This is something I’ve been curious about…
Today, when you see a movie, the movie credits are rolled after the movie. Way back when, the full movie credits were shown before the movie began and at the end of the movie, they showed “The End” and that was it.
As best as I can tell, the changeover happened sometime in the 1970s. Does anyone know why this happened?
George Lucas did not want to disrupt the opening scene of Star Wars with film credits.
There were plenty of movies with a cold opening before Lucas came along. I think the question is more about the post credits that run for ten minutes listing things down to the caterer’s dog-walker. I have puzzled about this from time to time as well.
George Lucas is credited with popularizing this with his Star Wars films which display only the film’s title at the start.[1] His decision to omit opening credits in his films Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) led him to resign from the Directors Guild of America after being fined $250,000 for not crediting the director during the opening title sequence. However, Hollywood had been releasing films without opening credits for many years before Lucas came along, most notably Citizen Kane, West Side Story, 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Godfather.
This has more to do with production contracts than anything else. The dog-walker had a contract with the production company for dog walking during the shooting of the film that required they give him or her a screen credit, perhaps in addition to, or instead of, paying them. Everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame.
Although this has been attributed to Lucas not wanting credits before the opening crawl, there are numerous films with minimal or no credits occurring long before Lucas even graduated from USC. Aside from those already mentioned (and Kubrick wanted no titles and no intermission in his film), Welles’ Touch of Evil has no titles other than the “Universal-International” before the extended opening sequence following the bomb through the US-Mexico border check point.
The reason that there are extended end credits is due to the fall of the studio system in which actors, directors, and production personnel who were employees of the producing studio with no rights to independent contractors who were members of guilds or unions which gave them collective bargaining power to demand explicit credit (and for some, rights to residuals). This required providing credits in the film itself per contracts and became a big source of lawsuits and negotiations over who can demand what credit and in which order they appear.
Although there is no requirement overall that these credits appear at the end of the film this is the obvious place to put them as nobody wants to sit through ten minutes of credits at the opening to discover who ‘Best Boy’ was, and because there were just a few companies actually doing the end credit text scrolls they essentially came up with a standardized way of presenting them which includes disclaimers, music credits, “No animals were harmed in the making of…”, production logos, et cetera. Directors, headline actors, and sometimes producers and key production personnel will also have contract requirements specifying that they appear in the opening credits, and the order in which they appear is often a major negotiation between multiple parties.
It isn’t just “15 minutes of fame”; for freelance contractors working in film these credits are literally their c.v., especially given how production companies will often go to great length to deny credit out of spite or to prevent paying residuals. Having one’s name or company name in the end credits is incontrovertible truth that they have worked on the film. One relatively recent issue were CGI animators who were often given only a group credit under the lead animator, even though the list of animators working on a large scale film is often larger than the cast. Given how quickly animation companies go bankrupt (see the documentary Life After Pi) getting individual credit is crucial to getting hired elsewhere.
Stranger
Yeah, I kind of understand this with some movies. I mean, it costs nothing, and even if your name is only up for a few seconds ten minutes after the end of the movie, what if that movie turns out to be another Citizen Kane, and your name is there for the rest of time? If it’s Fast and Furious 17, maybe not so much.