Is there a time limit for credits? How long a name has to stay on screen? What is the deal with some shows just having the copyright date at the end? Why does my local (Atlanta GA) station cut the credits of Network shows? (After the 10/1030 shows, the anchor cuts in, teases a story, and then the credits (to the side stop in the middle, and the entire shot fades out, to fade in the news …
I would guess that there are Govt. regulations or some TV union regulations involved in how credits can be show, etc.
Hopefully someone will come along and expand on that.
There are guild regulations about who gets credits, but I don’t think there’s any rule about how much time the credit must be displayed.
These don’t apply to the local TV affiliate. There may be agreements not to cut into the logos at the end of the show, but they can do what they want with the credits afterwards.
I’ve often wondered this myself. A lot of times the credits are squished over on one side of the screen while a promo or something is running on the other side. Between the size of the text and speed of the scroll, I’ve wondered why they even bother running the credits, there’s no way anyone could read them.
A partial answer: sometimes the certain specifics of credits are dictated by contract.
Writer Paddy Chayefsky once said in an interview on PBS that the film Hospital was going to be entitled Paddy Chayefsky’s Hospital until George C. Scott was cast in the lead. His contracts routinely specified that no one else’s name could appear in the title of a film in which he starred. Similarly, I read once that the film Juarez was originally entitled Maximillan, as that is actually the more prominent part in the movie, but Paul Muni had an agreement with Warner Brothers that if a film in which he appeared was named after one of the characters, it had to be the character he played.
Union contracts also play a part. When an actors strike was threatened a few years ago in Hollywood, one of the points of contention was that the Screen Actors Guild objected to studios putting titles at the beginning of a movie giving “ownership” to a director or producer; e.g. “A Film by Some Drivelling Hack” or " A Legend in His Own Mind Production". Some observors suggested that this was not truly viewed as a matter of urgency by the Guild, but instead was a ploy so to ensure that a strike could be ruled by the courts as not being purely economic in nature. Federal law provides greater protections to workers who strike in part because of conditions of work, rather than purely for more money.
Some years ago I drafted a contract for a nonprofit organization which was lending assistance to an independent film maker in St. Louis. The contract specified that the organization had to be thanked for its assistance in the credits, and that the type used as the duration of the credit would be the same as for other groups or individuals who were acknowledged for their assistance.