A Revolution In Movie Writing Credits

Update: In comments, Marty McKee writes: "This has been the case for more than a decade now. It's the result of negotiations between the Writers Guild and Hollywood studios." I could have sworn I was still seeing writing credits before the producer credits in movies made in the first part of this decade, but I could be wrong, and anyway that's pretty much gone now, for the reason he mentions.

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This is not something anybody ought to be noticing, but it seems like in the last few years, we've seen the first major shift in almost half a century in a truly vital issue: where to put the writing credits in a movie?

Seriously. Up until the '50s or even early '60s, the writing credit always came in the middle of the credits, usually just before the director of photography -- implying, I guess, that the credited writer was more like a technician than a key creative component of the movie. (I think, when it comes to most movies, that's not inaccurate.) Then there was a change, and the writer started getting the third-last credit in most movies, followed by the producer and finally the director.

And now a lot of movies have the writing credit as the next-to-last credit, after the producing credits. Look at the fourth Indiana Jones movie (if you can stand it after that damn CGI gopher pops up): the writing and story credits are before Spielberg's credit and after the credit for Spielberg's longime producer Frank Marshall.

I don't know why this has happened exactly, though it might be that the term "producer" is sort of meaningless now -- every movie has a ton of producers, executive producers, double-super-secret producers -- and it makes more sense to put all the different producing credits one after the other, followed by the easier-to-allocate writing credit. So congratulations, Hollywood screenwriters; according to the credits, you're # 2.

I could talk about the tectonic shift in the '30s from putting the director's credit in the middle to putting it at the end, but that may be too important and deep a subject to deal with in such a short post.