". . . it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." - Rick, Casablanca
Humphrey Bogart said it, but I had no idea who wrote it. All that remained in my memory about the writing was that the script wasn't finished until three days before filming and there were constant revisions during shooting. When I look the quote up on IMBD there were six writers attributed to the film. Six people who probably worked far longer on the script than Bogart did for the entire duration of the filming. Yet the only person associated with that line is him.
Really sad when you think about. If you're an aspiring screenwriter it's enough to make you want to go into another line of work.
For the record the following people were responsible writing one of the best, if not the best, film in history:
Murray Burnett and Joan Alison wrote Everybody Comes To Rick's, the play Casablanca was based on.
Julius J. Esptein, Philip G. Esptein, Howard Koch, and Casey Robinson pounded out the final
screenplay.
The only reason for posting this was an article courtesy of the LA Times the day the nominees where announced for this years Oscars from David Kipen, author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History.
Here's a brief synopsis in his own words:
Yet this is nothing compared to the treatment screenwriters receive from two powerful arbiters of how we decide which movies to watch: Netflix (netflix.com), and the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).
Let's assume you enjoyed "The Constant Gardener." Let's further assume that, unlike most moviegoers, you have the cockeyed notion that the screenwriter may have been partly responsible for your enjoyment. Let's say you'd be curious to see another movie written by Jeffrey Caine. If, like me, you're a Netflix subscriber, you might type his name into the search window.
"Michael Caine?," it offers cheerfully. "Jeffrey Wright?," the fine actor who may by now have been nominated for "Syriana." Even, with just a hint of desperation, "Citizen Kane?" You get the idea.
Netflix, despite its pretensions to comprehensiveness, indexes its films by actor, genre and director, but not by screenwriter.
Even if you're not the author of a new book (as I am) arguing that screenwriters have a more legitimate claim to the authorship of their films than directors do, this omission seems wrongheaded in the extreme.
BIG DEAL, YOU SAY. Anyone daft enough to rent movies according to who wrote them can always look writers up on the Internet Movie Database. Oh, really?
Type "Jeffrey Caine" into imdb.com and links to his film and television credits do appear, but just try following one. Click on the above-average James Bond film "Goldeneye," for example, and the writing credits show "Ian Fleming (characters), Michael France (story) and an enigmatic link reading "(more)."
Only after clicking "(more)" do we discover the news that yes, Jeffrey Caine did co-write "Goldeneye" with Bruce Feirstein.
Apparently it's IMDB's policy to bury all writing credits longer than two names even if neither of those names belongs to the screenwriter himself.
After all this effort to answer the simple questions "Who wrote that, and what else did he write?," it seems fair to ask: Is it such a pain to follow a screenwriter's career because, as Netflix and IMDB might insist, nobody cares anyway?
So as you're wading through all the pointless reported tallies of how many nominations each film got in search of, oh, who got them or next month, as you're watching the two screenplay awards announced a good hour before the far more hyped "best director" rolls around spare a thought for the poor, beleaguered screenwriters.
Year in and year out, they write the best Oscar acceptance speeches (sometimes even for themselves), and what thanks do they get?
As a footnote to this article - the films nominated this year on the Academy's own website are listed, but to find out who wrote it you have to follow a link for more information.
My prediction for the names which will be remembered from this years ceremony: George Clooney, co-writer of Good Luck, Good Night, and Woody Allen for Match Point.
The winners that year were Brokeback Mountain by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and Crash by Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco.
If you like writing and writers as much I do then you recognize the names. Especially McMurty and Haggis. If you don't really pay attention to such details then you probably know these films as the "Gay one with Heath Ledger and the one with Ludacris in it."
That is really the sad part of all of this. No matter how much coverage and attentions the writers strike got they are still the most important unseen face in an industry that is built upon image.
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