No sooner do I write an adulatory post about George Clooney than I come upon this story about the trouble he's been having with the Writers' Guild of America over credit for the Leatherheads screenplay. He's so upset at the way he's been treated that he's gone "financial core" at the Guild, which is an irreversible decision making him a limited, non-voting, dues-paying member. He says he would have quit altogether, but that would have basically prevented him from working as a screenwriter in Hollywood. According to Clooney, the original Leatherheads script by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly had been bouncing around for almost two decades before he took it, rewrote it as a screwball comedy, and got the project greenlit. He believes that he wrote all but two scenes of the resulting film. But when the credit squabble went to arbitration before the WGA last fall, the guild determined that Clooney didn't deserve screen credit for his work. That was the end of the line for him (he declined to appeal), though he kept the matter quiet at the time because of the ongoing writers strike.
David Poland thinks this is a whiny and petulant move on Clooney's part, using a "chainsaw to operate on a papercut." He makes a good point that there are few writers in Hollywood who haven't gotten burned on a WGA arbitration at some point in their careers, and this is the equivalent of "going nuclear." On the other hand, Clooney emphasized that he never tried to displace Brantley and Reilly, and only wanted to be appended to the end of the "written by" credit. And keeping the conflict under wraps until the strike resolved seems like a typically classy way of handling it. So I think I'll join The Bad and Ugly in their agnosticism on the issue.
1. So just because other writers have been burned (I seem to remember Joss Whedon got screwed out of a credit on Speed), it's perfectly okay? That's some ass backwards thinking there.
If Clooney did rewrite it that way, and we can compare drafts, then he deserves credit. Simple as that.
Posted at 4:23PM on Apr 4th 2008 by dukrous