How do they decide who gets the following credits:
And…
With…
With _________ As __________
Also Starring…
The only one that seems to have set parameters is
And Introducing…
I always thought that movies saved the And… credit for the more respected, venerable actors in the movie. But the credits for The Departed run like:
Matt Damon
Leo Di Caprio
Jack Nicholson
And Mark Wahlberg.
Also, the theory that its someone with a small, almost cameo role that gets the And… Credit can be shot to shit with the following from The Black Dahlia and The Untouchables;
And Hilary Swank
And Sean Connery.
Can anyone be picked for this credit? Who decides?
Why do people get their character name on the credits as well, as seen in
With _________ As _______
Also, what actors can you always be sure will get the And… credit? I reckon;
The pecking order for credits is usually fought over. You usually get an “and” credit because your agent required it as a condition for making the film. If there’s more than one (which is a bit unusual), then the person who is listed last has the most clout.
Is this in any way related to the TV practice of, during the opening credits, listing each actor by name only, except for the last actor, whose name is listed along with the name of the character he or she portrays? (This is usually a regular cast member, as opposed to a recurring or guest character.)
The strangest example of this is the credits of Gilmore Girls, which feature the credit “Special appearance by Edward Herrman,” despite the fact he presumably appears in every episode.
Big Name Star (1)
in
Movie Name
Starring
Another star(4)
Featuring
Lesser Known Stars in a group (5)
with
Another star (3)
and
Jerry Mathers as the Beaver (2)
It’s mostly in TV credits where you have so many; a movie would have above the title stars, below the title stars, and perhaps an “and” credit or two.
The last name in the cast is the second most desirable position, after being billed above the title.
And if there are two big stars, the order in which they appear on posters is fought out and determined by contract. One solution when you have a lot of big names is to list them in alphabetical order except for the “featuring” and “and” at the end.
Obligatory link to the relevant Straight Dope Classic Column, which addresses many of the OP’s concerns, and includes as a lagniappe the case of equally-billed costars, who must then have “Upper-Right” and “Lower-but-further-to-the-left” screen credits (Cecil’s example there is The Towering Inferno, with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen).
The amount of screen time has a lot to do with billing, also. Hilary Swank is an “and” because she is not the star and doesn’t have as much screen time as Eckhart and the female star. Since she is a double Oscar winner(and still very much in demand), she can’t just be another co-star.
On televison, I think the “and” credit is reserved for dinosaurs in the industry, although respected ones. Sometimes a big name movie star is an “and”, such as Sally Field in ER.
Trumped by Heather Locklear’s “Special Guest Star” credit on “Melrose Place” despite appearing in every episode for several seasons. IIRC that billing had something to do with money. If she had been billed as part of the regular cast she couldn’t get paid as much as a “special guest star.”
And that is trumped by Marin Landaus “Special Guest Star” gig on Mission Impossible, which started in the very first episode (Locklear joined a little ways in).
I always thought this was reserved for situations where the character is more famous than the actor playing him, like James Bond or Sherlock Holmes. But I’ve seen it in places where this is not the case, so I guess that’s not a hard and fast rule.
The weirdest is when (non-series) MOVIES have special guest stars. How can a movie have a “special guest”? It’s its own thing!
My favorite is when Julia Phillips recounted her battles with co-producer Tony Bill on The Sting to make sure that the production credits were the same width, same fonts, and that their relative positions on the screen was to her liking.
Imagine how pissed she was when she saw the final product on the big screen: production credits that were contractually correct, but had Tony Bill’s name twice the height of the other producers!
Tiny nitpick, but I just finished You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again about an hour ago. Julia and Michael thought they’d been very clever in negotiating that the height of their credit was the same as Bill’s. It was the width that they didn’t realize they needed to negotiate over. All the producer credits were the same height, but everyone but Tony Bill was in really, really skinny type.
