In a show’s credits, along with the producer, director, and writer, there is a “created by” credit. What does this person do that the others mentioned here don’t do? …dream up concepts for shows all day long?
The creator is basically the person or team who pitches the original idea to the production company. That gives them the title in perpetuity. If the show is picked up, then by contract they must be mentioned every time and normally get a fee for each episode, whether or not they have anything to do with the show after it has been sold.
Exactly. I used to work on The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game.
Chuck Barris created The Dating Game. As well as getting paid as Executive Producer, he also got paid $1,000 per episode for the “Created by” screen credit.
Barris (from Philadelphia) went to Hollywood and tried to pitch the show but was unknown and nobody was returning his phone calls. He spent the last of his money to rent a bungalow at the (very exclusive) Beverly Hills Hotel. He started getting his calls returned immediately and successfully pitched the show.
Ah, yes that does explain it. Thanks!
Bachelor Number One: Imagine I’m a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream and a cherry on top…
I’ve seen it used in things like reboots, remakes, and sequels to give a credit to the people who worked on the original production the new production is based on.
Example: I happen to be currently watching the fourth season of Community. Although series creator was not involved with this season (although he was heavily involved in the first three), the opening credits still prominently state “Created by Dan Harmon.”
He created another game as well: “Came up with a new game show idea recently. It’s called ‘The Old Game’.”
As for the o.p., a “created by” or “story by” credit is often a way to give legal credit to someone with a concept or story idea but who wasn’t involved in actual production. By including them in this and paying what is often a nominal fee negotiated by the Writers Guild of America (for US productions) a studio can avoid being successfully sued for not giving credit for an idea from a story pitch.
As an example, Leslie Charteris gets a “character created by” or “based on the character created by” all of the various productions of “The Saint”/Simon Templar even though he hasn’t worked on a Saint production since the Roger Moore ITV-produced show and didn’t even write all of the novels himself, and everything since Vendetta for the Saint and The Fiction-Makers have been wholly original stories and have often deviated so far from the original concept that the character isn’t even vaguely recognizable as Simon Templar of his stories. (The Philip Noyce-directed Val Kilmer film is the epitome of this; while well-cinemagraphed and entertaining in a goofy, completely implausible way, as well as one of the first Hollywood films to shoot extensively on location in Moscow, it has absolutely nothing to do with Charteris’ former soldier-of-fortune-cum-amateur-detective.) The Charteris estate actually only gets a small payment for this credit but it does entitle the estate to royalties from distribution and use of the character.
Stranger
Anything featuring Superman these days usually has a “Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.”
Black Lighting gives credits to Tony Isabella and Trevor Van Eeden, where Lucifer has a line about characters created by Neil Gaiman.
Though I’m not sure what payment would be in those cases.
There have been decades of legal wrangling between the Siegal and Schuster estates and DC/Warner. They now have what seems to be a lasting legal settlement, including prominent “created by” credits for Superman in pretty much anything the character appears in. I don’t think the details of the compensation agreement have ever been made public (I may well be wrong about that), but that is a special side agreement with those two estates, not a standard WGA fee.
Batman also gets a “Created by Bob Kane” credit*, and Wonder Woman gets “Created by William Moulton Marston.” Those have always seemed to me to be the only DC characters that regularly get that kind of creator credit. I was unaware that Black Lightning apparently gets a similar credit for Isabella and Van Eeden.
- That “created by Bob Kane” thing brings up another whole legal wrangle with the estate of Bill Finger, who wrote the early Batman stories. Bob Kane drew them, but somehow he’s the one who’s ended up with sole credit over the years.
I think this is a recent change in SOP, in direct response to those wrangles with Siegal, Schuster, et al. I think all of the CW shows, the DC Universe/HBO Max shows, recent DC OAVs, and the DCEU movies routinely now give “created by” credits for a lot of the characters.
People are mixing two related but separate concepts: the creation of a production and the creation of a character.
Obviously, many productions are based on already-existing characters, whether from novels, plays, comics, magazine articles, or radio and television. Since the evolution of movies into modern form way back in the silent era, the originator has always been given a place in the credits. They exist under various designations: adapted from, based on, characters originally created by, etc. Movies almost never use a “created by” credit; that’s almost exclusively for television. The only major exception is material from comic books, where giving credit to the originators of a character was a battle fought for decades and is now the norm.
That “created by” is not the same as the “created by” that goes to the people who bring the concept - whether it involves original characters or not - to the production company. In modern practice, the people the show is created by are the same as the showrunners and/or executive producers who are responsible for all aspects of the show’s continuing existence. Game of Thrones was created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, even though the characters, mostly, were created by George R. R. Martin. Benioff and Weiss took Martin’s material and found ways to turn his thousands of pages into an ongoing set of teleplays that would develop characters and drive plots across several seasons. They probably provided masses of supporting material, like budgets, possible shooting locations, timeframes, and all the other backstage stuff that major networks need to decide whether the showrunners know what they’re talking about. Comic-based productions have exactly the same structure, though I noticed that DC shows give the showrunners “developed by” credits rather than Marvel’s “created by.”
Given the volatile nature of show biz personalities, there are productions whose creators were yanked immediately after selling the show. Can’t remember any names offhand, though I know I’ve read about them. And somebody like Shonda Rhimes creates spinoffs of her shows, but gives them to others to act as showrunners because she can’t be everywhere at once. They’re the exceptions. Most of the time today, the people that the production is “created by” are the production, at least in the beginning. They may hand things off after a few seasons to others, but it’s always their show that the others ruin. (I’m thinking of you, West Wing.)
Credit gets muddled because a lot of DC characters are essentially reboots. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman are three exceptions; they are still the same characters that were created back around 1940 (don’t think about the chronology here). Other characters like the Atom, Flash, Green Lantern, or Hawkman are considered to be different people than the characters who were first created back in the thirties and forties. So if you look at the Green Lantern movie, for example, you have a situation where Martin Nodell created the character of the Green Lantern in 1940 and John Broome and Gil Kane created the character of Hal Jordan in 1959.
Sol Saks, the person who wrote the pilot episode of ‘Bewitched’ afterwards never wrote another episode for ‘Bewitched’ or any other program, and became very wealthey because he was a ‘creator,’ and got money from the reruns until his death at the very ripe age of 100.
If you’re really into legal jargon, you can read about the “Created By” credit in the Writer’s Guild TV credits manual.
A “Created by” credit shall be given on each episode of an episodic series or serial to the writer when such writer has separated rights and is entitled to sequel payments under the terms of the MBA. The Company may contract to give such credit to any writer, but such contract shall provide that in the event another writer is determined to be entitled to such credit, as provided above, that writer shall be given a “Developed by” credit or other similar credit.