Raiders of the Lost Ark, ‘a film by Lawerence Kasdan’? Within the years 1960 to 1980, screenwriters encountered another obstacle in their quest for recognition and expression. This took the form of the coined phrase, ‘director adulation’ where the director is hailed as the superstar. This evolved from the development of the ‘auteur theory’ which was employed to isolate a single person in the film making process and make him or her the author of the film. It was part of the argument to define film as art. Proposed by François Truffant in the late 1950’s, he maintained that the [...]

By 1954 there were five different writer’s guilds representing writers in the various trades: The Author’s Guild, The Dramatists Guild, The Radio Writers Guild, The Television Writers Group and The Screenwriters Guild. That year they formed two affiliated guilds with offices in Hollywood and in New York. They were entitled the Writer’s Guild of America west and the Writer’s Guild of America east respectively and were defined geographically by the Mississippi River. In streamlining and reorganising the representative bodies, the two guilds could now focus on their member’s needs in a more geographically confined area and with all the guilds [...]

During the 1940’s the production line mentality among studios still prevailed meaning that there was a lot of work for the screenwriter. Just after World War II the employment figures for the screenwriting trade peaked at 560 writers working in Hollywood. There were still problems regarding the allocation of credit as a selfish director could and did claim all or part of the writing credit. To combat this the Screenwriter’s Guild under took the task of creating a comprehensive directory giving credit to where it was due. Writers, with a greater sense of security were establishing themselves as more important [...]