What does that mean? I was watching Natural Born Killers today and the credits read “Story by Quentin Tarantino”, while the scriptwriting credits went to three other people (David Veloz, Richard Rutowski & Oliver Stone).
Now Pulp Fiction, released in the same year, has shown that Tarantino was quite capable of writing a script at that point in his career, so I was kind of wondering… what do you have to do (or who do you have to piss off) to get a mere “story by…” credit? Is it a case where the concept is great, but the director doesn’t care for the script and has it totally re-written?
Lots of times, yeah. You don’t have to make anyone angry or write a bad script, someone higher up in the Hollywood food chain just has to decide that the script they bought from you isn’t really what they want and call for a significantly different version from someone else. Happens all the time.
The story is the general outline, and the screenplay are the exact words being said. Sort of. The director has the right to do an uncredited rewrite of anything he’s filming.
Special tip: There is a major difference between the use of “and” and of the ampersand in writing credits:
“Written by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel” means it was written by a team of writers working together.
“Written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard” means the first writer wrote a draft and the second writer took that draft and rewrote it, sometimes substantially.
If there’s a dispute, the WGA makes the determination as to how the writers should be credited. They go over all the drafts to try to figure out who gets listed, of whether they get listed at all.
Let me add that, in something like Natural Born Killers, if there had been any question about who gets credit, the WGA would have made a determination. A director can’t just take credit for a rewrite unless he had done enough to provide evidence to the WGA that he deserves that credit. Otherwise, he’s subject to any challenges the writer makes.
If you search around, you can find that Tarantino actually wrote a draft script that Stone presumably bought. I don’t know why he didn’t get a screenplay credit.
He didn’t get a screenplay credit because if someone comes and buys your draft, and then has in-house people rewrite it into a shooting script, typically you receive “story” credit and their people get screenplay credit.
I recall reading that Tarantino and Stone didn’t get along and he wasn’t happy with Stone’s treatment of his script. That’s probably another reason why he accepted “Story by” credit instead.
It’s not a matter of “accepting”. If the script you wrote is substantially different from the script that’s shot, you don’t get screenwriting credit. You get screenwriting credit if what you wrote ends up on screen. It wouldn’t have mattered what Tarantino was willing to settle for or how he felt about Stone. As RealityChuck says above, the WGA makes the decision if there’s disagreement as to what constitutes substantial difference or who deserves screenwriting credit and who deserves “story by”.
I think you can ask for a different credit if you’re displeased with the result, and Tarantino was apparently very unhappy with what Stone did to Natural Born Killers. I’ve heard of other instances where credit changes supposedly happened- it’d be great if somebody could come in and say definitively. I doubt that it’s impossible to reject a credit if you want to.
In regards to the ampersand, I just cut 'n pasted the screenwriting credits from the IMDB. Not the most reliable source, true, but that’s where the ampersand came from.
This might or might not relate, but I know that Harlan Ellison had a psuedenym (sp!) ready for when he believed the script was hacked too much from his original version, and he would demand that it be used.
You cannot get a change in the credits made just because the movie didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to. Otherwise everyone involved would take their names off lousy movies. The various movie guilds are there in part to make sure everyone gets what they deserve in terms of credit…and blame. However, if “what Stone did to Natural Born Killers” involved major rewrites to Tarantino’s original script, then Tarantino did not deserve credit or blame for the screenwriting, just the story.
*I think it is nigh-on-impossible if your only reason is that “you want to”. If Tarantino wanted to reject screenwriting credit, I believe he’d have to show that another person actually made substantial changes to the script. If this was not the case, he’d be stuck with screenwriting credit whether he liked it or not. Of course, if the script was not rewritten by someone else he’d have little legitimate reason to complain in the first place.
I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. Tarantino didn’t get screenwriting credit because he didn’t write the script. He wrote a script, but not the one that was filmed.
IIRC, every member of Writer’s Guild registers a pseudonym with the Guild and, if the Guild allows, can have that name replace theirs in credits. Some known examples:
Harlan Ellison–“Cordwainer Bird” (The Starlost)
Robert Towne–“P. H. Vazak” (Greystoke)
David Lynch–“Judas Booth” (the TV edit of Dune)
And from what I’ve read, movie writing credits are sometimes the biggest lies in Hollywood.
Sydney Howard is officially credited as sole screenwiter for Gone With the Wind, yet Howard died before the picture was finished and there were at least four other people who worked on the script after him.
According to Gore Vidal, the credited writer on Ben-Hur (1959), Karl Tunberg, was fired and Vidal and Christopher Fry were hired to write a new script, which was then rewritten by Maxwell Anderson.
In Star Trek Movie Memories, William Shatner claims that two of the credited writers on Star Trek VI (whom he didn’t name, but I suspect Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal) contributed nothing, but only attended script meetings and took notes on what the other writers were saying.