George Clooney and WGA Have a Falling Out
Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Scripts, George Clooney
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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-04-2008 @ 4:23PM
dukrous said...
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.
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4-05-2008 @ 3:41AM
AJ Wiley said...
Joss Whedon did indeed get screwed over for Speed, one of the most ridiculous rulings I've ever read.
4-05-2008 @ 11:57PM
cr in chicago said...
But Clooney is Clooney. Maybe by actually taking a stand, things can change a little for the little guy in the future.
I highly doubt Joss Whedon would get screwed today...but its all too easy for the next Joss Whedon to get screwed - and maybe this helps in keeping that from happening again.
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4-09-2008 @ 12:29AM
dddd said...
He looks so familiar. I saw his profile on the celebrities and millionaires dating site wealthysoulmate.com last week. It's said he is interested in dating hotties on that site!
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6-21-2008 @ 2:43PM
Girl #2 said...
He's being a big "star" baby. Arbitration of a script with multiple writers was developed so that the stars, studio heads and producers couldn't hand out screen credit like candy, as favors to their friends. It was one of the reasons the WGA was formed - people with power were taking credit for writing.
How many times did Clooney need to see his name on this piece of crap? What an ego. The Arbitration is completely anoymous and if Clooney had read the rules of arbitration he would understand that part of the judgement is about the structure of the film - creation of plot, creation of characters....etc....He didn't create the story - that is likely what swung the vote against getting credit. So he re-wrote dialog...so what? The original idea, setting, plot, characters = not his.
As a WGA member he knows these rules, everyone does. Perhaps if he started with a BLANK sheet of paper and wrote something from scratch he might understand.
What a spoiled baby.
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