If you watch movie made in the united states you know that right before the Director’s Credit, contractually the final credit displayed before the film plays, you will see the credit for the writer of the screenplay. You may see a single person credited, or several. If there’s an ampersand between two names it means those people are a team and if there’s an and it means one person wrote and then the other came along and also wrote but they did not work together. This is all well and good but in the end it seems like it’s not really the whole truth of the matter.

The writer is employed at the whim and dictates of the producer and in the film that has such a large impact that it makes it very difficult for anyone outside of the process that made that particular film to know just what elements of the screenplay are the result of the writer and which are elements that were forced into the work by some other agency. The writer may be against have a giant mutant worm sexually assault a female character but if the producer insists on the scene then it will be written and shot and for the rest of time the writer will be the one carrying the credit and the blame for the exploitive sequence. The director may be a hired gun for the production with little interest in the material who throws out the final act and writes his own ending, but it will be the credited screenwriters who are blamed for ripping off Aliens for their script.

When you watch a movie it can be nearly impossible to know who is actually responsible for both the great and terrible elements of the story and that’s a problem in my book. I wish I had some solution, but I don’t. The truth of the matter is that the final product is what it is and the credits may give you a clue as to how it came to be and its potential quality but only a clue.