DR Panni, Anyone who is a Miklos Rozsa fan like Bruce knows the theremin...Really, he wasn't looking at your paper.
JMK, I know nothing of Mike Rich's supposed credit shut-out, but you're talking to the wrong guy.
As the pit-bull of writers' creative rights, I believe the first writer should get credit and anyone else who comes on a project after that should be an uncredited script doctor. I think the guild should be doing things to reduce writers on projects, not to increase the number of writers.
Anything that encourages a studio from cavalierly throwing a writer off a script and throwing two, three, four or more other writers at the script is bad...bad for the script and bad for all writers. I also don't believe in a system that encourages writers to leap over the fallen carcasses of their brethren and feed on their carcasses. If you don't give first writer credit, then you should not tie backend monies and residuals to credit. Too many writers blithely rewrite their fellows in an attempt to get credit and a cut of the backend. Their goal becomes not to improve the script but to get credit...and hence, money.
I hate being rewritten...I would think any writer would...so why do to somebody else what you hate having done to you?
For a long time now, my policy has been I will rewrite only if I have the early writer(s)'s blessing to do so or it is a page-one rewrite and I'm starting from scratch or with the original source material and I do not have to read any previous drafts.
The Writers Guild can sometimes be its own worst enemy. Any system that encourages a proliferation of credits or encourages writers savaging other writers and other writers' work in order to get credit and more money is a bad system.
Why is the director so powerful? Because there is only one director on a film. A lesson the Writers Guild should learn. I won't be happy until the Writers Guild has the same deal the Dramatists Guild has...no one can change a thing without the playwright's permission. No one in drama works without the dramatist. He is the reason everyone else gathers.
"The director and the cast are servants of the playwright; He must therefore be the centre of the collaboration." -- Sir Peter Hall --
But, I did a screenplay weekend with Mike Rich in Vegas a couple of years ago and found him a delightful and talented fellow. Please say hello for me. He's a very good writer. I don't know Mike's situation on this film you're talking about (Was he the original writer? Or did he come in as a re-writer?).
But I'm always leary when Writers talk about getting screwed in the arbitration process. Flawed as it is, I think it's more fair in its guidelines than most writers claim. I, for one, have always come back from an arbitration with exactly the credit I expected to get...be it sole or shared credit. The only time I was ever surprised is when I was not only awarded sole screen credit, but also awarded a shared story credit I had not asked for and wasn't expecting. It was a remake of an old film, but the arbiters thought that I had substantially changed the story enough that I got a shared story credit with the writers of the original film from the fifties.
