FILM CREDIT

by

James Adrian Mikael Crawford

A Dissertation Presented to the

FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

(CINEMA-TELEVISION: CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 James Adrian Mikael Crawford

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Literature Review and Intervention 6

Methodology and Fields of Study 24

Historical Scope, Organisation, and Chapter Descriptions 32

The Prehistory of Credit 41

The Functions of Credit—Presences and Absences 59

Chapter One Notes 64

Chapter One Figures 72

ABSTRACT

This dissertation explores the aesthetic, industrial, and legal considerations that

determine the rhetoric, structure, and function of screen credit in American film industry.

Appearing in the opening credits that precede the film, and in the final crawl that follows the

film, credits are the names and job titles that which individuals or corporations were

responsible for what contributions to a motion picture, creative or otherwise. Credits, in

their form, syntax, and function, appear fairly straightforward. Yet they are subtended by a

number of wide-ranging regimes and complex structural systems: visual experimentation

within the collaborative creative practices of film production; collective guild and union

bargaining with film producers (as well as one-to-one negotiation between film employees

and employers); and a labour law backbone that regulates and reinforces these negotiating

regimes. Accordingly, this dissertation argues against considering credits solely in relation to

the films that they inaugurate (or follow), and instead posits that credits are semiautonomous

entities, properly intelligible in their own right. By reading the opening credits

and final crawl, we learn about the aesthetic values and industrial function of the American

film industry in ways that can often surpass analysis of the diegesis itself.

Focussing primarily on the era immediately following the Paramount Decrees of

1948, this dissertation highlights a period when credits assumed greater importance within

the American film industry. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a proliferation in the

visual experimentation of opening title sequences, particularly through the creative efforts of

Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro. These practitioners, who

moved from commercial advertising into the cinema, imported discourses from other artistic

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and business practices into their title sequences—including typography, print design,

lithography, and fine art. These artists and others also used title sequences to engage with

and challenge the conventions of and boundaries between cinema and the visual arts

practices that flourished during this period. When the Paramount Decrees ordered the

Hollywood studios to divest themselves of their holdings, credits also assumed greater

importance to industry professionals. Without the institutional memory guaranteed by

vertically integrated film studios, media professionals, working within more ad-hoc

production environments characterized by more fluid employment relationships, increasingly

relied on credits to certify their professional résumés. The mid-1960s dispute over the

possessory credit testifies to the importance of credits during this period and beyond, as

writers and directors engaged in a legal battle over who should have the right to the credit

“A Film by…” This protracted controversy, which embroiled the Directors Guild of

America, the Writers Guild of America, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television

Producers, reveals how credits became a deeply coded matrix built on decades of legal

manoeuvring and industrial practice, with meanings that go far beyond the surface. Credits

became laden with fraught and vital semantic differences, which are inflected by a long

historical tail of professional relations in the industry. This semantic evolution is also

reflected in the evolution of the final crawl, i.e., the protracted list of names and titles that

follow virtually every feature film. The history of the final crawl, which dates back to the late

1930s, is a history of below-the-line industry workers, whose contributions became

recognized with greater frequency. In addition to their numerical proliferation, these job

titles have also changed in their valence—Sound Editors have become Sound Designers, for

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examples—which have elevated the creative esteem of positions that were previously seen as

mere “craft” inputs. The history of credits in cinema is therefore tending towards evergreater

stature garnered for its practitioners, ranged against the perceptions of film critics

and audiences who viewed this proliferation of credits as an example of distasteful

Hollywood self-aggrandizement.

This dissertation argues that credits are a vital tool for understanding the American

film industry because the opening titles and final crawl are the only two places in narrative

film where its aesthetic, industrial, and legal determinations are written directly onto the

screen. The structure and function of credits have broader consequences and determinations

into how film texts come to be made, and reveal the machinery of creative labour that goes

into making any motion picture.

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Connie: Stanley, you knew the deal when you signed on.

Stanley: Oh, come on. The deal’s changed! Sure it has!

Connie: Let’s re-think that ambassadorship. I’m talking London, I’m talking Paris, I’m talking a

secret account for

all your extra expenses, getting laid whenever you want. Marine guards will salute you all the

time.

Stanley: No, it’s tempting, but I gotta answer to a higher calling—art.

Connie: Money?

Stanley: You think I did this for money? I did this for credit.

Connie: You always knew that you couldn’t take the credit, Stanley.

Stanley: That’s one thing, but I’m not going to let two dickheads from film school take it.

Connie: Stanley, listen to me. No fooling—you’re playing with your life now.

Stanley: Oh, fuck my life. Fuck my life! I want the credit! The credit!

—Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog (1997)

In the commercial narrative cinema, two facets are virtually guaranteed as certain:

the opening credits and the final crawl. The former ranges widely from stark letters on black

title cards to a profusion of unique typography and computer-generated imagery,

inaugurating the spectator into the world of film. The latter contains a protracted parade of

names and the roles—often scarcely known to the public—they fulfilled during production.

The opening credits and final crawl are endemic to cinema practice—indeed, almost every

film made in discursively major or minor cinema traditions is accompanied by some

indication of the film’s title and who was responsible for it. And yet, in both popular and

academic discourse, these elements have been marginalised in a number of ways. Film credits

have been treated as an unwelcome distraction into the diegesis, disrupting spectatorial

immersion into the narrative world of a film. They have been treated as peripheral to the

text, for a film does not truly begin until the opening titles have ended, and a film is over

once the action fades to black; the final crawl too is a mere addendum to what has just

transpired, and as such is rarely watched by all but a few dedicated theatregoers. Credits

have frequently been derided as an indicator of Hollywood avarice; for example the disputes

2

between two equally prominent actors over who should be given first billing have been

disparaged as the ultimate in egotism. Yet these disagreements involve a high degree of

investment into what seems, from an outsider’s perspective, to be a trivial matter of

semantics. Despite their generally understood status as peripheral or even marginalised

objects, credits are vitally important to the individuals who work within the film, television,

and new media industries, because they are one of the few mechanisms by which these

workers can build their professional careers. Since the 1950s, credits moreover have evolved

a high degree of visual sophistication, and become a semi-autonomous art in their own right.

Accordingly, this dissertation treats credits as worthy of serious enquiry. What

appears as an ancillary discourse is in actual fact subtended by a number of wide-ranging

regimes and complex structural systems: visual experimentation within the collaborative

creative practices of film production; collective guild and union bargaining with film

producers (as well as one-to-one negotiation between film employees and employers); and a

labour law backbone that regulates and reinforces these negotiating regimes. Together, these

discourses weave a complex, deeply coded matrix of meanings and semantics that goes far

beyond the mere presence of words and images on screen. In that vein, this dissertation is

something of a corrective, because it takes the opening credits and final crawl, those

underscrutinized

yet vital parts of cinema practice, very seriously, and makes them worthy of

academic investigation. Film Credit delves into the as yet untold aesthetic, legal, and

economic-industrial considerations that play a part in the rhetoric, structure, and function of

screen credit.

3

Reviled from without the film industry, but treasured by those within, credits are

caught in a fraught push-pull between public perception and private necessity. That divide is

evidenced by two very different film texts, from two different decades, made under two vastly

different production regimes: Bacall to Arms (1946), a Warner Bros. animated short; and

Wag the Dog (1997), a feature directed by Barry Levinson and co-written by David Mamet.

Bacall to Arms lampoons the screen coupling of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, and is

structured around the experience of watching a film program in the cinema, from the

newsreel to the main feature. The audience is filled with anthropomorphic animals, there to

see To Have- To Have- To Have- To Have... (these two words of the title flash repeatedly on

the screen), a clear parody on the Bogart-Bacall vehicle To Have and Have Not (1944). After

the title comes the opening credits, a list of “Cast Off Characters” [sic] that scroll upwards

on the screen at a pace that makes them all but illegible. When the credits appear, a

corpulent pig leaves his row in the theatre, taking this occasion to go to the bathroom.

Others choose to sleep in their seats while the credits continue to roll, ad absurdum. The

joke is that the credits are overlong and audiences ignore them because they present an

unwanted distraction. They sit between the beginning of the picture, signalled by the

opening title card, and the true beginning of the film’s narrative, and so interrupt the

audience’s immersion into the diegesis. Credits here exist in a liminal space, in between

extra-diegetic and diegetic worlds, put up on screen as necessity, but unwanted, unloved,

and most importantly, unwatched—at least by those present in the theatre.

Wag the Dog occupies the other end of the spectrum, creating an environment where

credits are paramount, and are pursued for the sake of reputation until the very literal end.

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Days away from the end of a presidential re-election campaign, political consultant Conrad

Brean (Robert De Niro) hires producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman, in a delightful

imitation of über-executive Robert Evans) to create a plausible war. The campaign’s intent is

to distract public attention away from the president’s alleged sexual scandal involving an

underage “Firefly Girl” (i.e., Girl Scout). Stanley brings the full weight of his considerable

Hollywood experience to the enterprise, drafting a nonexistent military special forces unit,

and creating fake vignettes of battle scenes from an illusory war with Albania. Cynical of

statecraft as nothing more than elaborate stagecraft, Wag the Dog also demystifies much of

the Hollywood machinery by focussing on Stanley and his creative decision-making,

answering the question: What does a producer do? Germane to this dissertation, Wag the

Dog’s climax ultimately hinges pivots around credit. At the end of the re-election-cum-war

movie operation, political pundits attribute the president’s success to a series of soporific

middlebrow commercials. Incensed, Stanley wants to call the network to set the record

straight and claim his proper credit for the president’s re-election, but Connie stops him,

leading to the dialogue that inaugurates this dissertation. The exigencies of state secrets

mean that the story—the specious war, the fake POW, all of it—can never be told, but

Stanley remains unbowed. To this maverick producer, credit is more important than

everything else—more than money more than perks, more than the thanks of a grateful

president, even more than his life—which is what Stanley surrenders when he can’t stay

silent. The film’s denouement is Stanley’s funeral, his heart attack faked by the CIA. To the

end, he insists on getting the credit due to him, which acutely encapsulates a broader need

for public recognition that permeates the film industry. As Stanley reasons, though actors

5

and directors receive individual Oscars for their work, there is no Academy Award for

Producing,1 meaning that relative to these positions, the producer’s contributions go largely

un-heralded. Though privately, a select few individuals may be aware of Stanley Motss’

efforts in producing the war or indeed a motion picture, it is of far greater importance to the

producer that his work be publicly and prominently recognised via screen credit.

The dichotomy in credits that plays out in the space between Bacall to Arms and Wag

the Dog, represented—a friction of two discourses—motivates this dissertation. The first,

dominant and predominantly external to the film industry, constructs credits as marginal,

unimportant, a nuisance, or otherwise trivial. The second, subordinate and internal to the

film industry, sees credits perhaps not so significant as a matter of life and death, but

certainly vital, central, and important to those who work within its strictures. As Richard

Caves demonstrates in Creative Industries: Between Art and Commerce, it is possible to hold

these two ideas in the same space, without experiencing cognitive dissonance. “Screen

credits for film participants,” Caves writes, “work exactly as vita entries:… the bricks from

which the structure of career and reputation are built. Any large film advertisement hence

contains a block of credits. The type is microscopic, and most of the names are unknown to

the vast majority of readers.”2 Caves thus provides an apt summation of credits’ structure

and interpretation, both on and off the screen, ultimately related to the challenges of

legibility. A “billing block” of text appears on every film poster, so small and compact that it

begs to be approached and read closely, but ultimately frustrating and opaque because the

names (in addition to job titles) are largely unknown and indecipherable to the public that

scrutinises them. The “billing block” resists interpretation, at least by individuals who are

6

not cognisant of the specialised language and vocabulary of the film production industry.

And in response to this inability to read and decipher, frustration arises—typified by a 1984

article in the New York Times, “What’s a Gaffer, Anyway?”3 In it, Chris Chase begs readers

to “Remember when the credits for movies were simple? And intelligible?” He lays the

responsibility for contemporary proliferation of inscrutable job titles and their accompanying

names at the foot of so much Hollywood ego. Credits are therefore dismissed in popular

critical circles, which ill attends to the vital functions that they serve for film industry

professionals. Film Credit seeks to perform that due diligence and examine the structures and

mechanisms that make credit work in the American film industry.

Literature Review and Intervention

Academic writing has treated credits with greater gravity, though it remains a minor

movement in cinema studies. French scholarship, especially the writings of Nicole de

Mourgues, Alexandre Tylski, and Laurence Moinereau have occupied themselves in trying to

divine the purpose, meaning, or raison d’être of opening credits. They are particularly rich in

their analysis of the role and function of génériques from a structuralist perspective,

expending great effort establishing its status and ontology as a discursive object, especially in

relation to the films that they inaugurate.4 De Mourgues, Tylski, and Moinereau are

particularly indebted to Gerard Genette’s formulation of the idea of the “paratext,” which

they have adopted from its original context and applied to the cinema. Like many other

theories applied to film, the paratext is literary in origin, and includes those elements that do

not belong to the text proper—such as prefaces, dedications, book covers, and front matter

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with publishing details, etc.—but are still routinely included in published works. Like

dedications, they may be important to the individual author, but otherwise peripheral; as

with front matter, they may be vital to bibliographic organisation, but otherwise un-read.

Because the paratext constitutes a demarcation around the text, Genette describes it as that

which “enables a text to become a book and offered as such to its readers and, more

generally, to the public.”5 Genette also defines the paratext as something

more than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is

rather a threshold…that offers the world the possibility of

either stepping inside or of turning back. It is an “undefined

zone” between inside and outside, without any hard and fast

boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text)

or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse

about the text) …a zone not only of transition, but of

transaction…. (Original emphasis)6

The paratext is what creates the book per se because its boundary allows the book to

be organised and circulated within social and economic frameworks. French cinema

scholarship takes this fundamentally literary character of the paratext and applies it to film

opening title sequences, finding both equivalences and divergences between the two in

functional structural terms. De Mourges and Tylski argue that the credits are the petit texte

that paves the way for the grand texte that is the diegesis.7 Tylski also argues, in

contradistinction to de Mourges and Moinereau, that it also more properly functions as an

overture, similar to those found in musicals, setting the tone for the narrative to come.8

Moinereau is much more expansive than his French counterparts, arguing that title

sequences can have up to seven different functions, among them: non-figurative, much like

an abstract film; emblematic, containing a visual reference to something appearing the film

8

to follow (a technique espoused by Saul Bass, as we shall later see); thematic, alluding to

themes and subjects that will appear in the diegesis (another familiar Bass technique); and as

a short film, understood as a textual object apart from the main narrative.9 As we shall see

later, this dissertation, particularly in Chapter Two, subscribes to this last of Moinereau’s

functions; I argue that credit sequences should be understood as semi-autonomous objects,

intelligible in their own right. For the most part, however, this tradition of French

scholarship is largely aesthetic in nature, and sees credits as too deterministically subservient

to the narrative. Moreover, this tradition of credits-as-paratext gives too short shrift to the

labour and industrial forces at work in creating credits because it does not sufficiently

account for ways that credits are necessary to enumerate and identify the labour

contributions made on any film.

American academic Leo Charney developed a thesis in the mode of this French

tradition, and laboured to create contiguities between credit sequences and the diegesis. In

his doctoral dissertation at New York University, Charney used Genette’s creation of the

paratext’s “undefined zone” as an occasion to give film title sequences a definitive function in

the experience of film spectatorship:

Classical film uses credits, title cards, and opening sequences

to position the viewer outside the film and then lead her

inside the action…Classical openings mark the point at

which the viewer, outside the film, begins to be led into the

film’s action; they recognize film-viewing as the viewer’s

negotiation between exteriority and interiority.10

Charney thus positions titles as providing a necessary psychological function: to ease

the viewer from the extra-diegetic world into the diegetic one, a stance very much in keeping

9

with Classical Hollywood cinema’s ideals of minimizing ruptures in the film’s artifice.

Charney’s intervention is a textually based construction of credits that does not adequately

account for the forces of its production. Moreover, I contend that the opening credits do

not serve necessarily as an apparatus that negotiates between the inside and the outside of a

text. The main titles can also serve as a shock, or bump to the narrative because they are a

reminder of its production circumstances, and evidence of the labour that went into

production. Germany too has a tradition of studying Vorspnannen (singular Vorspann), the

most prominent scholar being Georg Stanitzek.11 Stanitzek’s article, “Reading the Title

Sequence (Vorspann, Générique)” translated for Cinema Journal in 2009, frames his article in

a similar manner to Charney, arguing that opening titles are first and foremost, geared

towards “providing a focus that allows for transition into the movie.” He also argues that

credits function like a “cinematic form of publisher’s imprint,” very much in the mode of

Genette’s paratext.12 He then goes into a wide-ranging excurses on its “constellations of

medium and form,” (i.e., modes of aesthetic expression), its legal-structural “inevitability,”

its “semi-autonomous role” in relationship to the associated film, and the interplay of

writing and images in titles, amongst others.”13 Stanitzek’s overarching survey is a valuable

resource setting the stage for this dissertation. Stanitzek’s analysis is a well-founded

overview, woven out of broad cloth he provides a brief overture to the fact that credits

“serve a whole array of functions: copyright law, economics, certification of employment in

the context of careers, movie title, entertainment, commercials, fashion, and art.”14 As a

totalising gesture, his treatment of credits is useful, but can benefit from a more nuanced

10

understanding of law, economics, and employment; he has left much room to colour in the

spaces between those discourses.

English-language scholarship is far less extensive than its European counterparts. An

article by Peter Hall, called “Opening Ceremonies: Typography and the Movies, 1955-

1969” is misleading, because it is not an overview of traditions in opening credits, but rather

an analysis of one designer, Saul Bass, and the novelty of his designs.15 Hall’s work is

otherwise scant and glib in its analysis of other designers. Chapter Two of this dissertation

seeks to redress that imbalance by exploring the work of Bass’ contemporaries. Will Straw’s

essay “Letters of Introduction: Film Credits and Cityscapes,” performs insightful close

readings of title sequences, tracing the history from pre-World War II credits that were

fundamentally literary in character (books, scrolls, etc.) into a postwar era, where they were

increasingly superimposed over the materiel of urban life—marquees, skylines, etc. Straw

finds commonality in “the cinema’s relationship to cities as places filled with words and

texts,”16 and is therefore a useful exemplar of how title sequences can be read with respect to

extra-textual discourses. In so doing, Straw’s otherwise useful work does not account for the

structure and function of credits on their own terms, especially with respect to their

industrial necessities.

Promises in the Dark, Deborah Allison’s doctoral dissertation from East Anglia

University, redresses that lacuna somewhat, by surveying industry-wide traditions of title

sequences rigorously and deeply from the 1920s to the present day. She identifies historical

periods where title design experienced particularly acute growth (e.g., the Saul Bass inspired

period of the 1950s, the special effects boom of the 1970s, the computer graphics resurgence

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of the 1990s), and delimits the major stylistic trends in each of these periods through a

statistical analysis. For example, she takes 2674 films, released by major studios between

1934 and 1994, and in five-year increments, identifies what percentage of these films

featured pre-title narrative sequences. She for example finds a crest in 1974 of pre-title

narrative sequences (approximately 47%) and a trough in 1994 (slightly over 20%),17 and

elsewhere analyses what percentage of films had credits over narrative action, etc. Allison’s

fastidiousness is duly appreciated, because it provides a comprehensive historical overview of

major title sequence trends. But in her excessive investment in the minutiae of statistical

analysis, some of the more potentially compelling forays into the aesthetic form and

industrial function of titles go wanting.

Catherine Fisk’s work on credit’s legal functions goes a long way towards grounding

the regimes of credit within the realm of industrial praxis. In “Credit Where It’s Due: The

Law and Norms of Attribution,” Fisk argues that legal attribution serves four important

extra-legal purposes: the Reward Function, which promotes creation of artworks through

the economic and psychic benefits that accrue from such recognition; the Discipline

Function, which ensures that creators will be made accountable in the cases of libel or

slander, and allows for appropriate redress; the Branding Function, which “attaches a sort of

brand or a trademark to both the object and to the putative creator;” and the Humanizing

function, which attaches the names of individual creators to a particular product instead of

solely the corporate entity, thus humanizing the particular product, because it is viewed as

creation of human labour.18 Fisk’s is a valuable intervention because it schematises the

function of attribution within creative regimes. It traverses the terrain from legal rights of

12

creators (which are governed by the American legal system) to their moral rights (which exist

in the USA in a strictly limited sense), making attribution a matter of concerns both legal

and extra-legal. She has elsewhere written about screen credit and the Writers Guild of

America for the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law.19 In this article, Fisk argues

credit was the major determinant in motivating Hollywood screenwriters to organise a

representative guild. And that guild, the WGA, has taken on all the responsibilities of

arbitrating screen credits amongst its members, making it an organisational body for both

writers and film producers. This is because the WGA manages “markets for labour and

ideas.”20 Fisk’s model is helpful in articulating some of the official legal and labour regimes

that organise and structure film credit within writers’ circles.

Catherine Fisk’s work is constructive for its legal and organisational interventions,

yet less productive when it is applied to regimes of credit (not merely attribution) that exist

in the film and television industries. Employment dynamics for Fisk are generally constructed

at the super-structural level—the definitions of writers handed down by the WGA’s

guidelines, or the contractual negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion

Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that govern writers’ employ. She ill attends to

the mechanics of credit, reputation, and prestige that circulate at the level of individual film

and television professionals, which is composed of personnel at myriad levels and gradations

of skill, influence, and esteem. Moreover, her analysis of attribution is woven out of broad

cloth; while she addresses creative attribution and the connotations it conveys to a wider lay

public (i.e., the average film audience member, for my purposes), she does not account for

the variations that credit can take across a broad community of creative professionals, and

13

how those variations circulate within that professional environment. From without, the

different form and type of credit across different types of film jobs titles (Assistant Director

vs. Assistant Editor) or even within the same manner of film job (Art Director vs. Production

Designer) appears to be minute, even inconsequential. However, to individuals working

inside the industry who are privy to its practices and well versed in its customs, the

differences are profound. Their semantics speak to differences both in the degree and kind of

work that a film professional might perform. A Second Unit Director’s job, for example, is

different than a Director’s merely by degree, for they both are responsible for entire

production crews; but the Second Unit films action sequences or “pick-ups.”21 An Assistant

Director’s job, when compared to a Director’s job, is different in kind, because the AD

manages the production crew over which the director presides. (A Second Unit Director also

employs an AD.)22 An Art Director and a Production Designer perform essentially the same

job, but the latter’s work is esteemed and valued more than the former’s, because of the

specific wording of the film credit, as I demonstrate in Chapter Four.

As will be shown in the third chapter, the credit “A Film By…” incorporates

discourses that transcend the legal. Three little words encompass a myriad of discourses,

including the fraught unofficial politics of creative contribution that exist between writers

and directors. It even extends deeply into debates surrounding creative (as opposed to legal)

definitions of authorship and the auteur theory. These semantic differences circulate amongst

the community of film professionals, creating an “economy of prestige,” to borrow David F.

English’s phrase,23 that is both formally coded by official negotiating regimes and understood

more informally by those who work in the business. This is the fundamental difference

14

between attribution and credit: a study of attribution deals with the certified regulations that

govern contributions in creative work moving in vectors between employers and employees;

a study of credit takes those formal factors into consideration, but also understands their

informal politics—the reputation and esteem that circulates within a community of creative

professionals, according to mechanisms that are colloquial, and a matter of common custom.

This dissertation is concerned with unpacking the different semantic degrees of credit that

have escaped Fisk’s more formal studies of credit’s structure and function. Moreover,

because her primary focus on screenwriters, there is significant space to consider the work of

other types of Hollywood labour—a space that this dissertation seeks to occupy, especially

through studying below-the-line workers, in Chapter Four.

The above scholarship inflects this dissertation, each useful yet each wanting in its

own particular ways. They are unified, however by two major lacunae, leaving considerable

space for the work contained herein. Firstly and more simply, “credits” are understood to be

synonymous with “opening credits” or “opening titles.” There does not exist, to my

knowledge, any academic study of the “closing credits” or “final crawl” that appeared

sporadically as early as the 1930s, and have been a routine appearance in American cinema

since the 1950s. In particular, Chapter Four of this dissertation pieces together a history of

this often overlooked part of cinema, through labour, aesthetic, and economic lenses. The

second lacuna is more complicated, because it relates to both the discursive relationship of

both the opening credits and final crawl to the film text (which is to say the narrative

diegesis), and to the orientation of film scholarship with respect to reading or interpreting

film through textual analysis. Put more simply, the works cited above strive to create

15

linkages between credits and the diegesis so that they exist in a relatively seamless

continuum, and can be read according to the same strategies of decipherment. When de

Mourgues and Tylski, borrow Genette’s paratextual framework and use it to argue for

credits as a boundary between the inside and the outside of texts, they create structural

sympathies between the diegetic world and the structural membrane that surrounds it.

When Charney contends that the opening credits help to ease the spectator into the

narrative environment of a film, he creates a psychological framework that seamlessly binds

these parts together. The critical intervention of this dissertation lies in that I advocate

against establishing a continuum between the credits in the narrative proper, and work more

in line with some of credit’s functions proposed by Laurence Moinereau. I dispute the

assumption that credits constitute a significant semantic break or rupture from the diegesis.

The presence of credits serve as a reminder that films are works of fiction, because they

indicate to us that they are a constructed products, and are the result of much labour

deploying a panoply of technological apparatuses.

Credits furthermore exhibit different semantic vectors than the narrative diegesis,

and therefore ought to be interpreted according to different strategies. Independent of any

other contextual information, the meanings that can be gleaned from watching a film’s

opening credits and final crawl are very few. Because these names and titles, as established by

Richard Caves above, have very little meaning for lay audiences, this lack of decipherability

creates a problem when reading the credits as a text. Because they do not conform to the

semantic-syntactic paradigm that characterises much of film criticism and scholarship, it is

argued that credits cannot be interpreted in the same way as the narrative diegesis. The

16

disciplines of cinema and media studies, not to mention their various sub-disciplines, are

fractured and diffuse, but at bare minimum united in their common interest of how best to

approach, interpret, or “read” a text—even if the solutions they arrive at with regard to the

“textual problem” are widely varied and are hotly contested. Robert Stam puts forth what I

find to be the most succinct and productive formulation of the current state of “textual

analysis,” stating that

Deconstruction was on one level a form of textual exegesis, an

“unpacking” of texts, a way of interrogating their unspoken

premises while being alert to their discursive heterogeneity.

And although textual analysis traces its long-term antecedents

to biblical exegesis, nineteenth-century hermeneutics and

philology, the French pedagogical methods of close reading

(explication de texte), and American New Criticism’s

“immanent” analysis, its more immediate antecedents include

Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, Umberto Eco’s study of the

“open work,” Roland Barthes’s distinction between “work”

and “text,” Althusser’s and Macharey’s (Freudian) notion of

“symptomatic reading” and “structuring absences,” and

Derrida’s work on différance and dissemination. (Original

emphasis.)24

Stam’s exegesis on these fraught and contested discourses is very well taken, suggesting that

there is no singular way to approach a text to realise its meanings. Yet one facet unites all

these disparate threads of approaches to textual reading: a movement away from

deterministic, hermeneutically closed analyses and towards an open (or at least, semi-open)

proliferation of signs and significations. Roland Barthes schematizes this divide in S/Z as the

difference between “readerly” and “writerly” texts, or as Stam interprets it, “between the

readerly and writerly approaches to texts.”25 Where the former fashions the critic as the “the

priest whose task is to decipher the Writing of the god”26 (the author), the latter “fashions

17

an active reader…turns its consumer in to a producer, foregrounding the process of its own

process and promoting the infinite play of signification.”27 This is the schema that unifies

contemporary cinema and media studies—the privileging of textual reading, focussing on the

polyvalent and generative work of interpretation. Such an approach is opposed to the

singular and reductive textual readings that derive from trying to divine creative intent, or

else use some manner of codex—such as a creator’s biographical information—to give an

authoritative and singular reading.28 And yet this more open, generative schema does not

properly work with regard to a film’s opening and closing credits, because they can only be

understood by access to specialised form of knowledge.

Take, for example two credits that are common to contemporary film practice, and

frequently appear in a film’s final crawl: the “Gaffer,” and the “Best Boy.” When confronted

in a vacuum, these two titles are virtually indecipherable; even when juxtaposed with the

film narrative immediately preceding the end credits, no immanent meaning emerges. The

work of a Gaffer or Best Boy is fundamentally opaque, with nothing contained in the text of

the film to indicate the precise meaning of those job titles. In order to understand what a

Gaffer or a Best Boy does, a spectator requires either some insider knowledge to understand

that a Gaffer is usually the chief electrician, and is often responsible for executing a motion

picture’s lighting plan; the Best Boy is the Gaffer’s first assistant. Without any knowledge of

the film industry, the average spectator needs the intervention of a third party in order to

communicate the meaning of those jobs.29 Indeed, journalists have periodically taken on that

responsibility through film history, and communicated the meaning of these esoteric job

titles through explanatory articles built on interviews and conferences with film industry

18

professionals.30 As a corollary, the job titles of Writer, Director, or Actor seem to be

immediately understood. But I contend that this is largely the result of the extra-textual

discourse that surrounds these creative titles. The understanding of actors’ labour has

derived from the voluminous writings found in fan magazines, a tradition almost as old as the

cinema itself, and explored at great length in books such as Richard Dyer’s Stars31 and

Richard deCordova’s Picture Personalities.32 Our contemporary knowledge of a director’s job

is founded largely on the interventions made by the auteur theory since the 1960s, imported

to North American film criticism and scholarship and promoted vociferously by Andrew

Sarris, who attributes a number of creative functions to the professional in the director’s

chair.33 Because film credits can only be fully understood by the interventions of third

parties, I maintain that they cannot be read in the same way as the narrative component of a

motion picture, which is built on immanent analysis.

For these reasons, I argue that credits constitute a different semantic register than

found in a film’s narrative component. For the vector of meaning that govern the diegesis,

meaning is transmitted outward, from a film’s creators to its consumers. The vector of

meaning for credits, by contrast, is transmitted inward, from a film’s creators back to the

community of creative professionals that work in the industry. Steeped in that working

environment and well-versed in its customs and particular argot, crafts film professionals are

able to interpret a film’s opening credits and final crawl. They can instantly intuit when one

of their colleagues has moved from being a Best Boy into the more rarefied ranks of Gaffer.

So too, writers are able to understand the significant differences between credits “Written

by…” versus “Screenplay by…” versus “Story by…” Likewise the more minute differences in

19

the credits “Screenplay by Jane Doe & John Doe,” which denotes simultaneous

collaboration on the same draft of a script; versus “Screenplay by Jane Doe and John Doe,”

which denotes that the two writers worked separately from each other, perhaps with one

rewriting

the work of another.34 These very particular meanings are all dictated and policed by

the Writers Guild of America, which has long governed who receives credit for a particular

script, and in what form, as dictated in its Minimum Basic Agreement struck with

producers.35 Yet there is also a regime of meanings germane to the industry that exceeds

even

the control of Guilds and Unions. Chapter Three of this dissertation, which studies the

court case prosecuted over the use of the credit “A Film by…”, argues that the semantics of

credit go deeper than even the more straightforward terms of labour employment. The

socalled

possessory credit, traditionally taken by directors over the objection of writers, is

imbued with broader philosophical discourses such as authorship, the auteur theory, and the

moral rights of creators. These meanings can only be gleaned by scouring the record of legal

documents and letters circulated within the WGA’s trade journals, none of which are

intended for public consumption. The same rubric of immanent analysis used by scholars to

interpret film texts cannot be applied to the opening titles and final crawl. Without using

ancillary documents or discourses to help decode credits, their true significance to the film

industry will go remain inadequately understood.

With this fundamental difference between the diegesis and its “paratextual” elements

in mind, I also assert that the opening titles and final crawl should themselves be interpreted

differently from one another, because they are structurally different. A film’s opening titles

are composed of two main components: visual play produced by a graphic designer; and lists

20

of credits. The first register, visual play, is more properly “readable” per se,36 because its

aesthetics are in continuum with those found in other film texts. Saul Bass’s animated title

sequences, for example, are intelligible as works of animation and graphic design. They can

be interpreted using those familiar rubrics to understand their syntax and semantics, and are

therefore directed outwards towards the audience. The second register—lists of credits—is

directed inwards towards film professionals, except for the few credits of major stars and

directors who are known to a wider audience. The opening titles are semantically split, with

the visuals distracting from the drudgery of the credits to serve the interests of the lay public,

while the credits serve an important employment function for film professionals.

The final credits, by contrast, are semantically unified, and almost entirely directed

inwardly to a community of creative personnel. As demonstrated in Chapter Four, from the

mid-1950s when a final crawl first becomes a fixture in American cinema until the early

1980s, the final crawl was directed exclusively inwards the film industry; and even as post

credit scenes or gags became more of a fixture from the 80s onwards, this still remained an

overwhelmingly minor practice in the cinema. To the average film spectator, the movie, for

all intents and purposes is finished with THE END, fade to black, or whatever device is used

to signal that the diegesis has come to a close. She may linger to catch the name of a

particularly noteworthy actor who escaped identification during the course of the film; he

may loiter to divine who it was that designed the costumes. But as Randy Kennedy wrote in

the New York Times in 2004, the overwhelming majority of spectators do not stay until the

very end of the picture—to the copyright statement and the company end title card/screen

that signals there is truly, absolutely nothing more to see.37 Unless a spectator has a

21

particular interest—scholarly, cinephilic—she simply does not attend to the final credits.

Yet as demonstrated in Chapter Four, the presence of these final crawl credits listing every

creative or humdrum contribution, nominally ad absurdum, is actually vital to those

employed in the film, television, and new media industries. They constitute the only reliable

employment record in the business for below the line personnel. The presence of the final

crawl ensures that employees’ contributions are duly recorded, in contrast to a period in the

mid 1960s to the early 1970s when a number of crafts credits were lost to administrative

oversight, and therefore serve as a vital resource for professional careers.38 Closing credits

are

primarily meant to be read by members of the industry, whether to verify that their credits

are properly worded, or to gauge the progress of their peers. Any notice taken by audiences

or critics—which, as I note in Chapter Four, has been overwhelmingly negative—is relegated

to secondary consideration. With these factors in mind, I argue that, in contrast to prior

scholarship, both the opening credits and final crawl ought to be read or interpreted

differently than the narrative proper. This dissertation enacts that alternative form of

interpretation by positioning the opening credits and final crawl at the nexus of aesthetic,

legal, and industrial labour a discourses that frequently have little to do with the narrative

content of the films they inaugurate and conclude.

Credits are worthy of study, moreover, because the opening titles and final crawl are

the only two places in narrative film where aesthetic, legal, and industrial determinations are

written directly onto the screen. They are also the only venues where a film’s visual

register—title design, for example—concatenate and directly mingle with its legal and

industrial labour. Hollywood filmmaking disavows those borrowings and influences at every

22

turn, with the purpose of erasing evidence that a film is an ineluctably constructed work of

fiction. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener speak elegantly to this paradox as the sine qua

non of the majority of narrative cinema, which

achieves its effects of transparency by the concerted

deployment of filmic means (montage, light, camera

placement, scale, special effects) which justify their profuse

presence by aiming at being noticed as little as possible. A

maximum of technique and technology seeks a minimum of

attention for itself, thereby not only masking the means of

manipulation, but succeeding in creating a transparency that

simulates proximity and intimacy.39

There are of course exceptions to these blanket generalities, especially in certain historical

moments of film production. But taken across the entire weft and weave of film practice,

American narrative cinema is characterised by a significant tradition of striving to erase its

own artifice. Elsaesser constructs these erasures in formal terms, but they are equally

applicable to the industrial efforts that go into making a film. American narrative cinema also

desires that a “minimum of attention” be paid to the labour that produces the film text and

the apparatus that goes into its manufacture. Contracts between producers and

talent/employees remain private, and production budgets published in Variety account for

only part of the overall expenditures made on a film, because they do not include costs of

marketing and publicity.40 The promotional apparatuses of major studios carefully control

what the public learns about the minutiae of the filmmaking process. Despite any “back lot”

tours given by Universal Studios as part of their theme park attractions, the stories they tell

do not account for the myriad efforts that go into making a motion picture.

23

Credit sequences are therefore worthy of study because they are one of the few

instances where we witness evidence of the elaborate machinery of cinema production, both

major and minor: the millions of dollars, invested by production companies; the thousands

of hours spent toiling by creative labour; the elaborate technological systems required for

both the creation and projection of moving images—recognition of which all appear in the

opening credits. These myriad business arrangements, creative collaborations, and

production technologies are distilled into a progression of verbs and nouns, proper or

otherwise. References to production financing (company title cards), job titles, artists’

names, guild/union affiliations (SAG, IATSE), post-production companies (Skywalker

Sound), and equipment suppliers (Technicolor, Panavision) all appear in opening and

closing credits as a matter of course. Their presence before the beginning of a film reveals a

snapshot of the work that went into making a film, and is also a contractual necessity,

mandated as a result of negotiations—sometimes with unions and guilds, sometimes at the

level of individual workers. These labour organisations ensure that creative personnel (and

even production companies) are properly enumerated and recognised for their contributions

to a film. Proper recognition is far from straightforward, though: credits are a deeply coded

matrix of syntax and semantics bearing very particular meanings for those employed in the

filmmaking industry; those meanings are highly contested.41 They are also one of the few

places42 in film production that the cinema shows its seams and acknowledges films as

constructed objects.

We may say that Matthew Broderick in direct address to the camera during moment

of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) is a reflexive gesture breaking the fourth wall. We may then

24

point to this as director of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, John Hughes’ acknowledgement that the

film is in fact a work of construction and not an autonomous fiction. Yet the only true place

where film acknowledges the extent of its own artifice is in the credits, when the words

recognising film labour are plainly written on the screen. In the process of crediting the

labour that went into creating a film, it can scarcely escape the audience’s notice that this is

a work of fiction, its fictional qualities inherently disavowed once the film has begun, was lit

by gaffers, wired by a Best Boy electric, with colour by Technicolor, and presented in

VistaVision.

Methodology and Fields of Study

Though it is discursively broad, Film Credit is at root a work of Media Industries

scholarship with a significant emphasis on Visual Studies. My approach motivated by the

fact that the structure of any film’s opening credits and final crawl are inflected by legal and

creative-industrial discourses, which is reflected in the Media Industries imperative. They

also have been a venue for noteworthy visual experimentation, whose creators borrow from

aesthetic traditions external to the cinema, which is borne out in the Visual Studies

approach. During the course of this dissertation, I will demonstrate that these two fields can

productively reflect upon each other, and respectively complement the other’s lacunae.

Media Industries scholarship has gained momentum over the past decade,

spearheaded by the Media Industries anthology, edited by Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, and

exemplified by such notable works as Global Hollywood 2, written by Toby Miller, Nitin

Govil, et. al. Both decentre film and media studies away from the monolith imposed by the

25

meaning of text, and focus instead on the structural mechanisms that work to produce its

meanings. These meanings also take on different registers from within (the community of

creative personnel who work in these industries and produce the text) and without

(audiences that receive the text via viewing and consumption) and in between (the popular

and trade presses that serve as intermediaries in between the two, and frame a critical

discourse). In Global Hollywood 2, Miller and Govil, et al. note that, culturally speaking,

“film remains at the apex semiotically, but not financially,” and for media industries that is

certainly true: other revenue streams like sales of DVDs video and video games outstrip

theatrical exhibition revenue streams.43 For the purposes of this study, I would amend

Miller’s and Govil’s statement to say that for cinema studies, texts remain at the apex

semiotically, but not discursively. While textual analysis sees a film’s meaning, embedded into

a cultural matrix, as an end in itself, media industries methods challenge the centrality of the

text, and ask after what embedded forces go into its production (particularly the production

networks that surround creation), and its circulation. As a result of these competing forces,

Holt and Perren posit that the work of media industries is to similarly position film,

television, and new media production as an arena for contestation: the media industries

approach “perceives culture and cultural production as sites of struggle, contestation, and

negotiation between a broad range of stakeholders. These stakeholders include not only

sectors of industry and government, but also ‘ordinary people’ (e.g. media

user/consumer/viewers).”44 As such, the text as a unit of rhetorical consistency negotiates, in

a media industry framework, with the broader cultural network of distribution and control.

Where traditional criticism treats the text as paramount, a source or a destination for

26

unpacking the semantics and meaning of a work, media industries uses the text along a line

of flight—as but one element in the flux between producers (itself a contested realm of

jostling labour) and consumer. Other works, both operating in the Media Industries

tradition and sympathetic to its aims, have also been valuable resources during the writing of

this dissertation, both as historiographic models and as supplementary resources that flesh

out the historical periods it covers. These include publications by Tino Balio, William

Boddy, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, Eileen Bowser, Leo Braudy,

Richard Caves, John Thornton Caldwell, James English, James Ettema and Charles Whitnet,

Robert Faulkner, Richard Fine, Douglas Gomery, Richard Jewell, Robert Kapsis, Tom

Kemper, Peter Lev, Denise Mann, Vincent Mosco, Paul Monaco, Charles Musser, Thomas

Schatz, Robert Sklar, Barbara Wilinsky, and Christopher Wheaton.45

The approach brought forward by Howard Becker in Art Worlds provides a valuable

improvement to the already constructive Media Industries framework, because it attends to

the less easily quantifiable facets of film, television, and new media production that Media

Industries scholarship sometimes puts outside of its purview. As Douglas Kellner writes,

media industries scholarship involves a definitive political economy perspective, specifically,

that “the production, distribution, and reception of culture takes place within a specific

economic and political system, constituted by the state, the economy, social institutions,

practices, culture, and organizations such as the media.”46 The focus here is on labour and

the work that goes into production, but from a more macro (not to be confused with

macroeconomic) perspective, governed at the organisational level. Becker’s Art Worlds

hypothesis contributes to that analysis at the sub-organisational level by studying the

27

network of quasi-formal or informal relationships that support and uphold the larger

structures of filmmaking practice. It also considers the very peculiar non-economic currency

that circulates in these networks—a currency that encompasses ephemera such as

relationships, reputation, and prestige.47 Tom Kemper’s book Hidden Talent: The Emergence

of Hollywood Agents is an exemplary work in this mould. He establishes how important

agents, an under-scrutinized part of Hollywood machinery, facilitate the careers of actors,

writers, and directors by managing the messy transactional necessities that are an intrinsic

part of every filmmaking endeavour, but are too bureaucratically unwieldy for the studios

and the guilds to internalize. Kemper’s analysis of classical Hollywood is especially useful in

establishing the minutia of agent work, and he is especially insightful when examining how

these relationships are handled. Outside of contracts and official business meetings, there is a

whole network of informal gatherings—lunches, parties, etc.—that seem outwardly trivial,

yet are vital to the functioning of Hollywood as a company town. At the weekend parties of

super-agent Charles Feldman, producers could informally meet with writers and directors

and in the process discuss future collaborations outside the scrutiny of company walls.

Similarly, apparently humdrum meetings over lunch hold significant symbolic and

transactional value:

A routine rendezvous involving an agent and client or studio

executive facilitated important swaps of information. An

exchange performed, for example, in the informal setting of a

restaurant, within the speculative and contingent manner of

gossip (the latest information about artists and projects...)

could subsequently translate into serious deals.48

28

I do not wish to make an overdetermined plea for “lunch” as the motor of Hollywood studio

system, but Kemper’s analysis exemplifies the type of Art Worlds analysis that is valuable for

the way it attends to and takes seriously the type of less-easily quantifiable facets of media

production that even Media Industries scholarship can leave behind. The circulation of

informal information is in large part the grease that keeps the Hollywood wheels turning, yet

larger studies of the media industries tend not to consider the role that informal information

plays in facilitating business transactions.

Other works in operating the Art Worlds tradition are similarly useful. For example,

David F. English in The Economy of Prestige studies a whole socio-economic network that

surrounds the giving out of literary prizes, which is nominally supposed to be above such

base and demeaning considerations. He establishes that there is quantifiable economic value

attached to even critical plaudits, not just for the individuals who receive them, but for the

organisations that give out such prizes.49 John Thornton Caldwell’s Production Cultures book

argues that the stories that individuals in creative industries tell to one other, are vital in

building relationships, networks, and reputations within those environments. Caldwell’s

contribution is that he illuminates how personnel trying to make way in the industry (or

indeed solidify a place in it) rely on certain genres of stories, usually told informally during

quiet moments on set. Some of these informal moments—“war stories,” for example, where

creative professionals swap tales of regarding particularly gruelling shoots or humorous

anecdotes of previous production experiences—establish for a worker a rhetorical reputation

internal to the industry, irrespective of what official regimes of credit might tell us about her

career. Caldwell persuasively argues that these “stories” are important forms of cultural

29

capital, and are essential to both the accruing (or losing) of economic capital and to cohesive

industry function.50 In this vein, the Art Worlds hypothesis is strengthened by Pierre

Bourdieu’s arguments regarding the nature of symbolic and economic capital from The Logic

of Practice:

Symbolic capital procures all . . . the network of affines and

relationships that is held through the set of commitments and

debts of honour, rights and duties accumulated over the

successive generations.... Economic and symbolic capital are

so inextricably intertwined that the display of material and

symbolic strength represented by prestigious affines is in itself

likely to bring in material profits, in a good-faith economy in

which good repute consists the best, if not the only,

economic guarantee.51

Bourdieu’s assessment of these two types of valuation, and the way that symbolic capital can

transmute into economic success, is the logical conclusion of the Media Industries

framework, nuanced by the Art World’s hypothesis: the operation of film, television, and

media production is governed far more by minute relationships than top-down studies of

broader frameworks and structures could ever hope to tell. With this theoretical framework

in mind, the following study of credit and credits within the American film industry is

inflected with both the formal regimes of attribution and the less formal regimes of credit

that circulate within its culture of production: created by labour and employment

negotiations, arbitrated by legal frameworks, finessed by aesthetic expressions, circulated

officially through popular press and trade journal outlets, and diffused unofficially via

networks of industry professionals. Screen and advertising credits are at the nexus of a

number of different discourses, and this dissertation grapples with their complex mechanics.

30

It does so through a methodology provided by Media Industries Studies, whose purview is

productively expanded by Howard Becker’s Art Worlds hypothesis.

Visual Studies is equally constructive to this dissertation because it treats visual

objects not as discrete artefacts, but as interrelated objects embedded in a larger field of

visual culture and aesthetic traditions. This dissertation is indebted to works by scholars

who operate in this mode: Martin Jay, W.J.T. Mitchell, David Nye, Vanessa Schwartz, Lynn

Spigel, and Jennifer Watts.52 Scholar Stephen Melville has criticised this approach as unable

to contribute an “interestingly interdisciplinary” mode of scholarship, because it seems to

cherry-pick its objects without reconsidering the nature of that interdisciplinarity and how it

can be constructive and alter our understanding of the objects it studies.53 This is what

James Elkins calls the “Magpie Theory of interdisciplinarity,” for the way it haphazardly

assembles visual artefacts and studies the resultant products of those intersections without

interrogating, a priori, the validity of putting those artefacts in close proximity in the first

place.54 Yet I would argue there is something productive in this interdisciplinary bent,

especially for the work of Cinema Studies and Media Industry Studies. As typified by the

scholarship cited above, these two scholarly traditions attend very well to the industrial and

historical circumstances that surround and influence the creation of an individual film text,

but has been less sensitive to the way that other visual traditions have wrought similar,

significant changes in cinematic modes of expression. David James’ Most Typical Avant-Garde

is conscientious of how the dominant mode of American cinema is rife with borrowings: he

argues that it is characterised by “cross-pollination in formal procedures, representational

codes, and production strategies [that] have circulated reciprocally through the entire field

31

of cinema,” and has interpolated these strategies from other relatively “minor” (but no less

important) expressive traditions of experimental and avant-garde film.55 James thus expands

the purview of Hollywood cinema and demonstrates these other traditions are constitutive

of its practice, but still operates largely in the domain of moving image media. Lynn Spigel’s

TV By Design further levers open the world of moving images to other modes of aesthetic

expression—particularly modern art and graphic design—and demonstrates how much they

influenced television production practices during the 1950s and 1960s.56 Though I disagree

with some of Spigel’s conclusions, the model she puts forward in TV By Design is valuable for

Film Credit. Chapter Two of this dissertation also brings that visually interdisciplinary model

to bear on the intersections between commercial television advertising, graphic design (and

to a lesser extent, fine art) as they played out in opening title sequences. Finally, this

dissertation is also motivated by a credo articulated by Vanessa Schwartz and Jeanne

Pryzblyski. In The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader, in which they argue that visual

culture studies “produces a discursive space where questions and materials that have been

traditionally marginalized within the established disciplines become central.”57 With this in

mind, this dissertation will move film credit, not necessarily to a central position within

cinema and media studies, but at least to a discursive position that is far less peripheral than

it currently occupies—and that it will increase consideration of how non-filmic visual

discourses have influenced filmmaking practices.

By synthesizing these two rather disparate realms—Media Industries and Visual

Studies—this dissertation will occupy a unique place (niche) in the discipline of Hollywood

film histories. Many histories have explored the post-Paramount Decrees period, roughly

32

that era of filmmaking from 1948, when the studios agreed to a divest their

verticallyintegrated

holdings, until 1969, when the conglomerates bought the production

infrastructure aggregated by individual studios and absorbed them as but one branch in a

diversified company. But even though the labour environment changed drastically in its

wake,58 there has not yet been a satisfactory study of an important mechanism that that

helped govern Hollywood labour during this period: film credit. Moreover, while there have

been accounts of film credits’ broader aesthetic trends (Deborah Allison, Georg Stanizek),

their legal function (Catherine Fisk), or their post-structuralist meaning (De Mourges,

Tylski, and Moinereau) there has yet to be a satisfactorily synthetic account of the way that

these mechanisms work in concert with each other. Film Credit provides such an account by

dealing with credits as a collision of aesthetic, legal, and industrial forces, demonstrating that

the opening titles and the final crawl are truly discursive (i.e., freighted with many

discourses), and therefore objects worthy of close scrutiny.

Historical Scope, Organisation, and Chapter Descriptions

This dissertation’s scope is both discursively broad and narrow—broad in that it

seeks to encompass the aesthetic, legal, and industrial forces at play in the opening credits;

narrow in the sense that these mechanisms operate in sequences that take up a fraction of a

film’s running time. Film Credit is also both historically narrow and broad. Chapter Two is

an aesthetic history of film opening title designs in the 1950s and 1960s. Chapter Three is a

narrow historical case study that explores the court case surrounding “A Film by…” credit in

1966-67. Chapter Four is a more panoptic history exploring the form and function of final

33

crawl credits from the mid-1950s until the present day. These three chapters coalesce mainly

around the historical period following the Paramount Decrees in 1948 because it witnessed

the greatest changes in the form and structure of screen credits, doubtless wrought by the

evolving production culture that occurred in this period. Since May 1948, southern

California had found itself to be a rather fraught place for established film production, as the

Paramount Decrees ended the vertically integrated oligopolies held by the so-called “Big

Five” studios. It is a familiar tale, borne out in many widely read American film histories:

beginning in July 1938, MGM, Paramount, RKO, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros,

and Universal59 found themselves embroiled in a lawsuit filed by the American Department

of Justice’s Antitrust Division, which charged the major studios with 28 separate offences

related to the structure and function of film business. The suit’s ultimate goal was to abolish

“all monopolistic practices in the motion picture industry.”60 The major studios had long

controlled the overwhelming majority of motion picture production, distribution and

exhibition in North America, and the suit, eventually won by the Justice Department in

1948 by virtue of a Supreme Court decision, augured radical changes in the way studios did

business. As a result of these “Paramount Consent Decrees,”61 the Big Five studios were

ordered to divest themselves of their theatre chains, and cease their interests in national film

distribution circuits. Given the magnitude of the financial and organizational undertaking

mandated by the courts, the retrenchment and reorganization of established business

practices were slow moving. Not until the late 1950s were the Big Five entirely divested of

the their American theatre holdings62 despite having been so ordered a decade earlier, and

the last and longest-running player contract—Rock Hudson’s—did not expire until 1965.63

34

However this period should not be seen as changing Hollywood business, in a precipitous

manner, but rather a gradual process of negotiation and reorganization that tended

asymptotically towards divestiture.

During this period, the financial stability of the studios waned. Without the revenues

guaranteed by box office receipts from their theatrical chains, and without the capital of

individual theatres to serve as collateral, studios could no longer afford to finance large

production slates. Without a system of theatres requiring a continuous flow of product, large

studio back lots, the infrastructure built to serve the projection needs of those theatres, were

no longer required. Studios began to sell off their assets in a piecemeal fashion to recoup

sunk investment costs, or to rent them out to independent production companies to cover

ongoing overhead costs.64 Because government mandated divestiture made the maintenance

of large back lots unfeasible, it forced studios rent or lease out their facilities to independent

producers, allowing pools of talent direct access to production infrastructure that they had

been previously denied (or allowed to use, but on strict studio supervision). This

development, Denise Mann argues in Hollywood Independents, allowed those figures whose

creativity and politics were not tolerated by the studio to finally have free reign over their

works outside of studio control. The first threat, by Mann’s reckoning, was therefore

creative. The post-Paramount Decrees era, Mann’s rationale goes, witnessed the birth of a

burgeoning American independent cinema that moves away from the hidebound story

formulas into a new, regime of personal expression that produces challenging films—or even

true works of art.65 This is a seductive portrait of a subversive cinema smuggled in under the

35

cover of hegemonic culture, and would that it were true. But alas it is something of a fable,

as recounted by Peter Lev:

the film studio remained an important economic presence

even after the increase in independent production of the

1950s. Studios no longer control every aspect of a film’s

production, but they do generally provide the crucial

elements of financing and distribution. Also, to protect their

investments, studios have generally retained some oversight of

the production process itself—for example, cost and schedule

guarantees and right of final cut—as well as control of

advertising and distribution.66

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle—between Mann’s radical break in

American cinema and Lev’s narrative of persistent, overriding control. If maverick film

directors did have to play at least by company rules, then their semi-independent

productions would have at least enabled these filmmakers to develop their talents and

prepare them to break out of studio strictures once their influence reached their low ebb in

the late 1960s. From labour and employment standpoints, the most productive way to

understand the effect of divestiture is in terms of the way it changed the collaborative

process of filmmaking.

When studios dominated the production landscape (roughly from the 1920s to the

early 1960s), they used largely routinised, relatively fixed production arrangements, drawing

on the pools of creative personnel under contract. Perhaps the most famous of these

arrangements was the Arthur Freed production unit at MGM, which specialized in musicals.

Freed utilised the same personnel for a spate of films from A Broadway Melody (1929) to

Brigadoon (1954), including Art Director Cedric Gibbons, Set Director Edwin B. Willis,

Dance Director Charles Walters, Costume Designer Irene Sharaff, and more.67 (However

36

Freed did not begin to establish his own unit—later dubbed “The Arthur Freed Unit”—

until he was established as an uncredited Associate Producer on The Wizard of Oz (1939).68

When these and other creators worked in Freed’s unit, their reputations were built upon

internal knowledge of their repeated collaboration on each film; it was not strictly speaking

necessary to advertise their inputs to a broader public (though there is an undeniable pride

in seeing one’s name up on screen). However, as the Paramount Decrees forced studios to

divest themselves of theatre chains, their economic troubles forced a rearrangement of

production practices. The major and minor studios could no longer afford to keep large

numbers of personnel under contract, and moved towards more ad-hoc arrangements of

hiring individual personnel. These systems of internal employment knowledge broke down

and credits became more important to advertise the reputation of individual creators.

Without the studios’ internal knowledge and certification of employee résumés, workers

relied on formal codification in screen credits, thus bringing about greater pressure from

below-the-line film employees to secure credit guarantees, and greater upheaval in the labour

landscape. Though the story of screen credits for film labour is most richly textured during

the periods of the 1950s and 1960s, there is also a significant prehistory to credits that also

merits telling—something I will attend to at the end of the introduction by way of transition

into this dissertation’s main chapters.

Film Credit is organised so as to imitate the structure of a motion picture:

Chapter Two deals with the visual design of opening titles; Chapter Three explores a legal

battle waged over the rhetorical creative “ownership” over the narrative of the film proper;

Chapter Four is a structural history of the final crawl credits.

37

Chapter Two, “Title Design in the Shadow of Saul Bass: Maurice Binder, Robert

Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro,” examines how title sequences became places for complex

visual expression during the 1950s and 1960s. In this era, film titles became a viable venue

for individual creativity that opened onto other forms of visual artistic practice. This is

especially true in the work of designers Saul Bass (North by Northwest, Anatomy of a

Murder),

Maurice Binder (Charade, Damn Yankees, Dr. No.), Robert Brownjohn (From Russia With

Love, Goldfinger), and Pablo Ferro (Dr. Strangelove, The Thomas Crown Affair). These artists

and many others adapted their graphic design talents from the profession of commercial

advertising, and embraced the credit sequence as an area for creative expression. Title

designers inflected their films with discourses they brought with them from other artistic and

business practices—typography, print design, lithography, and fine art. Though Saul Bass’s

contributions to title design during this period are well documented, the careers of other

artists are less well known. By focussing on the title design work of Maurice Binder, Robert

Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro, this chapter seeks to broaden the understanding of how title

sequences operated in the post-Paramount Decrees period. I disagree with Bass, who

believed that titles should prepare audiences for the film narrative to follow, and therefore

were subservient to it. Rather, Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro turned title sequences into

autonomous works of art, and used the title sequences to engage with and challenge the

conventions of visual arts and cinema during this period. As such title sequences are one of

the few instances during this period of filmmaking where highbrow discourses: for example,

Binder questioning the ontology of the camera’s moving image apparatus; Brownjohn musing

about the play of typography on projected screens; Ferro experimenting with Mondrian’s

38

abstractions. These and other sophisticated concerns find their way onto cinema screens

through their designs. Moreover, as studios hired these same designers to produce newspaper

advertising campaigns, television trailers, and one-sheet posters for films, their work

obscured the traditionally defined boundaries between film and print; the visual strategies of

film permeated their way into promotional materials, and vice versa. Sequences by Binder,

Brownjohn, and Ferro therefore also served as points of departure for cross-pollination

between, print, various visual arts, and moving image media. Here I demonstrate that title

sequences are vibrant venues for aesthetic expression, and should be understand on their

own terms.

Chapter Three, “The Three Little Words (“A Film By...”) that Menaced

Hollywood: The WGA, the DGA, the AMPTP and the Battle for the Possessory Credit,”

explores credit’s legal and economic functions as well as its subtextual meanings through the

case study of a 1966 lawsuit filed by the Directors Guild of America (DGA) against the

Writers Guild of America (WGA). In 1966, the WGA was able to secure a contract for its

members guaranteeing that writers—and only writers—would be allowed to use the socalled

“possessory credit” in opening film titles. Directors had largely used the credit “A Film

by…” until the mid-1960s; the WGA sought to curtail this practice because it believed

directors were unduly and falsely positioning themselves as the authors of their motion

pictures. Directors fought this provision in the courts, feeling that writers and producers

were involved in anti-trust collusion to bargain away their credit rights. In the discourse that

followed, both in the legal documents and the industry press, a seemingly straightforward

professional dispute became embroiled with larger issues of the auteur theory, and the moral

39

rights of creators. This chapter explores how credits became a deeply coded matrix built on

decades of legal manoeuvring and industrial practice, with meanings that go far beyond the

surface, and are inflected by a long historical tail of professional relations in the industry. I

excavate how credit regimes function in American cinema, where they break down, and how

credits both hide and reveal broader creative concerns. These relations are both formal—

dictated by collective bargaining regimes—and informal—subtended by the common custom

of the film industry’s employment environment. Chapter Three is a thus a demonstration of

how film credits constitute a discourse apart from the narrative proper. Even as the credits

indicate who performed which particular job on a given film (which clearly reflects onto the

diegesis), they contain semantics that do not pass in the traditional vectors of meaning,

which is outwardly, from creators to audiences. As demonstrated by the possessory credit

dispute, the vectors of meaning in a film’s credits are transmitted inwardly, back into the

community of creative professionals that make the motion pictures themselves. The

importance of three little words, “A Film by…”, are significantly greater to members of the

film industry than to the spectators watching the fruits of industry member’s labour.

Chapter Four, “From Here to Eternity: A History of the Final Crawl,” chronicles the

growth and evolution of final crawl credits, from the late-1930s, when they were first

established to recognise film labour on screen, until the present day. Since film executive

David O. Selznick coined the term “Production Designer” for the work William Cameron

Menzies in Gone With the Wind in 1938, the number and type of film craftspeople

recognized in credits has increased exponentially, until Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring:

Return of the King in 2004 featured a final crawl nearly ten minutes long. This chapter

40

follows the proliferation of credits from the time that they gained prominence in the wake of

the Paramount Decrees, and chronicles the various ways that they have been threatened—

such as a proposed elimination in the name of World War II film stock scarcity measures, or

their lack of administration record-keeping during the 1960s. Even though film executives,

media critics, and lay audiences have seen credits as disposable and a nuisance to film

narrative, I assert that they serve an important archival function, in that they are the only

truly reliable record of a film’s labour inputs. In more recent years, the upper echelon of

production company executives, the very levels that once disdained closing credits, have used

them to their advantage, as the final crawl has increasingly become part of the studios’

branding and marketing strategies. Simultaneously, this chapter also contains two shorter

case studies that demonstrate increasing credit prestige: Selznick elevated Menzies, from the

title of Art Director, to Production Designer, and charged him with a portfolio of

responsibilities for Gone With the Wind that rivalled even that of the director; the terms of

Menzies’ employ allowed Selznick to keep a consistent creative vision whilst he hired and

fired three different directors. Unintentionally, Selznick’s actions later provided a rhetorical

boon to the Art Directors’ organising union. In 1979, a similar seminal moment occurred,

but in defiance of union rules; Francis Ford Coppola credited Walter Murch as “Sound

Designer” on Apocalypse Now, a clear promotion from the Sound Editor title that the

Editors’ union refused to let Murch, a non-member, claim. In codifying these job titles that

had heretofore been nebulously defined, Coppola and Murch also altered how classical

Hollywood understood the art and craft of a film’s visual and auditory components,

respectively. Each instance has elevated the creative esteem of positions that were previously

41

seen as mere “craft” inputs. The history of credits in the cinema is therefore tending towards

ever-greater stature garnered for its practitioners. While this growth and change in credits

was seen as a boon to those within the industry, film critics and audiences both viewed this

proliferation of credits as an example of Hollywood self-aggrandizement. Chapter Four

primarily explores the evolution of final crawl credits from mere afterthought to endemic

part of film practice. It also examines that tension between creators and spectators: the

semiformal

politics of reputation and prestige that operate in the ad-hoc business of filmmaking;

and how that status interacts with perception by critics and audiences.

The Prehistory of Credit

Though this dissertation coalesces around in the post-Paramount Decrees period,

there exists a pre-history to credits that leads up to this moment, beginning in the late 1900s

and continuing until the late 1930s, where Chapter Four begins its narrative. This period is

characterised by a fluid and contingent period of granting screen credits. It is a time without

much oversight and organisation in terms of credit form and structure, because it precedes

the formation of Hollywood labour unions and guilds.69 These unions and guilds are largely

responsible for securing better working conditions for their constituencies, and in the case of

the DGA and WGA, achieving gains in screen credits. In more recent years, credits have

become largely synonymous with the careers of film and media professionals, in that the

contributions of labour to a film or television production, but the earliest forms of credit had

nothing to do with labour at all. As old as the cinema itself, credits initially performed a

purely legal function—to protect the copyright of film producers. Their first appearance, in

42

early silent motion pictures, associates credits exclusively with film production companies.

Jane Gaines writes in “Early Cinema’s Heyday of Copying” that between 1893 and 1909,

studios copying each other’s films—whether duplicating pre-existing prints (piracy) or

remaking

films that made a close re-creations of other works (copying)—“was as much an

industry practice as it was an industry problem,” even as the production companies decrying

the practice were also guilty of film piracy and copying.70 The oft-repeated history goes that

the first titles originated with Thomas Edison at least by 1897, where credits his name, his

company, and a statement pertaining to the copyright of the film that was to follow.71 The

first credits thus had a predominantly legal purpose, which was to protect the property rights

of the companies that created films, and early titles become synonymous with trademarks.

Any pleasing aesthetic value that titles might have had was incidental to the goal of

preserving intellectual property rights.

This early gesture toward protecting film copyright proved largely ineffective, likely

because this opening title card could be easily spliced out of the film. This prompted

production companies to pursue other methods to protect intellectual property rights. By

1907, production companies commonly opted to insert their trademarks into the décor of

every scene, somewhere “on the walls of the set, or even trees when the scene was shot

outdoors,” leading to the faintly risible spectacle of an embossed rooster pinned to the

foliage on the external scenes of Pathé features.72 If exhibitors tried to pass off licensed films

as their own, they would be thwarted by the presence of identifying copyright marks in

nearly every single frame. This prevalence of trademarks did not go unnoticed by the popular

press; they scarcely could, when in the case of the IMP Company film The Penniless Prince,

43

an actress had to lift her skirts in order to avoid tripping over the IMP trademark.73 George

Rockhill Craw, writing for Moving Picture World in February 1911, decried the “painting or

tacking of trade marks upon scenery” as a particularly pernicious “example of the inroads of

commercialism wrought upon art in motion picture dramas.”74 Equally importantly, these

credits undermined the primary function of fictional films, which was to “form an illusion, to

make the audience believe that the thing has really happened as a matter of life, or is

happening as such.”75 The presence of trademarks, the movement of credits from the

beginning of the reel into the actual materiel of the film itself, destroyed the fictional illusion

that the presence of costuming and realistic scenery had laboured so long to create.

Audiences could not hope to concentrate on the narrative at hand for the intrusion of

unwanted company credits. Craw’s critique is succinct and sophisticated, but also

remarkable because his concerns, as we shall see in Chapter Four, would echo down through

the history of film criticism: credits, though to a certain degree necessary to the livelihood of

film companies and labour, were viewed as a profligate, unwanted distraction to film, and

ought to be curtailed. In the century that followed, such discourse would hardly change.

Film production employees began to make inroads into film credits, when in 1909

the Edison Company was the first to list cast members on some of its more opening titles,76

expanding actors’ credits to all motion pictures in 1911,77 believing the practice “to be for

the good of the business in that it will emphasize public interest in these moving picture

actors and actresses, whose personalities are certainly…interesting.”78 Still, widespread

credit was far from ubiquitous. As Eileen Bowser writes in The Transformation of Cinema,

1907-1915, “during 1910, 1911, and 1912, most films were released without any naming of

44

the players on the film itself or even in advertisements,”79 and the practice appears to have

been far from ubiquitous as late as 1913.80 Even as companies such as Edison, Pathé,

Gaumont, Selig, and Vitagraph81 were beginning to introduce their cast members, the

Biograph Company steadfastly refused to release the names of its actors, a strategy related to

the way it sought to build its business brand. In contrast to Edison, Biograph viewed actors

labour as something inherently unreliable, and transient—untenable as a bankable strategy

because it depended on the whims and tastes of a capricious public. As Moving Picture World

wrote, the understood reason for this philosophy was that “the Biograph company is an

institution and an entity; that the Biograph quality depends upon no individual, but is

unchanging from year to year no matter who may come or who may go; and that to feature

any individual in connection with the pictures would be to detract something from the name

Biograph as an idea.”82 It has been widely established (though contested by Richard

deCordova)83 that the Biograph policy of not enumerating actors on screen was for their

then-biggest star, Florence Lawrence, deciding factor to leave the company. While under

contract, Laurence was known simply as “The Biograph Girl,” or the “Girl of a Thousand

Faces.” When she departed Biograph for Independent Moving Pictures (IMP), its president

Carl Laemmle was more than willing to exploit Lawrence’s name and likeness. (And

Laemmle famously did so in a most extravagant way, planting a fake story in the St. Louis

Post-Dispatch in the first week of March 1910, stating that Lawrence had been killed in a

streetcar accident in New York. Laemmle then took out a half-page advertisement on March

5, 1910 in Moving Picture World proclaiming that “We Nail a Lie!”: “Miss Lawrence is in

the best of health, and will continue to appear in ‘Imp’ films.”84 ) Laemmle’s charlatanism

45

was so elaborate that it is doubtful that the original article was even published in St. Louis;

nonetheless, his willingness to trade loudly on the name of Miss Lawrence, both in print and

on screen, is evidence that Laemmle believed it had significant financial value. Laemmle’s

belief most likely stemmed from the fact that during this period film spectators were

frustrated with not knowing the identities of the actors who appeared on screen, and like

Edison, Laemmle saw an opportunity to differentiate his pictures. The fan magazines

Photoplay and Motion Picture Story featured regular columns devoted solely to questions and

answers from their readership; well into 1912 the majority of these questions were related to

the identities of select performers for certain films.85

In this relatively short case study of Florence Lawrence, we witness perhaps the first

recorded rumination on the cost-benefit analysis that film companies had in the granting of

screen credits. Recognising the contributions of actors by way of credit, on screen or in print

advertising, meant that producers could trade on the identity of the star actor or actress to

market subsequent films; their names gain a partial association with the studio employing

them. Giving name recognition to stars means that the name of both the performer and the

company can be associated with a track record of laudatory performances, a nominal

guarantor that future films featuring the same performers will feature performances of

likewise high quality. Simultaneously though, publicly identifying individual film

professionals had its costs, too. By establishing the identity of the actress as Florence

Lawrence and not merely as “The Biograph Girl,” allowed Lawrence to develop a reputation

semi-independently of any film company that happened to be her employer. The majority of

prestige lies with the individual actor, not the producer, allowing her to claim credit for her

46

performances, and use her individual name recognition as leverage to secure better

compensation in future negotiations with other producers. This is especially important

because a credit once gifted to a performer (or any other film professional for that matter) is

rarely taken away. Because credit was given on a prior film, the actress will expect that all

future contracts will include the same credit provisions.86

In the late 1900s and early 1910s giving such recognition to actors and actresses on

screen represented a diminution of the power of individual production companies, because

actors were no longer wholly beholden to production companies to develop reputation and

prestige. And though an actress such as Florence Lawrence did remain under contract, her

name recognition gave her a career with more autonomy than had she merely remained “The

Biograph Girl” or the “IMP Girl.” When her business relationship with Independent

Motion Pictures became strained, Lawrence was able to break her contract and leave the

company. Because her fame and name recognition had spread across the Atlantic to

Europe,87 recognition that she leveraged into a contract with the Lubin film company.88

Given the fame, influence, and importance of actors during this historical period, it is

therefore predictable that in the 1910s, the credits’ primary function migrated from securing

the intellectual property rights of film producers. This period witnessed an evolution where

the credits’ main purpose was to recognise film professionals for their contributions to the

film, most especially actors.

Actors were not the only contributors who began to be singled out in the credits of

the early 1910s, however. Edison was responsible for adding the first screenwriter’s name to

screen credits in 1912.89 When Biograph relented and recognized the names of the

47

professionals responsible for its product, it announced that it would only single out camera

operators and producers/directors, in addition to actors.90 Nonetheless, even as the tide

turned towards broader credit recognition, some prominent producers were steadfast in

retaining their rights to sole copyright ownership and the majority creative authorship over

their motion pictures. As late as 1915, D.W. Griffith, in The Birth of a Nation fronted his

film with four title cards which asserted his overarching copyright claims and creative

control. The first reads “GIFFITH FEATURE FILMS,” and below, “Produced Exclusively

by D.W. Griffith.” The second proclaims, “This is the trade mark of the Griffith feature

films. All pictures made under the personal direction of D.W. Griffith have the name

‘Griffith’ in the borderline, with the initials ‘DG’ at bottom of captions. There is no

exception to his rule,” (original emphasis), and concludes with Griffith’s signature. The third

title card tells the audience to refer to printed programs for “the characters in the play.”

Griffith claims credits of “personal” direction, and co-credit for story arrangement with

Frank E. Woods. G.W. Blitzer is credited with doing The Birth of A Nation’s photography.

In the following cards, Griffith prohibits exhibitors from censoring the film and the film is

properly introduced as “D.W. Griffith Presents The Birth of a Nation, Adapted from Thomas

Dixon’s novel ‘The Clansmen,’ ” and a stack of copyright reservations—one for David W.

Griffith Corporation, one for Epoch Producing Corporation, and one for the Thomas Dixon

himself. Here we can see Griffith’s insistence in reserving intellectual property rights through

credits, as well as resistance to allow other creative contributors, especially actors, to fill the

screen’s opening moments. Despite Griffith’s recalcitrance, the silent film period from 1909

onwards was an era of expanded recognition for these creative personnel beyond the director

48

and producers. Yet as Richard deCordova argues in Picture Personalities notwithstanding the

increased recognition for writers, and cameraman “the actor quickly became, for the public,

the principal figure in the enunciative apparatus”91 of film; credits for motion pictures in the

1900s and 1910s became synonymous with actors’ credits.

In this climate of actor-dominated credits, some members of the public expressed

displeasure that the credits of other collaborators might clutter up the screen in that small

amount of time before the narrative began. Writing in to the New York Tribune in

November 1918, Glendon Allvine reserved particular vitriol for screen credits, which he

deemed were already overlong:

Why not hold up to ridicule some the preliminary bunk that

producers persist in peddling to audience before actual

motion pictures are finally placed upon the screen?

Do you really suppose that anybody outside the motion

picture business cares two whoops who cranked the camera

that photographed the film? Did you ever see an audience

register anything but relief at the final termination of the

elaborate preliminaries as to who directed the picture, who

produced it, who wrote the captions and who conceived the

idea of the final close-up?92

Note that Allvine desires censure for writers, directors, producers, and

cinematographers, but metes out none to the actors. This supports deCordova’s contention

that the actor was viewed to be the primary creative force in this period of cinema, and that

audiences desired to know their identities; other creators were of lesser import, and could

remain comfortably anonymous. It is moreover clear that Allvine’s position was not merely

the expressions of a lone disgruntled theatre patron. A follow up letter, written by one S.L.

49

Rothapfel printed in the New York Tribune one month later was very supportive of Allvine’s

position, stating an

earnest insistence that the use of these credit titles tends to

defeat their own purpose by the very number of them, and

that it is my very best experience that they interpose a

disconcerting note into the presentation of the picture in the

theatre….The picture starts, and the main title comes on the

screen. The audience is ready. Is the picture ready? No. Then

come the credits. While the orchestra tries manfully to

sustain and carry across the particular emotional atmosphere

required, the film begins to prosily recite that Mr. So and So

did so and so, and so forth. Presently the picture really opens,

but the right moment for that opening, the exact instant of

dramatic preparation, has passed.93

Credits, however short they were in this relatively early moment in film history, are seen as a

rupture into the diegetic flow of film, an interruption to that crucial moment when the

audience is preparing to give themselves over to the cinematic illusion; the presence of

credits are a prosaic intrusion into the poetry of film art. Moreover, Rothapfel, in a fit of

pique, opines that audiences scarcely remember the names paraded on screen, thus

establishing that other contributors to the film unfairly claim film credit that is not justly

due to them. “In every work of art,” Rothapfel continues, “there is one master mind [sic],

one central all-important conception, and it is upon that focal thing that the work has to

stand or fall. And it is to that one conception that the credit is due.”94 For Rothapfel the

practice of granting screen credits derogates from the plaudits deserved for single source of

inspiration that is responsible for the film’s conception and execution: the director. The

public, he reasons, will “hunt up the name” of any contributor of any deemed worthy of

50

praise; any others who have the temerity to insist their names appear on screen are claiming

a “laurel wreath” that is not justly theirs.

Together, the letters of Messrs. Allvine and Rothapfel form the start of a discourse

that can be found recurring through the next century: credits are too long; they are a

nuisance that detracts from the purity of film narrative; they detract from the auteurist ideal

that a solitary genius is responsible for the individual work of art; and they are representative

of an industry dominated by egoists who speciously desire to be credited for an inspiration

that is not theirs. Note that this discourse is underpinned by a subtle, but important

linguistic slippage. The word “credit” is etymologically descended from the 16th-century

“credential,” or “letters of credential,” which in turn derives from the 14th-century “letters of

credence,” which was a document attesting to the truth or validity that a individual’s

identity and qualifications.95 In this mode, credits from first principles merely certify the fact

that an individual performed the work that they have so claimed;96 ontologically speaking,

those credits make no overtures towards the quality of that work, and the esteem derived

therefrom. Yet credit also has a secondary connotation, one that more properly solidified

during the 17th century, which is to commend or praise the merit of a personal quality or

action.97 Thus credit has become increasingly synonymous, not merely with truth or

veracity, but with competence and acclaim. The above letters bristle at the notion that

cameramen and scenarists might take away the plaudits that are properly gifted to the

singular source of creative inspiration, which is located in the film director, producer, or

production company. On the eve of the proliferation of the Hollywood studios, the credit

system of enumerating only actors was beginning to change.

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Credits in the studio of Hollywood film production mirrored and even deepened the

early silent period’s inclination for identifying motion pictures predominantly with the

production companies, but it also ushered in an era for greater recognition for workers who

in contemporary parlance are considered “below-the-line” workers. As the major studios

(Paramount, Loews/MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO) and the

minors (Universal, Columbia, and United Artists) began shoring up their respective

production infrastructures (filming lots, costumes and props, physical capital) and business

networks (distribution channels and exhibition houses)98 we also see the studios’ corporate

identities via screen credits. In an evolution from the relatively simple icons and line drawing

that identified the producer responsible for a motion picture, the studios began to conclude

their films with more graphically elaborate title cards. In the mid-1920s, Warner Bros. began

a practice of concluding their films with a single title card bearing the words “THE END”

with the now-familiar company shield sandwiched in between. The letters “WB” fill the

shield’s lower half, and the old executive offices of the Warner Bros. studios99 stand in the

background, circumscribed by the shield. The shield itself is located above the words “A

Warner Brothers Production” (See Fig. 1). Such a card was used for the Lionel Barrymore

vehicle When a Man Loves (1927), the Jazz Singer (1928), amongst others. In so doing,

Warner Bros. claimed ultimate ownership of these films through its logo. This end title card

tied the making of these films to the exact location of the studios’ production offices,

allowing them to claim not only legal and rhetorical ownership of the film via copyright, but

to a uniqueness that is bound to a specific location. The Jazz Singer could only emanate from

these creative forces and personnel, which could only be found at this particular geographical

52

locus of the Warner Bros. studios. Once Warners began releasing features using their

Vitaphone productions, their end titles shifted to gas lamps, and curtains with tassles

attached, which was largely in concert with the graphical approach taken by MGM and

Paramount. MGM’s end title cards featured its lion and the words “Ars Gratia Artis;” and

Paramount favoured its literal rending of a mountaintop ringed by stars, peaking into the

clouds. Warners Bros.’ first end titles were an important visual gesture, hoping to establish

aesthetically what the studio was already doing with its business and crediting practices,

which was to use credits to emphasize the studios’ creative responsibility. This was

accomplished via the presentation credit such as “Warner Bros. Presents John Barrymore in

When a Man Loves”—the actor was prominent enough to exploit his or her name, but always

below or after the presentation credit, and subordinate to it.

In the early studio period, it was most infrequent that any title card after the movie,

save for “THE END.” Appearing at the beginning of films, casts lists had by this point

become a matter of course, and some of the more technical or below the line credits had

come into prominence—commonly the writer, the director, the cinematographer (usually

under the heading “photography”), the art director and the electrician. Yet despite the

number of these crafts names (which is to say non-actors) being enumerated, they appear not

to have detracted from the impression that this was the era of the all-controlling producer.

This was particularly true of someone as irascible as Samuel Goldwyn, about whom

humourist Montague Glass wrote in 1925 that

when you see a motion picture produced by Samuel

Goldwyn, you must not take the screen credits too seriously.

They may read: “Scenario by John Doe. Directed by Richard

53

Roe. Titles by Jacques Casanova. But what they ought to

disclose is:

Scenario Argued Out, Pleaded For, Warmly Praised, and

Finally Accepted

by

Samuel Goldwyn

Directed nominally by Richard Roe, but Actually, Firmly,

Politely, Occasionally Explosively and Sometimes

Apoplectically

by

Samuel Goldwyn.

Title Utterly Condemned, Grudgingly Accepted, Raged At,

Jeered at and in a Frightful Near-Cataclysm Anathemized

by

Samuel Goldwyn.100

Glass moreover asserted that, no matter what the credits said, “the personality of the

producer” is a film’s animus. It is not that credits lie per se, but that they tell only the

nominal story of a how a motion picture came to be made, because a film is ultimately

“made” only by Samuel Goldwyn and other producers of his ilk. In this light, credits for film

professionals understood as lower in creative esteem—in other words, those less important

to the film’s “creativity” or “artistry”—could be eliminated because their work was

disposable, and the workers themselves were eminently replaceable. Granting credit to crafts

workers in this period was a matter either of historical custom or professional courtesy, not

contractual obligation. The ability for a cameraman or an art director to achieve credit was

based on their ability to negotiate it for themselves, because crafts professionals did not

attain its first closed shop for union workers until the Studio Basic Agreement of 1926.101

Even then, the contract signed dealt with wages, working conditions and seniority of labour;

securing credit guarantees was a lesser consideration.102 (Writers were first the Hollywood

workers motivated by credit in their quest for a labour agreement contract signed with film

54

producers in 1933. This move was necessitated by producers’ ability to assign screenwriting

credit to whomever they chose, even allowing producers who had no hand in writing the

screenplay or scenario to take credit for it themselves.103 ) The original case for suppressing

crafts workers’ screen credits is similar to that of actors’ credits: lack of public recognition

keeps those workers under greater control by the studios. This was especially true given the

general public annoyance with expanded screen credits during the 1920s. Accordingly, it

behooved studios to keep their intrusion at the beginning of films to a minimum, but that

desire to suppress credits was complicated by an important technological innovation: the

advent of synchronised sound films.

Adding sound to films meant that studios had to hire an entirely new category of

sound recordists and sound editors, a direct threat leading to incremental “credit creep”—a

colloquial term for the growth of film credits. However, since studios had already commonly

credited those who had contributed to the visual look of their films—art directors,

cinematographers, etc.—the studios could scarcely employ these new audio technicians

without similarly displaying their names and job titles on screen. There is even a case to be

made that studios could have benefitted from the presence of sound technicians in their

opening title cards. Warner Bros., for instance, was known to herald the use of the Western

Electric Vitaphone system for synchronising sound to image, and duly publicised its use both

amongst the opening title cards and the final title at picture’s end. Studios made a

conspicuous display of their sound technology and infrastructure,104 and credits would

further this impression of the sophistication and craftsmanship required to create this more

complicated style of motion picture. So even as the film editor of the Indianapolis Star chided

55

Hollywood producers for “the practice of flashing before the audience the names of every

individual who took even a trivial part in the preparation of the film,”105 Danny Gray, the

head of the film editing department at MGM grudgingly admitted in an interview that,

because of the new expertise required to create talkies, “the name of the sound-specialist,

the musical director, the speech director, [and] the electrical engineer” on screen were here

to stay.106 The advent of having larger credit rolls at the beginning of films was a public

relations cost studios had to bear (or were willing to bear) in order to reap the significant

benefits and box-office receipts promised by synchronised sound films. Because of this

proliferation in sound technicians, both camera operators and sound technicians began to

receive screen credits for Movietone Newsreels in January 1929,107 making them equal in

recognition to their feature film counterparts in the Fox Films Company.

Amidst this growth of sound credits, a patchwork system of recognition developed,

displaying a lack of consistency in which job titles were recognised and which ones were not.

Official respect was accorded those charged with recording actors’ voices for film, and they

received credit, as did those who were responsible for composing the overall score and

musical accompaniment. However, the same was not accorded to those who created sound

effects, nor for those who added more incidental music. Writers and composers of individual

songs did not receive official screen credit until the Screen Writers Guild bargained for it in

1935.108 Yet while composers received prominent screen credits, the labour that they relied

upon did not. Orchestrators, the artists responsible for turning the composers’ ideas into

fully-fleshed compositions to be played by orchestras (whose players, incidentally, were

never

recognised during the studio era), were never credited during this period, nor were the

56

conductors who directed the orchestras responsible for the recorded sound track.109 There

is

also no small irony that Universal sound man Jack Foley, the artist after whom a widely-used

credit (Foley Effects) would be created in later years, never received recognition on screen

for any of his sound effects contributions during his lifetime.110 The film industry

demonstrated a differential emphasis on certain parts of the soundtrack, and this

fundamental difference is evidenced by the way they accorded screen credit. Paradoxically,

while credits were used to highlight the technical prowess to make film soundtracks, their

absence in many cases was used to conceal the true extent of the labour that went into

creating the auditory half of motion pictures.

Over the coming years of the studio era, more job titles outside of the sound

department would also come to be codified, though not always in contractually bargained

screen credits. Stunt performers (gendered as stuntmen in the Chicago Daily Tribune) began

to receive credit in 1932 with the RKO film Lucky Devils.111 Assistant directors began to

push for codified credits in 1934 and again in 1938,112 but were denied any guarantees to

official recognition. Rather they had to agree to “code of ethics and fair practice” whereby

the Academy agreed that it would, “from time to time publish the names of first assistant

directors, so that although not getting screen credit, they will nonetheless get suitable

industry recognition.”113 Set Decorators bargained for credits in 1942;114 camera

“mechanics” began to receive credits in 1947,115 the same year that “Unit Publicist,” Joe

Weston became the first to receive on-screen credit, beginning with the films produced by

Sol M. Wurtzel.116 Technicolor too firmly established a codified form for its screen credits

in 1947, mandating that “In color by Technicolor” must appear on every film using the

57

process; prior to that point, the wording was subject to a number of vagaries, similarly

worded, but under the discretion of an individual film’s producer.117 At the same time as

some production sectors were making gains in screen credits, however, others companies

remained vehemently opposed to granting screen credits. Walt Disney was by far the most

intractable of these, and refused to publicly recognise any of the rank-and-file members that

did most of the physical labour—the frame-by-frame drawings that animated the film—

while simultaneously giving credit to department heads.118 When its animators prepared to

strike Disney Studios, the “reason” for labour action as reported by both Variety and the Los

Angeles Times was that animators were split over whom they should affiliate—the Screen

Cartoonists Guild or with the American Federation of Labour. Walt Disney steadfastly

opposed such attempts at organisation.119 Later scholarship revealed that their reasons for

striking were more generally related to seeking guarantees for wages, working hours, and

screen credits.120

The fundamental question—to recognise labour or not?—played out broadly in the

discourse of the time, especially through newspapers and trade journals, and evidenced a

deep divide in Hollywood. In 1934, seven years before the Disney Studios strike, E.C.

Sherburne, the film and drama critic of the Christian Science Monitor defended Walt Disney’s

decisions to remove animators names from the title cards of the Mickey Mouse and Silly

Symphony shorts. He did so on the grounds that it prevented other companies from

poaching his workforce: “When a big firm wished to start a cartoon series, it would entice

these names away with offers of larger salaries than Mr. Disney was willing to pay.”121 In this

deeply conservative view, workers became property and chattel of the studios, subordinate

58

not only to its working machinery, but the cult of creativity established by the overwhelming

presence of Walt Disney himself. Credits of other technicians, Sherburne argued, detracted

from the cult of Disney’s personality. Such rhetoric aligns very strongly with the cults of

personality that surrounded producers such as David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, as

illuminated above, which lay creative animus at the feet of various studios’ heads of

production. But various parties were also taking active steps to undo this view of

overwhelming individual creativity that resided in producers and studios. Variety printed a

full-page spread in its 1936 production year recap devoted to “Hollywood’s Unsung

Heroes,” those “forgotten men of an industry that forgets easily,” whose “remuneration for

their work is manifested at the pay window” or only an “occasional credit mention…a quick

and unimportant flash of recognition which the public seldom reads, cares less, and gets

impatient to get over with. [sic]”122 Given the industry’s overall tendency not to recognise

these technicians, the article comprehensively lists Art Directors, Film Editors, and

Cameramen, giving them a modicum of unofficial recognition. In subsequent years, such

newspaper-published lists would become less and less important as guilds such as the WGA

and DGA arrogated to themselves the responsibility of managing their members’ credits.

With these and similar labour organisations in place ranging across a wide variety of

professional categories, credits became more regulated and codified, doing away with a

thirty-year history of more ad-hoc attribution. This history is further chronicled in Chapter

Four.

59

The Functions of Credit—Presences and Absences

In being discursively broad, this dissertation treats the manifold functions of credit

seriously and comprehensively, but still some of its meanings could not be incorporated into

the following pages, and so fringe and stalk this writing. The fate of countless films has hung

in the balance as its stars bicker with each other over differences in credit that, even in the

context of this most particular and nuanced writing about the opening titles and final crawl,

seems overly pedantic. How else to deal with the curious case of The Towering Inferno

(1974)? When the film went into production, neither of its two stars, Steve McQueen nor

Paul Newman, had taken second billing in a film for over ten years. Given their relatively

equal star power of the time, could either be expected to do so for this picture? The

solution? McQueen’s name was positioned the furthest to the left on the opening titles and

advertising credits, meaning that it would be read first, left to right; Newman’s name,

however, was positioned half a line higher than McQueen’s, meaning that his name would

be read first, top to bottom.123 Therefore both Newman and McQueen could lay equal

claim to top billing. This technique, known as the “quadrant formula” has been used to

lessen similar disputes ever since. In another instance, the similar stature of Jack Lemmon

and Tony Curtis led to a billing détente in The Great Race (1965), resolved by the fact that

Lemmon’s name appeared first on half of the posters, while Curtis received first billing on

the other half (See Fig. 2). Even further back, neither Cary Grant nor Ginger Rogers

reportedly were willing to accept second billing on Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), which

also led to their billing being split on film posters; half featured Grant’s name first, the other

60

half featured Rogers’ (See Fig. 3). Such impasses are not completely risible, for an actor’s

professional esteem is closely tied to the billing they receive.

Yet this dissertation is less interested in the gossip over billing—the particulars of

each individual case of infighting—and more concerned with exploring the system that

causes such disputes to appear so frequently in Hollywood filmmaking. These myriad

controversies have led to credit being summarily dismissed as an exercise in ego, and thus

ignored as a subject for serious study. Credits have many functions, but their primary

function is to enumerate those who have made a contribution to the production. And that

enumeration has different levels of import according to the type of creative labour being

done. Actors, for instance, have their labour written directly onto film, in their physical form

of their faces, bodies and their performance recorded on camera and displayed onto the

screen. The embodied form of this labour means that the fact of their contributions are

clearly not in doubt. For those who serve as an actors’ bodily replacements on screen for

certain specialised situations, the case is less clear-cut. Stunt performers, called in to perform

work that is deemed too physically taxing or dangerous for an actor, have secured codified

screen credit since as early as 1932,124 though in a form that is somewhat diffuse. Instead of

individual recognition—who performed which stunts for which actor—stunt performers are

now billed in an alphabetical block in the final crawl, which recognises the overall

contribution of the stunt performers. Body doubles, another class of physically delimited

performers, generally do not receive credit as diffuse and nebulous as those given to stunt

performers. For reasons of modesty or other social beliefs, certain actors or actresses elect

not to perform certain scenes that call for nudity, which necessitates hiring an actress of

61

approximate physical likeness to be cast. When Julia Roberts decided not to perform the

opening scene to Pretty Woman, where her prostitute character puts on her negligible outfit,

Touchstone Pictures was obliged to hire Shelley Michelle to perform the scene. However,

Michelle was not credited for her work, and Touchstone, along with its parent company,

Disney, declined to confirm or deny that a body double was used.125 Though Michelle’s

body partially remains on screen, her contribution goes unrecognised in the form of screen

credit. This, coupled with Disney and Touchstone remaining taciturn, such a situation

makes it difficult for body doubles to trade on their past experience in terms of building a

career, and this relatively recent example has been repeated throughout film history for jobs

that production companies and studios elect not to officially credit. Therefore, the primary

function of enumerating credit has a secondary function of building professional resumes for

creative labour.

Paradoxically, when in certain cases where performers have been denied screen

credit, it has proved to be a rare boon to the performer in question. When Marnie Jahan was

not credited as Jennifer Beals’ dancing double in Flashdance (1983), a number of critics

sought to discover her name. In the ensuing uproar, Jahan was offered many roles based on

her Flashdance work, far more than she would have otherwise received without the publicity

she gained from being the aggrieved, anonymous dancer taken advantage of by Hollywood

conceit and greed.126 The inequality of the credit system provided a surprising boon to an

actress who would have otherwise remained largely unknown. It is perhaps easy to

discriminate against and objectify a performer when their contributions are only bodily in

nature, but the American film industry has also marginalised those whose talent lies in their

62

voices. For years Marni Nixon was the singing voice for less vocally able, but nonetheless

formidable actresses such as Deborah Kerr, Natalie Wood, and Audrey Hepburn, among

others, the latter for whom Nixon performed the songs in My Fair Lady (1964), while

Hepburn lip-synched.127 During her working career, Nixon’s contributions went uncredited

for fear that such a gesture would undermine public perceptions of those actors’

performances. It was not until years later, in the early 2000s, that Nixon’s efforts were

recognised, long after the careers of those she doubled for were over. There are moreover

other important contributors to the media industries who still have not received credit,

including story board artists, musical score orchestrators, script doctors (i.e. re-write artists),

casting agents for reality TV, costume fitters, and doubtless many others besides. Their

absent labour constitutes a curious paradox in the film, television, and new media industries

because their work is written on various screens, but absent from the public record. In some

cases, this lack of recognition is a calculated stance taken by industry professionals based on

their reputation in the industry. Casting agent Marion Dougherty, for example, elected to

have her name removed from the films Midnight Cowboy (1969) and A Man Called Horse

(1970) because she was unable to secure a lone title card for herself and her company in the

closing credits.128 Dougherty calculated that the injury to her reputation from sharing a card

with other names was greater in magnitude than the benefit to that reputation at having

been associated with these two films. The exact form and type of credit was of great

significance to Doherty. With these instances in mind, it is important to remember that the

American film industry has long been built on a refusal to recognise certain types of creative

63

labour at the expense of others, and those absences partially—that shadow economy of

credit—structures this dissertation.

More generally, studying credits closely reveals subtle but nonetheless important

details about the American film industry’s values. As Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock

have argued in Directed by Allen Smithee, the American film industry is heavily invested in

the

necessity of film credit, to the point that it would rather have a director’s false pseudonym

fronting a film than no director at all. Since the 1969 film The Death of a Gunfighter DGA

has allowed the credit “Directed by Allen Smithee”129 whenever one of its members can

demonstrate that the film has been taken out of the director’s creative control and released

over that director’s objections. In return, said director is not even allowed to confirm or

deny their involvement in a particular film. The DGA, though protecting the creative rights

of its members, is also invested in promoting the idea of a director; thus, it would prefer that

a film be seen as directed by a phantom presence, than by no directorial presence at all.130

Whatever debates may take place in academic circles about the validity of the auteur theory,

the American cinema is truly a director’s cinema, by virtue of the director’s proximity to

picture: that credit is always the last to appear in the opening titles, just before the film is

about to begin. We take a glimpse into Hollywood’s deep-seated chauvinism when noting

that the term “Script Girl” was used as late as the mid-1970s to denote the individual

responsible for keeping track of a film’s continuity.131 We may also mark Steven Spielberg as

a prolific creative force when surveying his numerous Executive Producer credits, but

account him differently when realising such a credit is routinely given in the film industry in

exchange for production financing or used for its name brand value, putting in doubt

64

Spielberg’s creative activity on any given project. All of this is to say that the history of film

credits is deceptively simple, and rife with both revelations and occlusions, played out both

in public discourse and private circles. This dissertation, exploring the aesthetic, legal, and

industrial labour parameters of credit, is sympathetic to both, and advocates that the

outwardly small differences in the phrasing of credits speak untold volumes in terms of their

broader structure and function.

Chapter One Notes

1 Motss omits the fact that a producer is the one who receives the Best Picture statuette.

2 Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (Cambridge,

MA:

Harvard University Press, 2 000), 107.

3 Chris Chase, “What’s a Gaffer, Anyway?”, The New York Times, 3 June 1984, H1.

4 See: Laurence Moinereau, Le générique de film: de la lettre à la figure (Rennes, France:

Presses

Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). Nicole de Mourgues, Le Générique de film (Paris: Méridiens

Klincksieck, 1993). Alexandre Tylski ed., Les Cinéastes et leurs génériques (Paris:

L’Harmattan,

2008). Alexandre Tylski, Roman Polanski, une signature cinématographiqe. (Lyon: Aléas,

2008).

Alexandre Tylski, Le Générique au cinéma: histoire et fonctions d’un fragment hybride (Lille,

France:

Presses Universitaires du Mirial, 2009).

5 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University

Press,

1997), 1.

6 Genette, 1-2.

7 Tylski, Le Générique au cinéma, my translation, 11.

8 Tylski, Le Générique au cinéma, my translation, 12.

9 Quoted in Tylski, Le Générique au cinema, my translation, 14.

10 Leo Charney, “Just Beginnings: Film Studies, Close Analysis, and the Viewer’s Experience,”

(PhD diss., New York University 1992). 10.

11 See: Georg Stanitzek, “Reading the Title Sequence (Vorspann, Générique),” trans. Noelle

Aplevich

Cinema Journal, 48. 4, (Summer 2009): 44–58. Georg Stanitzek. “Vorspann (titles/credtis,

générique).” In Das Buch zum Vorspann. The title is a shot (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2006).

12 Stanitzek, “Reading the Title Sequence,” 44.

13 Stanitzek, “Reading the Title Sequence,” 56.

14 Stanitzek, “Reading the Title Sequence,” 46.

15 See: Peter Hall, “Opening Ceremonies: Typography and the Movies, 1955-1969,” in

Architecture and Film, ed. Mark Lamster (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000),

129-

139.

16 Will Straw, “Letters of Introduction: Film Credits and Cityscapes,” Design and Culture 2.2

(2010): 166.

65

17 Deborah Allison, “Promises in the Dark: Opening Title Sequences in American Feature

Films of

the Sound Period” (PhD diss., University of East Anglia, 2001), 24.

18 Catherine L. Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due: The Law and Norms of Attribution,” Georgetown

Law Journal 21.1 (Fall 2006): 57-65.

19 Catherine L. Fisk, “The role of Private Intellectual Property Rights in Markets for Labor and

Ideas: Screen Credit and the Writer’s Guild of America, 1938-2000,” Berkeley Journal of

Employment and Labor Law 32.2 (2011): 215-278.

20 Fisk, “The Role of Private Intellectual Property Rights,” 1.

21 Myrl A. Schreibman, Creative Producing From A to Z: The Indie Producer’s Handbook (New

York:

Lone Eagle, 2001), 72.

22 Schreibman, Creative Producing, 114.

23 James F. English. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural

Value

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

24 Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction,(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 185.

25 Stam, Film Theory, 186.

26 Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974),174.

27 Stam, Film Theory, 186.

28 Admittedly, the Media Industries and Art World’s hypotheses compromises Stam’s “infinite

play

of signification,” but I would argue that they do not fully contradict the generative possibilities

of the

text; rather, by embedding understanding of the text within industrial-cultural forces of

production

and circulation, they set limits on infinite play.

29 To verify this information, I had to consult a New York Times article (Chris Chase, “What’s

a

Gaffer, Anyway?”, The New York Times, 3 June 1984, H1.) and a film production handbook

that

was required reading for USC’s film introductory graduate film production course, CTCS 507

(Mick Hurbis-Cherrier, Voice & Vision: A Creative Approach to Narrative Film and DV

Production

(New York: Elsevier, 2007), 122.

30 Chase, “What’s a Gaffer, Anyway?”, H1. Richard L. Coe, “Film Editor’s Job is Gigantic Jigsaw

Puzzle,” Washington Post and Times Herald, 5 July 1959, H3. Bill Cosford, “Movie Titles: Time

to

give due credit,” Boston Globe, 26 July 1981, A13.

31 Richard Dyer, Stars (London : BFI, 1998).

32 Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America

(Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 2001).

33 Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture 27 (Winter 1962-63):

1-8.

Andrew Sarris, “The Auteur Theory and the Perils of Pauline,” Film Quarterly 16.4 (Summer

1963): 26-33. Andrew Sarris, “Notes of an Accidental Auteurist,” Film History 7.4 (Winter

1995):

358-361.

34 The “Written by” credit subsumes the first two, connoting that the screenwriter authored

both the

original story and the screenplay. “And” between two names indicates that the two writers

worked on

different, successive drafts of the screenplay; “&” between two names means those writers

collaborated on the same draft of a screenplay. (The Writers Guild of America, “Theatrical

Schedule

A: Theatrical Credits,” 2008 Writers Guild Of America Theatrical And Television Basic

Agreement

(Los Angeles: Writers Guild of America, 2008), 262-267

http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/MBA08.pdf Accessed 19

April

2010.

35 For more, see Fisk, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, 251-266.

66

36 Jacques Derrida, writing in Echographies of Television, argues that “We are by and large in

a state of

quasi-illiteracy with respect to the image. Just as literacy and mastery of language, of spoken

or of

written discourse, have never been universally shared…so today, with respect to what is

happening

with the image, we might say, by analogy, that the vast majorities of consumers are in a state

analogous

to these diverse modalities of illiteracy”. Derrida’s counterart, Bernard Stiegler proposes the

reason for

this insufficiency is that “we can only talk about literacy or literacy education insofar as we’re

dealing

with letters, that is to say, with a discrete element that the image apparently lacks.” The

cinema

possesses no morpheme, or a minimal, reducible element of language around which we can

localize

and individuate meaning; symmetrically, nor does it have a grapheme, or a similarly

condensable

inscription or writing unit. Shots are not words, sequences are not sentences, and acts, to

borrow from

theatre terminology, are not paragraphs. These writings speak to the inability for film to be

localized in

terms of language, and yet we still speak very commonly of “reading” an image—something

that

literally cannot be done because words and images are different genres of semiotic elements.

(Jacques

Derrida, Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002),

59.)

37 Randy Kennedy, “Who Was That Food Stylist? Film Credits Roll On,” New York Times, 11

January 2004, N1.

38 In Chapter Four, I explore this moment in the late 1960s, when the Contract Services

Administration Trust Fund took on the administration of a database of crafts screen credits.

Many of

these credits were lost because of the Trust Fund’s inability to collect this information. See

page 342.

39 Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction to the Senses (New

York:

Routledge, 2010), 18.

40 Robert G. Friedman, “Motion Picture Marketing,” The Movie Business Book, Third Edition,

ed.

Jason E. Squire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 282-299.

41 I am particularly aware to the vagaries of language that course through regimes of film

credit and

attribution. This study of credit, particularly Chapter Two and Chapter Three, reveals that

seemingly small differences in syntax denote significant differences in semantic meaning, and

I have

written with likewise sensitivity. For these reasons, I have avoided the very simple possessive

construction, “Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds” because his right to that credit has been hotly

contested.

Screenwriters believe that such “possessory credits” should only go to those who have

written a film.

Since Hitchcock was only the director, I have opted for the more cumbersome construction

“The

Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock” and similar, in deference to the fraught and contested

meanings

of credits.

42 Others might be dream sequences, non-diegetic dance numbers, direct address to the

camera, etc. Yet

these are creative devices subject to the whims of individual directors; the opening credits

and final crawl

are contractually mandated through union and guild collective bargaining agreements.

43 Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, et al., Global Hollywood 2 (London: British Film Institute, 2005)

45-

6. Thomas Schatz, “Film Industry Studies and Hollywood History,” Media Industries: History,

Theory, and Method, eds. Jennifer Holt, and Alisa Perren (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,

2009),

48.

44 Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, “Introduction: Does the World Really Need One More Field

of

Study?”, Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, 5.

45 The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,

1985); Tino Balio, Hollywood in the Age of Television (New York: Ungar, 1992); David

Bordwell,

Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of

Production to

1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); William Boddy, Fifties Television: The

Industry

and its Critics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Eileen Bowser, Transformation of

the

67

American Screen 1907-1915, History of the American Cinema, Vol. 2 (New York: Charles

Scriber’s

Sons, 1990); Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History (New York: Oxford

University

Press, 1986); John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical

Practice in Film and Television (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Richard E. Caves,

Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University

Press, 2000); James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation

of

Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Individuals in Mass Media

Organizations: Creativity and Constraint, eds. James S. Ettema and D. Charles Whitnet

(Beverly

Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982); Robert R. Faulkner, Music on Demand: Composers and

Careers

in the Hollywood Film Industry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983); Richard Fine,

Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 1928-1940 (Ann Arbor, MI.: UMI Research

Press,

1985). (AKA West of Eden: Writers in Hollywood, 1928-1940 1st Smithsonian ed., 1993.);

Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1997);

Richard

B. Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood 1929-45 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007);

Robert

E Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);

Tom Kemper, Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley

University Press, 2010); Peter Lev, Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959. History of the

American

Cinema, Vol. 7. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003); Denise Mann, Hollywood

Independents:

The Postwar Talent Takeover (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Paul

Monaco, The Sixties 1960-69. History of the American Cinema, Vol. 8 (New York: Charles

Scribner’s Sons, 2001); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to

1907.

History of the American Cinema, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1990); Thomas

Schatz, The

Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio System (New York: Pantheon,

1988); Robert

Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the American Movies (New York: Random

House,

1994). Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis:

University of

Minnesota Press, 2001); Christopher D. Wheaton, “A History of the Screen Writers’ Guild

(1920-

1942): The Writers’ Quest for a Freely Negotiated Basic Agreement,” (PhD diss., University of

Southern California, 1974).

46 Douglas Kellner, “Media Industries, Political Economy, and Media/Cultural Studies,” Media

Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 101.

47 Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (25th Anniversary Edition) (Los Angeles: University of

California

Press, 2008), 1-39.

48 Kemper, Hidden Talent, 6-7.

49 English, The Economy of Prestige, 2005.

50 John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture, 2008.

51 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University

Press, 1990) 119.

52 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought (Los

Angeles:

University of California Press, 1994); W.J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual

Culture,” The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2000), 86-

101;

David Nye, “Electricity and Signs.” Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology

(1880-1940) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Vanessa R. Schwartz, It’s So French!:

Hollywood,

Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2007);

Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1992); Lynn Spigel. TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of

Network

Television. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the

Dreamhouse:

68

Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke Univeristy Press, 2001); Jennifer

Watts,

“Picture taking in Paradise: Los Angeles and the Creation of Regional Identity, 1880-1920,”

History

of Photography 24:3 (2000): 243-50.

53 Stephen Melville, “Art History, Visual Culture, and the University; response to the “Visual

Culture Questionnaire.” October 77 (Summer 1996): 52-54.

54 James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), 27.

55 David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in

Los

Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 14.

56 Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago:

University of

Chicago Press, 2008).

57 Vanessa R. Schwartz, and Jeanne R. Pryzblyski, “Visual Culture’s History: Twenty-First

Century

Interdisciplinarity and its Nineteenth-Century Objects,” The Nineteenth Century Visual

Culture

Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4.

58 As Denise Mann has demonstrated, the number of independent production companies

greatly

increased during this period. They filled a niche left by studios, who could no longer afford to

produce as many motion pictures without the revenues guaranteed by their theatre holdings

(which

the Paramount Decrees had forced the studios to divest).

59 Universal, which did not own a studio, was also named as a co-defendant, even thought it

did not

own theatre chains, and is therefore counted as one of the “Little Three,” along with United

Artists

and Columbia Pictures.

60 Ernest Borneman, “United States versus Hollywood: The Case of an Antitrust Suit,” The

American

Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 449.

61 Paramount was but one defendant, but since the suit was “United States v. Paramount

Pictures,

Inc., et al,” the decrees bore the name of only the first, and largest studio, and became

popularly known

as the Paramount Decrees.

62 Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960-69. History of the American Cinema, Vol. 8 (New York:

Charles

Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 10.

63 Monaco, The Sixties, 19.

64 Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (Cambridge,

MA:

Harvard University Press, 2000), 93-4.

65 Denise Mann, Hollywood Independents: The Post-war Talent Takeover (Minneapolis, MN:

University

of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1-29.

66 Peter Lev, Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959. History of the American Cinema, Vol. 7

(New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003), 25-6.

67 Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio System

(New York:

Pantheon, 1988), 359-380.

68 Hugh Fordin, MGM’s Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit (Boston: Da Capo Press,

1996),

7-8.

69 In January 1936, Carpenters, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and IA were

granted a closed shop with producers. (Mike Nielsen and Gene Mailes, Hollywood’s Other

Blacklist:

Union Struggles in the Studio System (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 20.) The DGA’s

precursor, the Screen Directors Guild, founded in 1936 (“Guild History: About the DGA,” The

Director’s Guild of America, Accessed 2 December 2012, http://www.dga.org/The-

Guild/History.aspx.) The WGA’s precursor, the Screen Writers Guild, formed in 1938. (Fisk

“Screen Credit,” 229.)

70 Jane M. Gaines, “Early Cinema’s Heyday of Copying,” Cultural Studies 20.2-3 (2006): 227.

69

71 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film

Style and

Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press 1985), p312.

72 Eileen Bowser, “Trademarks, Titles, Introductions,” The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-

1915

(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 137.

73 Bowser, “Trademarks,” 138.

74 George Rockhill Craw, “The Technique of the Picture Play—III,” Moving Picture World, 4

February 1911, 229.

75 Craw, “The Technique of the Picture Play—III,” 229.

76 Pilar Morin, “The Value of Silent Drama; Or, Pantomime in Acting,”Moving Picture World,

13

November 1909, 682.

77 Bowser, “Trademarks,” 118.

78 Quoted in deCordova, Picture Personalities, 76.

79 Bowser, “Trademarks,” 117.

80 As Bowser relates, “it is difficult to find the beginning of credit titles by looking at surviving

films, not only because most films of the period are lost, but also because few prints survive

with the

original titles in tact, and sometimes credit titles were added later when a film was reissued”

(118).

As such, a narrative on early credits is heavily reliant on articles from the trade and popular

presses.

81 Bowser, “Trademarks,” 118.

82 “Doings in Los Angeles,” Moving Picture World, 22 March 1913, 1207.

83 Richard deCordova notably has challenged the received history of the Florence Lawrence’s

employment with and subsequent departure from Biograph in Picture Personalities (57-61).

84 “We Nail a Lie!” (Advertisement), Moving Picture World 5 March 1910, 365.

85 deCordova, Picture Personalities, 57.

86 Regarding these processes of negotiations over repeated transactions, as well as the cost-

benefit

analysis that surrounds credits and reputations Richard Caves’ Creative Industries is helpful:

“In the

early motion-picture industry, film producers chose not to identify the actors appearing in

their

films, astutely anticipating that the actor who lured the audience to the Nickelodeon would lay

irresistible claim to the films profits. Nonetheless, the fans’ clamor for information on the

‘star’

show that catering to the public’s interest in performers would enlarge greatly the demand

for films”

(76).

87 Florence Lawrence’s husband wrote a letter to Lawrence saying “We will take the chance

and go

somewhere else. We can go to England and get a job as they want us there.” Quoted in

deCordova,

Picture Personalities, 61.

88 deCordova, Picture Personalities, 62.

89 Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 312.

90 deCordova, Picture Personalities, 80.

91 deCordova, Picture Personalities, 80.

92 Glendon Allvine, “Releasing Our Copy According to Film Methods,” New York Tribune, 10

November 1928, C5.

93 S.L. Rothapfel, “Let the Public Bestow the Laurel Wreath,” New York Tribune, 15 December

1918, C5.

94 Rothapfel, “Let the Public,” C5.

95 “credence, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. September 2012, accessed 4 November

2012,

http://www.oed.com.libproxy.usc.edu/view/Entry/44099

96 This claim begins to unravel somewhat in the case of the Allen Smithee credit, which the

Directors Guild of America has the power to grant, but only if one of their members can

70

satisfactorily prove that the film they directed has been wrested from their control by

producers or

production companies. In this paradoxical case, “taking a Smithee” is a certification that a

certain

director has in actuality not performed the work they were entrusted to do; or rather that the

work is

not a true representation of their talents due to extenuating factors beyond the director’s

control.

97 “credit, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. September 2012, accessed 4 November 2012,

http://www.oed.com.libproxy.usc.edu/view/Entry/44113

98 For a more detailed account of how Paramount accomplished this consolidation, see

Douglas

Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1997), 18-25.

99 The building still stands at 5800 Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles, California.

100 “Glass Draws His Portrait of Goldwyn,” New York Times, 6 December 1925, X7.

101 Nielsen and Mailes, Hollywood’s Other Blacklist, 9.

102 Nielsen and Mailes, Hollywood’s Other Blacklist, p7-9.

103 See: Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes: Unionization of Hollywood (New York: Columbia

University

Press, 1941), 58-9. Catherine L. Fisk, “The role of Private Intellectual Property Rights in

Markets

for Labor and Ideas: Screen Credit and the Writer’s Guild of America, 1938-2000,” Berkeley

Journal of Employment and Labor Law. 32.2 (2011) 222-30.

104 On October 3, 1928, Fox took out a full-page advertisement in Variety, highlighting its

“Forty

recording units, covering America and Europe” (12); Warner Bros. boasted that its sound-on-

disc

system, which was ultimately scrapped, was “The Best in Sound Reproduction” (Variety (W)

11

December 1929, p33). There are many other similar examples littered through the industry’s

trade

papers.

105 Quoted in “Too Many Screen Credits,” The Billboard, 5 October 1929, 22.

106 “More Credits,” The Hartford Courant, 14 October 1928, E3.

107 “Movietone News Credits,” The Billboard, 12 January 1929, 19.

108 “Scribe 5-5 Platform,” Variety (D), 4 February 1935, 4.

109 “Music on the Screen,” Variety (W), 27 February 1935, 23.

110 “Profile: Universal Soundman Jack Foley,” All Things Considered, WNPR National Public

Radio. (WAMU, Washington, D.C. :15 April 2000). Transcript from

http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/?

url=http://search.

proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/190081383?accountid=14749 Accessed 27 October

2012. Jack Foley was also profiled by the New York Times on July 21, 1935, in an article that

extensively detailed the minutia of his working process, and remarked favourably on his

ability to

create effects out of a myriad of “canned sounds.” (“Sound Comes in Cans,” New York Times,

21

July 1935, X4)

111 “Movie to Tell Story of Film Stunt Stars,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 26 October 1932, 16.

112 “Directors Demand 60 Hour Week, Overtime and Voice in Casting,” Variety (D), 16

September 1938, 6.

113 “Academy Edge for Asst. Directors,” Variety (W), 16 October 1934, 2.

114 “Decorators Get Screen Credit Under New Pact,” Variety (D), 28 April 1942, 1.

115 “Mechanic Gets Credit,” Variety (D), 24 June 1947, 1.

116 “Hollywood Inside,” Variety (D),17 July 1947, 2.

117 “Hollywood Inside,” Variety (D), 20 August 1947, 2.

118 Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Biography (New York: Aurum Press, 2011), 354.

119 “Union Leaders Ready Strike Call at Disney,” Variety (D), 2 April 1941, 1, 6. “Walt Disney

Cartoonists Strike in Bargaining Dispute: Workers Get Guild Threat,” Los Angeles Times, 29

May

1941, A1.

71

120 Gabler, Walt Disney, 354.

121 E.C. Sherburne, “Movies Place Personality Above Art,” The Christian Science Monitor, 30

October 1934, 1.

122 “Hollywood’s Unsung Heroes,” Variety (D), 6 January 1936, 46.

123 Stephen Grover, “Hollywood Stars Play the Top-Billing Game With Bitter Intensity,” Wall

Street Journal, 18 September 1975, 1.

124 George Shaffer, “Movie To Tell Story of Film Stunt Stars,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 26

October

1932, 16.

125 P.K Lerner, “Double Duty,” Los Angeles Times, 2 June 1981, 86.

126 Lerner, “Double Duty,” 86. Chris Chase, “At the Movies: No Screen Credit, But Lots of

Attention,” New York Times,10 June 1983, C17.

127 Marc Santora, “Boldface Names,” New York Times, 3 January 2003, 2.

128 Marion Doughery, “Letter to Sandy Howard.” A Man Called Horse production files. Elliot

Silverstein Papers. Folder 10.f-90 Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts

and

Sciences, Los Angeles, California.

129 “U’s Imaginary Director,” Variety (W), 28 May 1969, 6.

130 For more on the Smithee phenomenon, see Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock, eds.,

Directed

by Allen Smithee (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

131 Gene Siskel, “Women Moving Up in Films,” Baltimore Sun, 8 May 1979, B3.

72

Fig. 1: End title card for When a Man Loves (1927) featuring the Warner Bros. production

offices.

73

Fig 2: Posters for The Great Race (1965)

Fig 3: Posters for Once Upon a Honeymoon

(1942)