuses, any particular films, that motivated the newly-unionized writers to demand that credits be assigned purely through the Guild? Did the studios resist it? If so, why? And how was this resolved?

And how has the system evolved over the years? I know it has; one anecdote I am surprised doesn't make it in here is the famous arbitration pileup that was The Flintstones ... 35 writers on the film (75, in some accounts), with eight of them going for credit. IIRC, and I think one of your sources, Den of Geek, even mentions that this led to a change in the rules. Yet we don't have that in the article. (Tootsie should also be mentioned ... by some accounts (although none yet I can find that are reliably sourced) the arbitration after 45 or so writers worked on it forced a delay in the release of the film.

In fact, I think we could also use a background section explaining, as many of our sources do, that often (especially on a big studio film) far more writers contribute in some way, from a few jokes like the ones Quentin Tarantino got into Crimson Tide to restructuring the story while leaving dialogue intact, to a major polish like what Elaine May did for Tootsie (she added Bill Murray's character, for Pete's sake, which was important ... yet she declined to seek credit), than will ever actually be credited.

Alright. It's late and I will stop here for tonight; when I get back I have some more things to say and some suggestions for how you can improve this (And really, don't fault yourself. The work you did in the spring is the reason why I'm writing a longer review rather than just a simple list (but then again, I never do that for any GA candidate I review).

Tune in tomorrow ... Daniel Case (talk) 06:41, 11 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the detail! I will say that the FA didn't have anything except for an attempt at explaining how credits are assigned, and then a long list of articles in external links; if you don't think all the specifics are out of scope, I'll work on that (I think the Simpsons movie also had a lot of credited writers, because of an animation thing I can't find many sources on!) Kingsif (talk) 11:50, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

Alright, I'm back.

Next thing I think we could explore, in the sense of the history of the credit system, is the blacklist era, so soon after the Guild's recognition. Many blacklisted writers submitted scripts using fronts ... how did the Guild feel about this? Did the credit system come into play? I think there was, infamously, one movie that because of this became one of the few, if not the only, studio production ever to reach the screen without any writing credit—I remember reading about this in Premiere once. If we can find out what that was, we should write about that. (And indeed, here's a New York Times article from 2000 about the Guild correcting past credits to include then-blacklisted writers, or include them under their real names).

And for The Flintstones, here's a great LA Times article from before the arbitration was heard, going into what was so controversial at the time: in addition to the record eight names submitted, the WGA decided to consider material ensuing from TV-style roundtables without granting an advance waiver, rather against its own rules.

I also found myself wondering, as I read this, well, has anyone ever sued the Guild over this? Yes, apparently someone did. And not always the Guild, either ... I think James Poe's suit against Michael Todd, who was not under the Guild's jurisdiction when he made Around the World in 80 Days is worth mentioning as the sort of thing that happens outside of the Guild process (even if the Guild was tangentially involved in things there).

Later there's Larry Ferguson's suit against the Guild over Beverly Hills Cop II. He had been given partial story credit; he had wanted sole credit for the whole thing, and sued the WGA in state court alleging the entire arbitration process was unfair. The appeals court held that Ferguson hadn't introduced evidence to back up some of his allegations of bias, or that the procedure gave rise to bias, and since courts generally give unions' internal procedures great weight and a great presumption of fairness, he lost and the credit system survived a direct court challenge. Federal courts reached the same conclusion in a similar case, over The Godfather III, two years later.

I have a lot of experience writing about law in articles, so I'd be happy to add this, probably in a separate litigation section, in the future, when I have more time. Keep reminding me about it.

Outside of that history, but sort of related to it, there's a passing mention of pseudonymous credit. We could write about how the Guild handles this ... basically very generously, since there are so many ways to distort a writer's or writers' work (in contrast to the more rigorous rules the Directors' Guild has about pseudonymous credit, even post-Allen Smithee). According to this blog post that might be reliable, although it seems to be based on an old version of this article, the Guild does have rules: The request must be submitted in a timely fashion, and the chosen pseudonym must not be one that seems to be chosen just to make a point. It cites the example of J. Michael Straczynski's request to be credited as "Eiben Scrood" (get it? Yuk yuk yuk ...) for all his work on Crusade because he didn't like what TNT was doing with/to it getting denied. I never knew the Guild had actually denied a request for a pseudonym.

But in this context, it might be fair to mention also the late Harlan Ellison's "Cordwainer Bird", used by him as a signal to those in the know that the work in question had been seriously compromised. He came very close to doing this with "The City on the Edge of Forever", which Roddenberry wanted to avoid. And speaking of Trek, there are also the pseudonyms that people use or have used to get around contractual restrictions on their work, like Gene L. Coon's "Lee Cronin" episodes during the third season of TOS, since he was under contract with Universal at the time and could only write for them. But I don't know if people do that/have to do that anymore.

I wonder too if we could also go for more images of, say, actual credits to illustrate some of these sections. If they're just phrases in a common typeface against, say, a black background, we'd not even need a fair-use justification since they'd be copyright-ineligible as stills. I think, for one, as lead image we could use the one from Lethal Weapon 3 that's reprinted in the Den of Geek article. The current one is difficult to read between the serifed face and the background, and that one is not only much easier to read, it illustrates the sort of apparent absurdities that can result from the credit system (in the text we could mention what the article does, that the studio's marketing department actually thought at first that that was a mistake and printed an initial run of "corrected" onesheets, which the Guild quickly intervened to have destroyed so new ones could be shipped with the proper credits. Also, it's from a more recent film.

We could also show screenshots from the films mentioned on the NEXTV page as having Guild-approved exceptions to the crediting. We mention the rare use of "Adaptation by" ... well, there it is at the beginning of Armageddon (although the article doesn't explain why, other than mentioning how many writers worked on the script). And take a look at what happens when you decide to use someone else's novel as the basis for the plot of one of the later films in a franchise suggested by a theme-park ride.

The article doesn't mention it, but I think we should, and maybe show a screenshot if we can: the very rare wording of the writing credit for Fatal Attraction: "Screenplay by James Dearden, based on his original screenplay". Again, to non-film people, this sounds ridiculous, but that's how it has to read when the producers liked a short film you wrote and made, and ask you to adapt it into a feature that they'll then produce.

OK, it's getting late again. More tomorrow. Daniel Case (talk) 05:30, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Alright, I think I can wrap this up tonight.

First and foremost it occurs to me what the real problem is with the citations. I can see why you cited both the TV and Movie WGA guides for so many things. But you have over 50 separate notes to each and every page, just about. That's where the real citation overkill problem comes from.

So what I would suggest is what I've been doing on a lot of older articles of mine that I've rewritten and brought up to code for recent GA noms and peer reviews where one document had to be cited a lot ... use the rp template for different pages from the same work. It cuts down on a lot on this, and I can see very clearly how it would benefit this article.

Nearing the end ... under "notable conflicts", that one with Clooney is interesting, I didn't know about it, but I think an even more drastic story is the one about Quentin Tarantino. A quarter-century ago he wanted full sole credit for Natural Born Killers; the WGA only gave him story credit. In retaliation he has not only disowned the produced film, he has refused to join the Guild, and so none of his scripts can be considered for the WGA awards as he's not a member and only scripts all or mostly by members are eligible.

Another notable unhappy-writer story that occurs to me that could be mentioned here just because it's got an unusual twist: Nancy Dowd's complaint that after she got awarded story credit on Coming Home through WGA arbitration, reflecting what she thought was a seriously deficient, depoliticized rewrite done at Jane Fonda's direction and originally to be credited in part to Waldo Salt, whom Dowd says was too drunk to seriously do anything worthwhile, Fonda (the coproducer) retaliated against her, or tried to, by giving her credit an almost ephemeral flash on the screen, something Fonda and her coproducer had to apologize for publicly after the Guild complained.

Finally, it sort of occurs to me that the major problem with this article, then and now, which I've been working on here is that it's fairly dry as it relies heavily on the Guild sources. We do need them, but we have to remember that screenplays are written by people and for people and thus an article about something like this really needs to have that human element in it, which I think it has too little of right now.

I will be putting this on my watchlist and probably making some of these improvements to it myself, if and when I can, if you don't mind. I think it does have potential to make it to FA by current standards. Daniel Case (talk) 06:14, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks - of course, feel free to improve. Re. the citations: I use both rp and sfn templates a lot, which I didn't do here because it is possible to have a url to each individual page of the manuals, and given the possible confusion between document page number and pdf page number, I felt separate cites with the directs urls was beneficial. Kingsif (talk) 06:41, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * OK. I hadn't realized that. It might be a good idea if you put an article notice in or something like that for editors who might be tempted to fix that. Or, are there links to the whole document? We should use those instead, really. Daniel Case (talk) 17:46, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

Oh, yeah, one last interesting story that might illustrate a point, although I'm not sure yet what: Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter, we know now just how difficult things got during the production of the first X-Men (which prior to this summer's anniversary no one outside the production had really known about).

One of the tortured aspects was, naturally, the writing process. After several dozen writers, including Joss Whedon, had had a go at it, David Hayter, Singer's assistant, began writing scenes without the knowledge of anyone save Singer since he knew the source material well, and eventually those scenes became most of the script. When the studio found out, they told the producers that they had to give him script credit or he could sue them. So he got called into the office and offered $35,000, take it or leave it.

Hayter got sole screenplay credit in arbitration, with Singer and Tom DeSanto, the producer, who also was a Marvel fanatic, getting story credit. Some people familiar with the writing process say that Ed Solomon and Christopher McQuarrie, who supposedly asked to have their names removed from the credits (a decision Solomon says now he regrets) to keep the Guild from awarding it to them. Daniel Case (talk) 00:37, 14 September 2020 (UTC)