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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

ii
DEDICATION

For Adrian, Lena, Mathias, Meredith, and Lady

In Memory of Anne Friedberg
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No dissertation is completed in isolation. Credit—and the inevitable, terrible pun!—
goes to the Critical Studies Division at the University of Southern California’s School of
Cinematic Arts, its faculty and staff, and the friends and colleagues who have supported me
along the way. I have been thoroughly fortunate to receive financial support through a USC
Provost’s Fellowship, which afforded me every luxury a scholar could hope for: a room,
ample time to think and write, funding for research travel, and a community of challenging
and gifted scholars, all of which aided me immeasurably in developing this project. My
presence at USC is indebted to the late Anne Friedberg, who was a formidable scholar and a
singularly gracious individual. Her advocacy brought me into the Critical Studies program,
and though I was only able to benefit from her tutelage for one semester before her untimely
passing, Anne’s kindness and generosity in that short span have stayed with me these past
five years. Anne still remains a lasting intellectual influence in my life. This dissertation is
dedicated to her memory.
The members of my dissertation committee have been invaluable to my intellectual
and personal growth, and I cannot thank them enough for their notes, their counsel, and
their encouragement as I completed this manuscript. Not enough commendable things can
be said about my dissertation chair, Rick Jewell, who has been tireless in his support. Rick
was my entry into the wonders of Classical Hollywood cinema, and I have been learning
from him since my second week at USC. I will be eternally grateful for the way he
shepherded me through this project when matters turned fraught, and thank him dearly for
his unwavering support of my intellectual growth and for his faith in my future. Rick is one
iv
of the few people about whom it can honestly be said: he is a gentleman and a scholar. Tom
Kemper, a gifted film historian, has also been a trusted mentor and friend throughout my
doctoral degree. Tom was instrumental in opening up the study of cinema and media
industries—denaturing them, making them strange, and putting pressure on realms of
intellectual enquiry I scarcely knew existed. When he threatened to write Film Credit if I
didn’t, Tom unwittingly became the impetus for this dissertation, and I am deeply thankful
for the notes he gave me during this project’s infancy. The guidance he has provided, in
completing the manuscript and beyond, has meant the world to me. Nitin Govil’s
intellectual gifts were also extraordinarily helpful in completing Film Credit. Long before he
was employed at USC, Global Hollywood 2 reoriented my thinking in a way that was
instrumental to help me think and write about film labour. When he became part of the
Critical Studies faculty, I welcomed the opportunity to learn from him in person. His
expansive, capacious, and febrile mind was essential for pushing this project across the goal
line, and his interventions been immensely helpful in expanding this project as assumes its
(hopefully) longer life.
The supportive intellectual climate at USC has been vital to making me the scholar
and person I am today. Coursework with Professors Priya Jaikumar, Akira Lippit, Michael
Renov, Ellen Seiter, Kara Keeling, and Richard Meyer challenged my assumptions and made
me a better and more probing academic. David James was especially generous to me during a
particularly charged moment as I completed my manuscript. Though I was never able to
profit directly from David’s teaching, I am grateful for his kindness, and for the atmosphere
of support he has fostered in the Critical Studies Division. Bill Whittington, Alicia Cornish,
v
Kim Greene, Jade Agua, and especially Linda Overholt have been steadfast in their support,
and I am thankful for the various ways that they have kept me on the straight and narrow. I
have also benefitted immensely from the research help of Ned Comstock, USC Cinema
Librarian extraordinaire, and from the drop-of-the hat archival assistance of Jonathon Auxier
at the USC Warner Bros. Archive. My deepest gratitude goes out to them both.
My graduate student colleagues at USC have been an indispensible source of support
and intellectual challenge for the duration, and I truly cannot imagine having made it
through this process without them. Casey Riffel, my roommate and dear friend, has been a
sounding board for my more ludicrously brazen flights of intellectual fancy. Eric Hoyt, my
trusted workout buddy, has been a singular champion of my work, and is the very model of a
young scholar. Leah Aldridge, my verbal sparring partner both in and outside academia, has
been a cherished grounding presence, and a generous source of sage counsel. My
dissertation-writing group—Kate Fortmueller, Stephanie Yeung, Brett Service, Elena
Bonomo, Courtney White, Feng-Mei Heberer, and Shawna Kidman—helped propel this
work forward in its various stages, and I am privileged to call you my friends. I am thankful
that Patty Ahn, Lara Bradshaw, Nadine Chan, Ghia Godfrey, Tim Holland, Brian Jacobson,
Chera Kee, Alison Kozberg, Dave Lerner, Sangeeta Marwah, Luci Marzola, Taylor Nygaard,
Ken Provencher, Jennifer Rosales, Kelly Wolf, and Genevieve Yue have been my fellow
travellers within the Critical Studies program. I am also grateful that Emily Hagenmaier, as
well as my USC MFA friends Jeff Chanley, Ryan Lipscomb, Alan Miller, and Eddie Ng have
all given me valuable perspective from without.
vi
On a personal level, I have been left agog, agape, and struggling for words when I try
to understand the unstinting affection and encouragement of my family: my mum, Lena
Crawford, my dad, Adrian Crawford, and my brother, Mathias Crawford. They are the
smartest, most wonderful, most caring people I could ever hope to know, but the greatest of
their gifts is the truly boundless love and support they have given me. I have always been told
to pursue whatever makes my heart sing, without caveats or qualifications, which is perhaps
the greatest thing that parents could give to their son. Or perhaps it’s these: thanks Dad, for
always being there when we came home from school, and for teaching us that lifelong
learning is the most awesome thing there is. Thanks Mum, for getting your law degree
despite dealing with two incorrigible kids, and for proving it’s never too late to go back to
school. Thanks Sabu, for always being nearby, and for being my best friend. Without your
love and support, I would never have been able to complete my dissertation and become a
(real) doctor.
vii
LIST OF FIGURES

DEDICATION ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

LIST OF FIGURES ix

ABSTRACT xi

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

CHAPTER TWO: TITLE DESIGN IN THE SHADOW OF SAUL BASS: BINDER,
BROWNJOHN, AND FERRO 74
Historical Grounding 77
The Shadow of Saul Bass 88
Graphic Design, Advertising, and Cinema—A Muddled History 95
Graphic Design 96
Advertising 102
Cinema 108
Maurice Binder—The “European” New Yorker 115
Robert Brownjohn—Sex and Typography 136
Pablo Ferro—The Man With the Red Scarf 154
Conclusion 172
Chapter Two Notes 177
Chapter Two Figures 188

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 230
Background Information 238
Legal and Theoretical Underpinnings 245
The Directors Declare 252
The Writers and Producers Strike Back 263
The Verdict and Aftermath 281
viii
Strike Averted and Conclusion 289
Chapter Three Notes 298

CHAPTER FOUR: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY: A HISTORY OF THE FINAL CRAWL 307
A Pre-History of the Final Crawl (1897-1929) 316
The Later Studio Period (1930-1948) 318
Case Study No. 1: The Production Designer Credit 325
The Post-Paramount Decrees Era (1948-1969) 335
Conglomerates and Blockbusters (1970-1995) 346
Case Study No. 2: The Sound Designer Credit 352
Contemporary Transmedia (1995-Present) 367
Conclusion 374
Chapter Four Notes 382
Chapter Four Figures 389

CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION 390
Chapter Five Notes 400

COMPREHENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 401
ix
LIST OF FIGURES

Chapter One Figures
Figure 1 End titles card for When a Man Loves (1927) featuring the Warner Bros.
production offices. 72

Figure 2 Posters for The Great Race (1965) 73

Figure 3 Posters for Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) 73

Chapter Two Figures

Figure 1 The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) opening titles 188
Figure 2 Psycho (1960) opening titles 188
Figure 3 From Russia with Love (1963) opening titles 189
Figure 4 Press Booklet for The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming
(1966). Norman Jewison Papers. United Artists Collection. Mss
122AN. Box 14, Folder 11. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater
Research, Madison, Wisconsin. 189
Figure 5 The Thomas Crown Affair Posters (L to R) Italian, Russian, and Spanish 190
Figure 6 Carmen Jones (1954) theatrical one-sheet poster 190
Figure 7 Carmen Jones opening titles 191
Figure 8 Vertigo (1958) opening titles 191
Figure 9 North by Northwest (1959) opening titles 192
Figure 10 Anatomy of a Murder (1959) opening titles 192
Figure 11 Walk on the Wild Side (1962) opening titles 193
Figure 13a Watching Words Move (1962), p7 & 13 195
Figure 13b Watching Words Move (1962), p15 & 16 195
Figure 14 Vertigo (1958) opening titles 196
Figure 15 Kim Novak’s hair in Vertigo, presaged by the opening titles 197
x
Figure 16 Charade (1963) opening titles 197
Figure 17 Damn Yankees (1958) opening titles 199
Figure 18 Kaleidoscope (1966) opening titles 204
Figure 19 Dr. No (1962) opening titles 205
Figure 20 From Russia With Love opening titles 211
Figure 21 Goldfinger (1964) opening titles 215
Figure 22 Dr. Strangelove (1964) opening titles 217
Figure 23 Bullitt (1968) opening titles 219
Figure 24 “Press Book.” The Russians are Coming, Box 6, Folder 6. Norman
Jewison Papers. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research,
Madison, Wisconsin. 222
Fig 24a Clipped Advertisement, The Russians are Coming, The Russians are
Coming. Box 8, Folder 4. Norman Jewison Papers. Wisconsin Center
for Film and Theater Research, Madison, Wisconsin. 223
Fig 25 The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) opening titles and screen shots 224
Figure 26 The Thomas Crown Affair promotional booklet. Norman Jewison
Papers. United Artists Collection. Mss 122AN. Box 14, Folder 11.
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Madison, Wisconsin. 229

Chapter Four Figures

Figure 1 Citizen Kane advertisement. Variety, 8 May 1941, 5. 389

xi
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 semi-
autonomous 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
xii
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
xiii
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 ever-
greater 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.

1
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 under-
scrutinized 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.

4
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

7
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

11
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 Stars
31
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 re-
writing 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 so-
called 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
places
42
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 vertically-
integrated 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 Universal
59
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 holdings
62
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 so-
called “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 semi-
formal 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 re-
making 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 Vitagraph
81
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 16
th
-century
“credential,” or “letters of credential,” which in turn derives from the 14
th
-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 17
th
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.

51
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. studios
99
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)

74
CHAPTER TWO: TITLE DESIGN IN THE SHADOW OF SAUL BASS: BINDER, BROWNJOHN,
AND FERRO

Introduction
In the commercial narrative cinema, there are two facets virtually guaranteed as
certain: the opening credits and the final crawl. The former ranges anywhere 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. This chapter concerns the visual structure and function of opening credits, and
narrates a visual history of title sequences in fiction film during 1950s and 1960s.
Such a limited object of focus during such a narrow historical time period immediately
begs the question: why study title sequences? Momentarily engaging with this query, I admit
it has certain validity. Outwardly, credits seem to have a rote, mechanical function, which is
to indicate who performs which jobs for any given film. By that reckoning, title sequences
are in service to a film, and serve a secondary, subordinate function to it. The sooner the
credits are over, the sooner the main narrative can start, for a film does not begin until the
narrative does; no one comes to the theatre to watch the titles. This view in particular has
been the occasion for some churlish journalistic grandstanding. Writing in 1984 for The New
York Times, Chris Chase yearned for the days of simple, short title sequences, and asked,
bombastically and dismissively, “What’s a Gaffer, Anyway?” to position credits as a risible
annoyance.
1
But rather than dismiss title sequences out of hand, I argue that the title
sequences are a worthy body of enquiry, because they are one of the few places in
75
Hollywood cinema
2
where its predominantly closed system opens up and reveals its
constructed nature. The word “predominantly” is here used advisedly, because American
cinema is clearly not completely inured to outside influences. David James’ Most Typical
Avant-Garde is a definitive treatise on how this dominant, overwhelmingly commercial
business of American cinema is rife with “cross-pollination in formal procedures,
representational codes, and production strategies [that] have circulated reciprocally through
the entire field of cinema,” even moving to and from nominally ideologically adversarial
“minor” practices of experimental and avant-garde film.
3
As explored in this dissertation’s
introduction via Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Hollywood cinema is founded
largely on a tradition that strives to incorporate those disparate influences into its fold and
normalise them, so as to make them a coherent part of its worldview.
4
Moreover, that same
tradition also seeks to paper over the ruptures in its own artifice. This is normally
understood in formal terms—continuity editing, for example, strives to minimise the shock
brought on by the breaks of successive shots sutured together—but I argue that it is equally
applicable to erasures of film labour. Hollywood filmmaking also deflects attention away
from the effort that goes into its manufacture; formal structures create seamless narrative
frameworks, which erase the effort that went into its creation, thus establishing an implicit
denial of the labour effort required to make motion pictures. A film’s opening titles are
therefore noteworthy because they are one of the few places in American narrative cinema
where that labour effort is laid bare before an audience, as the names of film industry
professionals, both above the line and below the line, appear on screen.
76
For the purposes of this chapter however, opening titles are important because, in
addition to their (primary) enumeration and recognition functions, opening titles are
(secondarily) venues for creative expression and aesthetic experimentation. This tradition has
become so pervasive that it caused Elsaesser and Hagener to write that, since the mid-1990s,
“the title sequence has developed into a quasi-autonomous genre with an art scene of its
own,”
5
though the history of creative expression or even artistry in opening titles is far
longer. David Bordwell establishes that “art titles” were present at least as early as the 1917
film The Narrow Trail, which “displayed its credits against a painting of a stagecoach
holdup.”
6
By the 1930s, the major studios were using optical printing devices to give their
title sequences visual flair, supplementing that work by contracting out to production
companies such as Pacific Title & Art.
7
Yet the current moment of titles as an “art scene”
did not truly commence until the mid-1950s when graphic designers began to lend their
talents to the screen. This chapter explores the aesthetic codes and creative conventions of
titles during this time period, focussing on two decades where the title sequence first
proliferated and gained its (quasi-) visual autonomy: the 1950s and 1960s. This history is
narrated through the work of three title designers—Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and
Pablo Ferro—all of whom worked in a creative environment rhetorically founded, fostered,
and ultimately overshadowed by the oeuvre of Saul Bass, an advertiser whose career turned
to the cinema in the 1950s. Scholarly and other writings, both contemporaneous to the
post-World War II period and in retrospect, have roundly canonised Bass as the most deft,
creative, and prolific title designer, but in so doing, have largely elided the efforts of other
designers who were his contemporaries. Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro who, like Saul Bass,
77
began their careers in commercial advertising, but presented aesthetic alternatives to Bass’s
work. Bass espoused the belief that title sequences should prepare the audience to accept the
narrative of the forthcoming film by condensing its narrative and visuals into an economical,
iconographic title sequence. Even though Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro, shared Bass’s
commercial design background, they used the title sequence for different purposes. They
deployed it as a venue for visual experimentation and explored the convergences between
advertising, cinema, fine art and typography, presenting subtly sophisticated musings on the
boundaries and ontology of each. Their designs became more than preparatory gestures for
audiences, and were instead places to experiment with discourses more highbrow than
cinema of the period usually admitted. Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro also found themselves
negotiating the title sequences’ aesthetic (secondary) function and its primary function
(enumerating). Accordingly, this chapter is an aesthetic-industrial history that seeks to
extract titles from the industrial vacuum that characterises most title design scholarship.
8

Historical Grounding
This chapter closely examines the interrelation of title sequences, commercials, and
graphic arts during the 1950s and 1960s. These years witnessed the first great aesthetic
explosion of title sequences, one that coincided with a number of graphic designers moving
from advertising into the world of title design, and adding film to their commercial
portfolios. This aesthetic history has largely been unwritten, because those articles that deal
with post-war title design focus almost exclusively on one particular figure: Saul Bass. The
general consensus of film and graphic design scholarship is that this sea change, where film
78
titles began to open up to the creative discourse of graphic design, commenced with Carmen
Jones (1954), directed by Otto Preminger, as Bass created an animated title sequence. But
his work truly root—and garnered wider attention—with another Preminger film, The Man
With the Golden Arm (1955) (See Fig. 1). Bass, who designed the title sequence around his
own strikingly jagged logo of a junkie’s arm to preface the tale of heroin addict Frank
Sinatra, is widely credited with inaugurating and presiding over a new era where opening
titles were not merely an afterthought to a film’s production, but rather rigorously integrated
into its framework and presenting its first units of semantic meaning.
In light of this singular hagiography, the title of this chapter, at least the first half—
Title Design in the Shadow of Saul Bass—is both something of an acknowledgement and a
provocation. It is an acknowledgement that, when it comes to surveying the landscape of
title design in the mid 1950s through the early 1970s, there appears an insuperable divide:
Saul Bass, and everyone else. The prevailing narrative says: it is Bass who first thinks to make
film titles move; Bass who perfects the form and renders its most striking examples; Bass who
collaborates with filmmakers in developing their visual ideas; Bass who realizes the apparent
goal of all graphic designers, and makes the transition to being a film director in his own
right. Through Bass, title sequences were rhetorically wrested from the marginal status of
invisible afterthought, to a vital and prominent component of selling a film and creating a
climate for reception by audiences. Along these lines, titles move from being an element of
labour, produced by in-house departments or technical production companies, into the
realm of craft, or even artistry, performed by designers and true “artists”—or more
accurately one artistic designer in particular. In the majority of academic discourse (both
79
histories of cinema and graphic design), the popular press, and trade journals, Saul Bass is
widely hailed as the Titan of the Title sequence, the undisputed master of crafting opening
credits, standing astride both the beginning of films and the field of graphic design in film,
leaving room only for artists to work in his shadow. All others succeeded on Bass’s coattails.
Such is the story presented in the preponderance of scholarship in the fields of both cinema
studies and graphic design.
9

As a broad strokes history, this narrative is fundamentally correct. Bass was indeed the
first prominent individual to design opening titles, did indeed create a climate that brought
attention to opening credits, and was indeed widely viewed as its most skilled practitioner.
However, my scepticism is aroused when scholarship lionises one historical figure to the
almost complete elision and disappearance of others who might have made meaningful
contributions. In other words, this chapter is motivated by a relatively straightforward belief:
surely, there must have been other title designers as capable and talented as Saul Bass, and if
so, what work did they do? In that mode, this chapter is also is directed towards correcting a
scholarly imbalance away from the singular focus on Saul Bass, and consider some of the
other artists—and they are legion—who designed the opening credits in the cinema, and
presented alternatives to the creative methods that Bass promoted. This is not to denigrate
the work of Saul Bass in any way. There is no doubt that Saul Bass was a deft and supple
practitioner of title design craft. But at the same time, Bass proffered a singular, relatively
narrow, perhaps even paternalistic approach to title design, and was fairly relentless in his
promotion of that ethos through a canny campaign of self-promotion in trade magazines like
American Cinematographer and Graphis. I would also argue that, since writings both by and
80
about Bass are the most readily available of all the established title designers, his design ethos
perforce would tend to dominate as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet it is important to
acknowledge that there are competing narratives, and questions that remain unresolved in its
history. The most prominent of these is: what aesthetic history do we lose when scholarship
devotes itself almost exclusively to Saul Bass? All of this is to say that the following chapter
will engage Saul Bass, but only insofar as he sets a framework for title design in post-
Paramount Decrees Hollywood.
10
This chapter hopes to fill in the lacunae of a title design
history, one that is interwoven with contemporaneous discourses on fine art, graphic design,
advertising, typography, and the cinema.
At the risk of re-creating the kind of auteurist model that has elevated the work of
Saul Bass at the expense of everyone else working in graphic design for the cinema, I have
winnowed my focus down to Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro. This is
because individually and collectively, they pose provocative aesthetic and industrial questions
to the field of graphic design as it appeared in cinema. Moreover, their titles inaugurate
enquires into the state of the American film industry in the post-Paramount decrees era—
what aesthetics it valued, and what degree of experimentation it could accommodate. The
title designs of Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro remain significant to
film history because their work negotiates, reflects, and represents some of the broader
debates regarding typography, advertising, fine art, and the cinema that circulated in the
1950s and 1960s. In the work of these three figures and others besides, we see many different
modes of experimentation. Ferro and Binder took highbrow and lowbrow artistic discourses
81
and laid them bare in front of film audiences. Brownjohn engaged with a reflexive
consideration of film spectatorship embedded in the film proper. Ferro and Brownjohn
meditated on the uneasy relationship between image and text in moving graphic designs, and
expanded the visual potentials of typography. And Ferro collapsed the otherwise strict
boundaries between print and film through his title sequence and publicity designs. All the
while, these sequences negotiated the freedom of artistic expression with the restrictions of
contractual negotiation by Hollywood guilds and unions, subtended by a tension between
the legibility of text versus the arresting qualities of visual images. There is a rich and vibrant
history to title design in the 1950s and 1960s, and this chapter seeks to bear out part of that
history—the films, the firms, the personalities, and the movement that made type and image
move on screen.
A study of Binder, Brownjohn and Ferro does more than recuperate a generation of
graphic designers that have been relatively marginalised in cinema history; it forces
scholarship to rethink how the semantic and visual field of film operated across posters, print
advertising, trailers, and the films themselves. Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro—like Bass—all
started their careers in graphic design for advertising firms, and eventually worked their way
into the cinema. Maurice Binder, an in-house print advertiser for Macy’s prior to World
War II, arrived in Hollywood after V-J Day, found work as an art director, and subsequently
moved into title design. Robert Brownjohn maintained an active advertising career in
London, where the American lived as an expatriate, while he designed titles for the James
Bond Films. And Pablo Ferro’s entry into title design was through film and video work; he
produced television films for advertising companies (and even made his own films) while
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working on his opening title sequence. but their creative dispositions could hardly be more
different in their aesthetic mien and their responses to the visual culture of the time. Paul
Rand, the celebrated graphic designer and soon-to-be Yale professor, published the book
Thoughts on Design in 1947, which Lynn Spigel credits as being the most influential book on
the post-war climate of graphic design—the closest the industry ever came to a universal
manifesto.
11
Amongst his many prescriptions, Rand wrote that graphic design is a
negotiation between the vagaries of advertising on the one hand, and the aspirations of art
on the other.
12
If we were to put Bass, Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro on a continuum strung
between advertising and art, Bass tended towards the former; Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro
moved decisively towards the latter. Bass mimicked the directness of expression of corporate
logos by condensing the film title into a clutter-free ideogram, in the name of economically
communicating the film’s overarching theme to the audience. His designs are reducible,
simple, and commercial—intended to flatter and deceive because they are easily digestible; it
is virtually impossible, for instance, to view the word PSYCHO cut in two, its halves
shuttling back and forth, as anything but a foreshadow of Anthony Perkins stabbing Janet
Leigh—or Perkins’ split personality (See Fig. 2). Titles such as these operate in the fashion
described by Leo Charney
13
—to ease the audience into the film, smoothing over any
ruptures between the extra-diegetic and diegetic worlds. Bass works very much in sympathy
with a filmic ethos that seeks to paper over any cracks in the fictional artifice, because from
the text’s first semantic units, spectators are being primed to accept its symbols and themes.
Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro, by contrast, frequently eschewed such simplicity,
even to the point of distancing the audience from the diegesis. Their work is significant
83
because they used title sequences to sequences as venues to explore more sophisticated, even
intellectual questions related to the media in which they worked. Brownjohn’s title sequence
for From Russia With Love (1963) is a prime example of this type of aesthetic probing. Under
the cover of titillation, Brownjohn is able to hazard some meta-textual ruminations on the
structural foundations of cinema, print, and typography. He projected words in light onto
the body of several curvaceous belly dancers, (See Fig. 3) clearly relying on the spectacle of a
woman’s body to titillate the audience for the forthcoming spectacle of guns, girls, and
gadgets. Simultaneously, however, Brownjohn enacts some sophisticated explorations of
graphic design. He blurs the boundaries between print and cinema, transforming solid and
legible words printed in ink on a flat page into ephemeral and quasi-illegible images
projected in light onto a curved body. In so doing, he questions the structural foundations of
typography and the surfaces that bear type. He also alludes to the intellectual graphic design
experiments made by his late mentor, the Bauhaus designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy—all hiding
in plain sight under the cover of a scantily clad woman. In a similar vein, Binder, explored
the apparatuses of image-making, from the technologies that create still and moving images
in Damn Yankees (1958), and lampooned the machinations of film production and the
culture that creates motion pictures in The Mouse that Roared (1959) and The Grass is
Greener (1960). Pablo Ferro too experimented—with high art discourses, evoking Mondrian
in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), while simultaneously playing with fluid boundaries
between still and moving images. More than mere reflexivity, the work of Binder,
Brownjohn, and Ferro presents a probing of the boundaries and divisions between
advertising, cinema, fine art and typography, etc. The sheer number of allusions, cross-
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pollinations, and outright insertions of other artistic discourses into the film also means that
this can be considered as an era of aesthetic convergence, avant la lettre. Pablo Ferro also
mounted a novel type of aesthetic convergence in The Thomas Crown Affair, giving the same
multi-screen visual treatment to the opening title sequence and the main film, two elements
of a text that are usually understood as separate in film discourse.
14
Bass’s designs sought to
make audiences better understand the main narrative through the insertion of visual motifs.
Ferro, by contrast, sought to give the audience strategies for reading the images to come, but
did not presuppose any particular thematic summation or distillation. Ferro inserted
relatively simplistic multi-screen designs into the title sequence as preparatory gesture for the
complex, furiously kinetic multi-screen images that would appear in the narrative, making
the title sequence a visual primer, aesthetic training wheels as it were, for the film to come.
During an era when independent production companies were challenging studio
norms through transgressive subject matter
15
or alternative cinematography experiments,
16

the most thought-provoking and sophisticated visual experiments were being covertly
practiced at the very beginning of major commercial motion pictures—in title sequences.
Where, as David James suggests, Hollywood cinema was wont to assimilate and internalise
minor production practices or aesthetic strategies and in the process erase their radical
differences, in these title sequences, experimentation was allowed to roam wild and free. By
focussing on Bass’s more straightforward visual distillations, we miss out on a vibrant and
challenging tradition of visual expression in post-Paramount Decrees cinema, as practiced
subtly, almost by subterfuge, through the work of Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro. The
insertion of Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro into the conversation of design in cinema also
85
undoes some of Hollywood’s geographical hegemony and assimilative powers. Though these
three designers worked on major commercial productions funded by Los Angeles-based
studios, they never truly “went Hollywood.” Binder became part of London’s expatriate
population, and enjoyed the city so much that he felt compelled to profess that affection in a
letter to the Los Angeles Times, as this chapter will soon illuminate; as such he was
considered in his time to be more of a “European” designer. Brownjohn too moved to
London, and died while one of its residents. Ferro moved back and forth between Los
Angeles and New York, but the latter was always his home. Bass, by contrast, set up his
design shop in Los Angeles; appropriately, his visual and narrative distillation affirms
cinema’s invisible apparatus; the experiments of these rival designers, suggests that cinema in
this period was characterised by so much more latent sophistication. Title sequences, per
Bass, can be viewed as condensed visuals, but in the 1950s and 1960s, under the command
of Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro, they were so much more—highbrow aesthetic exploration
camouflaged under the cover of a commercial art.
Their title sequences are all the more intriguing because of the relative autonomy
given to Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro. Anecdotes from these designers indicate that they
were allowed to work with very little interference from the producers who employed them.
This is was likely due to the fact that graphic designers garnered prestige and by association,
the production companies who employed them, to the films these companies produced.
Unlike other technological and aesthetic experiments in the post-Paramount Decrees era, the
employment of graphic designers to create title sequences did not differentiate films from
television, and provide audiences with an attraction that their TV sets could not—such as
86
widescreen technologies or palatial theatres. Television programs also hired graphic designers
to design their titles,
17
thus rendering that comparative advantage moot. However,
employing graphic designers did garner film productions a measure of esteem, as film reviews
invariably commented on the high quality of a film’s designed title sequence, even if such an
appraisal only amounted to a line or two. Title designers did give film studios a competitive
advantage with respect to one another, because it enabled them to differentiate their films by
way of their graphic designers’ work. Pablo Ferro, for instance, was hired by Mirisch
Productions to create an entire slate of visual materials for their productions The Russians are
Coming, The Russians are Coming (1966) and The Thomas Crown Affair. The logo Ferro
created for The Russians are Coming found its way onto stationery letterheads and cinema
marquees, and also appeared in print advertisements, trailers, and the opening film titles (See
Fig. 4). The cases of The Russians are Coming and The Thomas Crown Affair represent
another example of aesthetic convergence between print and moving image media, because
Ferro used techniques of sequential images and juxtaposition to “animate” some print
advertisements for the films. These cross-media convergences texts also represent an early
instance of film branding. By using the same graphic designs across all facets of film
production and promotion, the Mirisch Company, for example, created a seamless and
consistent icon for its films, making it more readily identifiable to a purchasing public. This
suggests an expanded aesthetic purview for the functions and purposes of branding in the
1950s. Instead of trademarks being associated with commodities or consumer products,
graphic design principles were used to make marks of distinction for certain films above
87
others. It is important to note that the advertising designs by Ferro in The Thomas Crown
Affair did not constitute a logo or iconographic symbol, but rather a visual ethos. The
Mondrian-esque style Ferro was adopted as a template for various arrangements of images
and lines for international poster designs. The philosophy of Ferro’s design, in many
different permutations and combinations—not a logo, repeated ad nauseam across print and
moving image media—was considered to be representative of the film.
On a broader level, a study of Binder, Brownjohn and Ferro does more than fill in the
historical margins, because their work presents an implicit ideological challenge to the
hegemony of Saul Bass, one that was keenly felt by graphic designers of the time.
18
Bass
fostered a climate where opening titles were something worthy of paying attention to, and
also an environment where studios and production companies believed graphic design was
worthy of creative and financial investment. But he did so by flattering to deceive—creating
easily understandable visuals, intended not to challenge audiences, but to ease them into the
diegesis, per Charney’s argument, via a number of easily digestible and intelligible icons.
Working in the creative environment Bass created, Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro frequently
opted for a different approach. They populated their designs with more sophisticated, and
challenging ideas.
19
Through Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro, the opening titles became that
quasi-autonomous art described by Elsaesser, bound to the film by structural exigency (i.e.,
they had to appear at some point near the film’s beginning), but expressing thoughts and
posing aesthetic questions that went far beyond the dramatic narrative. Where Bass’s titles
turned inwards and pointed wholly towards the film text, the works of these three
88
competitors more often than not turned outwards, embracing creative traditions that spread
far beyond the world of cinema. They made enquiries into the structural foundations of
cinema, advertising, graphic design, and typography, and questioned the nature ontological
boundaries that appeared to divide them. Various moving image and print media converged
in their title sequences, which in turn muddied and ultimately upended the traditionally firm
boundaries between them. These designers do not present a creative movement per se;
Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro did not associate or collaborate with one another, and never
directly espoused any unifying credo. Yet Binder’s, Brownjohn’s and Ferro’s work is
sympathetic to each others’. Individually, they present subtle, but nonetheless potent
aesthetic rejections of Bass’s straightforward, reductive, and sometimes even paternalistic
approach to title design. Individually, they turned opening credits into a venue that
interrogated the very nature of the design services they were providing. Excepting Salvador
Dali’s Surrealist dream sequence in Spellbound (1945), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the
designs of Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo represent perhaps the most
unadulterated and sustained insertions of high-art, highbrow discourses and enquiries in
commercial cinema of the post-World War II period.

The Shadow of Saul Bass
Any history of post-World War II title design must begin with Saul Bass, because his
oeuvre convinced Hollywood that opening credits were a viable and worthy investment, and
created an environment where graphic designers were allowed greater penetration into the
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cinema’s creative ranks. The prevailing narrative posits that Saul Bass came to prominence
with the titles to Carmen Jones (1954). When designing the one-sheet poster for the film,
Bass apparently proposed the idea to director Otto Preminger to turn the logo (See Fig. 6),
a rose engulfed in flames that Bass designed, into a graphically animated title sequence (See
Fig. 7).
20
Over the following year, he also designed the opening credits for a handful of films,
the most prominent being The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Billy Wilder’s The
Seven Year Itch (1955).
21
Within five years, Bass had assembled a body of work for Preminger
and Alfred Hitchcock—Vertigo (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), North by Northwest
(1959), Exodus (1960), and Psycho (1960) that fully brought him to the attention of various
film and graphic design trade magazines (See Fig. 8–10). In the multilingual graphic design
journal Graphis, Bass espoused his understanding of the current state of opening credit with
the 1960 article “Film Titles—A New Field for the Graphic Designer.”
22
A two-paragraph
declaration of principles signed by Bass himself fronted the article, in which he laid out his
understanding of the disposition of audiences towards the litany of credits that graced the
screen, prior to the commencement of narrative action. “In spite of all efforts to control the
situation,” Bass wrote, “the list of credits on films grows larger each year. Yet it is generally
recognized that the filmgoing public is not particularly interested in any of these, with the
exception of the leading actors and actresses, and a few well-known directors.”
23
And
because they were not interested in knowing the names of anyone but above-the-line talent,
audience members found other things to do with that time:
Normally the running time of the title is a period during
which the patrons leave their seats for popcorn, make small
talk with their neighbours, or simply explore their seats for
90
long-range comfort, and when the film itself begins, there is
usually an initial ‘cold’ period.
24

Yet the business of filmmaking mandates that credits appear before every union and guild-
based production; Bass thus sought to warm up his audiences for the film to come by
imbuing them with graphical intrigue:
Since trade requirements demand these extensive credits, it
seems that this usually neutral interlude should be converted
into a positive introduction to the film…. I have approached
the titles with the objective of making them sufficiently
provocative and entertaining to induce the theatre
inhabitants to sit down and watch, because something is
really happening on screen. It then may become possible to
project a symbolic foretaste of what is to come, and to create
a receptive atmosphere that will enable the film to begin on a
higher level of audience rapport.
25

Bass is determined to make spectators pay attention to title sequences, but not so that they
can recognise who performed which role during production. Rather, his visual design
operates in a semi-paternalistic mode determined to induce film spectators to pay attention
to the screen. Once he held that attention, Bass wanted to welcome them into the
narrative—his idea of a “symbolic foretaste” to avoid an initial audience “cold period” aligns
strongly with Leo Charney’s belief that titles are meant to ease the spectators into the
diegesis. Bass’s title sequences prefigure what is about to happen in the film proper, and
prepare spectators for the themes and imagery yet to come: for example, Vertigo’s swirling
vortices that end up bunched into Kim Novak’s hair.
Saul Bass was a frequent and obliging interview, and used trade journals to promote
his title design philosophy. He was profiled four times in American Cinematographer in the
early 1960s: chronicling his collaborations with Preminger and Hitchcock;
26
shooting brick
91
alleyways for West Side Story;
27
detailing his cat wrangling expertise for Walk on the Wild
Side, credits that elicited “enthusiastic applause that was little short of an ovation”
28
;
explaining animation techniques for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).
29
He
invariably reiterated, through the words of the journalists, his desire to create titles that
would captivate attention, distil a film’s essence, and massage audiences into a receptive
frame of mind. Simultaneously, Bass positions himself as the bearer of craftsmanship and
technical acumen, a man who possesses the unique ability to envision a new direction for
title sequences, and the expertise to bring this vision to life. In a stunningly paradoxical
gesture of verbal gymnastics, Bass professed in Variety, with a modicum of self-deprecation,
that his designs were becoming so popular and prominent to an extent that they had began
to rankle Hollywood creative executives, and had started to harm his career. “There is no
film which cannot be helped by careful, intelligent title credits, so says Saul Bass” but:
there is a problem of course, says Bass, in being too jazzy or
spectacular, and he thinks that he has been used, unfairly,
from time to time “as a club” by critics who wished to beat
certain directors. There has been a somewhat too frequent
use of the line—“The best thing about the film is the Saul
Bass credits”—and Bass is apt to wonder that anyone will
ever hire him again.
30

Whatever the contradictions inherent in this article, not to mention the fact that it bears the
mark of being partially authored by Bass himself
31
his prominence and titling philosophy by
the mid-1960s were well and truly established.
In addition to establishing a design ethos and place within the Hollywood film
community, Bass also promulgated a very particular version of previous opening title design
history, denigrating it as dull and lacking in sophistication. He did so through two films: Bass
92
on Titles (1974), a singularly brazen act of self-hagiography; and That’ s Entertainment, Part II
(1976), an assemblage of MGM “classics” that reflected glowingly on the studio’s former
glory. In Bass on Titles, he also recounts the history of title sequences prior to his arrival in
Hollywood, which “had tended to be a list of dull credits,” monotonous, and easily
dismissed—ignored by dint of unimaginative design, rather than inattentive spectators. Bass
enacted a visual expression to his understanding of title design history with the film That’s
Entertainment, Part II. It was the second in a series of omnibus films, where MGM sought to
remind spectators of its salad days by trotting out its greying cadre of former stars and
interspersing their scripted conversations with memorable clips from classic films. Bass was
commissioned to design the title sequence, which were inspired by “antique” film credits.
The examples chosen stand very much at odds with Bass’s own oeuvre: the USC marching
band spelling out the word “AND” in capital letters 20 yards high; Bing Crosby scrawled in
the sand, washed away by the tide; Clark Cable inscribed on a scroll, which is then burned
away; the Marx Brothers popping up on the tabs of an antique cash register; Greta Garbo
written in the pages of a leather-bound book; Betty Hutton burned into wood with a
branding iron; and the list goes on. It is a witty credit sequence, but it is also subtly
dismissive in its homage of title design history, of the “old, well-loved title devices that were
used in by-gone days.”
32
Slyly, Bass takes a dim view of pre-1954 titles, which are re-created
as excessively literary (parchment scrolls, books), gimmicky (humans forming letters, words
in the sand), or else staid and inert. They all appear as fussy examples of a lesser era, of “by-
gone days” and “forgotten films” in contrast to Bass’s body of work, which embraces the
principles of “modern” (and I use scare quotes advisedly) design. There is no hint of his
93
blocks of solid colour, typography that moves and bends, nor the concatenation of the film’s
ideas in a single, simple, easily parsed icon. In honouring the names of MGM’s stars in the
era of their own titling, Bass cements a history of titles that pales in comparison to his own
contemporary dynamism.
This version of titling history, however, simply isn’t borne out by the scholarship that
has been performed on film titles, most of which has surfaced in the last decade (roughly
2000 onwards): the individual work of Alexandre Tylski, Nicole de Mourgues, Laurence
Moinereau, Georg Stanitzek, and Deborah Allison demonstrate that Bass’s version of titling
history is a specious one, albeit gently so.
33
Allison in particular, refutes the prevailing
assumption that the film titles of the 1930s through the 1950s were overwhelmingly static
and literary, pointing to a wealth of examples, overlooked by film scholarship, that are
expressive and visually inventive, and not at all hidebound to skeuomorphic design.
34
In
addition to showing the blind spots in Bass’s graphic design history, Allison’s refutation also
opens up space to reconsider the other modes of expression contemporaneous to Saul
Bass—consideration that forms the preponderance of this chapter. Compared to the
relatively private Maurice Binder, or the positively counter-cultural Robert Brownjohn and
Pablo Ferro, Saul Bass was gifted with better business acumen. There is no denying his
talent, but as illuminated above, any cursory examination of graphic design history shows
that Bass was the more savvy with self-promotion, and by a goodly margin.
To reiterate, and to distil this preamble on Saul Bass, it is best to understand his work
as priming the semantic pump; it is an act of narrative condensation, distilling the essence of
a film into a few minutes, or else localizing the main narrative’s primary metaphor. Title
94
sequences should be in service of the diegesis, instead of the parade of names that grace the
screen. Accordingly, Bass crafted a series of highly literal opening titles. In the titles to Walk
on the Wild Side (1962), a Laurence Harvey-Jane Fonda melodrama about a brothel in
1930s New Orleans, a feral cat strolls through a back alley and ends up in a (literal) cat fight
with a white stray feline (See Fig. 11). For North by Northwest, grid lines accrete and
condense into the façade of a glass office building, which is used as a screen typography; the
words slide up and down the edifice, but balanced by white blocks that slide in the opposite
direction, rather like an elevator’s counterweight used to balance its load (See Figs. 12).
There is wit and playfulness here, but also a faint air of paternalism, especially in the context
of Bass’s modest manifesto on graphic design in title sequences. Read in the light of his
desire to “induce” audience attention to the screen during the opening credits, Bass’s design
philosophy suggests that audiences could only be engaged through direct address and literal
renderings. Graphic design could productively engage audiences, but only by directly
planting symbols in his text (vortexes in Vertigo) or by literalizing ideological structures
(humdrum office culture in North by Northwest). Bass’s imagery is potent, his iconography
economical, his expression direct; yet as this chapter will demonstrate, in spite of its
subsequent widespread adoption as the predominant ethos in title design, the approach used
by Saul Bass in designing opening credits was but one of many. In the chapter to follow, I
will demonstrate that title sequences during this particularly fertile inauguration of the
1950s and 1960s allowed discourses and designs more sophisticated and challenging Bass’s
mode of narrative condensation and audience preparation.

95

Graphic Design, Advertising, and Cinema—A Muddled History
Film title sequences in the 1950s and 1960s were a site of convergence between
aesthetic and industrial practices for graphic design and advertising. Accordingly, before
exploring the careers of Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro, advertising
designers who migrated to the cinema, it is first necessary to establish some of the broader
business and creative contours of graphic design and advertising during the period in which
these practitioners worked. I use the word “practitioners” deliberately and with great
circumspection, because it is not immediately clear how to label the careers of those creative
personnel, like Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro, who moved with various levels of ease
between the world of commercial-, fine-, and industrial arts; dabbled with film; made forays
into television; pioneered the use of video; and experimented with typography. Moreover, as
summarised by William Golden, best known for his graphic design work at CBS Television
during the 1950s and 1960s,
the dilemma of the literate advertising designer is that
emotionally he is part small businessman and part artist. He
isn’t strong enough to cut himself from the world of business
to make the personal statement of the artist. He isn’t a pure
enough businessman to turn his attention completely away
from the arts. He somehow wants the best of both worlds.
35

In addition to the myriad and varying positions, roles, functions that these and other graphic
designers occupied during the course of their careers, their relationship to the business
culture they associated with was also particularly fraught.
36
Because the responsibilities of a
graphic designer were so ill defined, and his creative disposition equally contested, this brief
96
excursus into graphic design and advertising history will provide the necessary context to
ground my later analysis of the title sequences created by Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro.
The following understanding of the artistic and commercial environment in advertising
is gleaned from these Annuals of Advertising and Editorial Art and Design (later amended to
include Television in 1968), which published the best of advertising in every year as
determined by the advertising Art Director’s Club of New York, as well as from other
primary sources—newspaper articles, confessionals-cum-autobiographies-cum-hagiographies
by advertising executives, industry trade journals, newsreel footage, etc.
37
Secondary sources,
such as retrospectives on different advertising decades,
38
histories of graphic design, and
cultural studies critiques of the period have also proved valuable. Two amongst the last (not
least) of these, Lynn Spigel’s TV By Design, and Thomas Crow’s Modern Art in the Common
Culture, are excellent chronicles of the 1960s nexus between fine art and mass media.
Spigel’s is certainly more industry-oriented in its mien than Crow’s artist-centric account,
but both have proved extremely valuable in shaping my understanding of this time period.
39

In the following pages, I will traverse the history of postwar graphic design and advertising
40

following World War II through to the end of the 1960s, with sideways excursions into fine
art and corporate culture.

Graphic Design
Universally, accounts of post-World War II graphic design point to a moment of
renewal, of a return to the vitality of the pre-war period. The exigencies of state propaganda
in the service of both Allied and Axis war efforts meant that, according to Philip Meggs and
97
Alston Purvis in the seminal and authoritative Meggs’ History of Graphic Design “many
painters, illustrators, and designers,” an overwhelming majority of them plucked from the
fields of advertising personnel, “received commissions from the U.S. Office of War
Information.”
41
The postwar period saw a move away from the highly representational,
realistic illustrations such as those drawn by Norman Rockwell, or the famous “We Can Do
It!” poster of the American war effort into an era of renewed growth and interest in “graphic
design.”
42
Drawings and illustrations gestured towards photorealism or a nominally
transparent “realism,” an indexical representation of the real world without the purported
expressive intervention of the working artist—all to remaining ideologically “neutral” or
“transparent” in the service of directness and economy of expression. Graphic design, by
contrast, is built upon an ideology of the plasticity and manipulation of visual elements in
the service of communication. Indeed, the term “graphic design” is said to have originated
with book designer William Addison Dwiggins, who used the phrase in 1922 to “describe his
activities as an individual who brought structural order and visual form to printed
communications.”
43
The ideas of “structural order” and “visual form” suggests a re-
asssemblage of the visual world to create a message (or a reality) that is anything but
indexically transparent or direct. In this way, graphic design in the postwar period mirrored
contemporaneous developments in the world of fine art, particularly Abstract Expressionism,
a movement perilously difficult to define, but at bare minimum is constituted at the
boundaries by a movement away from indexical fidelity and figuration.
44

A number of creative/design manifestoes (albeit not labelled as such) published in the
wake of World War II period, are a testament to the restlessness and soul-searching during
98
this period in the graphic arts.
45
Amongst all of these, Thoughts on Design (1947), a
prescriptive tome by Paul Rand, was by far the most influential on the worlds of graphic art
and advertising. Rand was a Pratt Institute-educated designer who worked for Weintraub
agency with Bill Bernbach,
46
taught at Yale University from the mid 1950s through to the
end of the 1960s, and is perhaps best known for having created corporate logos for
Westinghouse, IBM, UPS, ABC, Yale University Press, and others besides.
47
During the
prewar period, Rand was credited with bringing the influence of “the modern [art]
movement, particularly the works of Klee, Kandinsky, and the cubists”
48
to populist
magazines,
49
and, as pronounced by the celebrated Bauhaus designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,
with wresting the American tradition from its tradition of visually “old-fashioned
advertising.”
50
In Thoughts on Design, Rand decreed that good design is a negotiation
between “the beautiful and the useful”:
In advertising, the contemporary approach to art is based on
a simple concept, a concept of the advertisements as an
organic and functional unit, each element of which is
integrally related to the others, in harmony with the whole,
and essential to the execution of the idea….Such an
evolution logically precludes extraneous trimmings and
“streamlined” affectations.
51

His great innovation was to move graphic design at large (and advertising in particular) in
the United States out of its reliance of illustration (a la Rockwell) and into the realm of the
symbolic. His work is characterised by an ability to “manipulate visual form (shape, color,
space, line, value)” in such a way that they “could have a self-contained life, both symbolic
and expressive”
52
without reliance on representational art. Instead of pointing to some other
referent, Rand’s designs were nested, “universally understood signs and symbols”
53
that
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submitted predominantly to their own internal logics. Paul Rand’s definition of design as
“integration of form and function”
54
came to bear the greatest influence on US graphic
design in the years following World War II until roughly the middle of the 1960s, when the
grip of sleek modernism and simplicity espoused by Rand was weakened by the so-called
“Postmodern” movement—the counter-culturally ornate letterforms and almost Baroque
psychedelia favoured by Wes Wilson, Richard Griffin, and Victor Mocosco, working out of
San Francisco.
55
This era of graphic design that moved away from figurative illustrations
meant that many aesthetic discourses, from the high-brow to the low-brow, and everything
in between, were welcome in the field. As a result, the post-World War II period was rife
with many different modes of experimentation. In this environment, designers like Saul Bass,
Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro, were able to thrive, as different as
their materiel and dispositions were, because Rand’s ethos of “integration of form and
function” offered no prescriptions as to how those ideals might be achieved.
If the Rand-inspired era of graphic design was rampant with aesthetic experiments,
some of the most important of these occurred in the graphic design-related field of
typography in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Philip Meggs and Alston Purvis, up until
the 1960s, typesetting was overwhelmingly beholden to the printing press: “most display
typography was the hand-set metal type of Gutenberg’s day.”
56
But beginning in that decade,
developments in “photo-type” were beginning to make metal typesetting somewhat
obsolete. Letterforms were instead printed on photographic paper with greater frequency,
which meant a revolution in how type could be laid out in magazines:
100
Letterspacing [sic] could be compressed to extinction and
forms could overlap. A greater range of type sizes was
available; type could be set to any size without losing
sharpness. Special lenses could be used to expand, condense,
italicize, blackslant, or outline letterforms.
57

Because typographers no longer had to invest large sums of money to create blocks of unique
metal letterforms, photo-type allowed for a proliferation of unique typefaces; moreover,
because designers were no longer beholden to the Gutenberg-era restrictions of letter
spacing, type could be set in ways that were only limited by the designer’s imagination.
Relevant to this chapter, a significant typographical experiment was undertaken by the
design firm Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and Geismar (BCG) which took advantage of this new
typographical plasticity. BCG took a somewhat contrary approach, believing that
typography needed no adornments or symbolism—type, rather, could communicate directly
through plastic manipulation. The firm produced an 8 ½ x 7 inch booklet called “Watching
Words Move,” inserted into volume 6 of the British magazine Typographica in 1962.
58
In
this booklet, they experimented with type, not merely as a vehicle for the clarity and
legibility of words, but as a bearer of meaning in its own right. Brownjohn et al made the
pronouncement that “words, words can have personality, and they don’t need special
typefaces or funny hats to do so.”
59
(See Fig. 12 & 13)
These experiments by Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar were a playful variation on
the postwar Swiss modernist typographers, also known as the Neue Grafik (New Graphic
Design), after the magazine of the same name.
60
Under the influence of Richard Loshe, Josef
Müller-Brockmann, and Hans Neuberg, design emanating from Switzerland came to
represent the epitome of the International Style: “austere and sober”
61
typography, rendered
101
in unadorned, sans serif typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk, or Helvetica, spaced according to
the principles of a geometric grid (though often off-centred in layouts, or tilted at angle).
Typography, as with BCG, was the nexus of graphical interest; type became the plastic
elements of experimentation and design in and of themselves, with the accompanying
images—if any—almost subordinate, or enlarged in the frame to a point where otherwise
recognisable objects became abstract, all in the name of finding “an absolute and universal
form of graphic expression through objective and impersonal presentation.”
62
To its
detractors, Neue Graphik represented a rather limited palette of expressive potential given
its rigid and ordered structure, considered to be “inflexible and dogmatic”;
63
to its
supporters it demonstrated “a certain visual poetry, a mixture of rigor and experimentation,
a personal quest in which to attract the eye or make it read.”
64
As we will see later in this
chapter, the influence of Neue Grafik extended beyond Brownjohn et al.’s typographical
experiments into the realm of film, particularly the design of Maurice Binder’s title sequence
for Dr. No.
In the history of title sequences, such experiments in typography would also provide an
early education for Robert Brownjohn. It should also be noted that photo-type
developments in this period brought the print arts into closer alignment with the cinema.
Though certain firms like Pacific Title & Art were still occasionally painting title cards onto
panes of glass to be photographed by a motion picture camera,
65
optical printing techniques
had allowed for experimenting with type and graphics in film since the 1930s.
66
Pablo
Ferro’s title sequences are particularly noteworthy examples of the plasticity available as a
result of techniques similar to photo-type that were used in the cinema. The underlying
102
development during this historical period was that the typesetting techniques of print
advertising and cinema converged in the early 1960s. This made it easier for graphic artists
to move between these different media because they did not have to alter their workflow
between traditional letterpress type and photo-typography. Despite any experimentation or
careerist movements between graphic design and the cinema, however, most graphic design
in the 1950s and 1960s was commercial in nature. Graphic design during this period was
overwhelmingly contracted out by advertisers working along New York’s Madison Avenue.

Advertising
Until the late 1940s, the advertising world was dominated, both rhetorically and
financially, by a handful of major firms situated in New York City, amongst them J. Walter
Thompson, Young & Rubicam, and BBDO, all of whom had survived the Great
Depression,
67
and become well-entrenched atop the industry in terms of selling philosophies
and billing receipts. Beginning in the early-1950s, small boutique firms challenged this
hegemony, eschewing contemporary trends of the “hard sell,” imploring consumers to buy
the biggest and best, or the Sachplakat, the antiquated approach of presenting an individual
picture of the product, with its name beneath.
68
According to Patrick Cramsie,
This new brand of communication relied on the smart sell, an
approach that demanded a little more from the viewer.
Where each of the former methods required the viewer to be
passive, this latter kind required them to be active. The
viewer had to engage with the design in order to decode its
more thoughtful and sometimes pointedly unorthodox
methods. The main tool used to elicit this more active
engagement was wit. (My emphasis)
69

103
The most celebrated of the firms to traffic in this mode of actively engaging the audience
through active participation and “wit” was Doyle Dane Bernbach. Founded in New York
City in 1949 by Ned Doyle, Maxwell Dane, and Bill Bernbach, the firm’s approach was
typified by their now infamous campaign for the Volkswagen “Beetle,” that squat rounded
car with little of the sex appeal of its American competitors, and freighted with the
unenviable legacy of having been the automobile of the Third Reich. The Beetle bore none
of the design elements of the jet age: fins that resembled wings, and rounded conical lights
that mimicked a jet turbine exhaust. Moreover, in an era when cars were usually portrayed
alongside a human presence in the picture, the Volkwagen magazine ads were absent of
people and more reliant on their striking compositions. DDB’s advertisements for
Volkswagen were evocative of Rand’s belief in graphical simplicity: the image of a car against
a white backdrop, beneath which sat a concise headline, and a body of witty copy extolling
the car’s (outwardly dubious) virtues. The vehicle became an object of contemplation, an
element to be visually consumed outside of its purpose as a functional family automobile. In
so doing, DDB set the model for advertisements that would garner praise during its own
time and in many retrospectives of design: graphically intensive design that actively engaged
readership, bolstered by copy-writing that was witty, self-deprecating, and even a little
humorous. They were not the only firm rethinking the nature of advertising, but with these
traits in hand DDB was seen as a plucky, boutique alternative to the relatively stodgy
behemoths J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, BBDO, and the like. These latter
firms had annual billings that far outstripped those of DDB, but Doyle Dane Bernbach were
widely seen as the standard-bearers of what manner of campaigns a “creative” advertising
104
agency should be producing. In the mid-1960s, trade journals seemed to agree; Printer’s Ink,
no doubt inspired by the DDB approach, wrote in 1964 of the “adult commercial,” a
development in advertising that “depends on the viewer’s ability to grasp a visual
metaphor,”
70
heralding the advent of sophisticated consumers, and creating rhetorical space
for a demographic that could understand, appreciate, and even participate in, the expressive
qualities of good graphic design in advertising. Advertisers were reaching out to audiences in
a more sophisticated fashion, and this benefitted designers like Brownjohn, and Ferro, whose
creative output was more experimental and provocative than most.
During the postwar period, however, this ideal of a more progressive advertising
audience was contested by developments in consumer research. At the same time as DDB
was pioneering the “smart sell” by appealing to consumers’ more refined instincts,
advertising executives like David Ogilvy, came to prominence and actively advocated against
the use of art. Ogilvy claimed instead that the best way to sell products and services was to
solicit from focus groups what appealed to them in advertising—and then give it to them.
Ogilvy’s book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, hit bookstands in 1963, containing many
anecdotes about the successes of his firm, Ogilvy & Mather, as well as prescriptions on how
to properly conduct advertising business.
71
Ogilvy came to advertising from Hollywood,
where he had worked under George Gallup at the Audience Research Institute, which
pioneered the technique of audience research to predict the future success of feature films.
72

Also an extraordinarily gifted salesman, Ogilvy brought this experience to bear when he
moved into the world of commercial, where he championed quasi-scientific research over
more ephemeral ideas such as “artistic prestige” and “good design”:
105
Over and over again research has shown that photographs sell
more than drawings. They attract more readers. They deliver
more appeal. They are better remembered….Photographs
represent reality, whereas drawings represent fantasy, which is
less believable….
73

In the process, Ogilvy also establishes an advertising credo that very closely resembles Paul
Rand’s design philosophy: direct, efficient, immediate communication with an audience
through economy of expression, and a minimum of attention drawn to itself in the name of
“creative” advertising. In Confessions of an Advertising Man, we find David Ogilvy railing
against the ideal of “creativity” that had made its way into the lexicon and come to permeate
the field of advertising from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. He stated explicitly that “I
will not allow [advertising agents] to use the word CREATIVE to describe the functions they
are to perform in our agency,” and that he would like to “blot the word creativity out of our
lives.”
74
He cites this emphasis on “creativity” as the reason for a particularly pernicious
tradition in his field: advertisements that couple an intent to sell with a secondary desire,
that “the public and the advertising world remember it for a long time as an admirable piece
of work”
75
(original emphasis). Ogilvy was the chief proponent of a school that believed a
good advertisement was one that “sold a product without drawing attention to itself”
76

(original emphasis). The public shouldn’t remark on the persuasive qualities of an ad, but
rather be so persuaded by those qualities that it is moved to buy a particular product.
Ogilvy’s belief is a none-too-subtle, sour grapes rebuke to the DDB’s approach of wit
and reflexivity, but it also levels a critique at the Art Directors Club of New York (ADC-
NY). The Art Directors Club of New York was an organization that had existed in the
1920s, but whose influence had begun to grow in the creative climate following the second
106
World War. As Michelle Bogart describes in Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art,
directors are those personnel in advertising agencies responsible for setting the visual style
and creative temperament of an advertising agency, and work with copywriters to negotiate
the advertisements’ visual necessities (in print or on television) with the exigencies of the
written word. The ADC-NY was a place where Art Directors could find a “creative outlet
that enabled them to override their ambivalence about having to put pragmatic concerns
above artistic excellence.”
77
They did so by giving out gold medals for exceptional work in
many different modes of graphic design, and published the Annual of Advertising and Editorial
Art and Design, which awarded the varied work of graphic designers as belonging to the
following overarching categories: print advertisements, booklets, posters, sale displays,
product packaging, record album covers, promotional kits, letterheads/trade marks,
calendars, editorial layouts, and magazine covers.
78
(Television commercials began to be
awarded in 1967).
79
The awards were given to various designs, irrespective of how financially
successful these designs proved to be in the case of print advertisements and television
commercials; the principles of “good” or “effective” design were paramount, as fraught and
contested as that ideal might be. As a result of their awards, art directors like Robert
Brownjohn found themselves in high demand, not only in New York, but in London as well.
Despite his myriad personal problems, all more or less related to his drug addiction,
Brownjohn’s reputation as a hotshot art director meant that he was able to move with
relative ease from BCG in New York to J. Walter Thompson to McCann-Erickson to
McCammell & Hudon in London.
80

107
As art directors like became celebrated figures within the advertising community, their
elevated stature allowed them to move into other aesthetic realms. In 1963, Fred
Mogubgub, of Ferro, Mogubgub and Schwartz, became celebrated as something of an
American “new wave” filmmaker, on the back of his editing work for a Ford television
commercial. Three years later, the New York Film Festival featured a program titled “One
Minute Movies,” where television commercials shared the screen with experimental short
films by Tony Conrad and Victor Grauer—including one of Mogubgub’s
commercials.
81
American Richard Lester worked as an advertising art director in Great
Britain before trying his hand in television, and eventually directing the Beatles films A Hard
Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965).
82
Yet even if they did not move into the director’s chair
like Mogubgub and Lester, the esteem and awards lent to graphic designers by the ADC-NY
meant that their design work was in higher demand, and much of that demand was found in
the form of producing work for television commercials. As Juliann Sivulka writes in Soap,
Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising, television advertising revenues
reached $100 million in 1950, and by 1954, TV was “the leading medium for advertising.”
83

Because billing sheets are closely kept corporate secrets, further financial numbers are
difficult to divine, but evidence of television’s boom can be found elsewhere. Television
commercials were becoming enough of a corporate and creative phenomenon that the
American TV Commercials Festival (renamed the Clios in 1963)
84
debuted on May 4 1960,
at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel,
85
with over 1,000 commercials submitted for its inaugural
awards ceremony.
86
Working to fuel this prestige for advertising commercials, 1964
witnessed a small but significant growth of New York-based television production
108
companies, including Pablo Ferro films.
87
And during the period of time between October
1967 and June 1968 alone, over 100 new production firms were founded in New York to
provide services in creating television commercials and industrial films.
88
A significant
portion of these production companies were hired by advertising firms to execute
commercials based on ideas conceived by their art directors. Pablo Ferro built his television
reel though his companies (first Ferro, Mogubgub, and Schwartz; later Pablo Ferro Films)
receiving production commissions from several major advertising firms, including McCann-
Erickson and BBDO. These commissions enabled him to transition into film with the title
design for Dr. Strangelove, as his work caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick.
89
In light of
these developments I would argue that Saul Bass successfully moving from advertising into
title design was an important step paving the way for Binder, Brownjohn, Ferro and others
to move into the cinema. However, the climate of prestige created by the Art Directors Club
of New York and the growth of television as a medium for professional development were
equally significant. At the same time that various creators and critics were debating the
entrée of various forms of art into the world of graphic design, it is also clear that those same
groups were discussing the penetration of graphic design into the cinema.

Cinema
With the arrival of Saul Bass in Hollywood in the mid-1950s, when he created designs
for s Carmen Jones, major film studios had definitively taken notice of the print
advertisement and television commercial work that was being done in New York design
circles. And in that admiration, they sought to emulate its successes in the promotion of
109
their films. The New York to Los Angeles trajectory is not quite uni-directional, because not
every graphic designer moved out to Hollywood to work full time, and most still based their
businesses in New York. However, in the 1950s and 60s, there is at least a sense of cultural-
geographical co-optation, in that Los Angeles studios were interested in trying New York-
based graphic designers on for size. During this period, the creative centre of American
commercial filmmaking was located in Los Angeles. If Hollywood sought to capitalise on
New York creativity in the postwar period, it usually took the form of bringing New York
writers
90
or Broadway actors into the Los Angeles fold, assimilating their talents. At the same
time, however, actors like Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman still remained a world apart.
Though they enjoyed success in the mid-1960s and beyond, they did not possess look and
bearing of stereotypical Hollywood leading men, and were not comfortably subsumed into
its machinery.
91
Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro represent a graphic design correlate to these
creators, because though they were employed by Hollywood, they never wholly succumbed
to its influence, and were able to retain a high degree of autonomy throughout their
respective employ. And as these New York- and London-based designers lent their talents to
cinema, individuals in the graphic design community began to take notice of their work.
Whatever the exact geographical movements, Bass’s influence meant that it became de
rigeur for major motion pictures to hire graphic designers. As reported in various trade
journals, they were usually in the later stages of pre-production just before beginning
principal photography, to work on opening titles for their films. In the summer of 1965, one
such journal, Print magazine, devoted an entire issue on the subject of “Graphic Design for
the Performing Arts.” In it, various articles examined how it had brought its influence to
110
bear on diverse areas, including the theatre of the ancient Greeks, film posters, television
graphics and promotion, live performing arts, and finally, film titles. The managing editor of
Print appears to have taken a rather dim view of graphic design in film stating that,
“particularly for film and theater design in the U.S. …the level of work is far below that
being done in other design fields. One of the purposes of this issue is to pinpoint this fact—
to explore the obstacles in the way of better design for the performing arts in the hope of
eliminating these obstacles.”
92

Whatever the parlous state of graphic design evaluated by Print in this special issue, its
publication is a clear indication that graphic design had become embedded into the creative
matrix of the cinema. When it came to commissioning title designs, critic, professor (and
sometime designer) Everett Aison established that film producers took one of two
approaches. The first was very laissez faire: call up an optical printing house, and tell the
person on the other side of the phone (who is decidedly not a designer) “give me some type
for the credits.” The second was quite au courant: “Aware that titles are ‘in,’ a producer will
hire a designer to provide some ‘wild’ titles. The designer, aware that this is his golden
opportunity to make a ‘splash’ and be noticed, goes full-steam ahead.”
93
Leaving Aison’s
rather snide commentary aside for the moment, it was clear that a number of producers and
productions were aware of the added value provided by creative title designs, even if not
every studio was caught up in its vogue.
It should be noted that, despite the seductive allure of exploring the creative genius of
individual design auteurs, the overwhelming majority of titles in the 1950s and 1960s were
executed not by individual creators, but by a number of ancillary production companies with
111
streamlined creative practices. Amongst them were Consolidated Film Industries, National
Screen Service, Howard Anderson Company, and Pacific Title & Art.
94
These companies
were not quite the “just give me some type for the credits” school derided by Aison above,
but worked in a more illustrative tradition. Pacific Title & Art was by far the most
productive of these, as CFI was more involved in the business of film processing, NSS
focussed on publicity materials and trailers.
95
Pacific Title, by contrast, employed over 100
artists to execute the designs for title sequences.
96
During this period, Pacific Title had not
yet embraced photo-type and was still clinging to the rather outmoded practice of hand-
painting letterforms on individual glass titles until the end of the 1960s
97
—the very exemplar
of Bass’s staid titles.
98
Though exact figures of output are nearly impossible to come by,
Pacific Title performed the overwhelming majority of titling in all areas of commercial film
production from the 1940s through to the early 1960s. As the Paramount Decrees forced
the major studios to divest themselves of their theatres, maintaining in-house titling
departments was no longer financially viable without the guarantee of receipts from studio-
owned theatres. Accordingly, Paramount and Twentieth-Century Fox closed their titling
departments in the late 1940s,
99
and by the late 1950s, Fox, MGM, and Warner Bros.
turned virtually all titling assignments to Pacific Title & Art,
100
according to Gordon
Hubbard, who worked with the firm beginning in 1954 and became its president in 1962.
101

This means Pacific Title & Art’s volume of titling work outstrips the creative output of
Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro by at least an order of magnitude, if not several. The simple
fact is that these individual creators were embracing technological advancements, which in
112
turn allowed them greater freedom in visual experimentation than their larger industrial
counterparts.
Other design businesses occupied a space between independent designers like Binder,
Brownjohn, and Ferro and larger production companies such Pacific Title & Art. The most
representative of these was perhaps the firm DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. Founders David
DePatie and Isadore “Friz” Freleng worked in the Warner Bros. animation department until
May 1963, when the company decided to shutter its commercial animation division. But
instead of going the fully independent route, DePatie and Freleng kept an office on the
Warners lot in Burbank,
102
and remained intimately bound up with the studio. They
producing the opening credits, for a handful of Warners films, including The Pink Panther
(1963) and The Great Race (1965). DePatie-Freleng Enterprises presents a picture of
industrial symbiosis. DePatie, son of Warner Bros. Vice President B.L. DePatie, used his
production acumen and business sense to leverage the talents of Freleng, who originated the
Looney Tunes characters Porky Pig, Sylvester the cat, Tweetie, Yosemite Sam, Speedy
Gonzales, and Daffy Duck
103
into title design commissions. Such work for the animated title
sequence on Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther (1963) is particularly exceptional in that the
literal Pink Panther animated in the titles (the name is a nom-du-crime for a burglar) created
a slew of merchandising opportunities. Moreover, DePatie and Freleng’s open credits are the
only instance I have discovered in my research where a title sequence has created a variety of
spin-off opportunities. Captivated by the success of the titles, United Artists signed on to
produce a series of animated shorts beginning with The Pink Phink (1964),
104
and the series
later migrated to television. From the following pages, it would appear that title design in
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the 1950s and 60s was exclusively the domain of individual auteurs—almost entirely middle-
aged, male, and maladjusted graphic designers—moving freely between the worlds of
advertising and cinema. However, both Pacific Title and DePatie-Freleng serve to highlight
that there were many exceptions to this paradigm.
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The foregoing traces some of the dominant trends and movements in graphic design,
advertising, fine art, and typography, from the post World War II period through to the end
of the 1960s, though it is far from exhaustive. It is important to note that creative
professionals moved across these disciplines with relative ease: print designers moved into
television; graphic designers experimented with typography; “fine art” artists were employed
by commercial firms, both before
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and after
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they became celebrated by art collectors and
critics; and in one celebrated instance, an art director, Richard Lester, became a prominent
film and television director. Lester’s case, however, was unusual. The majority of graphic
designers, if they made the transition into directing motion pictures, made films that were
experimental, avant-garde, or wildly eccentric, as we will see later in the chapter.
The largest migration from advertising to the cinema occurred in the form of graphic
designers employed by studios to create title sequences and promotional campaigns for
commercial narrative films, both major and minor. They were also often hired to create
logos for film stationery—Pablo Ferro’s screen logo for The Russians are Coming, The
Russians are Coming adorned the letterheads of communiqués sent out from the desks of
director Norman Jewison and producer Walter Mirisch
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—as well as film trailers, television
spots, and posters, usually charging a blanket fee for all design services rendered.
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Title
sequences are slightly different entities than trailers and promotional posters, in that they are
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more closely bound to the film proper. However, neither are they fully integrated into the
diegesis, because they were (and still are) often bracketed off from the main narrative action.
The titles exist in a liminal state, hovering between the extra-textual (or even para-textual)
matrix that surrounds the film, and the film itself. Indeed, opening credits could be argued to
have greater affinity with posters and trailers during this period because studios often trusted
these three responsibilities to the same artist, and gave them relative autonomy (cf. Saul
Bass, and Pablo Ferro). More often than not, this division of artistic labour meant that
there was frequently more affinity (visual, structural) between trailers, posters, and titles,
than between titles and the film itself, as I will demonstrate in this chapter. Having sketched
out the landscape of graphic design, advertising, and cinema in the 1950s and 60s, I will now
turn to the main subject at hand: the work of Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and
Pablo Ferro.
Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro are gathered here because they
worked on prominent films of the 1950s and 1960s, and because many (though not all) of
their title sequences expanded the expressive possibilities available to opening title designers.
The moving image careers of Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro all began through employment
by and in major advertising agencies—the similarities between their title sequences and
personal lives essentially end there. They differed in temperament, chosen artistic medium,
working process, and affiliation with commercial firms, yet are unified in that they all pushed
the boundaries of how a title sequence should look, how it should operate with respect to
garnering audience attention, how it discursively related to the narrative diegesis.
Individually and collectively, Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro present some of the most
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intellectually sophisticated, and creatively challenging designs of the time period, and
represent some of the most sustained and rigorous interrogations of film aesthetics to be
found in American cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.

Maurice Binder—The “European” New Yorker
Maurice Binder’s graphic design career was characterised by two major migrations: first
towards Hollywood, and subsequently away from it. Born in New York City in 1925, Binder
started his professional life working in the advertising department at Macy’s in New York,
and according to an account in Amateur Movie-Maker magazine, “ climbed from tea boy to
art director,”
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where his interests turned to film and television advertising. During his
ascendance, “he moved from designing catalogues and advertisements, and eventually
oversaw all of [Macy’s] publicity.”
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After he completed his World War II service where he
was stationed somewhere in the Middle East, Binder moved west to Los Angeles and landed
a job supervising the artistic output of Universal Studios publicity department. He then
moved to Columbia Pictures, where he performed similar work, distinguishing himself with
the promotional campaign for Gilda (1946), directed by Charles Vidor. By mid-1947 at the
very latest, he apparently had moved into an Art Director’s job at Columbia Pictures,
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though he appears not to have distinguished himself to any great degree. In 1957, Binder
formed an independent production company and created the opening title sequence for The
James Dean Story (1957),
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a documentary on the actor’s too-short life, directed by George
W. George and a not-yet-established Robert Altman. Binder’s firm specialised in
promotional materials, posters, trailers, and most prominently, title sequences for films.
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Beginning with Indiscreet and Damn Yankees in 1958,
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Binder began collaborating with
Stanley Donen. For the next eleven years, Binder would be Donen’s exclusive title designer
and created opening credits for a total of nine films directed by him.
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During this particularly fertile period of the waning 1950s and early 1960s, Binder’s
work brought him to London, where he made the acquaintance of James Bond Producers
Harry Saltzman and “Cubby” Broccoli. Saltzman and Broccoli were in attendance when The
Grass is Greener (1960) premiered in London’s Leicester Square in April 1961, and, dutifully
impressed by Binder’s title sequence, they approached Binder and commissioned him to
produce opening credits and promotional materials to Dr. No. for £2,000.
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Binder
emigrated to London in 1962,
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and became part of the large expatriate community that
moved to England during the mid-1960s. He would have to travel to the United States
occasionally to consult on Hollywood productions, but he became so firmly ensconced in
London that he wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times in 1972 extolling its virtues:
Thomas Wood is so right in stating that we former Southern
Californians find the British way of life much more to our
liking. Some of us, like Fred Zinneman, in fact, have become
so un-Hollywood, that you can find his name and address in
the London telephone book. Mine, too.
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While in London, Binder became known as something of a sophisticate and a gentleman
scholar, and cultivated a collection of “what he considered to be the best of early Modernist
art,” amongst them Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, and Miro.
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He turned his apartment into an
ad-hoc space for displaying these artists’ work. As a result of his highbrow tastes and his
permanent emigration, Binder began to be identified within the filmmaking community
more with his European geography than his American roots,
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an impression that only
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deepened through the title designs he produced for a number of European masters. He was
commissioned to create opening credits for the remake of La Ronde (1964), and for
Barbarella (1968), both directed by Roger Vadim; Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965); After
the Fox (1966), helmed by Vittorio de Sica; and The Taming of The Shrew (1967), directed
by Franco Zefferelli.
Doubtless his association with the innate British-ness of Bond films also bolstered his
“European” credentials, but Binder’s career with the franchise was almost over as soon as it
began. After Dr. No (1962), Saltzman and Broccoli contracted Robert Brownjohn to design
the opening titles on From Russia With Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964), but after being
pressed to sign a long-term commitment, Brownjohn balked, and the job reverted back to
Binder. He would be responsible for designing every licensed Bond film
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until his death in
1991. Though Binder was primarily known for a trademark combination of veiled eroticism
and intensely coloured graphics that characterized the Bond titles, these titles are only a
smattering of Binder’s output;
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Pat Kirkham, who has written several popular articles on
Binder, estimates that he produced approximately 200 title sequences while working in
Europe, most of which have not been adequately credited to him.
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Binder’s title sequences are not characterised by any particular or dominant overriding
style, though it is possible to align them roughly into three major paradigms. The first is
Binder’s fondness for gestures of media reflexivity, both questioning the ontological function
of the technical apparatuses required to make various media, and in the norms of production
culture that create and circulate those media. The second is acute awareness of
contemporary art and design trends. And the third, semi-related to the second is a tendency
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to borrow from the cultural zeitgeist, frequently in a way that is only partially related to the
content of the film to follow. These categorisations, of course, are fluid and circumspect,
because what unifies Binder’s designs, other than a rigorously intellectual approach to
graphic design, is their lack of uniformity. He was just as liable to work in animation as he
was with live photography, and just as apt to incorporate the film’s primary themes and
metaphors into his sequences as he was to disregard them entirely. Whatever the
complications and contradictions in his oeuvre, Binder’s titles constitute an open system,
welcoming outside discourses into the world of the film and allowing them to bleed into the
diegesis, all the while enquiring after the form of the medium in which he worked. Binder
did not seek to represent (or condense) it fully into a single icon, as was Saul Bass’s wont.
Here it is important to illustrate Binder’s visual invention in contradistinction to the
visual and narrative-thematic distillation practiced by Saul Bass by comparing a Bass title
sequence from Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and a Binder’s title sequence from
Charade, directed by Stanley Donen. The Vertigo title sequence, superimposes a spirograph
vorticies (known as Lissajous form)
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over a woman’s face (See Fig. 8). It starts as a dense,
condensed form, and then opens up in the middle, rather like a human iris (See Figs. 14a and
14b). Bernard Hermann’s ominous score sets the mood, while Bass’s titles work to condense
the narrative and prepare the audience for the symbols and themes they are about to receive.
The Lissajous iris/eye concatenation distils Vertigo’s investment with looking, and the
woman’s face, revealed piecemeal, references to its libidinal obsession with femininity, and
controlling a woman’s body. The titles also foreshadow the film’s overriding symbol: the
vortices that will later appear in Kim Novak’s hair, the painting in the museum, and the
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tightly bunched bouquet of flowers posed in the picture (See Fig. 15).
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Bass’s sequence
symbolic and narrative condensation, but it also operates by pointing to elements we will
later see the film proper. Bass’s symbols stand in for a whole host of Hitchcock’s thematic
preoccupations in Vertigo, but they also present abstracted forms of what the audience will
soon see in the film proper. Bass sets the mood of the forthcoming film by showing us literal
examples of the spirals that will later appear in the diegesis, seemingly everywhere, according
to its protagonist Jimmy Stewart.
Maurice Binder also uses spirals in his title sequence for Charade, and like Vertigo, he
even superimposes these spirals over live action. But Binder’s imagery is in a different
register: his design for Charade is about pure graphics, and playing with forms of shape, line,
and colour. At the end of the pre-credit sequence a body is thrown from a moving train and
lands dead, facing upwards beside the tracks. A horn sounds, an instrumental version of the
Henri Mancini title song swells, and two spirals, one blue-purple and one pale green, rotate
in opposite directions (See Fig. 16a). Their place is taken by four brightly-coloured
horizontal lines undulating across a black backdrop (See Fig. 16b), which condense into a
tight banding across the screen. The bands transform into the names of the movie’s stars
(Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, etc., see Fig. 16c), and then start to undulate again. The
rest of the sequence is similarly graphically intensive, as ribbons of colour enfold white text,
trap a series of supporting players’ names in a maze (See Fig. 16d), or else present a screen
filled with alternating light and dark bands of colour that wink like the leaves in a Venetian
blind (See Fig. 16e). Yet none of these forms actually appear in the main film itself; they are
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used by Binder only to riff graphically on screen in the titles. Binder’s investment remains
primarily a visual one.
As compared to Bass’s literal rendering, Binder’s titles for Charade trade in metaphor
and simile. He suggests the labyrinthine intrigues and the maze of alliances that make up the
spy game that plays out in the film, and also the act of surveillance by looking through
blinds, but without any literal referent. There is no actual maze in the film, just a symbolic
one of trust misplaced and criminal alliances forged and broken. Instead of preparing the
audience for the film by showing it some of the film’s literal narrative tropes as Bass did for
Vertigo, Binder does so symbolically for Charade, a film with its tongue planted firmly in
cheek, by playing with the graphic design space of the screen. No doubt inspired by the art
of famous painters that he collected, Binder experiments with colour combinations and the
interrelation of geometric forms, and sets a mood for the film, subtracted of any actual
imagery and iconography that will appear in the diegesis.
Beginning in 1958, Binder practiced a series of reflexive visual experiments that he
would continue throughout the remainder of his title design career. The credits for Damn
Yankees, also represent a more sophisticated interrogation of the media in which he worked,
by ruminating on the nature of the cinematic apparatus and the intersections and
divergences between film and print. The pre-credit opening to Damn Yankees is a live action
affair, with a husband (Tab Hunter) glued to watching baseball on television while his wife
grumbles her displeasure. The title sequence then reverts to animation. A fanfare starts to
play as a red painted square grows from the top right corner of the screen, and the letters
“DAMN YANKEES,” in large capital letters fill the screen (See Fig. 17a). The words and
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background change colours—black against red, yellow against blue, etc. and finally red
against white—at which point the words shrink in the frame to become a series of red dots
(See Fig. 17b) which themselves become interspersed with black circles equal in size (See
Fig. 17c). The animated move is essentially a zoom out, away from the letters, but it actually
replicates a zoom into the text. When undertaking an extreme enlargement of image and
type from a newspaper or magazine layout, the image breaks down into its component parts;
the solid colours we see at a distance are actually composed out of a variegated field of
minute halftone dots that are printed in various combinations to replicate the full spectrum
of colours.
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In this moment, Binder is drawing on his experience as a print advertiser at
Macy’s. His work as an art director would have furnished him with a familiarity with
printing processes, because in creating layouts for catalogues and print advertisements, it
would have been virtually impossible to avoid very close scrutiny of images. For this instance,
Binder appears to be reflecting on his previous experience as a print designer by breaking up
the construction of images and words at a near-microscopic level.
This reading of the image is legitimated by one of Binder’s later title sequences, for the
Warren Beatty vehicle Kaleidoscope (1966), in which Binder would muse playfully about the
construction of words and images printed both on the screen and on paper. In those credits,
Binder creates some of the fractured effects suggested by the film’s title, for example tilting
two mirrored images of the British parliament at a 45-degree angle to one another, so that
the spires of Whitehall splay outwards from one another. But elsewhere, he puts knowledge
of printing processes to work. The film’s title, KALEIDOSCOPE, starts off printed in four
separate instances, each in a different corner of the screen, printed in block capitals in four
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distinct colours: purple, yellow, blue, and green; the four iterations of the words converge
into the centre, to form one title in white (See Figs. 18a and 18b). The result is literal
interpretation of additive colour theory, which states that white light is composed out of
individual complementary colours,
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knowledge that was used to create coloured film stock
in the 1930s and onwards. The four colours converging is also a nod to the fact that full
colour in print is composed out of four colour components, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and
Black (CMYK). Indeed, later in the Kaleidoscope titles, Binder decomposes shots of London
double-decker buses into a split-tome of magenta and yellow (over the credits for
Technicolor and the Director of Photography, no less); another shot of the Royal
Horseguards is split and mirrored diagonally into blue and green. Through this use of colour,
Binder is gesturing towards the gaudy colours that characterised the modish fashion of
Swinging London during the mid-1960s (and indeed, Kaleidoscope is an unabashed paean to
those free social mores), but it also smuggles a canny understanding and deconstruction of
how colour and light operate in image making, both in cinema and in print media.
Elsewhere, the remainder of the titles for Damn Yankees feature many other examples
where Binder muses about the composition of still and moving images at their most basic
structural level. The pioneering images captured by Eadweard Muybryide and Etienne-Jules
Marey remind us that ineluctably the cinematic image is composed from a series of still ones.
Binder reflects on this history and replicates that phenomenon, even down to those masters’
preoccupation with athletic bodies in motion. A baseball pitcher drawn in black outline
winds up and throws, his movement is broken down into a series of individual drawings that
progress from right to left across the screen (See Fig. 17d), and the flight of the ball is traced
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as a series of undulating white dots as it leaves the pitcher’s hand (See Fig. 17e). The image
follows the path of the ball by “panning” left, and then stops, at which point the ball
becomes a blur of accelerating lines (See Fig. 17f). As such the titles animate the very
transition from stasis to movement, a gesture that also reflects the nature of still
photography. If a traditional camera moves synchronised to the flight of the ball (and
captures the image with a fast shutter), it appears roughly circular in nature. The same ball,
captured with a camera in a fixed position relative to its flight as it moves across the image
plane, will appear blurred, thus Binder animates the difference in an image when it is
captured by a fixed camera and a moving camera. During the course of these aforementioned
moments, Binder blurs boundaries between drawn animation and the mechanical apparatus
of the film camera, and in so doing highlights the paradox that the discrete frames rendered
by the hand of the artist must be captured individually by the camera and assembled into a
succession of images in the film strip if they are to achieve motion.
Later, Binder further traces the evolution of film by exploring the nature of the motion
picture camera’s mechanism. A pitcher, silhouetted in black against a baseball stadium
adorned with bunting, winds up and throws off screen left, and upon that motion, the
animation simulates a quick pan, making the world rotate. As it does so, the pitcher and the
background stadium transform into lines of solid colour (See Figs. 17g, 17h, and 17i). The
move simulates the effect of a rapid swish pan, when the camera’s resolution becomes
unstable because the lens is moving too rapidly, and the image decays into an abstract wall of
stacked horizontal lines. Binder would again use a similar technique nearly a decade later for
the opening credits to Bedazzled (1967), directed by Stanley Donen and starring Dudley
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Moore. In this sequence we see glimpses of London through large, block-letter cutouts,
blurred into streaks of colour by a progression of rapid panning movements; the city is
transformed into walls of indecipherable forms and colours through the excessively fast
movement of the camera. In both Bedazzled and Damn Yankees, the camera, real or
synthesized, becomes an expressive paintbrush, taking the physical world and transforming it
into unrecognizable, abstract forms.
At this moment in the Damn Yankees sequence, Binder embeds the mechanics of a film
camera into the hand-drawn world of animation, but here he makes one of the several
allusions to modern art and design practices that would populate the rest of his career. The
pan then stops to reveal the titles of the Art Director Stanley Fleischer and other visually
minded creatives like the Set Decorator and Makeup Supervisor, framed within wide, thin
rectangles of solid colours—something of a middle-brow co-optation of abstract
expressionism. And to stretch Binder’s outside inspirations to their breaking point, the
vertical orange and red rectangle that serves as a backdrop to Stanley Donen’s title card
depicts a stadium turnstile but actually recalls something like a mid-cult Mark Rothko (See
Fig. 17j).
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Kirkham’s article paints Binder as a “gentleman scholar” and man of arts and
letters, very much interested in the weft and weave of highbrow culture, and I would argue
that Binder’s status as an avid collector of modern art and his familiarity with developments
in the field bore an influence on his title designs. In addition to these high culture insertions,
the simulated camera effects are unmistakable: in addition to replicating the camera
movements in his animation, Binder exuberantly flaunts an understanding of its
technological limitations (the lines from the swish pan) and its historical, ontological
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foundations (a progression of still images recomposed into a moving continuum). Binder
created a wholly animated title sequence for Damn Yankees, but in the process of a few
minutes, he cannily traverses visual influences from print to film to abstract art.
With other opening titles, Maurice Binder moved from meditating on the
construction of film images to the cultural climates and organizational structures that
produced those texts. The Mouse That Roared (1959) is rendered in very similar visual tones
as that of Damn Yankees, with muted blocks of colours dominating the screen from top to
bottom, with occasional graphic flourishes to make transitions between blocks of credits.
Prior to the title sequences, a white-robed woman stands on a pedestal, a torch borne aloft
in her right hand, light rays streaming out in all directions from the fiery source. She stands
in front of the word COLUMBIA in block capitals painted into relief. These are the familiar
titles of Columbia Pictures, but disquietingly so, with something subtly wrong. The word
COLUMBIA is at a slightly canted angle, rather than appearing square to the camera. And
after a few moments the woman looks down, and lifts up her robes. We cut to an insert of
her legs and feet, seeing a mouse on the blue pedestal. The woman alights down from the
pedestal and runs off screen; and upon a return to the wide shot, the flame is revealed to be
an electric light, with a cord dangling past the bottom edge of the frame. The mythos of
Hollywood image making is revealed to be nothing but a sham, built out of paper moons
and muslin trees.
Binder’s next title sequence for Stanley Donen, The Grass is Greener (1960), is a
similarly slight curio, conceived around a simple idea and executed without much visual élan,
but invested in breaking the strained seriousness of Hollywood self-image. He depicted the
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names of adult actors Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum, and Jean Simmons
above short shots of infants sitting, lying, and crawling on a field of green grass. Using thin
vertical split-screens to segment the 2.35:1 image, Binder reveals the infants one by one, and
through their movements, he literalises the film’s story, which involves the broke aristocrats
Grant and Kerr agreeing to split up in order to find wealthier partners (Simmons and
Mitchum, respectively). The titles to The Grass is Greener clearly trade on the old saw of
actors literally behaving like petulant children, and extends it to other film professionals.
One writer baby is depicted pecking at a typewriter whilst the other waves script pages in
the air, lying on his back; the composer baby bangs away at a miniature grand piano
keyboard; the director of photography tries to eat a filmstrip; the director (Donen) is caught
in freeze frame “yelling” at his crew. Though quite endearing, and a gentle lampoon of
Hollywood egos, The Grass is Greener credits have very little to recommend for themselves in
the way of invention; indeed, Binder admitted that his choice of child actors was motivated
by an evaluation “that babies on the lawn are sure-fire winners with the average family
audience.”
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These titles’ true interest is in its investment in reflexively engaging with film
production practices, and, as mentioned earlier, in its status a springboard from which
Binder leapt into his career designing opening titles for the James Bond film franchise.
As alluded to earlier, other writers debate Binder’s exact path to the job as James Bond
in-house title designer, yet we are given insight into his exact working process for Dr. No,
thanks to an interview he gave with the British hobbyist magazine, Amateur Movie Maker.
From this first-person account, “How I Designed the Titles for Dr. No,” we can understand
the techniques he used, the exact nature of his collaborations, and also the restrictions
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placed upon him by Saltzman & Broccoli during the course of his work. The title sequence
for Dr. No is divisible into three distinct, equally stylish, barely coherent sequences. In the
first sequence, computerized beeps and whirring noises play underneath a black title card,
across which moves a white dot (See Fig. 19a), stopping just left of centre to form the credit
“Harry Saltzman & Albert R. Broccoli present” (See Fig. 19b). We see James Bond from
inside the barrel of a gun, and after a gunshot a red tide of “blood” cascades down from the
top of the screen (See Figs 19c and 19d), the main Monty Norman theme replaces the
computerized noises. The barrel wobbles and descends towards the bottom right of the
frame, and the gun barrel fades away, leaving only a white dot against a black background
(See Figs. 19e, 19f, and 19g). Building off this lone dot, Binder created a kinetic display of
type and dots cascading and bouncing around the screen; the film’s title Dr. No flits between
being stacked vertically, as a number of dots flicker over the range of the screen in various
patterns, figurations, and ever-changing gaudy colours (See Figs. 19g and 19h). Over the
course of a minute, the dots gradually increase in size until the Production Designer credit,
where one gigantic red dot and one-third of another fill the screen (See Figs. 19i and 19j).
The main theme fades out to commence the second sequence, replaced by Caribbean
percussion music, as saturated red, orange, purple, blue, and green silhouettes of people
appear against a black background, superimposed on top of one another; credits appear in
white type across the screen (See Fig. 19k). Soon thereafter the third sequence begins, with
three black silhouettes of men carrying canes and tin cups, walking in single file (See Fig.
19l). Appropriate for the setting, the drum music is replaced by a calypso arrangement of
“Three Blind Mice”, which continues into the main action of Dr. No. The silhouettes
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dissolve to the same three men walking on a street in Kingston, Jamaica, and the narrative
begins. Leaving a close reading aside for a moment, the sequence is remarkable for its various
technological ingenuities, which Binder dutifully chronicled in the Amateur Movie-Maker
article. The opening, where we see Bond through the rifled barrel of a gun, presented a
problem with depth of field; the gun barrel was a still photograph (another example of
Binder’s reliance on mixed media), and in order to make both the actor and the picture stay
in frame, Binder was obliged to use a pin-hole camera.
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The dots were laid out by Binder
himself with circular stickers, and then animated by his colleague, Trevor Bond; the
coloured silhouette dancers were filmed in backlight, and then processed, begrudgingly and
with great difficulty, on single-hued film stock by Technicolor,
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building off their expertise
with the three-strip process that had fallen out of favour with the film industry with the
invention of Eastmancolor in 1950 by the Eastman-Kodak company.
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Whatever these technical achievements, Binder also seems to have been hamstrung by
particular visual and audio mandates that he accepted as a condition of taking the job.
Binder wrote, that for “Dr. No…I found that I had to work within certain well defined
limitations,”
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and was required to work from the end of the credits, backward to the
beginning:
a special musical arrangement of Three Blind Mice had been
written and scored in Jamaica to accompany these scenes and
this represented a restriction on my work. I had to start
thinking of the titles in reverse so as not to allow anything to
clash with the beggars and their theme.
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Binder was also obliged to incorporate various different musical themes from the film proper,
as well as the Monty Norman score. All of this goes to suggest that title designers, though
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they began to be specially credited for their work in the late 1950s, still were beholden to
the directors and producers of the films they inaugurated, and did not enjoy the degree of
autonomy that the credit “Titles designed by” would otherwise indicate. This lack of
creative autonomy is also likely the reason why the three distinct parts of Binder’s titles are
barely coherent with respect to one another. Sounds of computers whirring and beeping
segue, unbidden, into the opening musical theme. The gaudy colours of the cascading dots in
the first third rhyme somewhat with the dancing silhouettes, as we move from one mode
where graphics are put into movement, to another mode, where moving bodies are
transformed in purely graphical displays. But the overall impression is of Binder labouring to
find a way to transition from those dots to solid fields of colour, and the music dissolves
awkwardly from the main theme to drummed music. Likewise, the coloured silhouettes of
the dancers match with the black silhouettes of the blind men, but the music transition from
the drumming to the “Three Blind Mice” again feel mandated, as Binder suggests above, by
contractual necessity. There is the distinct impression that Binder brings his own ideas to
bear on a structure that had already been pre-ordained. Binder speaks to these limitations in
the Amateur Movie-Maker confessional stating that, “I wanted to use native dancers as a
visual accompaniment (to the music) but the problem was how to do this without losing the
formalised graphic feeling which had been established by the animated dots. We could have
animated the dancing figures but this would have been a long and tedious job. Indeed, it
would probably have taken more time than we had to complete the job.”
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For these
reasons, the credit design for Dr. No is an exemplar of graphic design creativity within the
collaborative and compromising framework of commercial cinema. While the last two-thirds
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of the title sequence appear to be dictated by the demands of Broccoli and Saltzman, the
producers that paid his salary, the first third makes no such concessions, and bears the
distinct impression that it was designed to indulge no concerns other than Binder’s.
The titles for Dr. No establish a mood and atmosphere for the film, but do so in a way
that makes the title sequence behave like an autonomous work of fine art. The brightly
coloured dots that cascade across the screen have almost no connection to the opening
sequence, save for a graphical rhyme between them and the white circle that remains on the
bottom of the screen after the gun barrel disappears. And those tumbling circles have little to
do with the espionage or international intrigue that we see in the James Bond films—nor
does it even herald the titillation that became the hallmark of subsequent James Bond
sequences. The titles more properly occupy the territory of fine art. The first third of
cascading dots bouncing around the screen is preoccupied with pure form and colour,
behaves rather like a standalone work of Modern art painting, animated and coaxed into
movement. The first third operates like an animated Colour Field painting, with the solid
tones of Yves Klein or Frank Stella come to life,
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the shimmering shapes of Bridget Riley,
or better yet like a piece of kinetic Pop Art, as though the halftone dots that characterise
Roy Lichtentsein work were coaxed into movement—influences crop up in Binder’s designs
likely due to his aforementioned fascination with Modern art. Moreover, Binder’s reference
to the “formalised and graphic feeling” of the dots’ ordered geometry and the stark, sans-serif
typeface used by Binder are both heavily reminiscent of the design principles established by
the Neue Grafik or International Style that came out of Switzerland in the 1950s and 1960s.
(The frenetic movement across the screen does, however, mute some of its rigidity.) As the
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circles and dots subside, Binder further works with visual experimentation, as the dancing
bodies presented become highly abstracted. They cease to be figurative human forms, and
instead are gyrating shapes of mobile colour. In finding a rhyme between the shuffling
circular shapes of the first third and the gyrating human shapes of the second third, Binder
deepens the impression that this is more than a mere preparatory gesture intended to
inaugurate a spy film; this is a sequence where he is expressing more cultivated aesthetic
impulses, and embedding a work of proto-Modern art into the cinema.
Indeed, the opening credits to Dr. No are strikingly sophisticated because, in contrast
to his later design work for the Bond franchise, which is predicated on the visual pleasure of
looking at female bodies,
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the Dr. No titles are primarily a spectacle of visuality, not
voyeurism. The opening credits are inaugurated looking down the barrel of the gun, and the
injury inflicted by the bullet is rendered in purely visual terms, via the downward cascade of
red “blood” filling the screen. The spiral grooves we see around the barrel are its “rifling,”
used by gun manufacturers since the 1500s to make the bullet spin, thus increasing its
accuracy.
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Yet as Pat Kirkham argues, “to those who do not know that it is intended to
represent a gun barrel, the image suggests either a human eye or an activated camera
shutter,”
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implicating Binder as being preoccupied with the various ways that humans look
at things instead of focussing on the content of what is being seen. We do not view the
details of the human body, but rather the outline of that form, displayed in an abstracted
mode of single colours.
The Bond titles were not the only venue that Binder would be preoccupied with
looking. For the titles to Repulsion (1965) Binder would return to his mechanics of looking,
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as the credits zero in on what is presumably Catherine Deneuve’s eye; the credits float over
her eye, moving upwards and downwards across the screen, as though suspended in a thin
layer of aqueous film or tears covering the cornea. Building off this visual trope of gun-cum-
camera in the Bond films, Binder drew inspiration from a number of artistic traditions for
the titles of Dr. No. This title sequence is a panopoly of different visual techniques and
influences, all initiated by looking down the barrel of a gun. Whatever the precise sources,
Binder’s work is concerned with kinetics, with colour, with bodies in motion, and he
borrows heavily from the cultural ether to express those interests, in a way that is heavily
pastiched and casual in the how it moves from one visual element to another.
Dr No’s opening titles are just as blithe in the way that they bounce between other
elements of the common culture. The number of kinetic and gaudy-coloured borrowings
present in the credits, especially the kinetic dance sequence that makes up the credits’
middle third, make it very tempting to align Binder’s title sequence with the ideal of
“Swinging London” from the mid-1960s, but those impressions are somewhat mitigated by
even a cursory examination of the cultural climate in which the first Bond films were made.
In describing the similarly-intentioned British television series, The Avengers, Toby Miller
describes part of its appeal as “relying on exclusive knowledge about fashionable texts,
clothes, and manners…conceived for and supplied to mass audiences.” But in actual fact, the
series was a “domestication of pop that takes it away from teenagers”
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designed to make it
more appealing to a wider demographic. The alignment of Bond with youth culture in the
early 1960s is also somewhat circumspect, given that, in Goldfinger, whose titles I will
discuss shortly, Sean Connery intoned the following:
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My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done, such
as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38
degrees Fahrenheit. That’s just as bad as listening to the
Beatles without earmuffs.

In an era when A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) were making the hysterical
display of Beatlemania a structuring device for their narratives, Bond, nominally that symbol
of youthful, progressive, “Swinging” London, wanted no part of them. Similarly, the
franchise initially shied away from any connections to “a general sexual liberation,” which
entailed “striking changes in public and private morals and…a new frankness, openness, and
indeed honesty in personal relations and modes of expression.”
142
Indeed, producer Albert
Broccoli mused that “nudity would destroy Bond’s career….His image must be clean cut.
We can’t risk offending his massive family audience in any way.”
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Understood this way,
James Bond represented a sanitised version of the Zeitgeist (which would only really
crystallize in April 1966 with the Time magazine article on Swinging London), a strategy
Frank Thomas demonstrates was very common to advertisers in the 1960s. In his book The
Conquest of Cool, Frank demonstrates how companies such as Pepsi-Cola internalised the
trappings of youth and the counterculture in order to sell to younger demographics.
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Maurice Binder’s title sequence resonates very firmly within those values, and makes
gestures towards younger audiences that the film itself does not. The dancing graphics
borrow some idea of “youth” so as to garner for Dr. No some of its cultural cachet, but with
its progressive edges dulled in such a way that they could offend no one. The titles position
the film in close proximity to the youthful and energetic trends of “Swinging London,”
without wholly subscribing to them. Similarly, the opening graphics borrow from Pop art
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and Op Art, and through their use of computer sound effects, genuflect to the burgeoning
technological age. Both moves are made with the purpose of surrounding the film with an air
of au courant artistic sophistication. The computer noises that permeate the very beginning
of the Dr. No title sequence mirror a preoccupation what British Prime Minister Harold
Wilson would in 1963 call the “white heat of science and technology,”
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and thus
foreshadow a narrative crutch that would permeate all subsequent Bond films. But for the
film at hand, they are almost a throwaway sonic accompaniment. In all cases, the titles
perform work on behalf of the film, nodding towards the culture of the time so that the
diegesis is freed up to concentrate on the necessities of narrative economy. That obsession
with technological culture would recur for Binder in Billion Dollar Brain, the 1967
instalment of the Michael Caine/Harry Palmer series—a more paranoid, cerebral, and
violent set of spy films that was designed to cash in on Bond-mania. The titles are a
cacophony of computer punch-cards, magnetic tape drives, and electronic sound effects. The
plot revolves around a supercomputer, and appropriately the titles are an ecstatic frenzy of
technology.
For From Russia With Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964), Binder was dropped from
designing the James Bond title sequences in favour of Robert Brownjohn, but was brought
back for Thunderball (1965)
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and returned to the idea of silhouettes borrowed from Dr.
No. From Thunderball onwards, Binder’s titles operated in a singularly focused formula: an
emphasis on titillation, depicting women, barely clothed (if at all), swimming, walking, or
standing in black silhouette against coloured backgrounds, the credits rendered in white
text. The credit for this paradigm goes not to Binder, but Brownjohn, who was unabashedly
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obsessed with “Sex and Typography,”
147
and I will examine Brownjohn’s work in this
chapter’s next section. Binder would design opening titles for every film in the Bond
franchise, ending with License to Kill in 1989, and followed this template of guns and girls for
the remainder of the series until his death in 1991.
Binder would receive more attention for the designs he created in service of the James
Bond films, but the volume of his work outside those texts is far more prolific. And whereas
Binder settled into a formula for the Bond series—silhouetted females that hinted at nudity,
with a similar hint at physical violence—it is clear from the foregoing analysis that Binder’s
work is far more varied and sophisticated than the impression given by surveying the Bond
franchise. Binder’s efforts were highly reflexive, deconstructing the mechanics of print and
other media (Damn Yankees, Kaleidoscope), and lampooning the overwrought seriousness of
Hollywood filmmaking (The Mouse That Roared, The Grass is Greener). He is caught up with
the burgeoning computer culture (Dr. No, Billion Dollar Brain) and inflects his titles with
circulating artistic expression, such as Op Art/Pop Art in Dr. No. As such, save for its
repeated obsessions with looking and the apparatuses that make it possible, Maurice
Binder’s work is characterized by its lack of singular character, and should be thought of as
open systems, shot through as they are by the influences of the cultural ether. Leo Charney’s
doctoral dissertation writes of opening titles being necessary to easing the transition from
outside the cinema to the diegesis, and conceives of them as a semi-permeable barrier
between “real” and fictive worlds. In this vein, Binder’s designs are semi-permeable in that
they usher outside influences into the film, if not the film proper, which is the domain of the
main narrative. With these titles as a gateway, Binder turns these films into open systems,
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positioning external discourses in close proximity to the main text via the opening titles, and
subjecting them to intellectual enquiry. In the case of Dr. No, these external discourses are
something of a bait-and-switch; values of high art and youth culture promised by the credits
are almost entirely absent from the rest of the film, which tempers the opening exuberance
into something palatable to a wider audience. Understood this way, Binder’s designs are
advertising par excellence: the commercial (credits) promise something that the product (film)
couldn’t possibly deliver.

Robert Brownjohn—Sex and Typography
Robert Brownjohn is a fascinating case of another New Yorker transplanted to
London. His title design work, though it spanned only four films, was amongst the most
sophisticated and rhetorically supple explorations of typography in film during the 1950s and
1960s. Brownjohn’s output for the James Bond films negotiated a delicate contradiction;
tasked with creating titles intended to titillate and arouse audience interest for a populist
film, Brownjohn used the occasion of From Russia With Love and Goldfinger to mount some
intellectual questions regarding the nature of typography in film and print media. There is no
paradigmatic or “normal” title designer in the 1950s through the early 1970s, but Robert
Brownjohn’s short-lived career, tempestuous personal life, and character idiosyncrasies far
surpass even the most extravagant excesses of his peers. Emily King profiled Brownjohn in
her excellent monograph, Sex and Typography, the title of which is borrowed from the title of
an article written by Brownjohn himself; the following biographical history is borrowed from
her book, which is built predominantly on the reminiscences of Brownjohn’s peers, captured
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in interviews.
148
My history is also founded on a smattering of newspaper articles, trade
journal columns, and fan magazine pieces. King’s work is primarily an art-book, but it is
particularly useful for the way it locates Brownjohn’s creative influences and positions him in
relation to design culture in Chicago, New York, and London during the 1950s and 1960s.
Robert Brownjohn was born in Newark, NJ in 1925, the same year as Maurice Binder,
and attended Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, in 1944. A classmate’s tales about the Bauhaus
design movement inspired Brownjohn to drop out of Pratt and move to the Chicago-centred
Institute of Design in 1944, due largely to the fact that the faculty featured the celebrated
Hungarian designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a former Bauhaus professor who emigrated to
Chicago in 1937.
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Brownjohn distinguished himself as one of the best students in his
cohort, his talents so exceptional that, upon graduation from the Institute of Design,
Brownjohn became part of the faculty, first teaching classes with Serge Chermayeff, and then
later on his own. In 1946, Moholy-Nagy, who had become something of a mentor to
Brownjohn, died of leukaemia. More devastatingly, sometime during this period, Brownjohn
became deeply addicted to heroin, an addiction that would follow him through the rest of
his life. Brownjohn moved to New York in 1951, and became friends with jazz musicians
Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Stan Getz—something that did little to mitigate his drug
habit—and after a spell of freelance graphic design, he formed his own advertising agency,
Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar (BCG) in 1957. The firm secured prominent clients
such as Pepsi-Cola’s internal company magazine, Pepsi-Cola World, and the American
pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair.
150
By this point, Brownjohn’s poor oral hygiene
began to affect him, which necessitated a dentist pulling out almost all of his teeth; but,
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typical of his eccentricity, Brownjohn insisted that the dentist make his dentures appear as
rotten and decayed as his natural teeth were.
151
In 1959, the firm began to experiment with
typography, and, in the words of Chermayeff and Geismar, “decided to explore the evocative
potential of words by compiling a handmade experimental notebook composed of pasted-up
letters and words, all in one typeface.”
152
These experiments would be printed in
Typographica magazine in 1962 as a booklet called Watching Words Move.
At the same time that BCG was securing the commissions of firms such as Chase
Manhattan Bank,
153
Brownjohn’s drug habit was becoming deleterious to the point where it
was interfering with BCG’s work. Says Chermayeff, “If someone says ‘I’m going out to get
cigarettes, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,’ and then you spend three days fielding telephone
calls from his wife, you know there is something wrong.”
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Brownjohn’s behaviour became
disruptive to the point that Chermayeff and Geismar ousted him from the firm. Brownjohn
subsequently emigrated to London via steamship in 1960, a move contradictorily motivated
both by Great Britain’s more lax approach to drugs, and its preponderance of addiction
rehabilitation centres.
155
He joined a thriving expatriate community of designers and artists,
and quickly shot to prominence, starting as Creative Director for the London branch of the
prominent firm J. Walter Thompson, then for the behemoth McCann-Erickson—both New
York-based firms seeking to “Americanize their London offices.”
156
While working for these
firms, Brownjohn’s work was characterized by daring creativity, but as King writes, his
“witty graphic concepts…were admired by his colleagues but more often than not rejected
by his conservative clientele.”
157
(Amongst these rejected concepts was cigarette packaging
that features photorealistic cigarettes on each side of the box.)
158
While at McCann,
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Brownjohn happened to meet Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, the producers of the
Bond films, and based on Brownjohn’s reputation as the most prolific and talented art
directors, they offered him the title sequence commission on From Russia With Love, and
jettisoned Maurice Binder.
159
Brownjohn had left McCann by the time he created the
Goldfinger opening titles. Saltzman and Broccoli were so enthralled with the work that they
offered to stake Trevor Bond (who had assisted in the animation for Dr. No, and had helped
with the two subsequent titles) and Brownjohn in their “own independent production
studios…to make future titles.” Brownjohn turned them down, and the series reverted to
Binder for Thunderball (1965) onwards.
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Brownjohn would go on to direct only two more
title sequences, the adventure comedy Where the Spies Are (1965), featuring David Niven,
and Night of the Generals (1967), directed by Anatole Litvak and starring Peter O’Toole and
Omar Sharif. In the late 1960s, Brownjohn also directed an award-winning television
commercial for The Midland Bank,
161
and executed the cover to The Rolling Stones’ Let It
Bleed album in 1969. Brownjohn died on August 1,

1970 in his rundown flat in West
London, the cause of death publicly and officially unreported, though King attributes it to
complications from a lifetime of heavy drug abuse.
162

Though Brownjohn only contributed four title sequences, they are remarkable
experiments in the plasticity of typography, ones that simultaneously grapple with the
interplay between word and image. The From Russia with Love and Goldfinger titles are
particularly concerned with the visual-tactile effects of light projected onto the human body,
especially, in deference to their films’ emphasis on sexual innuendo, the bodies of buxom
female ones. As the Monty Norman theme plays, the opening to Dr. No is replicated in every
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way—shot down the barrel of a gun; Bond turns and fires; a red tide descends down the
screen while the barrel dissolves away; and the white dot left over drifts downwards to the
bottom of the frame. But from there, Brownjohn creates a break from Maurice Binder in
that the dot shrinks in size—once, twice, three times—and then disappears entirely,
dissolving into a night scene. There, “James Bond,” (who is actually revealed to be a man
wearing a Sean Connery mask) is hunted down and killed by a powerfully built blond man,
working for the SPECTRE. After the impostor’s mask is removed, the opening titles proper
begin. Accompanied by an orchestra arrangement of the main James Bond theme music, we
see brightly coloured words projected onto the body parts of a bikini-clad belly dancer, or
actually a handful; Brownjohn revealed to Showtime Magazine, a fan publication from the
1960s, that he employed three different belly dancers, each for different parts of the title
sequence.
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Yet the disembodied cutting, and the fact that we never see the whole of one
dancer in any single shot, give the impression that it is one performer: her shimmying,
tasselled breasts bear the light of “007” (See Fig. 3) on her thigh read the words “and Robert
Shaw Bernard Lee as ‘M’,” as her upper leg moves in and out of the frame, etc. (See Fig. 20a)
The bodies, masquerading as one, become the screen.
This sequence is designed to titillate with disembodied parts becoming nothing more
than mere surfaces. It is also intended to objectify, with the bodies of three women being
merged into the impression of a single body, which invites direct contemplation, ogling, even
fetishisation of their sensuously gyrating curves (See Fig. . Indeed, when tasked with creating
the From Russia with Love title sequence, Brownjohn was unabashed in his approach: “On
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this type of film the only themes to me are sex or violence. I chose sex.”
164
But to pick apart
Brownjohn’s own favoured phrase, while focussing on sex, it is quite easy to miss out on
what he is doing with typography—and I would maintain that the populist move towards
ogling the female body is a gesture intended as cover for a more cerebral deconstruction of
the media he was working with. Amongst his clearly craven objectification, Brownjohn
proffers insightful thoughts on the underlying apparatus and structures that subtend his title
sequence. In other words, he demonstrates a theoretical thoughtfulness that belies mere
titillation. For during the creation of this sequence, Brownjohn was surveying the
conventions of title design: By his own admission in Typographica magazine, he had been
“considering the problems of the integration of type and image,” and “had often wondered if
film titles did not provide an opportunity for a different solution from the usual technique of
superimposing type [over image] in the laboratory.”
165
This revelation is borne out in two
other experiments with type that Brownjohn had made in the 1960s, once before From
Russia With Love, and once afterwards. Emily King makes a very cogent observation in Sex
and Typography, establishing a lineage between the booklet “Watching Words Move,”
published with Chermayeff and Giesmar in 1962, and a commercial that Brownjohn made
for The Midland Bank, which aired on British television in 1966.
166
The aforementioned
texts question the suitability for the human body to bear light projection, with its three-
dimensional curves and appendages that move with respect to one another, in contrast the
immobile, two-dimensional screen favoured for the cinema. In the booklet, BCG made the
meaning of words literally borne out in type: for example, “dividing” becomes “di vi ding,”
“togetherness” becomes “togetherness,” and “multiplying” becomes “multimultiplying,”
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(See Figs. 12 and 13). In the first Midland Bank commercial, the “o” in “Morning” rises
from below the line like a rising sun, and the “O” from “Golf Subscriptions” drops into
place like a ball falling into the hole. In both cases, they refer back to a typography where it
is “not…an adjunct to an illustration or the image but in its use as the image itself.”
167
The
words shown in BCG’s booklet hover somewhere between word and image, conveying a
thought or an idea that, in a deceptively playful manner, outstrips its purely semantic or
literary meaning.
From Russia With Love titles are a different manner of experimentation, but consistent
in the way that they a) mediate on the form and function of type, and b) turn words into
images. Just as “Watching Words Move” liberated typography from the ordered graphical
grids of the International Neue Grafik style, as well as the rigid kerning (horizontal spacing
between letters), and the absolute leading (vertical spacing between lines) of traditional
type-set typography, From Russia With Love lifts typography and turns it into an object of
luminance; words are composed entirely of light. Moreover, type also pushed to the limits of
its legibility, because as the words splay across female bodies, in some moments they bend
around a bodily contour, and at others the movement of a body in front of the focal plane of
the screen causes the words to lose focus (See Figs. 20b, 20c, and 20d). As the text warps
and becomes blurry, the type becomes somewhat denatured as “word,” and moves into the
realm of “image” because they are on the cusp of illegibility (See Fig. 20e).
In making these experiments with projected type-image, Brownjohn confessed that he
was indebted to the visual experiments of his mentor, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whose 1928
book, Vision in Motion, revised and reprinted in 1947, which concerned with analysing the
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structure and mechanics of art, “in it primordial, basic elements, the ABC of expression
itself.”
168
To that end, Moholy-Nagy turned his attention to the minutiae of the craft,
focussing not on the output of artists themselves, but the constituent components of art
making that allowed these individuals to create. Moholy-Nagy deconstructed many different
techniques and phenomena, including the textural properties of the canvas, the principles of
solid massing and volume in sculpture, principles of space in architecture, and the use of
light in the visual displays that populate the modern metropolis. In The New Vision, he
writes about the use of light that illuminates flat surfaces such as billboards, but also the
possibility of projecting light images “onto clouds or other gaseous backgrounds through
which one can walk, fly drive, etc”
169
(Original emphasis). In Typographica magazine, a trade
journal that explored developments in typography, and was a frequent outlet for graphic
designers to espouse their own visual philosophies, Brownjohn “remembered that, Moholy-
Nagy had proposed projecting advertisements on to clouds at night—perhaps having
London in mind as the most suitable place.”
170
This fascination with light spilled over into
Moholy-Nagy’s creative practice, epitomized in kinetic scuplture, the Light-Space
Modulator, a series of metal mesh, rectangles, perforated discs and other detritus set at
canted geometrically skewed (which is to say semi-ordered) angles to each other, mounted
on a circular platter. As captured in Moholy-Nagy’s film, Lichtspiel Schawarz-Weiss-Grau,
171

the sculpture operated by projecting light on the sculpture as it revolved slowly on the
platter. The focus is not on the surfaces themselves, but how light plays off those surfaces—
the shadows and reflections cast, the glare and diffraction seen from the bounced light
sources themselves. The From Russia with Love titles are in homage to this ideal, in that they
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partially focus on the contours of the projecting surface, and partially on how light behaves
when it interacts with those surfaces. In addition to their meditation on projection surfaces,
these images also hazard something more reflexive, something that interrogates the nature of
film spectatorship itself. According to Brownjohn, the inspiration for the sequence came
from the impression given when watching spectators leave the cinema—walking out, their
bodies obscure the light from the film projector, and their bodies become the surfaces for
projection.
172
The titles thus embed a part of film spectatorship into the film proper, and
also meta-textually ruminate on the fact that, as Saul Bass frequently expounded, audiences
of his time were less likely to pay attention to the credits, and instead were likely to walk
out during this time. A person becoming a projection screen cannot view the titles.
Those body-surface-light interactions created significant problems for Brownjohn
because the tools he used to create the title sequences confronted him with technical
limitations. Using a 3000W slide projector, he writes, created certain difficulties because its
intensity, necessary to register the effect on motion picture film, created a “flair of light”
around the letters, creating a significant problem, as alluded to above, with text legibility.
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These issues were exacerbated by the fact that “a projector lens has no depth of focus, and
another major problem was therefore to make the dancer control her movements in a plane
at right angles to the projector without destroying the illusion of dancing.”
174

Notwithstanding Brownjohn’s awareness, legibility on the body is a largely insurmountable
problem in these titles because the body causes the words to warp and weave, making them
difficult to read; and despite attempts to mitigate the deleterious effects of the projector’s
depth of field, the type still slides in and out of focus, frequently making it unintelligible,
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more in the realm of image than type. Such technical glitches forced Brownjohn to effect a
simple workaround: the From Russia with Love titles alternate between moments of bodily
contour, and then moments where the text is projected onto a flat black surface (See Figs.
20f and 20g).
In these instances, we can see the artistry of the title sequence butting heads with its
structural, mechanical necessities. From a spectatorial standpoint, the opening titles are
meant to draw the viewer in; from an industrial perspective, the titles have identification and
enumeration functions that are contractually mandated. Hollywood labour is organised by
Minimum Basic Agreements, contracts that are forged between producers and unions and
guilds like SAG, the WGA, and IATSE. These collectively bargained contracts dictate the
minimum working conditions for anyone employed under union and guild auspices: wage
floors, maximum working hours, benefits, minimum hours between call times, etc. These
agreements also dictate the minimum form, type size, and order of credits as they appear in a
film’s opening titles and final crawl, though creative personnel are also able to secure better
terms for themselves as a result of their professional stature and bargaining clout, and this is
especially contentious in the case of credit. (As my second chapter demonstrates, the
Hollywood film industry came to the brink of total shutdown because directors and writers
disputed who should be allowed to use the credit “a film by.”) Cinema history is also rife
with stories of film projects that have been aborted because two prominent actors could not
agree on who should receive top billing.
175
When a star like Sean Connery demands that his
credit be a certain percentage size with respect to the title of the film or with respect to
other actors, he is seeking guarantees of prominence, but also of legibility—in other words,
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the ability for audiences to recognize and read his name during the time it appears on screen.
Many billing sheets have contractual stipulations that state certain actors must appear on a
title card alone, thus enhancing their readability because the name does not have to compete
with other text. By obscuring the text or making it warp on the body of a belly dancer,
Brownjohn compromised that readability. Therefore, the titles must include moments where
the text is fully readable, in order to keep the terms of a creative personnel’s contract, and to
keep that individual creator mollified. Indeed, the credit for director Terence Young, is
projected onto the bare back of a belly dancer, who moves very deliberately and slowly,
looking partially back at the camera as if seeking confirmation that text adorning her back is
fully readable. The From Russia With Love titles therefore should be seen as alternating
between moments of expressive creativity (projection on the body), and moments that fulfil
contractual necessities (projection on the blank wall).
Film critics generally praised From Russia With Love’s titles, describing them, in the
one or two sentences they devoted to evaluating the opening credits, as “disturbingly smart,
clever, jazzy, and crazy”
176
and Brownjohn claims to have been subsequently inundated for
solicitations of his work.
177
Critics of graphic design appear to have been less enamoured of
the credits, for the very reasons of their frequent illegibility. Everett Aison, a self-professed
title designer for television and film, and an instructor and Chairman at the School of Visual
Arts in Manhattan, also wrote criticism for Print, a trade magazine that critiqued graphic
design in various media. Aison spoke to this very issue of aesthetics versus legibility. The
magazine’s July/August 1965 issue was devoted to “Graphic Design for the Performing
Arts,” and Aison’s article, “The Current Scene: Film Titles,” touched on the work of Saul
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Bass, Pablo Ferro, and Robert Brownjohn, some of the very “few designers doing interesting
work in this area,” title design.
178
In his article, Aison both praised and critiqued
Brownjohn’s work in From Russia With Love:
One of the few is Robert Brownjohn, who created the titles
and introductory sequences to the last two James Bond films.
From Russia with Love, his first feature film assignment,
sparkles with brilliant photography and editing. The titles
area projected onto the body of a belly dancer, who gyrates
throughout the title sequence. This clever action captures
both the humour and suspense of the film which follows.
However, there is one important flaw in the sequence. As a
result of the cross-movement of picture and typography, the
actual credits become somewhat difficult to read.”
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Elsewhere in the article, Aison becomes perhaps a little too preoccupied with being able to
read the credits in a title sequence; he claims that of the approximate 200 feature films
produced in the US in 1964, “no more than ten had adequate titles.” A dubious figure
perhaps, and Aison defines “adequate” not in terms of being “fancy or elaborate or
expensive,” but rather that these inadequate titles “lacked clean, legible typography.”
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Notwithstanding Aison’s peccadilloes, Aison’s status as critic-designer-instructor, and his
belief that titles, like those of the venerable Saul Bass, should be “graphically exciting, legible,
well-paced, and [executed] with utter simplicity,”
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mirrors the industrial-contractual
concerns of the time.
For his next Bond title assignment, Goldfinger (1964), Brownjohn sidestepped this
issue by projecting scenes from the movie—explosions, helicopter chases, etc.—onto the
stationary, buxom
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body of starlet Margaret Nolan, while having white, sans serif credits
text plainly projected on the other half of the screen, against a background flat and black (See
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Figs. 21a, 21b, and 21c). While Shirley Bassey crooned the title song, Brownjohn took his
feminine “three-dimensional gold screen,”
183
and used her body for a number of jokes, both
bawdy and chaste. A golf-ball rolls over Nolan’s left breast and disappears into its hole, which
is strategically placed in the middle of her voluminous cleavage; the grill of Bond’s Aston
Martin align with her eyes, while the license plate flips over top of her mouth (See Fig. 21d).
Any projection issues are mitigated by the fact that Nolan remains stationary; the text also is
fully legible because it is shown on a flat black surface, and does not warp or bend (See Fig.
21e). Yet despite Brownjohn’s obvious attempts to resolve some of the “problems of the
integration of type and image”
184
that he faced, Aison levelled another critique:
“Goldfinger, Brownjohn’s second titling assignment is even
more successful, but the same problem exists to some
extent….The action at left is so diverting that the viewer
devotes all his attention to this, disregarding the actual credits
on the right.”
185

By segregating word and image to different parts of the screen, Aison argues, the viewer is
torn between watching the scenes lit up on Nolan’s body, or reading the list of names and
titles for the film’s cast and crew—but the spectator cannot successfully do both. Understood
this way, titles exist in a contested aesthetic zone: dreary lists of credits means that the
audience won’t pay attention to the titles at all, and use them for, as Bass describes, them,
“popcorn time.” Then again, if the graphics in titles are too engrossing, the audience will pay
attention to the wrong part of the screen, and undercut the titles’ enumerating function. The
ideal title sequence, then, finds a middle ground where it’s arresting, but not too diverting.
This allowed the viewer to split attention between typography, which fulfils the title
149
sequences’ contractual necessities, and graphic design, which makes the sequence visually
compelling, something worthy of looking at.
As illuminated above Aison regarded Saul Bass as the best title sequences for the
economy of his expression, but also for the fact that Bass, more often than not, made
typography the object of design interest, meaning that the audience would not have to split
their attention between word and image. (The image becomes a relatively neutral field
against which type is the dynamic, plastic element.) Brownjohn publicly conceded that Bass
was the dominant figure in the field of title design, and cited Bass’s influence, albeit in a
contested fashion being “not so much influenced by his ideas, as the way he changed this
whole system” of making title designs an important part of motion pictures, and putting the
work of graphic designers in higher demand.
186
Unlike Bass, Binder, or Ferro, however,
Brownjohn never moved wholeheartedly into the world of film (though his premature death
in 1970 means that all facets of his design career were cut short), and he lamented the fact
that many British and American production companies would not meet his asking price of
£5,000, which appears to have been the going rate for title design of the time. After he
turned down Saltzman and Broccoli’s offers to form his own production company (see
above) Brownjohn quit the Bond franchise, and would only design two more titles before his
death. Night of the Generals (1967) is more memorable, and is very similar in bearing to the
optical experiments Brownjohn conducted for the Bond films. In this sequence, images of
Nazi war medals, hats, boots, and coats, are compressed and stretched, horizontally and
vertically, as though someone was swapping anamorphic and regular lenses in and out of a
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film projector up in the booth. Much like his experiments with the James Bond films,
Brownjohn is experimenting with the mechanisms and machinery used to create moving
images. The focus here, as with Dr. No, is on the projection of images, or the ways in which
these images of light are thrown onto various surfaces. They are less about the ways that the
eye sees the regalia of fascism, than the way that the moving image apparatus mediates and
alters the parameters of vision. In the same single shot, the embroidery of an officer’s hat, for
example, will suddenly transform from its regular dimensions and stretch across the screen;
then it will abruptly compress back to its original size. The way that the images warp and
bend is highly reflexive, because it draws attention to the processes of image creation—as
they are manufactured and skewed by the machinery of projection, rather than by the
photographic apparatus that initially captures the image. This sense of skewed perspectives
also ties in neatly with the themes of looking and investigation that permeate The Night of
The Generals. Interpol Inspector Morand (Philippe Noiret) reopens the case of a prostitute
murdered in Germany-occupied Warsaw in World War II based on a similar killing that
happens in 1965. In the process, he is forced to review and re-examine old evidence that is
brought into new perspective by the details of the new crime under consideration—much
like how, in the opening titles, the certainty of the image is undermined as it is expanded and
compressed by changing lenses.
Brownjohn also remained aloof from cinema in the way he conducted his business
practices, and conducted his financial transactions more in the mode of his familiar milieu of
advertising, rather than in the traditions of the film industry. Any cursory examination of
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contracts between film studios and their employers during the 1950s and 1960s shows that
agreements stipulate either set salaries or weekly wages for above the line talent, and weekly
or daily below the line personnel (plus living expenses for prominent artists if they have
particular demands, and/or a per diem for all cast and crew members if shooting is being
done on location. Title design contracted out to production houses such as Pacific Title and
Art or National Screen services, was billed out in the same manner as optical printing/effect
and special effects printers—which charged for services by the effect created or the printing
performed. DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, the firm that designed the opening titles for Blake
Edwards’ The Great Race (1965) invoiced Warner Bros. for $16,000 which was broken down
into itemized billing sheets for the following for individual animated vignettes: these
included $950 for “four gags” of a film “slide catching on fire, operator’s thumb, inserted
into aperture, projector lamp flicker and dying, dead fly removed from aperture” and $250
for “Warner Bros. shield cards to conform to the silhouette of woman crossing screen.”
187

When producers or directors reached out to graphic designers, the higher regard held for the
work of Robert Brownjohn and Pablo Ferro, meant that these “artists” would not be
subjected to the hassles of itemized bill sheets. Rather, their work was paid out in a manner
more similar to the changing billing practices of the advertising industry. As John Philip
Jones writes in The Advertising Business, the common practice of advertisers prior to the
1960s was that the agencies would spend the money on “advertising space and time, plus the
relevant production” to place advertising segments in print media and on billboards (buying
“space”) and on television (buying “time”). Those costs would then be refunded to the
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agency, plus a “15% gross of the cost of all expenditures” to cover overhead and salaries, and
furnish the agency with profits.
188
Beginning in the 1960s, Jones writes, agencies and their
clients evolved to a different system of remuneration whereby agencies charged “fees to cover
time of staff plus profit, and commissions were rebated.”
189
In other words, advertising
agencies charged a flat fee for the sum total of all of the work on a particular advertising
campaign, and then kept whatever was left over out of that fee to cover staff salaries, and pay
the firm a profit dividend. Graphic designers like Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro, also
worked according to this system. Recall that Binder charged a flat fee of £2,000 for Dr. No;
in Sex and Typography, Emily King presents a snapshot of production manager Trevor
Bond’s From Russia With Love production notebook—Brownjohn billed out £2,653 for the
titles, reserving £750 for his own fee, plus £100 in non-itemized “expenses.”
190
(Pablo Ferro
worked in a similar fashion when he designed titles for The Russians Are Coming, The
Russians are Coming (1966) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), both for Norman Jewision
and The Mirisch Company. He quoted producer Walter Mirisch $24,500 for both Russians
and for The Thomas Crown Affair, and in turn directly contracted the printing and
animation for those titles out to National Screen Service, keeping the remainder for
himself.
191
After From Russia With Love, Brownjohn nearly doubled his fee, but many
producers balked at the price. As he confided to Showtime Magazine in 1964, “Good titles
are expensive. Since From Russia With Love I have had many offers but few will meet my
price; and that’s only £5,000. Not much when you realize I pay my team out of that.”
192
But
as Bond recounted, Brownjohn’s team didn’t see much of that fee. “We quoted £5,000 and
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it cost £5,000. You never made a profit on Bj [sic], he always used all the budget and went
over the top.”
193
Acclaimed designer though he might be, Brownjohn’s business acumen
clearly did not match his visual prowess.
Rather than attend to business issues, Brownjohn had a disposition more akin to
that of a fine artist, musing, after Laslo Moholy-Nagy, about the nature of light and
projection as it plays on physical surfaces. Pressed into the service of titillation for the Bond
films, Brownjohn brought latent sophistication to From Russia With Love and Goldfinger via
the opening titles. Inspired by his late mentor, he explored the expanded possibilities and
limitations of the projected screen, and found new ways of watching words move. The body
is an intriguing surface for projection because it gives words and images new shape and
contour, though in the process of warping designed graphics, they also compromise the
words’ readability, as Brownjohn was well aware. Successful though they are as visual
experiments, these titles are less wholly viable as credit sequences because, per Aison’s critique,
they compromise the credits contractual exigencies; in order for titles to perform their
industrial functions, words must be legible. Under the cover of gyrating female bodies,
Brownjohn grappled with new ways to negotiate the tension between word and image, both
of which vie for viewer attention, making his title sequences far more than mere sex and
typography. The work of designer Pablo Ferro, as we shall see in the following section, can
be seen as a rhetorical response to Brownjohn’s problems, by creating novel interplay
between word and image.

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Pablo Ferro—The Man With the Red Scarf
Pablo Ferro was the least traditional, most iconoclastic, and perhaps most
idiosyncratic of graphic designers here under consideration—a figure known in equal
measure for his slightly madcap titles, his extravagant mid-1960s Lower East Side parties,
and his floor length knitted Technicolor-red scarf, worn for much of his life to hide a
gunshot wound scar on his neck. Ferro too was a New York designer that took commissions
for major commercial film projects, but for a long time resisted the allure of transplanting to
Hollywood.
194
Born in Cuba in 1935, Pablo Ferro immigrated to Brooklyn with his family
when he was 12 years old. He describes himself as a self-taught artist, having learned
animation from a book by MGM animator Preston Blair.
195
Ferro worked as a penciller for
Atlas Comics (which would later become Marvel Comics) under editor Stan Lee, and later
for Dell Comics in 1953; from 1955 to 1960, he was employed in various capacities as an
animator and animation director—most prominently under Disney veteran animator Bill
Tytla (known for creating the devil from Fantasia’s “Night on a Bald Mountain” vignette).
He also worked as a commercial film director for various production companies like
Academy Pictures, Gifford Animation, and Elektra Studios. These companies were
commissioned by advertising firms to create television spots, found themselves in rotation
amongst agencies like J. Walter Thompson, BBD, McCann-Erickson, and BBDO.
196
After
branching out to form his own production company, Ferro, Mogubgub & Schwartz in June
1961, Ferro’s firm found immediate success, and Ferro was contracted by major companies
to direct commercial such as Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Company, NBC, Television, CBS
155
Television, and General Foods; the firm also received an award from the Art Directors Club
of New York for a US Steel television commercial on behalf of BBDO
197

The company also created a film sequence that began the Broadway production Oh
Dad, Poor Dad, Ma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad in 1962,
198
the same year
that Fred Mogubgub left Ferro’s firm to form his own production company. (Lynn Spigel
reports that Mogubgub, one of whose short films appeared in the New York Film Festival of
1963, came to be recognised as a promising young filmmaker in his own right.
199
) Ferro
ventured to London in 1963, where the commercials he created for both British and
American television caught the attention of a famous American expatriate living in Britain,
Stanley Kubrick.
200
On the strength of Ferro’s reel, Kubrick commissioned him to create a
trailer for Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964); on
the strength of that work, Ferro was then kept on to design the title sequence and some
television commercial spots.
201
Its trailer in particular was revolutionary for its use of rapid
editing techniques—40 edits in 90 seconds, by Ferro’s own estimation.
202
Upon his well-
publicized return to London—a hand-drawn doodle in Back Stage, is a moment of
deprecating self-promotion, hailing “his witty, controversial, highly-paid and sometime
downright bad work”
203
—Ferro left his firm to create Pablo Ferro Films. Over the next
decade, Ferro would alternate roughly between a year designing titles while his son, Jose,
tended to the firm, and a year of advertising commissions. In these years, Ferro began to
experiment with split-screen images, experiments that would feed into later efforts: a
commercial for Beech Nut Sours in 1964 was an early example of split-screen techniques
used in commercials; a film for the Singer sewing machine corporation debuted at their
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pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York showed 12 images on screen simultaneously.
Ferro designed the print campaign and main titles for The Russians are Coming, The Russians
are Coming (1966), directed by Norman Jewison, and began branching out into independent
short films. Collaboration with Jewison beckoned again with The Thomas Crown Affair
(1968). Ferro designed a print campaign, but also the multi-image main titles and scenes
that appeared in the film proper. During this time, Ferro resisted transplanting to
Hollywood, instead opting to move to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where, newly divorced
from his wife, he threw extravagant, multi-day parties allegedly fuelled by access to copious
amounts of drugs and alcohol.
204
While cultivating the image and lifestyle of a
countercultural Bohemian, over the next five years, Ferro worked on Bullitt (1968), The
Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Harold and Maude (1971), A
Clockwork Orange (1972), in various capacities as a title designer, trailer editor, visual
consultant, special effects artist, 2
nd
Unit director, film editor—and in the case of Hal
Ashby, general right-hand man.
205
Ferro nearly did not survive to work on these last two
projects. As Steven Heller describes it:
one morning in 1970, as he was entering his downtown
Manhattan apartment, an unknown assailant who mistook
Ferro for another man, shot him at nearly point-blank range.
Ferro, bleeding profusely was rushed to the hospital. A year of
recuperation, with his studio in the hands of his assistants,
ended his Madison Avenue career.
206

In the wake of his near-death experience, the studios also wanted little to do with Ferro,
fearing that the shooting was emblematic of his reckless lifestyle; employing Ferro was
viewed as too much of a risk.
207
Ferro was only allowed entrée back into the world of film
157
through the generosity of Ashby, who employed Ferro on numerous projects in the years to
come, and allowed Ferro to rebuild his reputation. Though this turmoil, Ferro did leave
behind a legacy that would affect the industry for years to come. He was a leading edge
adopter of using video technology for use in creating television commercials, which had
heretofore used film almost exclusively, and, seeing it as a cost-effective alternative to
celluloid, actively advocated for its widespread use in advertising production circles.
208

Despite his move away from Madison Ave., Ferro still had his film design work to fall back
on, and created trailers for Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), again for Jewison, and Zardoz
(1974). Ferro later became the favoured title designer for Jonathan Demme (Stop Making
Sense, 1984; Married to the Mob, 1988; Philadelphia, 1994), and created opening credits for
many prominent films and television shows including Family Ties (1982) L.A. Confidential
(1997), Men in Black (1997), the Gus van Sant Psycho (1998) remake, Bones (2001), My Big
Fat Greek Wedding (2002), and Napoleon Dynamite (2004). Pablo Ferro was inducted into
the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame in 2000, awarded the AIGA medal in 2009, and with
the Men in Black 3 movie released in 2012, is still very much active as of this writing.
Where Robert Brownjohn grappled with the problem of dividing attention between
different parts of the screen during From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, Pablo Ferro solves
it by collapsing the division of image and typography during his first title sequence, the
opening credits to Dr. Strangelove. In so doing, Ferro’s work on Dr. Strangelove represents a
sea change in the way typography behaved on screen. This sequence foreshadows the
excessively male libidinal energy that permeates the film, from the monologue by Strangelove
about the copulation of the human race in a post-nuclear world, to Sterling Hayden’s
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character, who is called “General Buck Turgidson.” Accompanied by the song “Try a Little
Tenderness,”—a lilting string arrangement resembling the original version recorded in 1932,
rather than to the soulful Otis Redding cover from 1966—two US Air Force B-52s refuel in
midair (See Fig. 22a). The act, by Ferro’s admission, is an act of mechanical copulation:
Stanley [Kubrick] and I were having a conversation and he
asked me what I thought about human beings, and I said
“Well everything that human beings do is very sexual.” We
looked at each other and said: “B-52s refuelling in mid-
air…Of course! That’s what the movie is about.” He had the
models and wanted to shoot it, but I said “let me take a look
at the stock footage.” They were very proud of their
accomplishment, and they had every angle you could think of.
And there’s one shot I showed Stanley and they were [moving
up and down like synchronised bodies.]
209

This multi-angle refuelling becomes an act of copulation, and in the process, the two planes
fill the screen, leaving very little extra room for the credits. In this moment, Ferro
encountered a conundrum very similar to Brownjohn regarding the negotiation between
word and image. “The problem started when we started to put lettering on it,” wrote Ferro
in a series of Internet articles on graphic designers commissioned by Adobe Integrated
Systems, the makers of Photoshop. “Regular title lettering didn’t work because you didn’t
know whether to look at the plane or look at the letters. So I thought the only answer was
to fill up the screen with lettering.”
210
Instead of segmenting the screen or dividing up type,
the spidery, handwritten font, lettered by Ferro himself, sits on top of the image, but in a
manner that is different than the simple superimposition of text on image, that Brownjohn
had earlier decried as commonplace. The thin strokes become something like semi-
transparent, a latticework that we are forced to look through, to the images behind (See Fig.
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22b and 22c). They are a mesh overlaid on top of the image, and therefore typography
becomes part of the visual matrix of the screen—not separate, but embedded within it, a
barrier that both prevents visual access to the image below, and allows the viewer to look
directly through. Ferro’s choice of hand lettering was also something radical, in that they
were revolutionary for their time, yet they became part of Ferro’s aesthetic almost entirely by
accident. Ferro drew the elongated, somewhat shaky letters fronting Dr. Strangelove as a
conceptual layout for the typesetter, who was commissioned to block out those letters in an
established typeface; at the typesetter’s insistence, the letters were instead optically printed
over the refuelling airplanes.
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Ferro’s work here alludes to the overwhelmingly destructive
male energy that suffuses throughout Dr. Strangelove, but in the process of doing so, he also
presents a cultivated deconstruction of the way type and image behave in the cinema.
Ferro also reconfigures how we look at type and the moving image in the titles for the
1968 film Bullitt, directed by Peter Yates, and starring Steve McQueen. Rhetorically
building from the designs of Robert Brownjohn as well as the titles from Dr. Strangelove,
Ferro obliterates the separation between image and typography, and collapses these two
nominally disparate worlds into one. In a single camera move, we tilt downwards and left
across a night-time cityscape, and then cut to a fisheye lens shot of an office building lobby,
viewing outwards at the front door behind a telephone control panel. The name STEVE
MCQUEEN appears in ultra-bold, sans serif white letters in the middle of the screen, and
then slides upwards, leaving a black hole where the letters once were, revealing an image
behind. The letters then zoom towards the audience, growing in size—as Pablo Ferro
described it, like a piece of paper with the words cut out moved towards your eyes
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—and
160
the image contained within those letters fill the frame, all trace of lettering gone (See Fig.
23a through 23d). The motif recurs several times, for the film’s title and its major stars, with
the words sliding off the screen upwards, downwards, left and right (See Fig. 23e). In Bullitt,
Ferro denatures the common practice of overlaying type on image, and again expands the
visual function of typography. Words, similar to the way they behave in Dr. Strangelove, are
once more something to be looked through. Type moreover becomes an image unto itself,
with a dynamism and plasticity, and moves from solidity (white type against image
background) to transparency (empty masque showing background), and back to solidity (an
image that fills the screen). In short, Ferro achieves a near perfect summation of Brownjohn’s
ideal of collapsing the boundaries between type and image—boundaries that, established by
Everett Aison are the problematic sine qua non of title sequences. In so doing, Ferro
demonstrates that the distinctions between image and type no longer remain tenable.
Ferro made further deconstructions of typography for The Russians are Coming, The
Russians are Coming (1966), directed by Norman Jewison. It is an amusing title sequence,
though more significant for the fact that The Russians are Coming marked Ferro’s first
attempt at creating a combined multi-faceted, multi-media film campaign for a feature film.
Kubrick had hired Ferro to create both trailers and titles for Dr. Strangelove, but also
Jewison contracted him to make a logo and print advertisements for the film.
213
After
screening a reel sent to him by agent Harry Ulfland,
214
Ferro was hired for a flat fee of
$24,500 to design the opening titles, the film logo, print material, and nine trailers for the
film, between 20 and 90 seconds in length.
215
Ferro settled on a horizontally reversed “R”
and “N” in “Russians” after the characters from the Cyrillic alphabet, and at the suggestion
161
of his colleague, turned the G into a hammer and sickle from the flag of the Soviet Union
(See Fig. 4).
216
This logo found its way into Mirisch Corporation Letterhead—missives from
Jewison feature it prominently—and also inaugurated the film’s credit sequence. The
opening titles are a jaunty duel between Russian and American cultures, as rendered through
competing flags and music. An instrumental rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” collides
with “Polyushko Pole (O Field, My Field)”, sung by the Red Army Chorus, as Ferro
undertakes a graphical deconstruction of the American Flag. The red stripes grow across the
white field, and a progression of stars moves diagonally across the blue square nestled in the
top right corner as black letters appear against the flag’s white bars. In a playful graphical
rendition of the cold war, the flags compete for space, by enlarging and shrinking, crowding
each other out for space. But Ferro also finds visual equivalents between the two countries.
One white star from the spangled banner morphs into yellow star atop the hammer and
sickle, and at one point the red Soviet flag shrinks and is revealed to be embedded into one
American red stripe. Without delving too much into an overdetermined analysis, Ferro
playfully suggests ideological equivalents between the two countries, an impression
underscored by the “Polyushko Pole” that serves as a musical counterpoint to “Yankee
Doodle Dandy.” The sequence comes to an abrupt halt after a single black and white eye sits
in the middle of an entirely black screen, looking on surveillance nervously left and right.
Ferro’s raucous animation smuggles in some particularly incisive visual and ideological
tropes, using the synecdoche of flags to satirise two countries locked in a protracted cold war
struggle. He denatures each flag’s component parts of their symbolism, both American—13
stripes for the original colonies; 50 stars for the contemporary states—and Soviet—hammer
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and sickle, for socialist industriousness—and returns them to the state of pure colour and
form, liable and prone to purely visual manipulation. A flag is an assemblage of graphical
elements; it only attains meaning once it is embedded in a socio-political (which is to say,
nationalistic) programme, and Ferro shuttles back and forth between moments where the
meanings of flags adheres, and moments where it unbinds. While not a fully nationalist
critique, for I would argue that Ferro’s politics are not fully formed, the titles to The Russians
are Coming deflate some of the national-libidinal investment that these two countries have in
the idea of their flags, by returning them to a state of visual play. More remarkable about
this title sequence is that the film’s title-cum-logo, as rendered by Pablo Ferro, became
visually synonymous with the film. Where some of the title sequences I have illuminated
have established a separation between image and typography, Ferro collapses the two in the
creation of the title logo. Several hand-written letters from the public, personally addressed
to Norman Jewison, replicated the backwards R and N, and the hammer-and-sickle G in
their penmanship,
217
suggesting that the words that denoted the title had become
inextricably conflated with the graphical iconic rendering of it. This is likely due to the fact
that, in addition to appearing on letterheads, the stylized “The Russians are Coming” was
also displayed on cinema marquees, special screening invitations, and virtually every
newspaper and magazine advertisement, regardless of size. The press book features a number
of different layouts to promote the film (each one bears Ferro’s stylised design; See Fig 24a),
and the Mirisch Corporation made sure that the publicity materials for The Russians are
Coming, The Russians are Coming were visually consistent. This created a brand for the film
that would cause it to be differentiated from others in the exhibition marketplace, and is a
163
moment of visual convergence, as the visuals that were created for the moving image were
subsequently adopted for print and other media.
In addition to creating a brand for the film, the print materials are of particular
interest because they create another ancillary environment of aesthetic convergence across
different media—cinematic techniques were deployed in the creation of print promotional
materials. Of all the detritus produced in support of the film, one series of print ads designed
by Ferro stands out because it asks to be read cinematically. On a number of full-page glossy
magazine ads, alternating red-and-white stripes fill the page. The red stripes are filled with
body copy promoting a particular aspect of the film—one primps for Alan Arkin after his
Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, another celebrates the fact that the film is being
well received in Athens, Belgium Glasgow, London, and even Moscow (See Fig. 24b).
218
The
true visual interest lies, however, in the images portrayed on the alternating white stripes.
On the first, we see a man on a horse, and two rows of the letter “T”; on the second, the
man and horse have migrated two inches to the left, and we see two rows of “The
Russian…” with the rest of the words cut off; on the third, the man and horse move farther
left and we see more of the logo, until by the fifth stripe, we finally read the full title of the
film and the words “Produced & Directed by Norman Jewison.” I argue that these
advertisements are designed to be read like moving images, with the white stripes being the
image content, and the red being the gap between images. If we were to view these images in
quick succession, after the fashion of a flip book or a film strip, then the words would appear
to animate themselves, moving jerkily it must be said, from screen left to screen right. Where
other graphic designers (including Pablo Ferro himself) were importing ideas from graphic
164
design into the cinema via their title sequences, Ferro here works in a reverse trajectory,
borrowing a visual technique from the cinema, and rendering it in print form. In Ferro’s
work, print and cinema do not appear to be mutually exclusive realms, but rather mutually
reinforcing, between which ideas are allowed to freely flow. Ferro would also carry this ethos
into his subsequent project for Jewison, finding ways to enact visual convergence amongst
the opening titles and publicity campaign for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).
Norman Jewison could not find a place for Pablo Ferro’s talents on In the Heat of the
Night,
219
but returned to him to create various visual effects for The Thomas Crown Affair
(1968); this time he was he given an expanded portfolio. Jewison commissioned Ferro to
design opening titles as well as some scenes appearing in the film itself (See Fig. 25a and
25b). It is here that Ferro executed his most well-known example of multiple-screen
sequences, but it is difficult to ascertain for which part of the movie the idea was intended:
the titles or the film. As Anne Friedberg writes in The Virtual Window, her definitive treatise
of all manner of screens, frames, and windows, Jewison, who hails from Toronto, Ontario,
“took his cinematographer and editor Hal Ashby to Expo ’67 [in Montreal], to see another
multiple-screen project, Christopher Chapman’s A Place to Stand as an inspiring model for
his complex use of multiple screens in The Thomas Crown Affair.”
220
From this it appears
that Jewison conceived of the technique in pre-production, then turned over its execution to
editor Hal Ashby, who in turn employed Ferro by virtue of his prior expertise in multiple-
screen film techniques for television and the Singer pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s
fair.
221
Jewison’s intent was to use the multiple images as a “story-telling device,” allowing
the film to show many different actions occurring simultaneously all over Boston,
222
but it
165
also was a temporal expedience, useful in trimming the film’s length. Ashby faced a problem
in that the running time of The Thomas Crown Affair was too long, and the multiple-screen
sequence of the polo match, for example, was conceived collaboratively between Ashby and
Ferro to cut down on the film’s runtime.
223
At this historical juncture, multiple-screen
images had found greater purchase in experimental and avant-garde film practice—Friedberg
cites its growth in Andy Warhol’s oeuvre, as well as the multiple monitors of prominent
video artists, amongst them Nam June Paik and Bill Viola
224
—and in populist displays at the
Czechoslovak and Canadian pavilions at Expo ’67. Yet as a device for narrative cinema,
multiple-screens were certainly more of a rarity, especially to the degree and number used by
Ferro in The Thomas Crown Affair. Again Friedberg is useful: It’s Always Fair Weather (1956)
“splits the screen into a tryptich,” and Pillow Talk (1959) divides Doris Day and Rock
Hudson down the middle of the frame “to establish both the separation and connection
between its two protagonists,”
225
both relatively isolated incidents, and far from avant-garde
in their effects. Another 1968 film, The Boston Strangler, directed by Richard Fleischer, is
more experimental because, instead of filling the screen with split images, he embraces the
use of the frame’s negative space. In one particularly representative instance, two portraits
are stacked on top of one another on the far right-hand side of the screen, while on the far
left, a medium shot of a library reading room is arranged above an insert of a detective’s
badge; fully two thirds of the screen, in between these images, is completely black.
The majority of split-screen sequences in The Thomas Crown Affair are used to convey
simultaneity of action, such as Thomas Crown orchestrating the bank robbery via a series of
telephone calls that reach across Boston, but their disjointedness is mitigated by Ferro’s
166
adherence to codes of continuity editing. Whenever Crown issues the “Go” order to one of
his henchmen from one split-screen, he is always “looking” in the direction of that
henchman (See Fig. 25c). Other sequences are also visually consistent: as the frontal image
of the wheelman’s is segmented around the frame, an image of Boston sits in the middle;
reversing the trajectory (forward, out to the camera), the image of Boston zooms in towards
his destination (back, away from the camera). Where these sequences are intelligible within
the codes and conventions of continuity cinema, the same cannot be said for the polo
sequence that sits at the midway point of The Thomas Crown Affair, which is a temporally-
and spatially-disjointed riot of moving images. Verbal description could never do the
sequence justice, but I will briefly hazard one here. Smaller frames grow and shrink with the
advancing and retreating movement of horses; a single image of a polo ball being struck is
reiterated 21 times in one frame (See Fig. 25d); a running horse is filmed from above in an
inverted tilt and showed 60 times (See Fig. 25e); and in one instance, the bottom half of the
screen is filled, left to right, with furiously running horses legs, while in the top half, a
quarter-sized cutout of McQueen’s torso gallops, disembodied across from right to left (See
Figs. 25f and 25g); when all is said and done, a single, tiny postage stamp of a woman ringing
a bell signals the end of the game—a visual respite from the cacophony just witnessed.
Images coalesce then explode, merge and then split; a POV shot and its reverse occupy the
same visual space. It is a furiously kinetic sequence to convey the visceral impact of a
furiously kinetic sport, and conveys this effect by inviting a kaleidoscopic, panoptic mode of
“polyvision” described by Anne Friedberg in The Virtual Window.
226
Yet at the same time,
the visuals thwart any assimilation because the editing and movement of frames are far too
167
rapid. Because this is such a radically destabilising mode of vision, we can see the previous
sequences (which are static and simplistic) as performing a function supplementary to their
effect of narrative and temporal condensation: they are visual preparation for the flurry of
images (which are kinetic and complex) found in Ferro’s polo sequence. And that visual
preparation begins with the title sequence.
The Thomas Crown Affair presents a unique situation because the visual rhetoric of the
title sequence finds its way, wholesale, into the film proper. From the lineage bequeathed by
Gerard Genette, whose idea of the paratext has fundamentally informed current scholarship
on the title sequence, to the way that paratextual philosophy has been enacted by Saul Bass,
the opening credits have been regarded as an entity separate from the diegesis: and mutually
reflective upon it, but ultimately a different species of moving image, and subject to different
norms and conventions. Yet The Thomas Crown Affair uses nearly identical multiple screens
in both the titles and the main feature. As Noel Harrison sings “The Windmills of Your
Mind” over Ferro’s titles, two smaller, still cutouts of Steve McQueen’s eye, grow and
recede in the frame; they are black and white photos overlaid with variegated tint—first
purple, then blue, green, red, etc. (See Fig 25h). In other instances, full faces are segmented
into individual frames, with the geometric order and balance of one of Piet Mondrian’s
abstract geometric paintings, and the various component parts too cycle through a rainbow
of overlaid colour (See Fig. 25i). Elsewhere, Ferro pans across still images, the most
prominent being a series of semi-disjointed views of a polo match, a clear preparatory gesture
clearing the way for his later, furiously kinetic sequence (See Fig. 25b). The fact that there is
such a connection between the titles and the main feature suggests there need not be such a
168
strict separation; the two are separated by convention, not ontology. Ferro opens up a space
for the convergence of opening credits and diegesis, and goes one step further in welcoming
the heretofore-marginal detritus into the title sequence. The opening title images are
sourced frame captures from principal photography, a familiar device to foreshadow some of
the scenes to come, but also from production stills and publicity photos.
227
Ferro
incorporates artefacts that are considered para- or even extra-textual objects into the film
itself, collapsing the boundaries of what is considered inside or outside the text. For all these
reasons, the split-screen effects throughout The Thomas Crown Affair are more than
narrative condensation. The titles collapse the distinctions between the titles and the main
film, with the former becoming a visual primer for the latter.
With The Thomas Crown Affair, Pablo Ferro work enacted a situation similar to that
of The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming: his graphic design became a visual
shorthand or icon for the film, and was used as a way to brand the film in distinction to
other competing releases. Larger capsule advertisements in the copybook featured some
variation on Ferro’s split-screen images, dependent on size.
228
Smaller, word-heavy segments
couldn’t accept the visuals for want of space, but the American theatrical poster features four
images vertically and horizontally offset from each other, separated by thin lines, similar to
the film; a variety of international posters also make various gestures to the multi-image
sequences from the film (See Fig. 5). The publicity seeks to brand the film and differentiate
it from others through the split-screen aesthetic; identification with the actors, expected
promotional practice for the film, becomes secondary to the way they are depicted through
Ferro’s visuals. It is important to note that the design principles put forward by Ferro were
169
more important than an infinitely replicated, identical logo. The international posters, which
cannot be attributed directly to Pablo Ferro’s creation, displayed many different layouts of
the same visual concept: thin, Mondrian-like lines, either dissecting a single picture, or
separating copies of an image fragment repeated in several frames. Ferro’s title sequence
formed a template for a number of designs executed across print and moving image media. As
such, the promotional material for The Thomas Crown Affair differentiated itself not by a
single icon repeated mechanically ad nauseum, but by the style of image-making; the exact
arrangement is less important than the design principles presented. The promotional
campaign for The Thomas Crown Affair distinguished the film by a graphic design ethos.
One particular artefact displays this ethos: a black legal-sized press book that stands
out amongst the others, because it, like the aforementioned series of print advertisements,
asks to be read in a proto-cinematic fashion (See Fig. 26). The cover of the press book
features a small frame cut out of it, slightly to the left of centre, and approximately three
inches from the bottom edge. Through the hole, we can see a close-up black and white
photograph of a pair of lips on the verge of kissing. A turn of the page adds a second frame to
the right of the first, about an inch from the right hand side of the frame—with the same
lips, this time locked in embrace. Another turn of the page adds another frame that fills the
gap between the two frames, with a detail insert of the couple’s eyes and noses; with one last
turn of the page, the layout adds a two-shot of McQueen and Dunaway kissing, and a
cutout of Dunaway’s eye. (This final layout of this series of images also appeared in an
alternate one-sheet poster.) The press book replicates the visual effect of a flipbook or
Herman Kasler’s Mutocsope—a series of still images printed on cards or pieces of paper,
170
animated into motion by flipping through the images in quick succession. The length of the
booklet foreshortens the length of the sequence, but the act of turning the page is visually
analogous to a flipbook; extended to a greater number of pages, the images would appear to
animate and come to life through successive turnings. Once again, Ferro takes the visual
ontology and function of film and embeds it into print, creating a visual convergence
between these two media.
Following The Thomas Crown Affair, Ferro expanded his portfolio and worked as a
second-unit director on Midnight Cowboy (1969). He was also responsible for creating a
spectacular “porno effects” sequence, a montage of sex, food, and violence that appear on a
TV screen while Jon Voight beds one of his New York socialite clients.
229
After a yearlong
convalescence from his near-fatal shooting, he was brought back into the fold by Hal Ashby
for Harold and Maude, and as mentioned earlier, was promptly fired after he produced a cut
of the trailer. He would also bring his fast-cutting aesthetic to the trailer for Stanley
Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), utilising the quick-edits technique he had previously
deployed in the theatrical trailer for Dr. Strangelove. During this time, he branched out into
acting, appearing in some experimental and low-to-no-budget films that, it must be said are
profoundly weird; the most reputable of these was as Chief Cloud in Head, “an Indian with
severe back problems”
230
in Greaser’s Palace, directed by Robert Downey, Sr. He also turned
his hand towards directing, and helmed the Rolling Stones documentary Let’s Spend the
Night Together (1982) with Hal Ashby; but because Ferro had let his Directors Guild of
America membership lapse, the DGA refused to recognise him as co-director.
231
All of
Ferro’s forays into other realms of filmmaking practice (he also re-cut the film The Night
171
They Raided Minsky’s (1968 for William Friedkin), means that it is difficult to pigeonhole
Pablo Ferro as solely a graphic designer. This is made even more difficult because of the fact
that, in those designs, executed both for screen and print, we find that one mode of
expression bleeds seamlessly into another. Ferro reconfigured the relationship of image to
typography in Dr. Strangelove making it a semi-transparent object that, enmeshed into the
image becomes an element to be looked through like a grid, rather than looked at; type in
Bullitt becomes further extrapolated down this trajectory by forming the borders and
boundaries of images themselves. For The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming,
typography melds into an icon that stands in synecdochic relationship to the film that it
represents, and so traverses back onto the page, collapsing the traditional distinctions
between cinema and print, and creating a visual alignment between these media—
convergence, avant la lettre. Ferro also executed advertisements that achieve their effects by
visual juxtapositions that are indebted to (proto-)cinematic devices—both Russians and The
Thomas Crown Affair use the techniques of flipbooks and Mutoscopes to promote their
respective films. Where Russians seeks to identify and differentiate the film via a typographic
logo, for The Thomas Crown Affair, Ferro reconfigures the notion of branding by identifying
the film not with a specific icon, but with a design ethos; that ethos serves as an adaptable
visual template across a number of different iterations. Finally, The Thomas Crown Affair also
enacts another set of conflations, first by incorporating extra textual materials into the title
sequence, and secondly by utilising the same split-screen techniques for both the opening
credits and the film proper; the relatively staid still images in the former are a visual primer
and preparation designed to ease the viewer into the visual cacophony of the latter.
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Conclusion
By way of conclusion I will turn, very briefly, to Stephen Frankfurt, the graphic
designer who created the celebrated title sequence for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), directed
by Robert Mulligan. Frankfurt’s early attempts to enter the film industry were rebuffed when
he came to California at the age of 22 in 1953 to solicit work. After graduating from Pratt
and working as a painter of animation cel backgrounds for UPA, Frankfurt landed a job at
Young & Rubicam, where he was hired as an Assistant Art Director in its fledgling TV
department. He was promoted to TV Art Supervisor in 1957, and was the head of Y&R’s
television division when producer Alan J. Pakula, duly impressed with a single commercial
Frankfurt directed for Bufferin painkillers,
232
called Frankfurt in late 1961 to solicit his work
on the titles for To Kill A Mockingbird.
233
The To Kill A Mockingbird title sequence proved
to be an entrée into film circles for Frankfurt, who would go on to create comprehensive
promotional campaigns—posters, trailers, taglines and title sequences—for such films as
Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, the same year that Frankfurt ascended to the presidency of Young
& Rubicam’s advertising division at the relatively young age of 37. He would go onto to
create titles and advertising campaigns for films such as Superman (1978) and Alien
(1979).
234
For this latter film, he created perhaps the most famous tagline in cinema history:
“In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.” Frankfurt seems to have been an exception to
the likes of Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro, because the title sequence
for To Kill a Mockingbird was a nested narrative unto itself and was purposefully designed so
“that it didn’t look like Saul Bass had done it.”
235
The Mockingbird opening titles are a live-
173
action short film that dwells on the treasured objects of childhood—marbles, safety pins,
dolls, crayons, etc.—intercut with a crayon picture of a mockingbird being drawn by a child.
At the end of the sequence, the drawing is rent asunder, a striking innocence lost. With this
in mind, Frankfurt seems to have been a director forced to find work in advertising by
necessity, rather than an advertiser who found his way into film. Or perhaps the distinction
doesn’t matter, because the worlds of advertising and cinema, both of which are both
concerned with image making, and the lively art of persuasion,
236
find striking sympathy with
each other, and borrow from each other the same basic creative philosophies. This common
ground is very succinctly expressed by Stephen Frankfurt, who provides a fitting segue into
the end of this chapter.
Frankfurt was profiled by the BBC in a 1965 installment of its programme Inside
America, “a series of insights into the lives of individual Americans.”
237
His episode, “The
Quiet Persuader,” is an insight into the advertising industry in the mid-1960s, and gives
glimpses into the inner workings of Young & Rubicam. He described the work and art as an
advertiser as follows:
There’s probably no more overworked statement than the
criticism that advertising sells people things that they don’t
really need. Well, I as one person working in advertising
plead guilty. Advertising sells people things they don’t need.
Things like television sets, automobiles, ketchup mattresses,
cosmetics, ranges, refrigerators and on and on and on. People
really don’t need these things. But people don’t really need
art or music or literature or newspapers or historians or
wheels or philosophies or critics of advertising either….The
advertising man is in a certain sense unique because he’s
probably part artist, part businessman, part scientist….The
artist as he fits into advertising is a different kind of artist. I
think the graphic artist is a designer, a filmmaker, but a man
174
who is making a film or putting together a design or a layout
for a very express purpose, to reach specific people, to get a
specific message across.
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Frankfurt’s beliefs, delivered honestly and directly into the camera, help encapsulate the
tripartite skills required of the advertiser—artist, businessman, scientist—and suggest a
community where commercials and cinema converge, but they also do graphic designers a
great disservice. There is perhaps no more apt summation of the rhetorical construction of
the graphic designer in the 1950s and 1960s than the one put forward by Frankfurt. Echoing
Paul Rand’s belief that design in advertising ought to integrate “utilitarian and formal
requirements” Frankfurt describes the graphic designer as an artist, but a compromised one.
The graphic designer denatures his or her pure talent, smoothing its rough, controversial, or
provocative edges to solve the problems of creating demand and desire for certain products
in the hearts and minds of mass audiences. Thus when Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn
and Pablo Ferro, erstwhile advertisers all, were hired by film production companies to create
title sequences for their projects, those designers brought a very particular horizon of
expectations with their work. Hiring graphic designers for feature film makes a certain
degree of sense from an industrial perspective. The directness of expression and visual
economy of television advertising aligns strongly with title sequences, not to mention the
foreshortened time allotted. And if we take Frankfurt’s belief system at face value—an ethos
mirrored by Rand, David Ogilvy, and others—these designers also bring with them an
implicit promise of inoffensive, middlebrow pablum.
Yet despite their commercial, some might say craven, backgrounds as advertisers in
the business of selling products, Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro thwart those expectations,
175
and present a considered, perceptive, and sometimes-challenging engagement with the norms
and traditions of various visual and graphic arts. In his early career for Stanley Donen,
Maurice Binder reflexively deconstructed the ontologies of the techniques and technologies
that make moving and print images, and satirises production cultures that create films in
Hollywood. When he moved into creating opening credits for Dr. No, Binder borrowed
from Pop Art to create something very close to pure art, and borrow from the vibrancy of
1960s British youth culture to give the film a swinging cultural sophistication that far
outstrips what we see in the film proper. When Robert Brownjohn assumed the mantle of
the James Bond films, he essays a treatise on the potentials and limitations of type and the
projection screen, and creates a sequence that meditates on the act of film spectatorship—all
under the cover of nominally straightforward sexual titillation. Brownjohn also grapples with
the visual mechanics of integrating type and screen on film, a problem that is a finely-
wrought balancing act between the artistic freedom of the title designer on the one hand,
and the contractual necessities of the medium of the title sequence on the other. While
attempting to resolve these competing claims, Pablo Ferro conceived of the titles as a place
for aesthetic convergence between print and moving image media, and using titles as a
jumping off point for the branding of an entire film. He also further expands the ontological
categories of type and image, making it an element of visual transparency and framing, while
simultaneously collapsing a series of once insuperable boundaries: print and moving image;
extra-textual artefacts and the diegetic world; titles sequences and the main narrative action.
Accordingly, under the talents of Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro, opening titles become a
discursive space—not merely one that eases the audience into the film (per Charney), or
176
prepares it imagistically for the narrative about to unfold (per Bass), but a place to encounter
various extra-filmic discourses, both artistic and otherwise.
There is a surprising (and surprisingly intelligent) degree of expression in the title
sequences explored during the preceding chapter, though I do not wish to make an
overdetermined argument and imbue the work of Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro with radical
properties. I do not wish to suggest that they have the power to permanently alter our
understanding of both title sequences across the entire weft and weave of cinema practice.
They present an important rhetorical movement in film history, but as alluded at this
chapter’s outset, the number of their title sequences was far outpaced by firms like Pacific
Title and Art. Any putatively transgressive or transformative effects that might reside in
opening titles is also somewhat muted by their relationship to the main narrative of the film.
After Gerard Genette’s formulation, the title sequence is a paratext, a semi-permeable
membrane that stands between the extra-diegetic world and the diegesis, bleeding into the
narrative proper and reflecting upon it. However, it is also important to note that title
sequences are also partially bracketed off from the film proper, and therefore have a logic all
of their own. Though title sequences can be rich, visually inventive worlds unto their own,
their influence wanes as soon as the “Directed by” credit appears on screen. Despite avowed
attempts by Saul Bass to make the audience pay attention, full immersion into the diegesis
239

cannot begin until the credits end, because the credits reveal the labour that subtends the
creation of a moving image, and reveals itself as artificial construct. All of this is to say that,
Pablo Ferro’s experiments in The Thomas Crown Affair notwithstanding, title sequences
remain entities distinct and separate from the films that follow, meaning that any outlandish
177
visual experiments or transgressive ideological statements made in these sequences reside and
stay nested within the title sequence. Directors or producers needed not fear that
Brownjohn’s heady experiments with luminous typography and the body as topographic
screens would alienate audiences, for those concerns in no way migrate into the adventures
of James Bond (though the charms of nubile, putatively obliging women certainly do). All of
this is to say that the title sequences have greater potential than serving as merely being
straightforward instances of narrative condensation and audience preparation. As viewed
through the creations of Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro, opening titles
were a venue to pose aesthetic questions and explore artistic discourses that are as fraught
and contested as the cinema itself—but circumscribed, and made safe.

Chapter Two Notes

1
Chris Chase, “What’s a Gaffer, Anyway?” The New York Times, 3 June 1984, H1.
2
Synonymous, for my purposes, with the dominant narrative cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, though
this is clearly a contested definition. See Denise Mann’s Hollywood Independents for further unpacking of
the distinctions between “classical” and “Hollywood” cinema (Denise Mann, Hollywood Independents: The
Postwar Talent Takeover (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
3
David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los
Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 14.
4
See my Introduction, page 22.
5
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction to the Senses (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 41.
6
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode
of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 26.
7
“Salute to Pacific Title & Art,” The Hollywood Reporter, 26 March 1994, S4, S10.
8
There is admittedly, a grand tradition of music selected for opening credit sequences. Though I will
reference music occasionally throughout, my primary focus for this chapter is the importance of visuals
in opening titles.
178

9
In cinema studies see evidence of this paradigm in Peter Hall, “Opening Ceremonies,” in
Architecture and Film, ed. Mark Lamster (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 130-
133; Ben Block and Lucy Wilson, George Lucas’s Blockbusting, (New York: Harper Collins, 2010),
335-336; Elsaesser and Hagener, Film Theory, 40-41; Lynn Spigel. TV by Design: Modern Art and
the Rise of Network Television. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 106. In graphic design
circles, see Philip B. Meggs in Six Chapters in Design (Hong Kong: Chronicle Books, 1997), 12-
69; Philip B. Meggs and Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 2006), 378-81; Patrick Cramsie, The Story of Graphic Design (New York: Abrams, 2010),
266-8; Roxane Jubert, Typography and Graphic Design: From Antiquity to the Present (Paris:
Flammarion, 2006), 314-6; Stephen Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007), 317-20.
10
For the past half-decade, Chris Horak, Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, has been
researching and writing a book on Saul Bass, using the extensive archival papers at the Margaret Herrick
Library in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
11
Spigel, TV by Design, 58.
12
Paul Rand, Thoughts on Design (New York: Wittenborn and Company, 1947), 1.
13
See Introduction, page 8.
14
Per Genette’s lineage, film is text, credits are paratext.
15
For example, the extra-marital affairs and generational schism in The Graduate (1967), the free love of
Antonioni’s Blowup (1963), the male prostitution plot of Midnight Cowboy (1969), or the drug counter-
culture in Easy Rider (1969).
16
For instance, shooting with available light for The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) to give the film a
realistic life-on-the-street look. (For more on thie film’s production history, see Denise Mann, Hollywood
Independents, 193-218), or highlighting New York’s grit through grainy, open-air, handheld
photography in The French Connection (1971).
17
For example, Pablo Ferro redesigned the opening title sequence to The Ed Sullivan Show in 1968.
(“The Sponsored Field: Pablo Ferro Films to do Reely [sic] Big Logo,” Back Stage, 6 September 1968,
5.)
18
And sometimes the challenge was not so implicit. Robert Brownjohn was quoted as being “not so
much influenced by [Bass’] ideas” (Tony Crawley, “Meet the man who gets the Bond films off to a
sizzling start,” Showtime Magazine. 1964: 22-23.) Stephen Frankfurt, an advertiser and designer
whose design philosophy informs the conclusion to this chapter designed the opening titles for To Kill A
Mockingbird (1962), with an explict intent to create something “that it didn’t look like Saul Bass had
done it.” (Peter Hall, “Film Titles,” Baseline. 17 (1993): 43.)
19
Of course, not all of the designs put into film by Binder, Brownjohn, and Ferro were challenging or
provocative; however, the following study of their careers in the 1950s and 1960s will demonstrate how
frequently they broke Bass’s mould and inserted aesthetic and ideological explorations of the media in
which they work.
20
Bass gives this account himself in the film Bass on Titles. Directed and performed by Saul Bass.
Written by Saul Bass and Stan Hart. (1997, Los Angeles, CA: Saul Bass Films & Pyramid Films).
21
For a full account of Bass’s work up to 1982, see “Filmographies,” Film Comment, 18.3
(May/June 1982): 70.
22
“Film Titles—A New Field for the Graphic Designer.” Graphis. 16.89 (1960): 208-216.
23
Bass, “Film Titles,” 209.
24
Bass, “Film Titles,” 209.
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25
Bass, “Film Titles,” 209.
26
Lowell A. Bodger, “Modern Approach to Film Titling,” American Cinematographer 41.8 (August
1960): 476-478.
27
Linwood Dunn, “Effects and titles for West Side Story,” American Cinematographer 42.2
(December 1961): 736-38, 757-58, 760.
28
Frederick Foster, “New Look in Film Titles,” American Cinematographer 43.6 (June 1962): 356-
7, 373-76.
29
Allen, Bob. “Designing and producing the credit titles for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
American Cinematographer 44.12 (December 1963): pp706-7, 728-9.
30
“Do Film Critics Extol ‘Bass Credits’ To Slur (By Contrast) the Director?” Variety, 17 June
1964, 5.
31
Note that in this last Variety article there is an absence of direct quotation marks.
32
Roxane Jubert, Typography and Graphic Design: From Antiquity to the Present, trans. Deke
Duinsberre and David Radzinowicz (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 316.
33
Alexandre Tylski has watched something in the neighbourhood of 3000 title sequences for the
purposes of his work; Deborah Allison, a comparatively modest (if very precise 2636) for her
dissertation (Abstract 20). The rigour that Allison shows in her statistical analysis of the types/genres of
title sequences prevalent in American film history, is particularly useful. Both Tylski and Allison give
firm evidentiary grounds upon which to dispute Bass’s more casual history. (Deborah Allison,
“Promises in the Dark: Opening Title Sequences in American Feature Films of the Sound Period”
(PhD diss., University of East Anglia, 2001).)
34
Allison, Promises in the Dark, 48. Allison details Bass’s fallacies at great length in an article titled
“Novelty Title Sequences” for the online archive Screening the Past.
(http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/20/novelty-title-sequences.html Accessed 21 January
2012.)
35
Quoted in Spigel, TV By Design, 81.
36
This is perhaps no more true than with Pablo Ferro, the most eccentric of this quartet, who in
addition to contributing some of the most well-regarded title sequences in cinema history, also produced
some films that are, it must be said, profoundly weird.
37
The fluid and ad-hoc nature of graphic design collaborations between and across disciplines in graphic
design and advertising means that it is very difficult to authoritatively pin down moments, dates, and
places for various historical developments—a fact further complicated that this muddled history is
clouded full of competing, even contradictory claims, self-aggrandizing autobiographies with unreliable
narrators, and artefacts that are often lost to history.
38
The Golden Age of Advertising—the 50s, ed. Jim Heiman (London: Taschen, 2005). The Golden
Age of Advertising—the 60s. ed. Jim Heiman (London: Taschen, 2005); Larry Dobrow, When
Advertising Tried Harder. The Sixties: The Golden Age of American Advertising (New York: Friendly
Press, 1984).
39
Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
40
Graphic design found its most frequent outlet through the campaigns created by advertising agencies.
41
Philip B. Meggs and Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 2006), 344.
42
Stephen Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007),
296.
43
Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History, ix.
180

44
For more on the definitions and politics of abstract expressionism, see: Irving Sandler, Triumph of
American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). Clement
Greenberg, “Abstract, Representational, and so forth,” Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1989), 133-138. Harold Rosenberg, “The Herd of Independent Minds,” Discovering
the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture and Politics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948),
15-28.
45
These included two edicts issued by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Hungarian professor at the Bauhaus
school and founder of the Institute of Design in Chicago: The New Vision (New York: George
Wittenborn, Inc., 1946); and posthumously, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobold, 1947).
Another volume was written by Gygory Kepes, another Hungarian Bauhaus professor who followed
Moholy-Nagy to New York (Language of Vision. (Chicago: Paul Theobold, 1944).) “Watching
Words Move,” (1962) was a provocative pamphlet created for the magazine Typographica 6 (1962)
by Robert Brownjohn, Ivan Chermayeff, Tom Geismar—disciples of Moholy-Nagy, who went on
to form their own design firm, Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and Geismar.
46
Bernbach would go on to form the influential agency DDB in the 1949, a company that itself would
form a minor revolution in advertising, as this chapter will explore shortly.
47
Esklison, New History, 329.
48
Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History, 374.
49
Despite Lynn Spigel’s assertions in TV by Design, fine art movements never truly found much
purchase in the advertising world. Advertisements on behalf of Container Corporation of America, from
prior to World War II until the 1980s are the most sustained commitment to modern art in the history
of advertising, but they were by far the exception rather than the rule. For more on the very minor
currents of fine art in advertising, see Michelle Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art,
Michelle Bogart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 259-291.
50
Quoted in Eskilson, New History, 322.
51
Rand, Thoughts on Design, 1.
52
Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History, 374.
53
Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History, 374.
54
Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History, 375.
55
Jubert, Typography and Graphic Design, 319-20.
56
Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History, 393.
57
Meggs and Purvis p393.
58
Robert Brownjohn, Ivan Chermayeff, and Tom Geismar, “Watching Words Move,”
Typographica. 6 (1962). Reprinted as Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar, watching words move
(New York: Chronicle Books, 2006) 2.
59
Chermayeff and Geismar 2. Some of their many experiments include setting the “O’s” in
“Automobile” down by half a line so that they resembled wheels, or flinging the dots on the i’s in
“missiles” so that they give the appearance of projectiles. See Fig. 12 & 13 for examples of their
typographical experiments.
60
Patrick Cramsie, The Story of Graphic Design: From the Invention of Writing to the Birth of Graphic
Design. (New York: Abrams, 2010), 248.
61
Jubert, Typography and Graphic Design, 327.
62
Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History, 365.
63
Eskilson, New History, 311.
64
Jubert, Typography and Graphic Design, 327.
181

65
For more information, see Adam Duncan Harris. “Extra Credits: The History and Collection of
Pacific Title and Art” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2000).
66
“Salute to Pacific Title & Art”, S-3.
67
J. Walter Thompson was founded in the 1860s, BBDO in the 1890s, and Young & Rubicam in the
1920s. For more, see Juliann Sivulka, “The Roaring Twenties: 1920 to 1929,” Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes:
A Cultural History of American Advertising (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011), 119-162. Frank Presbrey. The
History and Development of Advertising. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).
68
Cramsie, The Story of Graphic Design, p235.
69
Cramsie, The Story of Graphic Design, 235.
70
Quoted in Spigel, TV By Design, 225.
71
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Atheneum, 1963).
72
For more, see Ohmer, Susan. George Gallup in Hollywood. New York : Columbia University
Press, 2006.
73
Ogilvy, Confessions, 118.
74
Ogilvy, Confessions, 90-91.
75
Ogilvy, Confessions, 90.
76
Ogilvy, Confessions, 90.
77
Bogart, Artists, Advertising 127.
78
The Clios, founded by Wallace A. Ross in 1959, were an entirely separate organisation devoted
solely to awarding television commercials.
79
The 47
th
Annual of Advertising, Editorial, Television Art & Design (New York: Watson-Guptill
1968). (Published for the previous year’s work, i.e. 1967).
80
Emily King, Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography, 1925-1970 (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2005), 7-8.
81
Spigel, TV by Design 221.
82
Spigel, TV by Design, 223.
83
Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes, 229.
84
“TV Commercials Festival Award Statuette Named ‘Clio’,” Back Stage, 31 May 1963, 6.
85
“TV commercials fete set May 4 in New York,” Broadcasting 60.4 (Jan 23, 1961): 28.
86
“Spots for Festival,” The Stage and Television Today, 5 May 1960, 20.
87
“Gallant-Roth Booking TV Industry On 45th St,” Back Stage 27 November 1964, 6.
88
“More New Production Companies Here Fight For Share Of TV Commercials,” Back Stage. 21
June 1968, 1-7, 13-14, 18.
89
Pablo Ferro. Looseleaf, compiled by Pablo Ferro. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, CA, 1. 2002. (Call Number PN1998 A3 F458 2002)
90
For instance, David Newman and Robert Benton, who wrote the screenplay to Bonnie and Clyde
(1967), were determinedly based out of New York, where they edited Esquire magazine. See: Mark
Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin,
2008), 7-8.
91
Paul Monaco, The Sixties 1960-69. History of the American Cinema, Vol. 8 (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 147.
92
Martin Fox, “Graphic Design for the Performing Arts: A Special Issue,” Print 29.4 (July/August
1965): 1.
93
Everett Aison. “The Current Scene: Film Titles.” Print. 29:4 (July/August 1965) p26.
94
Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, 5.
182

95
Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, 5-6.
96
Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, 2-3.
97
Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, 4.
98
This is not to pass judgement on the credit sequences of Pacific Title—they are quite beautiful and
artisinal in their bearing—but rather to acknowledge the fact that the company, prolific though it was in
volume of work, was being left behind in the wake of technological and visual developments in film
titling, and as such is less relevant to the scope of this chapter.
99
“Salute to Pacific Title & Art,” S4, S10.
100
Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, 52.
101
“Salute to Pacific Title & Art,” S8.
102
Raymond Levy, “The Art of Film Titles,” Motion Picture Herald, 4 March 1964, 16.
103
Philip K. Scheuer, “New Craze Started by ‘Pink Panther’: DePatie and Freleng Reveal Story
Behind Cartoon Series,” Los Angeles Times, 24 December 1964, C7.
104
Eugene Archer, “Cartoon for Film Becomes a Series: ‘ Pink Fink’ [sic] Will Be the First of
Animated Shorts,” New York Times, 4 Aug 1964, 19.
105
In addition to eliding these aforementioned corporate histories, this chapter could not hope to cover
the creative output of all title designers working in the 1950s and 1960s. As such, the designs of Wayne
Fitzgerald (Pillow Talk, 1960; Man’s Favorite Sport, 1964), Dan Perri, and others besides will
unfortunately have to go largely wanting from these pages.
106
Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns created window displays for Tiffany & Co. (1956); James
Rosenquist did the same for Tiffany’s and the Bonwit Teller department store. (Christin Mamiya, Pop
Art and Consumer Culture: American Super Market (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 134-
137). Before embarking on his more infamous career, Andy Warhol did illustrations for CBS, a
drawing for an RCA record cover, illustrations for Doubleday Press, stationery for Bergdorf Goodman,
and a Christmas card for Tiffany’s. (Bogart, Artists, Advertising, 259-269).
107
Pablo Picasso rendered a small oil painting for De Beers Consolidated Mines (1940). Geogria
O’Keeffe depicted some local fauna for Hawaiian Pineapple. (Bogart, Artists, Advertising, 157-165)
108
“The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming Press Release.” Norman Jewison Papers.
United Artists Collection. Mss 122AN. Box 6, Folder 6. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater
Research, Madison, Wisconsin.
109
Jewison, Norman. “Pablo Ferro Deal.” Inter-Office Memorandum. Norman Jewison Papers.
United Artists Collection. Mss 122AN. Box 9, Folder 1. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater
Research, Madison, Wisconsin.
110
Maurice Binder, “How I Designed the Titles for Dr. No.” Amateur Movie-Maker 6.2 (February
1963): 69.
111
Pat Kirkham. “Dots and Sickles,” Sight and Sound. 5.12 (December 1995) p10.
112
Kirkham, “Dots and Sickles, ” 10.
113
Kirkham, “Dots and Sickles,” 10.
114
Kirkham, “Dots and Sickles,” 10.
115
Binder received screen credit for neither of these features; however, reviews in Variety chimed
that “an engaging wrapping is provided by clever title credits by Maurice Binder” for Indiscreet (28
May 1959, 6), and praised that “Maurice Binder’s bristling main titles put the hex of fun on the
production” of Damn Yankees (17 September 1958, 6). It remains unclear how Binder’s association
with the film was promoted to these critics.
183

116
These titles included The Grass is Greener (1960), Once More, With Feeling! (1960), Charade
(1963), Bedazzled (1967), and Two for the Road (1967), amongst others.
117
“Movie Marketing Acquires a British Accent.” George Lucas’s Blockbusting, eds. Alex Ben Block
and Lucy Autrey Wilson (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 433. Kirkham, “Dots and Sickles,”
12.
118
Kirkham, “Dots and Sickles,” 12.
119
Maurice Binder, “London Trek Explained,” Los Angeles Times, 30 January 1972, V8.
120
Kirkham, “Dots and Sickles,” 10.
121
Scheuer, “New Craze Started by ‘Pink Panther’,” C7.
122
Excepting, of course, Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again, (1983).
123
See: “Filmographies.” Film Comment, May/Jun 1982: 70 for a more complete list of Binder’s
titles.
124
Kirkham, “Dots and Sickles,” 10.
125
Jennifer Bass, and Pat Kirkham, Saul Bass: a Life in Film and Design (London: Laurence King,
2011).
126
Bernard Herman’s score also repeats a musical motif from the credits during the scene when Kim
Novak receives a makeover from Jimmy Stewart.
127
In the halftone process, pioneered by Stephen H. Horgan in 1880, the entire tonal range of
grayscales (and later the spectrum of colour values) was produced by minute “halftone” dots in
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK) against a field of white paper, in varying compositions.
(Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History, 147-8.) For an actual, real-time illustration of this process of
zooming into an image to reveal its halftone dots, see the opening title sequence of To Die For
(1995), created by Pablo Ferro. Some of Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings embraced this aesthetic, and
characterised by large segments of halftone dots.
128
Though for additive colour theory, the primary colours are Red, Green, and Blue.
129
Stylistically, the background images like a baseball field rendered only in solid blocks of navy
and green, resemble very much the type of jagged and jazzy compositions favoured by Saul Bass.
130
Binder, “How I Designed the Titles,” 69.
131
Binder, “How I Designed the Titles,” 69. The smaller the aperture, the greater the depth of
field; the smallest of these is a pinhole.
132
Binder, “How I Designed the Titles,” 70.
133
Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland Classics, 2000), 106.
134
Binder, “How I Designed the Titles,” 69.
135
Binder, “How I Designed the Titles,” 69.
136
Kirkham, 11.
137
1946-1968: The Birth of Contemporary Art. ed Emma Cavazini (Milan: Skira Editore, 2007),
245-6.
138
Indeed, when compared to the opening titles to the 22 films to follow, which rely heavily on the
presence of lithe, barely-clothed female bodies, the credits for Dr. No are a chaste curiosity.
139
Robert Crowley and Geoffrey Parker. The Reader’s Companion to Military History (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 49. David Westwood, Rifles: An Illustrated History of Their Impact
(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 85.
140
Kirkham, “Dots and Sickles,” 11.
141
Toby Miller, The Avengers (London: BFI, 1997), 27.
184

142
Quoted in James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: a Cultural History of the James Bond Films. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 116.
143
Quoted in Chapman, License to Thrill, 117.
144
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip
Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 169-70, 175-77.
145
Quoted in Chapman, License to Thrill, 116.
146
This was due in large part to Brownjohn’s personal problems, a story I will narrate shortly.
147
Brownjohn published an article in Typographica called “Sex and Typography” in 1964, and
Emily King used that as the title for her monograph on Brownjohn, which was published in 2005.
148
King, Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography, 1925-1970.
149
“Institute of Design History,” IIT Institute of Design, Accessed 27 February 2012,
http://www.id.iit.edu/about-id/history/
150
King, Sex and Typography, 37.
151
King, Sex and Typography, 33.
152
Chermayeff and Geismar, Watching Words Move, 3.
153
King Sex and Typography, 43.
154
King Sex and Typography, 44.
155
Emily King, “The Hipster Bebop Junkie,” Print. 60.1 (Jan/Feb, 2006): 88.
156
King, Sex and Typography, 185.
157
King, “Hipster,” 89.
158
An image of this packaging is reproduced in King, Sex and Typography, 182-3.
159
King, Sex and Typography, 204
160
King, Sex and Typography, 210.
161
Staff Reporter. “Observer’s TV adverts win awards.” The Observer. 19 June 1966. p3.
162
King, “Hipster,” p91.
163
Tony Crawley, “Meet the man who gets the Bond films off to a sizzling start,” Showtime
Magazine 1964: 22-23.
164
Robert Brownjohn, “Sex and Typography,” Typographica 10 (1964): 49-57.
165
Brownjohn, “Sex and Typography,” p57.
166
Staff Reporter. “Observer’s TV adverts win awards.” The Observer. 19 June 1966.
167
Quoted in King, Sex and Typography,” p147.
168
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. The New Vision. Trans. Daphne M. Hoffman. New York: George
Wittenborn, Inc., 1947. p13.
169
Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, p50. Original emphasis.
170
Brownjohn, “Sex and Typography,” p57.
171
Lichtspiel Schawarz-Weiss-Grau. Created by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. SFMOM video Accessed 19
August 2012. http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/1
172
King, Sex and Typography ,207. Another story, related by Brownjohn in Showtime Magazine,
goes as follows: “It started six years ago. I was teaching typography with a slide projector at school.
One student came in late. He walked in front of the projector’s beam. Immediately the type in the
slide shot on to his shirt. Of course the shirt wasn’t flat like a screen, so the type changed sizes. It
looked great!” (Crawley, “Meet the Man,” 22-23.)
173
Brownjohn, “Sex and Typography,” 57.
174
Brownjohn, “Sex and Typography,” 57.
185

175
These include Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in The Great Race (1965), as well as Cary Grant
and Ginger Rogers in Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942). See the Introduction, page 59, for more.
176
Rich, “From Russia With Love Film Review,” Variety (D), 16 October 1963, 6. See also: Philip
K. Scheuer, “ ‘From Russia With Love’ Blends Comedy and Thrills on Screens,” Los Angeles Times,
28 May 1964, C10.
177
Crawley, p22.
178
Aison, “The Current Scene: Film Titles,” 29.
179
Aison, “The Current Scene: Film Titles,” 29.
180
Aison, “The Current Scene: Film Titles,” 26.
181
Aison, “The Current Scene: Film Titles,” 29.
182
Showtime Magazine positively effused over her “fantastic statistics (41-23-47),” and featured a
pin-up picture of Nolan in the accompanying article. (Crawley, “Meet the man,” p22-3).
183
Brownjohn, “Sex and Typography,” 58.
184
Brownjohn, “Sex and Typography,” 57.
185
Aison, “The Current Scene: Film Titles,” 29.
186
Crawley, “Meet the Man,” 23.
187
“The Great Race,” The Great Race Production Files, Box 3 of 5 (Barcode B00172), Publicity-
Misc Folder, Warner Bros. Archive, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
188
John Philip Jones, The Advertising Business: Operations, Creativity, Media Planning, Integrated
Communications (New York: Sage Publications, 1999), 13.
189
Jones, The Advertising Business, 13.
190
King, Sex and Typography, 209.
191
“The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming Press Release.” Norman Jewison Papers.
United Artists Collection. Mss 122AN. Box 6, Folder 6. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater
Research, Madison, Wisconsin.
192
Crawley, “Meet the Man,” 22.
193
Quoted in King, Sex and Typography, 207.
194
According to the biographical film Pablo (2013), Ferro did not move to Los Angeles until physical
infirmity, exacerbated by New York’s temperamental, inclement weather forced him to migrate out west
in 1971.
195
Ferro, Pablo Ferro Book, 1.
196
Stanley Kershower, “New Animation Company Rolling Along,” Back Stage, 30 June, 1961, 4.
197
“Advertisement.” Back Stage. 11 May 1962. p6.
198
Kershower, “New Animation Company Rolling Along,” 4.
199
Spigel, TV by Design, 221.
200
Ferro, Pablo Ferro Book, 1.
201
Pablo. Directed by Richard Goldgewicht. Shoreline Entertainment, 2013.
202
Ferro, Pablo Ferro Book, 2.
203
“Ferro, Mogubgub, and Schwartz Advertisement,” Back Stage, 28 February 1964, 4.
204
Pablo. Directed by Richard Goldgewicht.
205
In Ferro’s trailer for Harold and Maude, he included a scene where Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon
kiss. Ferro claims the scene apparently so incensed Paramount Production chief Robert Evans that
Evans fired him and forced Ashby to remove the scene from the film. (Pablo Ferro, “An Evening
With Pablo Ferro,” (Presentation, Cinefamily at The Silent Movie Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, 27
September 2011. My recording.)
186

206
Steven Heller, “for openers,” Print 59.1 (Jan/Feb 2005): 77.
207
Pablo. Directed by Richard Goldgewicht.
208
Tolnay, Tom. “Ferro Turns On Filmaniacs To Groovy, Inexpensive Tape.” Back Stage 6 June
1969. pp9, 21.
209
“Pablo Ferro Receives the 2009 AIGA Medal.” http://www.aiga.org/video-gala-2009-ferro/
Accessed 23 June 2012.
210
“Pablo Ferro.” Adobe Studios. Pablo Ferro Book, p5.
211
“An Eveing With Pablo Ferro,” my recording.
212
“An Eveing With Pablo Ferro,” my recording.
213
Jewison apparently did so without consulting producers Marvin and Walter Mirisch: Harold
Mirisch, “Letter to Norman Jewison,” 29 June 1965. Norman Jewison Papers. United Artists
Collection. Mss 122AN. Box 5, Folder 3, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
Madison, Wisconsin
214
Harry Ulfland, “Letter to Norman Jewison,” August 4 1964. Norman Jewison Papers. United
Artists Collection. Mss 122AN. Box 5, Folder 3, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
Madison, Wisconsin
215
Norman Jewison, “Pablo Ferro Deal.” Inter-Office Memorandum. Norman Jewison Papers.
United Artists Collection. Mss 122AN. Box 9, Folder 1. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater
Research, Madison, Wisconsin.
215
Binder, “How I Designed the Titles for Dr. No,” 69.
216
“Adobe Studio Feature,” Ferro Book p6.
217
“Letter from ‘Alan’ to Norman Jewison.” 31 July 1966. The Russians are Coming, Box 5, Folder
3. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Michael Lawler, “Letter to Norman Jewison.” 4
July 1966. Mss 122AN. Norman Jewison Papers. United Artists Collection. Box 5, Folder 3.
Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research.
218
“Advertisements for The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming,” Norman Jewison
Papers. United Artists Collection. Mss 122AN. Box 8, Folder 4. Wisconsin Center for Film and
Theater Research.
219
This perhaps suggests that the visual distractions provided by title sequences were inappropriate
for serious, social message pictures like In the Heat of the Night, perhaps because they rupture the
diegesis, or perhaps it’s merely because Ferro’s eccentric visual style wasn’t appropriate for the
project.
220
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Albertini to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), 212.
221
In distinction to his previous work, Ferro was not viewed only as a title sequence designer in
financial terms, too. Instead of a flat fee, which I demonstrated above was the norm for title
designers, Ferro was employed by Mirisch Corporation at a rate of $500 per week, plus $100 for
living expenses. (Ray Kurtzman, “Memo to Oscar Steinberg re: Thomas Crown & Company—Pablo
Ferro.” Mss 122AN. Norman Jewison Papers. Box 12, Folder 5. United Artists Collection.
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Madison, Wisconsin.
222
Quoted in Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 212.
223
Ferro, Pablo Ferro book, 9. Harper Cossar, Letterboxed: The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema
(Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 209.
224
Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 214.
225
Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 204-5.
187

226
Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 203-217.
227
Ferro, Pablo Ferro book, 9.
228
“Press Copybook.” Mss. 122AN. Norman Jewison Papers, Box 15, Folder 3 United Artists
Collection. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Madison, Wisconsin.
229
Heller, “for openers,” 77.
230
Ferro, Pablo Ferro book, 2.
231
Ferro, “An Evening With Pablo Ferro,” 27 September 2011.
232
“Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame: 1983, Stephen Frankfurt,” Art Directors Club, accessed 13
March 2012 http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/1983/?id=251.
233
Hall, “Opening Ceremonies,” 133
234
“Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame: 1983, Stephen Frankfurt.”
http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/1983/?id=251 Accessed 13 March 2012.
235
Peter Hall, “Film Titles,” Baseline 17 (1993): 43.
236
What is a film but a bid for an audience to spend money on a film and invest emotionally in its
narrative?
237
“The Quiet Persuader.” Inside America.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00ljycb/Inside_America_The_Quiet_Persuader/ Accessed
via youtube 24 February 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg5f0SKrekA.
238
“The Quiet Persuader,” Inside America.
239
This presupposes that the director desires the audience not be aware of the film-as-artifice,
though this is a distinguishing feature of the preponderance of classical Hollywood cinema. Films
like Rear Window and Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema are directed towards revealing cinematic artifice,
but during this period of the 1950s and 1960s, they are clearly in the minority.
188

Fig. 1: The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) opening titles

Fig. 2: Psycho (1960) opening titles
189

Fig. 3: From Russia with Love (1963) opening titles

Fig. 4: Press Booklet for The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming (1966)

190
Fig. 5: The Thomas Crown Affair Posters (L to R): Italian, Russian, and Spanish

Fig. 6: Carmen Jones (1954) theatrical one-sheet poster
191

Fig. 7: Carmen Jones opening titles.

Fig. 8: Vertigo (1958) opening titles
192

Fig. 9: North by Northwest (1959) opening titles

Fig. 10: Anatomy of a Murder (1959) opening titles
193

Fig. 11: Walk on the Wild Side (1962) opening titles

Fig 12a: North by Northwest (1959) opening titles
194

Fig 12b: North by Northwest opening titles

Fig. 12c: North by Northwest opening titles

195
Fig. 13a: Watching Words Move (1962), 7
& 13

Fig. 13b: Watching Words Move (1962), 15 & 16
196

Fig. 14a: Vertigo (1958) opening titles

Fig 14b: Vertigo opening titles

197

Fig 15: Kim Novak’s hair in Vertigo, presaged by the opening titles

Fig 16a: Charade (1963) opening titles
198

Fig. 16b: Charade opening titles

Fig. 16c: Charade opening titles
199

Fig. 16d: Charade opening titles

Fig .17a: Damn Yankees (1958) opening titles
200

Fig. 17b: Damn Yankees opening titles

Fig. 17c: Damn Yankees opening titles
201

Fig. 17d: Damn Yankees opening titles

Fig 17e: Damn Yankees opening titles
202

Fig. 17f: Damn Yankees opening titles

Fig. 17g: Damn Yankees opening titles
203

Fig. 17h: Damn Yankees opening titles

Fig. 17i: Damn Yankees opening titles
204
Fig. 17j: Damn Yankees opening titles

Fig. 18a: Kaleidoscope (1966) opening titles
205

Fig 18b: Kaleidoscope opening titles
Fig. 19a: Dr. No (1962) opening titles
206

Fig. 19b: Dr. No opening titles

Fig. 19c: Dr. No opening titles

207

Fig. 19d: Dr. No opening titles

Fig. 19e: Dr. No opening titles

208

Fig. 19f: Dr. No opening titles

Fig. 19g: Dr. No opening titles

209

Fig. 19h: Dr. No opening titles

Fig. 19i: Dr. No opening titles

210

Fig. 19j: Dr. No opening titles

Fig. 19k: Dr. No opening titles

211

Fig. 19l: Dr. No opening titles

Fig 20a: From Russia With Love opening titles

212

Fig. 20b: From Russia with Love opening titles

Fig. 20c: From Russia with Love opening titles
213

Fig. 20d: From Russia with Love opening titles

Fig. 20e: From Russia with Love opening titles
214

Fig. 20f: From Russia with Love opening titles

Fig. 20g: From Russia with Love opening titles; same text as in Fig. 20f.
215

Fig. 21a: Goldfinger (1964) opening titles

Fig. 21b: Goldfinger opening titles

216

Fig. 21c: Goldfinger opening titles

Fig. 21d: Goldfinger opening titles

217

Fig. 21e: Goldfinger opening titles

Fig. 22a: Dr. Strangelove (1964) opening titles

218

Fig. 22b: Dr. Strangelove (1964) opening titles

Fig. 22c: Dr. Strangelove (1964) opening titles
219

Fig. 23a: Bullitt (1968) opening titles

Fig. 23b: Bullitt opening titles
220

Fig. 23c: Bullitt opening titles

Fig. 23d: Bullitt opening titles
221

Fig. 23e: Bullitt opening titles

222

Fig. 24a: “Press Book.” The Russians are Coming, Box 6, Folder 6. Norman Jewison Papers.
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
223

Fig 24b: Clipped Advertisement, The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming. Box 8,
Folder 4. Norman Jewison Papers. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
224

Fig 25a: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) opening titles

Fig. 25b: The Thomas Crown Affair opening titles
225

Fig 25c: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) opening titles

Fig. 25d: The Thomas Crown Affair screen shot

226

Fig. 25e: The Thomas Crown Affair screen shot

Fig. 25f: The Thomas Crown Affair screen shot
227

Fig. 25g: The Thomas Crown Affair screen shot

Fig. 25h: The Thomas Crown Affair opening titles
228

Fig. 25i: The Thomas Crown Affair opening titles
229
Fig 26: The Thomas Crown Affair promotional booklet. Norman Jewison Papers. United
Artists Collection. Mss 122AN. Box 14, Folder 11. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater
Research, Madison, Wisconsin.
230
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

Introduction
In 1968, three little words nearly shut down Hollywood. Between May 1967 and
April 1968, a period of 11 months, the mainstream American narrative film industry found
itself on the brink of a strike over what seemed to outsiders and casual observers—or even
those intimately acquainted with and employed by the business—as a rather trifling matter.
The source of the stalemate was a dispute over the wording of a particular screen credit. And
despite the significant challenges American narrative cinema in the mid- to late-1960s—
including runaway production and challenges to its longstanding business practices—it was,
of all things, an apostrophe that heralded the very real possibility halting all film and
television production in Southern California. The three little words, “A Film by...”, and the
apostrophe, “John Director’s Film,” are known as the “possessory credit,”
1
and careened the
commercial film industry to the verge of shutdown, threatening the first-ever directors strike
in April 1968. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), had negotiated with the American
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that writers, and only
writers, would be allowed to receive possessory credits. The outcome from these
negotiations infuriated directors, who, unable to undo this agreement through closed-doors
negotiations with writers and producers, took both sides to court in order to determine
which creative personnel should be entitled to these credits. The subsequent stalemate came
within a week of instigating an industry-wide work stoppage. In the events that precipitated
this brinksmanship, two traditional allies, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the
231
Directors Guild of America (DGA), were pitted against each other in what seems like a
furiously, sometimes amusingly pedantic, legal debate over grammar. If Hollywood labour
disputes are an index of the industry’s anxieties at any given time, the very particular
semantics of credit wording seems of lesser import when framed against its broader
industrial, and even subordinate to intra-guild issues of residual payments and health care
benefits. And yet the degree to which writers and directors were willing to defend their
credit rights—which creative personnel should receive the possessory credit, in what form
that credit should be granted, and under what terms—means that there were greater stakes
greater than typography or grammar framing this disagreement. The dispute over the
possessory credit, the majority of which played out between December 1963 and April 1968,
but continues even as of this writing in 2013, discloses a host of issues and anxieties that
percolated through post-Paramount Decrees, pre-blockbuster Hollywood: collusion,
restraint of trade, recognition, prestige, creativity and creative control, and ultimately
authorship.
The possessory credit is more than a curiosity, because it also occasioned one of the
largest breaks in Hollywood labour solidarity heretofore-encountered. Film Guilds and
Unions have traditionally shown solidarity when one of their accredited sister organizations
2

have resorted to a strike in their contract talks with the AMPTP, the body that negotiates
all contracts between talent (those individuals who are the creative inputs to a film, whether
below-the-line, or above-the-line) and producers. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) finally
attained a closed union shop in May 1937, for example, an achievement that was predicated
largely on the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees’ (IATSE’s) threat to
232
strike if SAG demands for actor representation were not met. Since IATSE represented the
overwhelming majority of projectionists responsible for screening prints across North
America, producers relented in negotiations, wary of losing theatre revenue for even a few
weeks.
3
During the course of their grievance over possessory credits, the Director’s Guild
sacrificed this long-standing, generally accepted tradition of solidarity against producers. In
May 1967, the DGA filed an injunction against the 1966 Writers Basic agreement, bringing
the first-ever lawsuit of one certified talent guild against another,
4
naming in their allegations
the Writers’ Guild of America, West, Inc. as co-defendants with the AMPTP. The
Producers Alliance’s members—the major and minor production companies responsible for
the overwhelming majority of films produced in Hollywood—were also severally named.
When Ralph Nutter, the presiding Los Angeles County Superior court judge, ruled against a
DGA injunction, the dispute deepened over the next year, threatening the first-ever directors
strike. The DGA refused to negotiate with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television
Producers (AMPTP) in collective bargaining, pursued a strategy, carried out in the industry
trade journals, whereby the DGA pressured to independently negotiate contracts with each
studio. This chapter is partially motivated to essay an understanding of why the Directors
Guild would first opt for this unprecedented legal manoeuvre that undermined guild
solidarity, and subsequently forego the advantages of collective bargaining—all in the name
of credits. More to the point, though this quarrel reached a détente in April 1968, the peace
that settled was an uneasy one at best, and as of this writing, in mid-2013, the issue of
possessory credits has still not been adequately settled. Which creative personnel receive the
right to have his or her name follow those three little words, “A Film by...” and its variations,
233
formed the foundation for one of the longest-running and most acrimonious disagreements
in Hollywood history, and so provides contemporary interest.
Guild disputes with the AMPTP, especially those within the last decade, have been
traditionally framed by industry trade journals and other media outlets around issues of
residuals and adequate payment for film and television distribution formats—especially those
that have not yet come under any official regime of compensation. The Writers Guild strike
of 2007-2008, for example, was fought largely over increased home video residuals and
compensation for writers’ work on new media platforms.
5
Four years earlier in 2004, the
largest obstacle to the contracts negotiated by producers separately with the DGA and the
WGA in 2004 were residual payments for DVD sales (but ended without an agreement on
this issue).
6
This issue dated back to 1970, the first year in which video cassette residual
revenues were a collective bargaining concern.
7
But of the various issues that have been
negotiated between producers and talent agencies, clauses over film credit are amongst the
most long longstanding, contentious, least-resolved, and most-ignored issues. In other
words, though talent guild bargaining issues like pensions, unemployment welfare, residuals,
and minimum wage levels have received the most ink in both popular, trade and academic
press, disputes over who receives credit on both screen and media advertising is just as
salient and fundamental determinant in the business model of the Hollywood industry. This
chapter will narrate the 30-month period that encapsulated most salient credit dispute in
Hollywood history: the Minimum Basic Agreement negotiated by writers and producers in
December 1966; the DGA lawsuit filed against the AMPTP and the WGA in May 1967; the
234
contentious negotiations between directors and producers that were disrupted January
through April 1968; and through the uneasy accord reached in its aftermath.
The narrative that follows is gleaned largely through court documents, although the
trade journals Variety, Film Daily, and The Hollywood Reporter, were also valuable to both
sides in order to frame their arguments in front of a broader public audience, one that was
presumably less literate in legal minutia. Guild newsletters, and studio memos, documents
that have rarely come to light, also explore some of the dispute’s most salient issues.
Together, these primary and secondary documents reveal much about the dynamics of guild
and union negotiations, both within its membership, and across different types and
categories of creative personnel. It provides insight into the reasons behind the significant
investment that writers, directors, and producers have in asserting their rights to screen and
advertising credit, and establish the wide-reaching implications behind the seemingly
straightforward systems of granting or denying screen credit. The controversy over the
possessory credit also speaks to broader issues of creative control over artworks, and who
should be considered the authors of motion pictures. It is a dispute inflected by many
artistic-historical precedents, especially those of the American stage. Credit also involves an
unexpected and vocal reaction to the practice of film criticism, an ancillary market that
depends on—but traditionally has little quantifiable influence over—the day-to-day practice
of commercial filmmaking. During the dispute over possessory titles, credit also becomes a
determinant of complex labour negotiations, a bargaining point where unions were willing to
sacrifice short-term financial compensation to secure long-term creative or “ethical” rights.
235
Along these more ephemeral lines, the legal affidavits filed by prominent directors in
the DGA’s suit help us comprehend how directing for the cinema was understood, in
creative and managerial terms, by directors themselves, the producers and production
companies that hired them. These court declarations also reveal how the director’s job was
construed by writers in contradistinction to the DGA’s legal claims. As far as film writers
were concerned, their testimony inaugurates a re-assessment of authorship within the
cinema, as negotiated between an understanding of the writers craft bequeathed from the
theatrical stage and posed against new forms of auteurist film criticism recently inaugurated
by Andrew Sarris. All of this is to say that the possessory credit dispute speaks to broader
regimes of labour, authorship, and creative control in the Hollywood narrative cinema of
Post-Paramount decrees Hollywood and into the 1960s. The prevalence of these issues
circulating in a legal dispute over attribution—issues that are not enumerated in any official
collective bargaining agreements—demonstrates that screen credits contain a subset of
meanings that circulate only quasi-formally through a community of filmmakers. And despite
the lack of a formal, contractual imprimatur, this more off-the-record, arcane significance of
the possessory credits is just as important to writers and directors as their publicly circulated
meanings, if not more so. By way of this controversy, we begin to understand how credit in
cinema is far more complex and fraught than a matter of mere semantics. And those credit
semantics are borne out in vectors that are very different than those used to decipher and
understand the main narrative of any given film; put more simply, the possessory credit
dispute indicates that credits must be read in a different way.
236
To an outsider, the investment in the possessory credit appears to be almost libidinal
in nature; writers and directors seem inordinately attached to that credit in a way that
surpasses its purely economic value. Yet to industry’s insiders, small modifications to a
credit—an apostrophe added or taken away, in this case—denote significant changes to how
their employment is construed within that culture of production. Such meanings are highly
pertinent to employees within Hollywood, but they are circulated in ways less formal than
contracts or collective bargaining agreements, their informality does not lessen the strength
of their effect or implementation. This is because these particular credit meanings have
become part of the peculiarity of production culture, which contains its own working
customs, and even its own community argot. John Thornton Caldwell’s book, Production
Culture, is instructive in this vein, because he demonstrates that casual relationships and
unofficial techniques of information circulation carry much weight within the film industry.
He demonstrates that the “manufactured identities” built within the industry from the
circulation of trade stories, for example, are highly deterministic in building and maintaining
industry workers’ professional reputations.
8
In this mode, the possessory credit takes on a
significance that was for a long time
9
not governed by official regimes, such as those
employment definitions laid out in the Minimum Basic Agreements signed between the
AMPTP and the DGA and WGA, respectively. Because the possessory credit’s significance
circulated within the relatively hermetic confines of the film industry’s production culture, it
escaped the general public’s understanding; Hollywood’s interlocutors either betrayed an
inability or an unwillingness to understand it. When the Los Angeles Times’ film reporter,
Harry Bernstein, wrote of the possessory credit dispute as “the battle of the apostrophe,”
10

237
he downplays the myriad significations that it assumed for writers and directors. Despite his
status as a privileged interlocutor, ferrying information from Hollywood to his reading
public, Bernstein frames the possessory credit issue as a matter of typography, or copy-
editing, not one that is concerned with the prestige and reputation of the writing and
directing arts. Bernstein’s article, as an exemplar of many that were published in the Times,
Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter, points to a wider public’s difficulty in understanding the
possessory credit. This in turn, I argue, is further proof that credits and credit sequences
should be interpreted via strategies that are different than those usually deployed by
academic and journalistic circles.
As explored in this dissertation’s introduction, cinema studies’ disciplines, whatever
their internecine differences, are unified by an interpretatively open approach to the text. In
other words, the work of textual analysis is productive and generative because the text’s
signification is immanent to the text, and predicated on the critic’s work to produce and
generate them. Traditional textual analysis thus needs no codex, interlocutor, or authorial
intent in order for the text to be understood. Credits, by contrast, present a sometimes
esoteric framework, because most of the film industry’s job titles possess meanings that are
by no means immanent or readily available for interpretation. The possessory credit dispute
further demonstrates the depth of arcane knowledge that is contained within credits,
because of the myriad significations that “A Film by…” has assumed to film employees and
employers as part of their involvement in that culture of production. For industry outsiders,
these significations can only be borne out by delving into more specialised documents: trade
journals like Variety, guild newsletters, and the records of legal proceedings. As such, this
238
chapter is fundamentally a close textual reading of these documents in attempt to divine the
deeper significations contained therein. My reading of the possessory credit dispute
chronicled in this chapter shows the myriad semantic meanings that result from small
changes in a credit’s syntax. I contend that lists of credits are not directed towards
audiences, but to film workers, and the vectors of semantic meaning are not flowing
outwards to spectators, but inwards towards members of the film industry. This chapter also
demonstrates the difference in how that information flows within the community of
filmmaking professionals through its internal publications, conventions, and common
customs—meanings that reveal far more than the official imprimatur given to collectively
bargained screen credits.

Background Information
Contracts in the film industry are based on a two-tier system: Minimum Basic
Agreements (MBA) and Personal Service Contracts. The minimum agreement prescribes,
among other things, the base working conditions, wages, and other forms of compensation
for all personnel engaged in a particular creative occupation. The 2008 Writers Guild of
America’s “Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement,” effective February 13 2008 through
May 1, 2011,
11
set the following: a writer for a “High Budget” feature film written May
2010-May 2011 was paid, at minimum $101,936 for a screenplay, including the original
treatment.
12
If said writer authored the final script (i.e., the “individual scenes and full
dialogue” that “represent substantial contributions to the final script,”
13
she is entitled to
the credit “Screenplay by”; such credit, if it appears in the film’s main titles, must also
239
appear on the title card immediately preceding the director’s title card, and must not be
more than two credits away from the beginning of the motion picture, in a manner and style
similar to those of the producer and director of the film.
14
The writer may not alter the basic
arrangement of the title cards, which have been the subject of inter- and intra-guild
negotiations over the last four decades; however, by the terms of a personal service contract,
that same writer may negotiate for a higher pay scale than the minimum guaranteed by the
Basic Agreement, or an alternative form of credit (i.e., “Adaptation by”) dependent on
individual contributions to the script and capacity to secure such terms. The ability to
secure contractual provisions above and beyond the minimum which are subject to the
financial and creative clout of the individual writer, the agent’s talent at negotiation, the
writer’s reputation, and other more ephemeral considerations.
Somewhat extraneous to the regular arm’s length negotiations that characterize the
basic agreement, the current WGA Basic Agreement contains a preamble regarding the
possessive credit, “highlighting the Writers Guild’s strong, continuing, long-standing
opposition to the use of so-called ‘Possessive Credits’ ” by directors:
Since its founding, the Writers Guild has opposed the use
of the so-called “possessive credit” on screen and in
advertising and promotion when used to refer to a person
who is not the sole author of the screenplay.
The Guild’s historic, current and ongoing opposition is
based upon beliefs and principles which include the following:
Credits should, as far as possible, accurately reflect each
individual’s contribution.
The granting of a possessive credit to a person who has
not both written and directed a given motion picture
inaccurately imputes sole or preeminent authorship.
The proliferation of the number of unnecessary credits on
screen and in advertising devalues credits in general.
240
The widespread use of the credit denigrates the creative
contributions of others.
Each Company acknowledges that the Guild holds the
foregoing strong objections and beliefs regarding the use of
the “possessive credit.”
The Companies believe that the best way to address the
foregoing objections is through tripartite discussions among
the Companies, the WGA and the DGA and, therefore,
commit to their full participation in that process.
15

This section has been boilerplate for WGA Basic Agreements since 1995, when the WGA
unsuccessfully attempted to re-inaugurate debate and resolve the possessory credit dispute in
its favour.
16
Realizing that an agreement on credits “would not be reached prior to the end
of the negotiation,” the WGA opted instead to state their objections in a non-binding
preamble. This clause has been reiterated in every subsequent Minimum Basic Agreement,
but has yet to be resolved to the present day.
17
This means that only writers,
18
whom the
WGA considers to be the “authors” of films, should be allowed have the words “A Film by
Jane Writer” or “John Writer’s Film” on screen or in print advertising. Yet prominent
directors who have taken no part in writing a screenplay—wholly, substantially or in part—
have long received possessory credits over the WGA’s sometimes-strenuous objections,
including Josef von Sternberg (The Docks of New York (1928), Shanghai Express (1932)),
George Stevens (Gunga Din (1939), Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)), Alfred
Hitchcock (Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963)), Fred Zinneman (A Man for All Seasons
(1966)), and many others besides.
Though the possessory credit controversy came to a head in May 1967, its origins
date back to the 1963 WGA-AMPTP negotiations. To curb the practice of directors taking
241
possessory credits, the WGA successfully bargained in Section BB of the credits schedule
that the particular credit “A Film by...” would could only be given to either the writer of a
film, the author of the original source material, or a director who was at minimum officially
credited for collaborating on the screenplay, by the terms of WGA basic agreements.
19
These
writer-producers, writer-directors, or director-writer-producers (affectionately and
colloquially known as “hyphenates” for the typographic linkages between their titles) would
receive “A Film by...” but only in recognition for writing contributions. The WGA only
concerned itself with the business of writing; other inputs were immaterial. This clause,
while it stood contrary to a long-held belief of the DGA that such credit should be reserved
for directors, did not appear to have rankled the Directors Guild membership—at least in
trade journals and the popular press—when it was initially won by writers in 1963. The
Variety article printed on December 13, 1963, heralding an averted writers strike and a
unanimously ratified Basic Agreement, dutifully tabulated the gains writers made “in the
areas of minimums [wages], a health and welfare plan and termination of contract, but
yielded on pension plan demands and failed to get what they wanted in the key pix-on-tv
demands.”
20
The possessory credit clause of Section BB receives nary a mention in this or
any other newspaper or trade journal coverage. An examination of trade journals and Guild
newsletters reveals that the issue appears to have lain dormant for the following three years.
The WGA Minimum Basic Agreement of 1966, finalized in late December of that
year, ignited the controversy, and provoked the Directors Guild’s ire. During collective
bargaining with the AMPTP, the Writers Guild’s representatives, headed by WGA-West
Executive Director Michael Franklin, and Assistant Executive Director Gary Ellingsworth,
242
met with Charles Boren, chief negotiator for the Producers Alliance, and his associates in the
waning months of 1966. Their meeting was meant to hammer out the final details of a new
Basic Agreement between writers and producers. In addition to concerns over increased
wages, residual payments, and compensation for films shown on television broadcasts,
Ellingsworth writes: “the membership of the Writers Guild expressed strong feelings about
the use of production and presentation type credits and the need for further bargaining to
preserve the integrity of the writing credits,”
21
and made a motion that, no credit may be
given to directors in the form of: “A Film of or by Sam Jones”; “Sam Jones’ Film [Hamlet];
Sam Jones’ [Hamlet].”
22
Over the course of that Ellingsworth called “arms-length” (i.e. non-
collusive, good faith) negotiations over the next few months, Producers and Writers sides
engaged in the familiar proposal/counter-proposal pas-de-deux that familiarly characterize
collective bargaining. Producers wanted to preserve possessory credits for those individual
writers, directors, and producers who had a demonstrable “box office value.” An
independent arbitration panel, similar to that already enacted by the WGA, would
determine the proper allocation of writing credits, and would resolve ensuing disputes over
proper attribution would determine the names of these individuals. Writers countered that
the determination of “box office value” was too vague and ephemeral a concept, and balked
at the difficulty of forming an industry-wide impartial arbitration panel.
23
Gradually,
producers acquiesced to writers’ demands based on the need to preserve the “integrity” of
film credits. The final agreement mandated that, in addition to limiting “A Film by...” to
writers (or writer-directors or writer-producers), only writers of the screenplay or the
original source material could be given "the included three other prohibited credits:
243
(2) “A Film (or Photoplay or Picture) of Sam Jones”;
(3) “Sam Jones’ Hamlet”; and
(4) “Sam Jones’ Film Hamlet”
24

It is this expansion of credit prohibition that motivated the DGA’s executive board to act—
albeit with considerable delay. The basic terms of the WGA Basic Agreement were set by
mid-December 1966, to be ratified later, in early May 1967, subject to confirming and
finalising other minor contractual language. Before ratification could take place, the DGA
filed an injunction to prevent that agreement—particularly the possessory credit
provisions—from coming into effect.
Variety reported that directors had been caught completely unawares by this
reduction of their allowable credits, claiming, that the DGA “awoke” to find their credit
rights suddenly abridged—though it was nearly five months after the WGA pact had already
been signed. On May 2, 1967, Variety framed this credit theft in quite Manichean terms—a
cunning ploy by the writers to “out-fox” their rivals and deliberately curtail directorial
bargaining power and position in the industry.
25
More accurately, the apparently sudden
reversal was the outcome of several months of negotiations that had finally reached an
impasse. The WGA and DGA had clandestinely met since January 1967
26
so as to avoid this
precise situation: the unseemly image of “one talent guild fighting another.”
27
After months
of ultimately unsuccessful meetings between all three concerned parties, the WGA and the
AMPTP were on the verge of formally signing their agreement in early May, 1967 over the
DGA’s strenuous objections. This prompted the Diretors Guild to file suit jointly against
the WGA and the AMPTP in California State Superior Court on May 9, 1967, alleging the
intent of the Minimum agreement was “to restrain trade and commerce and to prevent and
244
restrict competition in the making, transportation purchase and sale of motion pictures,”
under the Cartwright Act, California’s anti-trust legislation.
28
The injunction, civil case
number 909265, sought to prevent the 1966 MBA from being formalized, on the grounds
that this disputed provision “do[es] not accord any rights or benefits to the union members
covered by the agreement, but merely preclude[s] any director, producer, or other artist or
employee from receiving such benefits.”
29
In other words, directors alleged that 1966 WGA
Basic Agreement constituted collusion between writers and producers to deny credit rights
to directors. The loss of credits would lower the director’s prestige in the film industry, and
therefore harm his (and the director’s chair has borne the worst witness to the glass ceiling,
and been overwhelmingly inhabited by men) earning power, thus constituting a restraint of
trade. This was not the first time that credits were coupled with economic importance,
30
but
never before had credit rights been freighted with the ominous overtones of antitrust,
conspiracy, and the systematic denigration of an entire creative profession. During the course
of the lawsuit, directors would prosecute their rights to possessory credits, and maligned the
WGA for taking away their credit rights without their consent.
It is understandable that the Directors Guild would wish to protect its constituency
by preventing its traditionally accorded rights from being bargained away by another guild.
Simultaneously though, it is not immediately apparent why the DGA, so apparently intent
on remaining amicable with its sister guilds, would be willing to risk its longstanding
relationship with writers, and make the unprecedented step of taking the WGA to court.
The DGA’s injunction was the first time one guild had sued another in Hollywood labour
history, over the nominally straightforward issue of whose name appears where in the credits,
245
in what syntax, and in what order of appearance.
31
This would seem to indicate the stakes of
the possessory credit dispute are ultimately less about “three little words” than what those
words signify, and how they have become associated with writing and directing roles in
Hollywood. Indeed, as I demonstrate in this chapter, the credit “A Film by…” subsumes a
host of significations and discourses internal to the film industry.

Legal and Theoretical Underpinnings
Before delving into the particular ideological positions of the various stakeholders in
the possessory credit debate, it is necessary to sketch briefly the structure and function of
credit in American cinema. Legal scholar Catherine Fisk argues that attribution, or the
recognition accorded to an individual for the production of a work (or indeed a work of art),
is “foundational to the modern economy,”
32
because, without regimes to recognize and
compensate individuals for the creation of their ideas or objects, economic systems would
lack a vital motor to “reward and promote innovation.”
33
If Mark Twain cannot be
guaranteed compensation, to the exclusion of others, for his having written Tom Sawyer,
then Twain has no incentive to write further novels unless the benefits to the fruits of his
labour as an author can be guaranteed. Fisk classifies this as the “Reward Function” of
attribution, which encompasses not only the “income stream from sales of the intellectual
property itself but also the economic and psychic benefits of the reputation gained by being
the creator.”
34
That is, there are tangible and intangible benefits to being recognized as the
author of a work. Other attribution functions also influence creative behaviour. The
“discipline function”, identifies an artistic creator for the purposes of being able to levy
246
damages and penalties in the legal cases of “heresy, sedition, or libel.”
35
For the “branding
function,” attribution “creates a sort of brand or trademark that attaches both to the object
and to the putative creator,” as is the case with the King James Bible, though King James I
had little to do with the work’s creation execution; rather, he commissioned it.
36
Finally, the
“humanizing function” serves the purpose of “legitimat[ing] business practices in the eyes of
the public” by giving multi-person products an individual face, and so “humanizes
bureaucratic work processes;”
37
an individual attribution to insurance company John
Hancock makes that company’s financially calculated decisions seem more human and
therefore more acceptable. And so, identifying the author of a work and attributing that
work to his creative agency or animus is far from a matter of mere identification and
clarification. It serves a discursive function that is embedded in a broader framework of
economic and social capital that far outstrips the ostensibly straightforward understanding
that Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer, and why. Directly translating these attribution
functions from literature to film is farm more problematic because of the cinema’s
collaborative nature. The individual contributions of many different creative inputs is far
more difficult to ascertain and quantify, than the traditional “one work, one author” concept
that governs attribution for a novel, a poem, or the written text of a play.
38
(Even though
cinema studies have gravitated towards the director as a film’s primary creative animus, the
director must rely on costume designers to imagine and construct wardrobes; and depend on
a cinematographer to execute the particular look of a film, for example.) For these reasons,
when the precise levels of differential attribution are in doubt, contract negotiations and
guidelines help to arbitrate and set a framework for wading through this creative quagmire.
247
It may not be a perfect system, but it is at least a system, which comes with rules for both
attribution—and redress, in the case of disputed attribution.
For Hollywood cinema
39
there exist strictly codified rules for the granting of screen
credit, a system that has been the subject of much inter-guild negotiation.
40
“Elaborate rules
govern whose name will appear and whose will not,” Fisk writes, “who can be listed under
which job title (director, screenplay by, key grip, etc.) and the order and size of the print in
which names are listed.”
41
Thus even the most seemingly straightforward elements of
attribution—font size and order—are governed by a complex set of operations fought and
won (or lost) during round upon round of negotiations between guilds and the Producers
Alliance. Importantly, the form and position that names take on screen marks the difference
between attribution and credit, a distinction that is more than semantic. Attribution connotes
ensuring that individuals are recognized for the contributions they make to a motion picture;
credit involves the particular syntactical and typographical forms that attribution takes. Fisk
establishes the inequalities in credit agreements—storyboard artists, for example, have no
contractual right to credit
42
—and rightly argues that attribution should reflect the degree to
which artists contribute the “same level of artistic contribution” as others.
43
However, there
are a few lacunae in Fisk’s appraisal of Hollywood attribution that warrant exploration.
There are regimes and relationships at play within creative industries that go beyond
contractual obligations ensuring certain individuals receive credit. It behoves production
companies and studios to credit below-the-line employees for their work because producers
are reliant on that talent pool. Repeated business transactions enacted between trade unions
like IATSE means that they cannot alienate these workers even in absence of legal
248
obligations. As Richard Caves writes, in Creative Industries, “enforcement of contracts in the
creative industries depends heavily on the power of repeated interactions among parties who
value their reputations for creative behavior,”
44
but these contracts need not always be
formal. (Perhaps a desire to keep other parties satisfied is why storyboard artists are almost
always credited in a motion picture’s final crawl, despite the lack of a contractual
obligation.) This gives way to a second consideration, in that credit can be granted in
different ways. A theory of attribution would state that it does not matter where, how, or in
what form an individual’s contribution is recognized, so long as this knowledge was
disseminated to the relevant industries and wider publics. A fully articulated theory of credit,
especially in Hollywood, would argue that there is a marked difference between whether or
not a creator’s name appears in the opening credits or in the film’s final crawl. There is a
level of financial and creative esteem granted to those roles mentioned at the beginning of a
film, when an audience has wrapt attention, than at the end, when patrons are filing out of
the theatre. Finally, while Fisk’s work is a valuable resource for understanding how guilds
establish credit guidelines and mediate disputes between its members, she does not address a
salient issue: it is not immediately clear how “equitable” credit is defined (i.e., what specific
syntactical form it should take) in different circumstances, and between guilds. As the
possessory credit dispute indicates, the definition of fairly allocated credits—not to mention
who should be allowed to have a possessive credit, and under what terms, is a matter of
contention between writers and producers. These fundamental differences are what
instigated the disagreement over possessory credits.
249
Within the various guilds, the distinctions and guidelines are clear. The WGA’s
policy in the Screen Credits Manual distinguishes very clearly and lucidly between the
different credits “Story by...” and “Screenplay by...” and “Written by...” and sets out rules
to give credit to the individuals who meet these criteria.
45
In the event that there is a dispute
over credit amongst writers, the Manual also contains explicit procedures for arbitration.
46

However, in reference to the DGA’s May 1967 lawsuit, there existed no similar rules to
arbitrate between guilds, as a result of Hollywood’s unique bargaining structure. Directors
who write fall under the auspices of the Writers Guild; writers who direct are governed by
the Directors Guild. However, talent guilds do not negotiate with one another, and instead
forge individual deals with the AMPTP, the body that represents member production
companies. There were (and to the best of my knowledge, still are) no formal agreements
directly between guilds over their competing jurisdictions, nor ways to arbitrate these
disputes outside of collective bargaining or the courts. This is especially pertinent to the
Directors Guild’s 1967 injunction, because there were no codified rules determining the
meaning and function of the possessory credit. There were only clauses stating certain
writers could be granted it, and others could not. In that definitional absence, it was difficult
to ascertain what other forms of writer’s or producer’s screen credit should be considered
commensurate with “A Film by John Director” and the three variations prohibited from use
by directors in the 1966 Writers Guild MBA. This inter-guild arbitration vacuum is likely
one of the reasons that led the DGA to seek redress through the courts. In the wild west
that constituted the different types of credits available to writers and directors, the WGA’s
1966 Basic Agreement was the first to limit Directorial credits. The DGA believed that
250
intervention was necessary to prevent what it considered to be an erosion of its members’
credit rights. As MGM legal counsel Saul Rittenberg wrote in his declaration in support of
the defendant producers, directors were still allowed to freely bargain for other nominally
commensurate credits including “A John Director Film,” a “John Director Production,” and
eight others besides
47
without abrogating the terms of that agreement.
48
Despite this variety
of apparently equitable screen credits available to directors, their Guild was still intractably
opposed to the WGA reserving possessive credits as writers’ exclusive right, and the DGA
was just as steadfast in refusing to give them up. The reasons for the DGA’s and WGA’s
obstinate positions is ultimately related not to attribution, nor even exclusively credit, but to
the deeper meanings connoted by a possessory credit: authorship of and creative control over
a given film. The writers and the directors engaged in this dispute because they failed to
reach an agreement on which screen positions ought to be a recognized as the true author of
a film, and who should be seen as its main creative animus. In so doing the Guilds,
particularly the WGA, invoked a most curious personality as the crux of their disagreement:
Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris. As I will indicate later Sarris’ rhetorical involvement in
the possessory credit speaks to the broader implications and deeper meanings of credits, writ
large, within the film industry.
Having established a rough legal and labour framework, I will now proceed to
illuminate the rhetorical positions staked out by the DGA and the WGA in their respective
legal briefs, as well as the stances articulated by their individual constituent members, in the
form of declarations (i.e., affidavits) presented on both sides before the Los Angeles County
Superior Court. These declarations, presented in both the more public venues of newspapers
251
and trade journals, as well as the more narrowly-circulated venues of guild newsletters and
court documents, demonstrate the more sub-textual, even arcane definitions associated with
the possessory credit.
As part of their injunction against the 1966 WGA MBA agreement, a number of
prominent directors, writers, and studio executives submitted declarations before Los
Angeles Superior Court in order to bolster the claims made by their respective legal counsel.
These declarations are an unexpectedly delightful boon to understanding the motivations of
individual creative professionals who supported (or defended against) this lawsuit with equal
vigour. In service of its cause, the DGA called upon name-recognition directors Josef von
Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, King Vidor, and Fred Zinneman. Delmer Daves,
the director of Dark Passage (1947) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and writer of An Affair to
Remember (1957), was likely sought out by the DGA for the fact that his writing credits
were just as prominent as his directing credits, if not more so, and therefore could speak
with greater authority about screenwriting craft. These directors’ declarations contain frank
and honest statements about the holistic, ephemeral construction of the director’s artistry,
and the rather more prosaic day-to-day responsibilities that he undertakes on set. They also
seek to elevate the importance of directorial craft over the writer, and claim that the script
should not be unduly privileged since it is but one input of many, alongside cinematography,
acting, and many others. The director, they argue, orchestrates these inputs. Though we
should take these directors’ declarations with all due scepticism (notwithstanding that were
bound by legal oath), such relatively straightforward statements about the nature of film art,
252
craft, management, and business are rare in a creative industry that traditionally strives to
obscure the machinations of the wizards behind the curtain.

The Directors Declare
Select directors filed statements before the Los Angeles County Superior Court, on
May 9,

1967 to accompany the DGA plaintiff’s memorandum. They presented a unanimous
front in their declarations, as expected for a group believing that credit rights were blithely
bargained away without their consent. Fred Zinneman, fresh from his success with A Man for
All Seasons, for which he won both Best Director and Best Picture in the 1967 Academy
Awards, articulated the plaintiffs’ position:
I have always regarded a presentation credit in which my
name appears above the title as of utmost importance in
establishing my own status in the industry, in increasing the
personal value of my services in terms of monetary return and
public recognition, and in enhancing the “box office value” of
the motion picture and any profit participation which I might
have therein.
49

Zinneman evinces a mix of cultural and economic capital,
50
arguing that the two are
essentially fungible—an increased status in the industry translates into an increase in
financial gain, both in with respect to his individual compensation for services rendered, but
also is a contributing factor in the film’s box office receipts and the ability to secure
financing. Zinneman argues further for the public knowledge of credit forms, noting the
credit “Fred Zinneman’s Film of A Man for All Seasons,” recognizes the very particular
wording and form of that credit, and responds accordingly by patronizing the film; the
possessory credit, and only the possessory credit induces the audience to respond this way.
51

253
Without possessory credits, Zinneman and director Frank Capra declared, financial
institutions would be less willing to hazard investment in motion picture productions
because a key marketing tool—the possessory credit—would be unavailable to the studios
and exhibitors.
52
(Sherrill Corwin, President of the National Association of Theatre Owners,
similary filed an affadavit claiming financial hardship for himself and his membership
constituency if directors were stripped of possessory credit rights.)
53
Zinneman writes,
“There can no question concerning the commercial value of the film credit, publicity, and
advertising credit given to me in connection with this Academy Award winning motion
picture,”
54
because it will serve as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with production
companies. He claimed that once gifted to a director, the possessory credit is rarely, if ever,
taken away. More to the point, Zinneman also maintains that the possessive credits have
become “a trade-mark of high-quality direction and production,”
55
in cinema. The
possessory credit constitutes a personal marque or brand that distinguishes films in terms of
their production values and technical competency, because only particularly prominent
directors are allowed to use this credit. By dint of a director’s unique stamp on a film, this
credit, which in Capra’s words was a “traditional practice of more than 50 years standing,”
56

having been first granted to “D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation” in 1915. (Capra’s claim
to possessory credits is expected, given that his 1971 autobiography was called The Name
Above the Title.) The director is thus historically construed as the force that distinguishes one
motion picture from the next. Neither the studio, nor the producer, nor certainly the writer
could claim creative animus; that resided solely in the figure of the director.
254
Alfred Hitchcock, whose last film, Torn Curtain, was rather poorly received by the
critical press,
57
concurs with Zinneman’s claims in every respect, and deepens those areas
that deal with the individual force of the director’s personality, and his personal
trademark—perhaps unsurprisingly given his penchant for self-promotion and branding.
58

The possessory credit “Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder,” a credit given to the director
since signing a five-picture deal with Paramount in 1948, signalled directorial excellence, per
Zinneman’s affidavit, and also was an explicit promise of a particular emotional and
atmospheric disposition throughout Hitchcock’s films. “In virtually every film produced or
directed by me,” Hitchcock writes, “I have striven to create unusual suspense and I have
many times utilized unusual psychological developments. In fact, I believe my name has
become known to motion picture audiences throughout the world as a trade-mark for the
startling, out-of-the-ordinary psychological suspense of mystery films.”
59
Hitchcock proposes
that his name promises a very particular aesthetic disposition and narrative worldview, also
that his reputation has spread to other creative enterprises. In syntax very similar to
possessive credit, he lent his name to a 1965 Random House collection of short stories,
entitled Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum, “none of which,” in his words, “was written by
me but all of which were selected by me, and my name was used in a possessory title in order
to identify my personal selection.”
60
The possessive credit here, by Hitchcock’s
interpretation, connotes the selection and combination of already completed stories. By way
of this short story collection, we begin to understand how these prominent directors
construed the directorial craft and represented it to a wider public. For Hitchcock, the
possessory credit is very much a matter of personal prestige, “the lifetime goal and ambition
255
of literally hundreds of directors,” but gifted to no more than 50 directors out of the
thousands of directors employed in 60 years of studio and independent filmmaking. The
possessory credit indicates creative ownership of a film, and also a personal trademark, but a
very particular one indicating that the person receiving it stands above the DGA rank and
file.
In addition to this elevation of directorial artistry performed by the upper echelon of
his profession, Hitchcock holds forth on the somewhat contradictory role that he plays as a
manager or steward of a film. For Hitchcock, the directing process requires skills both
artistic and managerial:
[D]irection is particularly creative; timing and so-called
“stage business” are of utmost importance. The director is
required to utilize a special skill in molding and welding the
various elements of plot, characters, lighting, music, props,
sound effects and all of the other diverse elements into a
single integrated whole which will convey to the audience the
precise psychological effects and denouements without which
the picture would be a complete failure. Without in any way
detracting form the importance of the contribution made by
the writer of either basic story material or screenplay, the
writing is but a single element in the production of a film. It
is the director who bears the primary responsibility to
produce the integrated film and to edit in such a manner that
the various elements are perfectly combined. This has
sometimes been referred to as “creative magic,” but in every
day terms it is not magic but tremendously hard work and
effort on the part of the director which creates the film.
(Original emphasis).
61

Hitchcock’s claims the director’s creativity is in evidence when he communicates emotional
desire and psychological pressures. Moreover, his managerial acumen lends the ability to
wield various film elements and assemble them into a cohesive, coherent whole. At the same
256
time as it elevates the director, that quasi-managerial function also debases the writer’s work
to the status of a single input in the creative assembly line. The script becomes mere raw
material to be realised, in both senses of the term, by the director. Similarly, Delmer Daves
and Fred Zinneman arrogate to the director functions of “act[ing] as the catalyst in
assembling the various elements of cast, camera, locations, motivation, characterization,
timing, cutting and editing the picture, and thus creating a final integrated film. The final
picture is the composite of all the different elements entering into the film production, and
can, therefore, truthfully be said to be the film of the director-producer responsible for it.”
62

Here the director’s work is akin to stewardship and management, a job necessity that
competes alongside the spark of creativity. Because the director manages and combines all a
film’s inputs, they argue, directors should be understood as the primary creators in cinema,
and with that greater prominence should be therefore be allowed to bargain individually for
possessory credits.
Writers, by contrast, often recede into the background, and generally fail to capture
the attention of the theatre-going public—at least according to directors. Such was the
opinion articulated by King Vidor, whose name had preceded the title of every one of his
films since The Big Parade (1925), which he directed, a credit that he obtained through his
last project of any prominence, the Audrey Hepburn-Henry Fonda epic, War and Peace
(1956). How could writers claim possessive attribution, he asks when “there are frequently
many writers who in turn prepare various story treatments and several different versions of a
screenplay”?
63
(As contrasted to the lone director who has assumed stewardship over the
entire production.) “The names of most of these writers are wholly unknown to the general
257
public, and it is only a writer of worldwide acclaim, such as Ernest Hemingway (Old Man
and the Sea), or Irving Stone (The Agony and the Ecstasy) who receives a possessory credit
above the title or who is entitled to receive it.”
64
(Delmer Daves denigrated the writing craft
further, claiming the screenplay was “not more important than the contributions made by
the actors, the director, the producers, and in many cases the cameramen.”
65
) Vidor
perpetuates a Romantic ideal of the solitary genius, a familiar construction that privileges the
creative animus in a matter befitting the more creatively isolated high-art realms of
literature, but perhaps less suited to film, a medium that is overwhelmingly collaborative.
66

In so doing, Vidor is migrating towards the stance articulated by auteurist film criticism, a
discourse that, as will be discussed presently, borrowed tenets of authorship and individual
expression bequeathed from literary criticism, and was most potently expressed by Andrew
Sarris. Writer-director-producer Delmer Daves, whose greatest success was An Affair to
Remember (1957), makes overtures into other areas of artistic prestige and auteurist
criticism, when he looks to the international art cinema as the desired model for Hollywood
directors. On the basis that Jules Dassin (Never on Sunday), Frederico Fellini (8½),
Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up), all received possessory credit for their films, Daves
argues that American directors should be treated similarly. He further proclaims that the
possessory credit rights are widely “true of foreign directors,” other luminaries including
Rene Clair, Jean-Luc Godard, Vittorio De Sica, Akria Kurosawa, and Ingmar Bergman.
67
By
one reckoning, this is an explicit attempt to yoke the work of Hollywood directors to
international filmmakers, and put them in the same exclusive level air of cultural esteem. By
another reckoning, Daves’ statement also evinces palpable anxiety over the disesteem of
258
American directors (and American transplants such as Hitchcock and David Lean) when
compared with their worldwide counterparts. Specifically, there is concern over the status of
these domestic directors compared to those foreign creators whom film critics had
proclaimed as directors of rarefied “art cinema.” As Barbara Wilinsky writes in Sure Seaters:
The Emergence of Art House Cinema, Godard, De Sica, Kurosawa, and Bergman had their
films shown in “art house” cinemas in the 1950s and 60s, separate from regular commercial
fare both figuratively (in terms of their lauded creativity), and literally (in terms of specialised
exhibition theatres showing their films). The result was a rhetorical shift in modes of film
reception and evolution of the film industry at large. Wilinsky writes, “The image of
prestige and culture associated with films by the art cinema industry, particularly art film
theaters, helped elevate cinema to the level of an art form and encouraged people to think of
film as something more than ‘mere’ entertainment.”
68
This prestige, however, was largely
limited to those whose films showed in art house cinemas. By appealing to the work of
established international film artists and men of “genius,” Delmer Daves is attempting to
recuperate the widespread image of American/Hollywood cinema as aesthetically
impoverished with respect to its international counterparts.
Moving onto another silent filmmaker who, like King Vidor, transitioned into
sound, Josef von Sternberg echoed Vidor’s quasi-auteurist position. The director of Blue
Angel and Shanghai Express, whose Hollywood career ended with the rather indifferent
Anatahan in 1953, opined:
It is, I believe, significant that although such great stars as
Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Emil Jannings, George
Bancroft,“Sylvia Sidney, Walter Huston, Albert Basserman
259
and Maria Ouspensaya appeared in the foregoing picture,
they were, nonetheless, advertised and accepted by the
theatre-going pubic as a “Film of Josef von Sternberg” or
“Josef von Sternberg’s Film.”

Von Sternberg’s circumstances are slightly more complicated because he also wrote a
number of the films for which he received possessive or presentation credit—i.e., “The
Shanghai Gesture, A Film by Josef von Sternberg.” However, he attributes this possessive
nature to direction, not his writing, and leans on film criticism to bolster his claims. “I have
always regarded the screenplay as secondary to the talent and ability of the director in
creating a motion picture and indeed the author of the aforementioned publication by the
Museum of Modern Art apparently share my opinion because he observes at page 50:
‘Yet, for the most part, Sternberg’s characters derive their
emotional resonance not from the specifications of the
scenario, but from a curious intensity of expressions in the
style of Sternberg’s direction....
Certainly the vibrant feelings of The Shanghai Gesture cannot
be attributed to John Colton’s stage shocker, nor even to
Jules Furthman’s expressively epigrammatic dialogue.” (The
Films of Josef von Sternberg by Andrew Sarris, Published by the
Museum of Modern Art and Distributed by Doubleday and
Co, Inc. Garden City, New York.)’
69

In laying claim to exclusive directors’ rights to possessory credits, von Sternberg denigrates
the screenplay to lesser importance, and invokes MoMA’s high art credentials. He also
appeals to Andrew Sarris as the authority representing his position—a curious rhetorical
turn, because, as I will discuss later, it is Sarris, authorship, and the auteur theory that most
provoke the Writers Guild in their defence, both legally and extra-legally.
The DGA injunction was thus prosecuted with a two-pronged attack: Directors
Guild legal counsel laid out their objections to WGA-AMPTP negotiating tactics on the
260
grounds of collusion and restraint of trade, while prominent Hollywood directors, confessed
legal neophytes, prosecuted their rights on more ephemeral terms regarding the directors
creative ownership of a motion picture—their moral right to such creative ownership. In
their view, directors deserve possessory credits because the nature of their employment—
managing creative personnel, assembling and coordinating a number of inputs across various
filmmaking departments—makes any individual motion picture properly the offshoot of its
director’s efforts. By their reckoning, the differential responsibilities of directors and writers
over the production process means that a film is trademarked with his name (though in a
moral, not in a legal sense). A director therefore deserves greater sense of ownership over the
final film produced. Writers do not deserve for themselves those same rights, because theirs
is a shadow craft, ultimately subordinate to direction. Writers constitute an input into the
film’s process to be moulded by the director; directors arrogate to themselves the status both
of employee (of the studio or production company) and as management (over the film’s
other creative personnel). The public, directors argued, acknowledges this directorial “trade-
mark” as markers of a film’s quality and a promise of a consistent aesthetic palette and
worldview across a body of work; the possessory credit in particular is reserved only for those
at the top of their craft. The possessory credit is aspirational—maybe not enjoyed by
journeymen creatives at an early juncture in their careers, but reserved later for those
directors who advance in their career—a carrot for directors to improve their creativity and
perhaps business acumen. Further in this auteurist vein, retaining possessory credit would
preserve the equal esteem of American directors versus their international art cinema
counterparts. It is intriguing that of all the directors who argued on behalf of the DGA in
261
1967, only Fred Zinneman was enjoying a career of any prominence, having won an
Academy Award-winner for A Man for All Seasons (1966). Frank Capra, Josef von Sternberg,
and King Vidor had all stopped working as directors at least a decade earlier—if not more,
in the case of von Sternberg, who had been run out of Hollywood in the early 1950s. Alfred
Hitchcock was still working as a prominent film director, but by the time the DGA suit was
filed, he was, by contemporaneous reckoning, on the downside of his career. The release of
Torn Curtain in 1966 marked the first truly negative reviews of his films, which was
lambasted for being stiff and out of touch with other spy-thrillers of the time, such as the
James Bond franchise.
70
Without explicitly saying so, Zinneman, Hitchcock, Capra, Vidor,
and von Sternberg, were presented as representatives of their community at large, yet they
were hardly representative of even the most prominent directors of the time period, either
long out of the business or in the twilight of their careers. This testimony is redolent of an
old guard holding on to the last vestige of their former studio-bound prestige in the face of
Young Turks coming through the ranks, and therefore largely out of touch with the new
developments in the American film industry.
The previous discourse is valuable for explicating the ways in which directors
constructed their profession, both in terms of their daily responsibilities, and in their
rhetorical claims to creative responsibility, and demonstrates the polyvalent signification of
the credit “A Film by…” from a director’s perspective. I would also argue that the manner in
which these definitions circulated is also important, because it speaks to the formal and
informal understandings. When the above directors established their various responsibilities
while working on a film set, they hew very closely to the official definitions of a director’s
262
job, as laid down in the Directors Guild’s Minimum Basic Agreement. However, when
Hitchcock asserts that his name is a personal trademark guaranteeing certain psychological
effects in a film, those principles surpass the definitions laid out in collectively bargained
contractual definitions. Formal legal discourse becomes concatenated with the more
informal politics and ideals that surround the art and craft of filmmaking, but their
informality does not make them any less vital or important within film production culture. I
would argue that the Directors Guild sought to retain their possessory credit rights—and
that writers defend their right to deny directors the same, as I will soon demonstrate—
almost entirely over informal definitions of creative control and authorship. Yet these ideals
appear nowhere in official records or contractual definitions. Rather they circulate within a
community of filmmakers, the result of years of collaborative working norms. Rhetorical
understandings of directing craft versus writing craft are a matter of common custom, not
official imprimatur, and that knowledge diffuses only amongst those who work within that
production culture. Such definitions have only become a matter of public record because
directors felt the need to defend their profession in the courts. In sum the above directors,
and by proxy the DGA, believed that that they should be considered the authors of their
motion pictures, and that overall, the director was source of a film’s true creative animus.
This stance set the Writers Guild of America to frenzied rebuttal, both in the courts and
through the industry’s trade journals. For the writers’ position, Variety, Hollywood Reporter,
and Film Daily would prove just as important in articulating their rhetoric as court
documents.

263
The Writers and Producers Strike Back
In much the same fashion that Directors Guild lawyers submitted arguments to
support their injunction, counsel for the Writers Guild filed briefs in response to DGA
claims on May 17, 1967, over a week after the preliminary injunction. Accordingly their
testimony, as with any show-cause defence, has the benefit of being able to assess the
Directors’ declarations and with an opportunity to rebut them. These statements are as
much statements of WGA ideology as they are a direct refutation of the DGA position.
Though several prominent directors were presented before the court, the WGA strategy was
rather to limit the number of official respondent voices. Executive Director Michael
Franklin, wrote several statements; Assistant Executive Director Gary Ellingsworth, and
James Poe, Screen Branch President of the WGA, contributed single documents. The other
part of WGA strategy was to publicly prosecute their case through the trade papers Variety,
The Hollywood Reporter, and Film Daily. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television
Producers, for its part, proffered statements by AMPTP Executive Vice President Charles
Boren, as well as by executives from Warner Bros., Columbia Pictures, and Twentieth
Century–Fox, and their respective legal counsel.
As an opening tactic, the Writers Guild questioned the timing of the Directors Guild
suit, noting that Directors were attempting to roll back an agreement that had already been
in effect for five months, with no prior complaint. More to the point, “the plaintiffs rush to
the courthouse is almost four years after the [WGA] 1963 Theatrical Agreement imposed a
limitation on the producer-employers’ right to...give the credit “A Film by” (original
emphasis)
71
which denoted an implicit acceptance of the contract, since directors had
264
ratified their own Basic Agreement in 1964. Because the information had been readily
disseminated for a number of months and years, this timetable undermines any attempt to
attribute clandestine intent on behalf the writers. And because the WGA and AMPTP
conducted negotiations over possessory credits in the expected ebb and flow of proposals
and counter-proposals, no collusion was evident. As statements by WGA chief negotiator
Gary Ellingsworth above indicate, producers and writers were initially at odds on the issue of
possessory credits; producers wanted to reserve these credits for individuals with proven
“box-office value,” but eventually relented under WGA pressure. Writers and producers
could not be guilty of collusion, he argues, because these negotiations were conducted at
“arms-length,”
72
(i.e., oppositionally and in good faith) a fact confirmed by Charles Boren,
Vice President of the AMPTP and one of its chief negotiators.
73
It should be noted here that
at no point does the WGA refute the claims that they are denying directors possessory
credits. Rather, these credits are being denied with cause: on the grounds that the credit “A
Film by...” and others connotes authorship, and authorship properly belongs only to
screenwriters. This denial could indeed be construed as a restraint of trade in certain
situation, but that this restraint was necessary in light of the glut of predatory directors who
were claiming undue and undeserved creative control of a film for themselves.
The Writers Guild’s defence centred on the idea of authorship, specifically that only
writers should be understood as authors of a film—and that directors, who for years had
claimed these credits for themselves, were fallaciously representing themselves as the authors
of their films. During its collective bargaining rounds with the AMPTP in 1963 and 1966,
the Writers Guild pressed their exclusive right to possessory credits on the grounds “A Film
265
By...” and other possessive credits connoted authorship of a film. Writers further contended
that that authorship can only be achieved through writing, whether creating the screenplay’s
original source material, or by writing the script for the case of a film adaptation. As one
WGA representative, who declined to be identified, opined in Film Daily:
“If a credit says Sam Somebody’s Dr. Zhivago and that
somebody is somebody besides Boris Pasternak, who wrote
the novel, or Robert Bolt, who wrote the screenplay, then the
public is left with the impression that someone different [Sam
Somebody] either wrote the underlying work or the
screenplay.”
74

WGA legal filings, in one form or another, return to this basic contention: that only writers
should be construed as authors in the cinema, and that the credit “A Film by…” connoted a
writing contribution. Its stance has strong precedent in the theatrical stage. President of the
Dramatists Guild, Sidney Kingsley, duly deposed and marshalled in support of the WGA’s
position, asserted that common practice in New York’s Broadway theatres gives the author
“of a play or musical comedy sole credit for its authorship,” in possessive form: e.g., “Neil
Simon’s Barefoot in the Park” and “Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy.”
75
In instances involving less
prominent authors, the playwright receives credit with the play title, “but the title of a play
is never preceded by the name of the director or producer in the possessive form.”
76
The
play’s director under this regime was customarily given a “Directed by” credit, not a
possessory credit.
77
The reasons for the writers’ position are twofold: as Christopher
Wheaton wrote in A History of the Screen Writers Guild (1920-1942), the WGA was an
offshoot of the Dramatists’ Guild of the Author’s League of America and so had an
ideological affinity with that body.
78
Secondly, theatre has traditionally held the writer in
266
greater esteem than the director. This is diametrically opposite to film,
79
which has a history
of heralding producers’ and directors’ contributions at the expense of writers, who are
frequently released from their obligations before principal photography begins, and are not
guaranteed script input while on a set.
80
Prior to the establishment of the Screen Writers
Guild (a precursor to the WGA) as a negotiating body in 1941, writers commonly
experienced the denial of proper writing credits, as producers frequently assumed writing
credits that, under later negotiating regimes, would not have been properly theirs.
81

Thus, even when working in film, a different medium with different practices of
collaboration and responsibility, writers naturally found a safe ideological harbour in stage
drama, a production culture whose credit provisions favoured their contributions, and
applied these criteria to the cinema. As Richard Caves so succinctly puts it, “on Broadway
the Writers Guild Basic Agreement assigns scriptural status to the written text, which
cannot be changed without the playwright’s consent.”
82
Naturally, screenwriters would
favour theatrical attribution norms. The Writers Guild seeks to translate creative input in
one realm (the stage) and apply it to another (the screen); it is also grounded in
spectatorship and audience expectations translating across these creative boundaries. If a
theatre-going public is accustomed to seeing a writer’s name in possessive form on Broadway
marquees, then the same syntax, applied to a director’s name, could be misleading to cinema
patrons—especially in the case of hyphenates like Josef von Sternberg or King Vidor, who
hold many writer-director credits. It is also made more confusing by the fact that in film,
though very few writers have the prestige of having their possessory credits on screen and
print advertising, such a right is reserved, is still reserved for famous playwrights. “Edward
267
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
provides a case in point. The blue billing sheet of Virginia Woolf indicates that Albee was
given that credit in contractual negotiations—a provision insisted on by Albee when Warner
Bros. optioned the play for adaptation.
83
It’s unclear the degree to which audiences would
be confused by these credits (and the degree to which such confusion would harm the
writing craft), but most certainly both of these effects exist at some non-zero (or non-
negligible) level. With these historical-artistic precedents in mind, writers tacitly
acknowledge they are limiting directors credits, but with creative and professional (which is
to say disciplinary) justification.
Writers also claimed disproportionate harm, i.e., that possessory credits affect every
screenwriter, but only benefit a substantially smaller portion of directors. If, in the words of
Alfred Hitchcock, “not more than fifty directors have ever been granted possessory or
production credit, although there have literally been thousands of persons who have directed
motion pictures during the past sixty years,”
84
then there can be no restraint of trade:
Possessive credits, [DGA] asserts, are the subject of individual
bargaining between individual directors on the one hand and
individual producer-employers on the other. The possessive
credits are achieved, it asserts, only by the most outstanding
of the directors. We submit that on the face of plaintiff’s own
pleadings, plaintiff cannot maintain a class action: the
members of the alleged class are in competition with each
other and the alleged right involved is truly individual and not
joint or common. Plaintiff concedes that the possessive credit
is not a matter as to which it engages in collective bargaining.
It therefore has no standing or interest here.
85

This claim asserts that since such a small portion of directors are granted possessory credits,
they are not governed by collectively bargained in basic agreements; they are a matter to be
268
determined when negotiating personal services contracts. Further along that line of
reasoning, because it is a credit of prestige, it affects only the upper echelon of directors, who
are well established both in critical acclaim and economic security. If, as the WGA claims,
the possessory credit derogates from film authorship, it affects the rank-and-file membership
as well as writers of higher standing. If given away to directors, the possessory credit
denigrates the entire profession of writing, as opposed to harming an anointed few directors.
Writers also expressed bemused scepticism over why directors would be so possessive, about
the four forms of credit being denied to them by the terms of the 1963 Basic Agreement,
when so many other credits were available, all above the title, some containing apostrophes:
A Sam Jones Picture
A Sam Jones Film
A Sam Jones Motion Picture
A Sam Jones Photoplay
A Sam Jones Production
A Sam Jones Presentation
Sam Jones’s Production of ______________
Sam Jones’s Presentation of _____________
Sam Jones Presents ___________________
A Production by Sam Jones
A Presentation by Sam Jones
86

Writers reasoned they were only curtailing a certain credit provisions, not all of them.
“Considering the number of such other ‘credits’ available to him,” Sidney Kingsley wrote,
“there is no reason why any director would insist on receiving instead, a form of credit which
indicates or suggests that the person therein wrote the work.”
87
The four possessory credits,
according to Michael Franklin, credit Sam Jones with having written the screenplay—both
in the “public mind and the mind of persons in the entertainment industry.”
88
The first half
of Franklin’s statement, directed outwards to a general and nebulously theatre-going public,
269
engender consideration of how audiences respond to credits. It is contestable whether or not
the general public would make the same connection between the credit “A Film by Sam
Jones” and authorship. It is also debatable whether or not audiences will make the same
differentiation in the credits “A Sam Jones Film” (WGA-acceptable) and “Sam Jones’s Film”
(WGA-unacceptable)—and whether or not that film will make a material difference in how
that public behaves when patronising the film at the box office. The second half of Franklin’s
statement—that authorship is misunderstood “in the mind of persons in the entertainment”
industry—is easier to navigate.
Contra to DGA claims that denied possessory credits would harm a film’s financial
prospects, the Writers Guild alleged that no economic damage could be proved. As outlined
above, National Association of Theatre Owners president Sherrill Corwin claimed that
possessory credits were necessary to guarantee funding for a particular project; without the
very particular form and syntax of “A Sam Jones Film” or “Sam Jones’s Film,” banks and
other lending institutions would be unwilling to advance funding. The WGA dismissed this
position out of hand, noting that “the plaintiffs have no declaration to support the charge of
unlawful conspiracy, and none from banks, financing institutions” to confirm that they
would cease funding film production if the possessory credit were to be suddenly taken away
from directors.
89
In this matter, producers were more than willing to weigh in (having
remained largely mute on issues of authorship and the prestige of the writers versus the
director). Senior executives from Warner Bros., Columbia Pictures, and Twentieth
Century–Fox testified on behalf of their own companies as well as the AMPTP and the
motion picture profession at large, largely on the subject of film financing. Their specific
270
funding formulas differed to some extent, dependent on their size and concomitant ability to
float loans to individual producers and productions. Given its sizeable production lot,
Warner Bros. was known by this juncture to largely distribute films by independent
producers, many of whom “utilized the production facilities and personnel of Warner.”
90
As
Vice President Walter MacEwen relates, most of these productions were financed in-house
by Warner; but in such a case where the production sought external funding sources, “the
bank will generally make the loan to the independent producer without regard to casting or
the director, or any other factors, if Warner will guarantee repayment of the loan within a
reasonable time frame after the release of the picture.”
91
For lending banks, the identity of
the studio and its vast collateral of industrial capital is of far greater importance than the
prestige of any individual actor or director, no matter how well regarded. Their stature
ultimately dwarfed by the size of the studio, whom the bank regards as the primary co-signor
and guarantor, not the individual creative input.
In those cases where Warner chose to finance the picture themselves, “the identity of
the director to be engaged by the independent producer is usually an important factor in
determining whether or not Warner will finance and distribute such picture, or, in the few
cases where bank financing is involved, whether or not Warner will guarantee the bank loan”
(original emphasis).
92
When the director has been identified as a fit for a film production, he
negotiates with the studio over what credit provisions he will receive. “But the form of such
credit,” in the words of MacEwen, “once the identity of the director is determined, does not
ordinarily control the basic decision as to whether or not Warner will finance and distribute
the picture.” Like Warner Bros., Columbia distributed far more pictures from independent
271
producers than it produced under Columbia’s own shingle;
93
Twentieth Century–Fox, by
contrast differed in that, “a substantial number of the motion pictures distributed by 20
th
are
produced by 20
th
,” with only a small remainder being produced by independent producers,
94

according to Frank H. Ferguson, a senior executive and head of its legal department.
Regardless of any differences in their particular fiscal arrangements, these three studios
agreed on one salient matter: the semantics of credit have no bearing on film financing.
Ferguson, wrote even more tersely direct than executives for Warners or Columbia:
I know of no instance in which the form of the credit to be
afforded the director has been a determinative factor in the
distributor’s decision as to whether or not it should finance
and distribute a completed motion picture. More
particularly, I know of no instance in which the form of the
credit has been the basis upon which distributor has rejected
a producer’s proposal that it will finance it finance and
distribute one or more of its motion pictures.
95

It is clear that the identity of individual creative personnel are important considerations
when banks or distribution companies elect which film projects to fund. Yet the credit
provisions granted to those personnel are immaterial to the studios. Yet credits are highly
important to those individual creators who seek them.
The scale of vested interests for the various parties involved (directors versus
producers) can help us intuit the differential significance they attach to credits. A director
stakes his reputation in having his name attached to films of quality and prestige. The quality
of the production flows from the director’s creativity, and his inputs, insofar as he can
control them as a director, vests his name with a trademark. A studio stakes its reputation
based on the films released under its auspices, and the quality of those films has a direct
272
bearing on how it is perceived to wider publics. A director is of interest to the studio insofar
as he can produce a marketable, saleable (and secondarily, an artistic) film. The director’s
name is similarly of interest in that it demonstrates a track record of being able to produce
films of similar quality to previous ones, and marketing campaigns benefit from being able to
tout an individual production as having been helmed by a particular director. It is only
important that the identity of the creative input is identified, not how it is identified,
because that input is one of many. Because there are so many contracts to be negotiated
with so many personnel, the studios would want to standardize credit forms—in the form of
a boilerplate “Directed by” rather than possessory forms—to limit the profusion of alternate
titles and the confusion they might engender in a film audience. By contrast, per Iago’s
words in Othello,
96
all a director has is his reputation, and the sole individual to reap its
benefits, and therefore would be particularly sensitive to the form and type these credits
took. The studios have an investment in reputation, but over a wider number of products
and projects, and therefore insensate to the relative minutia of credit syntax and form.
Producers and writers were also united in ridiculing the DGA’s possessory credit
objections as hypocritical. Since 1948, DGA Basic Agreements had stipulated that only a
director
97
of a film could receive a credit containing the word “Director.”
98
There is no small
irony in this last position, because the Directors Guild itself has a history of circumscribing
the credit rights of cinematographers, choreographers, and other talent unions. Title IV,
Section 8 of the 1964 Director’s Guild Minimum Basic Agreement prevents any individual
in any other guild from being attributed the credit “director,” or any of its derivations, save
for the overarching film director.
99
While preserving for the DGA the credits of director and
273
various assistant directors, this clause also prevented similar credits “musical director,”
“music directed by,” “dance director,” “choreography directed by,” “stage director,” “art
director,” etc.
100 ,
from being used by those respective artists—the very type of exclusive, even
predatory collective bargaining over which the DGA sued the writers.
101
In an open letter
from AMPTP executive vice president Charles Boren in January 1954, he reminded studios
that those granted the credit Dance Director, would have their credits changed to “Dances
by” or “Choreography by.”
102
Just as the DGA complained in the possessory credit dispute,
the 1948 Basic Agreement consisted a wholesale bargaining away of credit rights of one guild
by another. As a result of this provision Ray Heindorf, a member of the Music Directors
Association of America, privately sued the Screen Director’s Guild (the original name of the
DGA) in Los Angeles County Superior Court (Civil Case 635,147) for abridging his credit
rights in October 1954.
103
Heindorff’s suit, backed by the MDAA’s legal involvement
proved ultimately unsuccessful, and the Director’s Guild kept their credit rights. Yet writers
and producersdutifully and happily exploited DGA’s practice of predatory credit practices as
rhetorical ammunition. Such glee was also in evidence when Michael Franklin pointed out
that the figures claimed by the DGA as the deep-seated, 50-year historical precedents for
possessory credits, were also themselves writers. Franklin was eager to accept D.W. Griffith
as an avatar for possessory credits with The Birth of a Nation in 1915—as he was more than
willing to do the same for the prestigious creators Billy Wilder, Joseph Mankiewicz, Ingmar
Bergman, Frederico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Akira Kurosawa.
104
Why, after all
this vitriol? Because these men had also written their films. For all the lofty rhetoric in
274
prosecuting their possessory credit rights, both sides were clearly not above a game of one-
upmanship.
Of all the legal and economic issues explored above, a question of cultural prestige
clearly rankled writers the most: who should be considered the author of a film? The answers
prompted the most frequent and colourful language of the possessory credit dispute.
According to writers, collective bargaining to limit possessory credits, both in 1963 and
1966, was prompted by prestige-hungry directors claiming script authorship credits that did
not properly belong to them. In WGA President James Poe’s affidavit, he writes:
That portion of our agreement with the producers which
is here attacked [by the DGA] is directed at the crime of
certain directors and producers who seek—through public
misrepresentation—to be credited as having written films
which were, in fact, written by others. We do not seek to
remove or deprive authorship credit from anyone.
The recent rash of film auteur credits on the part of such
writer-directors as Richard Brooks, Fellini, Antonioni, Joseph
Mankiewicz, Bergmann [sic], John Huston, Blake Edwards,
all men who author their own scenarios—alone or in
collaboration with other writers—seems to have excited a
desire by some other directors to receive similar credit,
despite their freely an openly admitted inability to write.
(Original emphasis).
105

Poe proffers a set of arguments here. The first involves the practice, relatively common in
classical Hollywood, where directors and producers would claim credit for screenplays they
did not write themselves—or else alter a writer’s screenplay just enough to the point where
it would satisfy WGA requirements and “legitimately” obtain credit for the director or
producer.
106
As Richard Caves has noted Creative Industries, his book on the economics of
art, there has long been an incentive for a director to interfere with completed work for
275
credit reasons, rather than for artistic or commercial ones. By maliciously rewriting someone
else’s work for any reason, the director can secure both writer and director credits, and so
elevate his esteem in the filmmaking community. In contrast to the stage, in film “the
producer, if given decision rights over the script’s quality, faces the moral hazard of being
able to always demand one more rewrite,”
107
effectively putting the writer at the mercy of
producers’ decision making. The power differential between producers/directors and writers
was so pronounced, and the practice of illegitimately co-opting others’ writing credits was so
widespread, that it has frequently been cited as one of the primary reasons (in addition to
proper residual payments and adequate wage floors) why writers sought protection in the
form of a representative Guild.
108
As claimed by Michael H. Franklin, the WGA’s Executive
Director, “the very first Producer-Screen Writers Guild Agreement, entered into October
1940, consisted of only two printed pages; but Schedule “A” which was attached to it and
related to the giving of credits and authorship consisted of two and a half pages,”
109
making
it longer than the main document. The assignation of credit has been of the utmost
importance to screen writers since the outset of their profession, and in the mid 1960s,
credit issues—largely arbitration proceedings, residual payments, and their respective
enforcement—occupied between 30 and 50 per cent of the WGA’s executive personnel.
110

The declarations by WGA executives reveal a pendulum-swing between the ethereal,
ephemeral issues of artistry and authorship and the more prosaic drudgery of economic
work. In both the sublime and the mundane, credits occupy much of the Writers’ time.
Poe’s second argument opens outwards to realms of reception, film criticism, and
how other publics construe the role of directors and producers. The “film auteur credits” he
276
references are those directors who claim possessory credits “despite their freely and openly
admitted inability to write,” is as inflammatory as it is misleading. It is a cheap shot at
Hitchcock, who claimed possessory credit rights without collaborating on the screenplay,
glossing his words in such a way as to connote that the director cannot write. Instead, Poe is
establishing directors as predatory across creative jurisdictions using a tautology widely
prevalent in the American film industry. Writers Guild Basic Agreements with the AMPTP
assert that only a screenwiter may craft a screenplay. Any other personnel who does craft a
screenplay vacates their previous title, and of necessity becomes a writer in the process, at
least as far as the Writers’ Guild is concerned. (Rules for so-called writer-director or writer-
producer “hyphenates” apply to compensation schemes, not the definition of titles.) A
director who writes is classified as a writer, as is a producer, a cinematographer, or even a
Best Boy electric. Poe is thus conflating a legal argument with an ethical and creative one.
Poe erroneously claims these contractual obligations, where only writers may write, are
tantamount to directors admitting that they have a constitutional inability to write. This
passage speaks to familiar cases in Hollywood arbitration and jurisprudence where legally
binding contractual obligations are leveraged into more ephemeral arguments surrounding
creative, ethical, or moral rights. None of these rights, as Catherine Fisk notes, are
considered under United States copyright law, but are taken into account in many other
European legal codes.
111
Nor do these rights appear in collectively bargained agreements;
they rather circulate more informally in the creative culture that surrounds film production.
Because these ephemeral, non-legally binding provisions cannot be written into collective
277
bargaining agreements, they spill over into public discourse and are tried in the overused
venue “the court of public opinion,” the only place where such beliefs have any purchase.
The third strain of Poe’s affidavit involves authorship, broadly considered, but also a
particular brand of authorship: the auteur theory, introduced to North America by film critic
Andrew Sarris. In one of the few instances where film critics actually change the discourse of
the medium about which they write, the auteur theory is indirectly responsible for
prompting the WGA’s aggressive possessory credit stance in negotiations with producers.
Even Variety, in its reporting on the possessory credit dispute, recognised the auteur theory
as a motivating factor in the legal dispute. On May 3, 1967, the day that directors
reportedly “awoke” to find the Writers Guild had out-manoeuvred the DGA and negotiated
exclusive rights to the possessory credit, Variety reported that the possessory credit
clause revolves around writers’ contention that when non-
writer takes top billing, he is implying he wrote the picture.
This practice, it’s explained by insiders, stems from the auteur
(author) theory which was developed in Europe, a theory
which assigns major creativity to the directors, the great one’s
[sic] rating “pantheon” status.
112
(Original Emphasis)

The final sentence is a none-too-subtle reference to Andrew Sarris, whose book, The
American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 organizes the work by declining
chapter-by-chapter importance of various auteurs: “Pantheon” directors who included
Charles Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, and others, followed by “The
Far Side of Paradise” (Frank Borzage, Frank Capra, Vicente Minelli, Nicholas Ray, etc.),
“Expressive Esoterica,” and so on.
113
Though Sarris’ book would not be published in its final
form until 1968, the word “pantheon” was still circulating in his vocabulary when he
278
imported the auteur theory from continental Europe in 1962. In that year he published the
now-canonical “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in the winter issue of Film Culture.
114

For this article Sarris wrote, “by the auteur theory, if a director has not technical
competence, no elementary for the cinema, he is automatically cast out from the pantheon
of directors.”
115
As such, it is reasonable to assume that it was percolating in the atmosphere
of film criticism, especially as auteurism was furiously debated in the coming years by Sarris
and film critic Pauline Kael—he writing for Film Culture, she predominantly in the pages of
Film Quarterly.
116
And as the Variety article illuminates, Sarris indeed imported the theory
from Europe, borrowing and developing it from Cahiers du Cinema’s “politique des auteurs”
from the 1954 essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” by François Truffaut.
117
Where James Poe makes a more broadly structural critique of film criticism, the above
Variety quote general turns criticism into a rebuke levelled at a single critic. Andrew Sarris is
directly targeted as being single-handedly responsible for bring auteurism to Hollywood, and
for promulgating it in the critical community. Sarris’ work in turn elevates the directors’
esteem in production circles. When the Writers Guild bargained for possessive credits as
their exclusive domain, they were motivated by directors who clamoured for recognition as
auteurs, the acceptance of which was almost singlehandedly spearheaded by Andrew
Sarris.
118

In the period following the DGA lawsuit, rumour and gossip from Variety’s ill-defined
“insiders” mentioned above became the official creed of the WGA; its board members
repeatedly invoked not merely authorship, but the auteur theory as a primary motivator of
their bargaining position. WGA Assistant Executive Secretary Gary Ellingsworth “scoffed at
279
efforts of the DGA to invoke the auteur theory prevalent in Europe,”
119
as a primary reason
for directors’ possessory credit claims. One year later the next WGA president, Michael
Blankfort, who assumed the role from James Poe, echoed these sentiments. Blankfort wrote
an open letter to WGA West Magazine, the official west-cost organ of the Writers Guild. In
it, Blankfort eviscerated film critic Edgar Z. Friedenberg, who had written a review of The
Graduate, and denounced the practice of Friedenberg and his critical peers, who cemented
the director as a film’s auteur. Blankfort argued that the critic had erred by giving director
Mike Nichols undue praise for The Graduate. He also chided Friedenberg for marginalizing
the creative input of “Charles Webb, on which the film script was based, and the authors of
the screenplay itself, Calder Willingham and Buck Henry.” Blankfort characterised
Friedenberg’s article as indicative of the way that film critics had marginalized the writing
craft.

As a result of the “chic auteur theory,” Friedenberg, a scapegoat for auteurist critics at
large,
attributes every strength as well as the faults to the director,
Mike Nichols, as if he had improvised the story. He willingly
gives credit to the actors, who perhaps had concocted their
dialogue and relationships at the moment the camera rolled.
In passing reference to the producer, Lawrence Truman, he
relieves him of responsibility for not placing human disaster in
its cultural setting. But the real authors who sense the
disaster and recounted it with truth—they are the invisible
men, the silent butlers, the other people of no consequence.

120

Blankfort argued that such critics “fail in their minimum obligation to the work they
examine. In a sense, they are assassins of their fellow creators.”
121
Intriguingly, Blankfort does
not level his invective at the directors or producers. He explicitly does not wish to “deprive
280
the director and producer of their important contribution to The Graduate.”
122
Blankfort
rather at lambastes critics who have done the larger artistic community a disservice. By this
peculiar transitive property, Sarris is partially to blame for the WGA pursuing possessory
credit limits, and emboldening directors to seek and claim credits that they do not deserve.
Critical discourse, not industrial practice, had created an environment that had disesteemed
the writer in comparison to the director. Critics are constructed as being largely responsible
for the imbalance between directors and writers—an imbalance that could only be corrected
through collective bargaining—with producers serving as ancillary enablers.
It is tempting to take these claims at face value, because if true, they would present
one of the few—and perhaps only—instances where the discourse and rhetoric of film critics
has directly influenced Hollywood labour and production practices. Simultaneously though,
it is dangerous to overstress such causality because reviewers, though dependent on the film
industry for their livelihood, still remain a world apart from their influence, both in degree
and kind. It is far more important that the Writers Guild maintain favourable relations with
the Directors Guild than it is to ingratiate film critics. Writers and directors are mutually
dependent on each other in order to pursue their respective livelihoods. All of this is to say
that writers blaming the auteur theory is potentially rhetorical expedience (i.e., blame the
critics so as not to anger the directors) and potentially a reflection of actual fact (i.e.,
Andrew Sarris and his auteur acolytes inflated the stature of directors in the production
community to the point where writers felt they needed to check their influence by denying
them the possessory credit). However, since the WGA’s rhetoric remained unchanged over
the course of a year, and persisted under the governance of two Guild presidents, I would
281
argue that critics did indeed influence collective bargaining, making the possessory credit
dispute unique in the history of Hollywood labour relations. The possessory credit dispute
gives lends considerable weight to the idea that critics can influence the culture of
filmmaking.

The Verdict and Aftermath
After this flurry of affidavits, accusations, and declaration, Los Angeles County
Superior Court judge Ralph Nutter denied the directors’ injunction on May 18, 1967.
Nutter accepted a minor argument by Michael Franklin, in that preventing the 1966 Basic
Agreement from enactment would have greater harm to writers (in the form of denied
Writers’ pensions and health care funds) than the harm would for abridged possessory credit
rights of Directors.
123
Nutter also declared he could not at this time rule on other claims vis-
à-vis collective bargaining, collusion, and restraint of trade.
124
In the wake of being rebuffed,
the DGA simultaneously promised to file a more comprehensive lawsuit against the WGA
and the AMPTP.
125
Directors also took a radical position at the bargaining table. On May
28, 1967, the DGA announced that they would no longer bargain collectively with the
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, and would instead forge individual
deals with its member companies,
126
the start of a multi-week campaign against the
Producers that played out in trade publications Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Film
Daily. The policy had strike implications eleven months later when the then standing DGA-
AMPTP contract expired in April 1968. More immediately, after the DGA’s first legal loss,
it signalled a very particular, if not unexpected rhetorical stance by the Directors Guild.
282
Though other documents hint that the two guilds were privately warring with each other,
127

the DGA found no public fault with the writers,
128
and instead levelled its criticism against
AMPTP. (This, despite directors naming writers as co-defendants in their injunction.
129
) In
newspaper interviews, at least, the Directors Guild averred that the AMPTP was to blame
for this “erosion of our rights.”
130
DGA vice-president Delbert Mann proclaimed that,
notwithstanding the WGA’s inclusion in the suit, the “offender really is [the] AMPTP,”
whom he accused of trying to set an “alarming” precedent by pitting one talent union against
another.
131
Mann explicitly strove to avoid he impression that the lawsuit was “one talent
guild fighting another.” He did this by rhetorically taking the fight to producers claiming
that DGA-wide talks with the AMPTP would not go forward in the following April.
The DGA’s new stance raised the spectre of “a dozen or more different contracts,
negotiated with separate companies, with ‘favored nation’ provisos”
132
being hammered out
for individual contracts—a collective bargaining nightmare that would be mutually
unfavourable for a number of reasons. Contract theory establishes that negotiations have
individual transaction costs (e.g., the wages for negotiators, mediators, or the opportunity
cost of union members who could be otherwise paid for rendering other services).
133

Bargaining collectively reduces transaction costs by ensuring that negotiations only occur
once, and that those costs are spread across a number of individuals or companies who can
share in the burden of hiring a legal or mediating team.
134
The DGA was willing to give up
those transactional cost benefits by negotiating directly with the companies, seeing the harm
done to the director’s prestige as outweighing the advantages of a collectively negotiated
contract. On the other side of the table, the AMPTP would want to avoid the resulting
283
contractual quagmire of proliferating individual, the primary economic motivations for why
the Producers Alliance refused to countenance individually settled contracts. In addition to
economic rationale, there were additional ideological issues at play here—predominantly
creative control and authorship—which were borne out over the next six months.
The contractual impasse continued through the following winter, when in January
1968, the DGA gave notice, as specified in the terms of their previous Minimum Basic
Agreement, that there would be no collective talks the following April. (The Directors’ deal
with Producers, as with most Basic Agreements, stipulates that one party inform the other of
its bargaining position at least three months in advance of the expiration deadline.)
135

Directors were “bluntly informed that the Producers association would not countenance the
DGA’s plan;” it was the avowed
position of AMPTP...that member companies are
contractually committed to bargain collectively with AMPTP
as their agent, and are not free to negotiate individual pacts
circumventing contractual obligations entered into on their
behalf with other guilds.... Company-by-company
negotiations [were] summarily rejected when each of the
producing companies belonging to the AMPTP dispatched
letters notifying DGA of...AMPTP readiness to bargain
collectively on continuing or modification of that agreement.
With each member company sending DGA a signed copy of
the same letter of notification, the action appeared
tantamount to a death knell to DGA’s hopes for separate
agreements.
136

From the above, it is clear that the AMPTP was congenitally opposed to the idea of
renegotiating a deal with the WGA, to the point where that it was willing to let its standoff
with the DGA shut down Hollywood. The DGA was equally intractable, and the impasse
led to many press outlets, including the Los Angeles Times’ Labour Editor, to predict that the
284
ideological gulf between the two sides was so great that it would lead to the film industry’s
first-ever directors’ strike.
137
Such posturing is expected during labour negotiations, but at
the end of March 1968, writers and producers were so far from an agreement that the
AMPTP asked Federal and California mediation services were called to intervene and
attempt to settle the dispute after a series of failed compromises.
138
This development
prompted another round of pessimistic media speculation.
139

Curiously for an employers’ organization, the AMPTP maintained a faith in the
collective bargaining process, culminating in a page-long advertisement in the Hollywood
Reporter. This letter, signed by AMPTP Chairman Lew Wasserman, President Jack Valenti,
and Executive Vice-President Charles Boren, summarily rejected the idea of individual
bargaining, in favour of industry-wide negotiation, “consonant with the long-established
relationship between the member companies of AMPTP and DGA,”
140
even though a
divide-and-conquer approach of individual directors could result in lower wages. Given the
Directors Guild history and their dissatisfaction with writer-producer collective bargaining,
it comes as no surprise that directors would attempt to work outside its strictures. The
stance of producers, however, is less intelligible. Why would producers profess faith in
labour power, when private companies have traditionally sought to break workers’
traditional positions of strength by atomising or demolishing union solidarity? While the
AMPTP’s public position adheres to economic and legal precedent as rhetorical cover, there
are unspoken deeper structural issues at work that rationalize the AMPTP’s position. The
shifting power dynamics of post-studio system Hollywood were an important motivating
285
factor in its bargaining posture, and constitute an effort by producers to curtail the power of
the director.
The Paramount Consent Decrees of 1948 signalled the end of the “Big Five”—
Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century–Fox, and RKO—studios’ oligopoly,
ending the vertical integration of production, and distribution, and exhibition that these
corporations had enjoyed for nearly thirty years.
141
Though the legal decisions established a
change in the business paradigms of Hollywood cinema, the historical infrastructure of the
major corporations still meant they possessed a competitive advantage in the post war
period. As discussed in the introduction of this dissertation, it took nearly ten years after the
Paramount Decrees for theatre chains to be fully divested, and another ten for the last
option contract to expire. In addition to these sticky legal and contractual obligations,
economic investments, business practices, and informal relationships that had been built up
during the studio system heyday would also have a long tail even after it was considered
“dead.” These would include capital investments (sets, props costumes) that were not
needed in an era when a major studio “no longer geared its production rate to filing the
screens of its theatres,” and were sold off in piecemeal fashion.
142
On a less formal level,
those creative collaborations in existence before divestiture would also continue into the
post-studio system era. Directors accustomed to working with certain screenwriters and
cinematographers would continue to do so in the post-studio era, a logical solution to the
nobody knows problem of Hollywood production. According to arts economist Richard
Caves, because “there is great uncertainty about how consumers will value a newly produced
creative product”
143
creators will likely fall back on working relationships that have proved
286
successful in the past. But even then, so great is that uncertainty about box office
performance that nobody knows if a past relationship will augur future success.
Artistic-professional relationships are also historically sticky, and take time to adapt
to the influx of new talent. Thus, even though the studio system was ordered to dissolve in
1948, reform only began to truly manifest itself in the 1960s because of the studios’
structural and ad-hoc momentum. Denise Mann in Hollywood Independents attributes
Hollywood’s change to producers; Paul Monaco’s contribution to the History of the American
Cinema series, The Sixites, modulates Mann’s thesis somewhat by declaring actors-turned-
producers were the driving influence, able to secure financing for pet projects on their own
terms.
144
With Movie-Made America, Robert Sklar claims agents, as “one of the few sources
of innovation or daring in beleaguered Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s,”
145
had the most
power in the postwar film industry, while firebrand critic Peter Biskind in his book, Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls, claims that maverick directors “saved Hollywood,” beginning with
Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate.
146
Whomever posed the most likely challenge, established
studios certainly were a beleaguered group, coping simultaneously with runaway
production,
147
declining box office revenues,
148
and threats to their traditional authority in
the production process. The preponderance of these developments were out of the
producers hands, leaving two bargaining issues over which they still had a measure of
control: contracts and credits.
These two issues, contracts and credits, are mutually reinforcing, and have long been
the only official regulators of relationships, personal behaviour, and professional conduct in
Hollywood. (The third regulator is reputation, and is only partially represented by the
287
credits an individual creator receives.) As John Thornton Caldwell reports in Production
Culture, there are many informal circuits of information amongst creative personnel that
speak to an individual’s reputation based on their behaviour on-set.
149
Tom Kemper, in
Hidden Talent also explores how these informal circuits are tapped and fed by agents, who
use them in contract negotiations with studios.
150
Both scholars assert that the formal
imprimatur given by credits is only partially responsible for building reputation. Credits in
particular assumed an even greater important in post-Paramount Decrees Hollywood, as the
traditional organizational structures that dominated the American film industry during its
studio-dominated “Golden Age” began to break down. Because workers were less frequently
employed in a pool of standing labour, and secured work on a more ad-hoc basis, they could
no longer rely on the institutional memory of studios to certify their employment histories.
Credits became the only official guarantor of professional reputation. Moreover, given the
radical changes in the Hollywood film industry illuminated in the introduction—runaway
production threatening jobs in Los Angeles, more stable employment contracts giving way to
picture-by-picture deals, foreign film auteurs being given greater prestige by the popular
press—the business of filmmaking, already precarious, was becoming even more so during
the mid-1960s. In light of this uncertainty, we can see writers and directors attempting to
secure their futures through rights to credits, one of the few realms of negotiation they could
control. The equally rigid stances taken by the DGA and WGA can be seen as a response to
the anxieties percolating through the industry in the preceding two decades—an attempt to
secure a life raft of creative control, while ignoring the fact that the tides were in fact slowly
slipping away.
288
Producers were also seeking to gain a measure of control during the course of this
dispute, even as they publicly maintained an appearance of standing by on the sideline. By
denying DGA the possessory credit, the AMPTP could contractually limit the artistic
esteem of the director, and so attempt curtail their negotiating position in Hollywood.
Producers would likely target the DGA because directors coordinate so many facets of a film
production, and therefore pose the greatest threat to a producer’s hegemony. However, even
if the AMPTP did not seek to explicitly hamper directorial influence, it was still a canny
power play. In an era when actors, writers, and independent producers
151
were all gaining
power at the expense of producers, granting disenfranchised writers the exclusive right to
possessory credit was one instance where producers could influence the industry’s future.
Elevating the relatively powerless writing craft while diminishing the relatively influential
directing role no doubt would have seemed the most sensible ploy, especially when
producers could couch their position in the two Guilds’ own rhetoric.
During the 30-month opening round of the possessory credit dispute, the AMPTP
remained tacit about its sympathies, and took sides neither with the Writers nor Directors
Guilds. The Producers Alliance, as illuminated above, stayed neutral behind the rhetorical
cover of previously established bargaining regimes.
152
Writing for The Film Daily, William
Tusher reported that
the AMPTP considers itself on the periphery of the dispute
and would take no initiative in seeking modification of the
controversial clause, and that it expected to honor its
contract unless the court should at a later time rule
otherwise.
153

289
The Producers Alliance was clearly content to let this appear to be a matter to be resolved
between two bickering unions, despite the DGA’s attempts to draw them into the fray. As
such, the AMPTP could deny directors certain credit rights without suffering too much
public criticism or industry backlash—and even could potentially play peacemaker.
Producer’s Alliance President and MCA mogul Lew Wasserman, did precisely that at the
end of May, with what was dubbed “The Wasserman Plan,” the details of which were not
publicly announced, that the DGA summarily rejected.
154
If anything, AMPTP faltered on
one crucial matter: they underestimated the degree to which directors and writers were
invested in the idea of authorship, specifically who has the right to be considered the author
of a motion picture, and negotiations came to within a few weeks of a strike.

Strike Averted and Conclusion
Ultimately, the fire, brimstone, and brinksmanship were for naught, and a
Hollywood work stoppage was averted as the Producers Alliance and the Director’s Guild
reached an agreement in good faith on April 9, 1968, three weeks before they were due to
strike. Temporarily, the DGA would not pursue any possessory credits under the proviso
that all directors would be allowed to “negotiate individually for any form of screen and paid
advertising credit,” beginning on June 15
,
1970—the expiry date of the WGA-AMPTP pact
that started the whole controversy.
155
The mechanics of the reversal are unclear, as here the
primary source material peters out. Secondary sources—an article by Ted Elrick in the 1998
June/July issue of DGA Magazine, and Kathleen Sharp’s biography on Lew Wasserman, Mr.
and Mrs. Hollywood—contain anecdotal evidence. Wasserman was allegedly responsible for
290
reversing the AMPTP’s position and opened the door to directors being given possessory
credit rights, which reportedly infuriated writers. Michael Franklin, then the WGA’s
Executive Director, reported that Writers Guild “members were livid...especially because of
Wasserman’s much-vaunted reputation for upholding his agreements.”
156
Little journalistic
evidence and no legal documents exist to support this claim, nor can another one of Sharp’s
contentions: when Wasserman, who personally oversaw the 1970 WGA-AMPTP
negotiations, asked the WGA to give up its possessory credit provisions, the Guild did so
reluctantly—but received significant wage increases in return.
157
Writing for The Hollywood
Reporter in 2005, Jesse Hiestand contended that the AMPTP’s “studio negotiators insisted
that possessory credits were not a proper item for collective bargaining because they involved
something above minimum-scale credits, like ‘written by’.”
158
Possessory credits should
therefore be governed by personal services contracts, not by minimum basic agreements. We
can verify that, when those June 1970 negotiations finally concluded with a signed
agreement, no mention was made of the possessory credit clamour of three years earlier.
Issues related to television pay rates and residuals payments for the new home video cassette
format were seen to be the cruxes of the 1970 Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement.
159

Credits appear to have been a non-issue, at least for the popular press, during the
negotiations of 1973,
160
but the debate reared its head again in 1981, when the DGA and
AMPTP agreed that all outdoor advertising with six or more names credited should
separately identify the director with “A Film by…”.
161
In 1995, the dispute re-ignited, when
the Writers Guild relented on the possessory credit, foreseeing that negotiations would not
291
progress unless they gave up their contractual right to the credit.
162
Catherine Fisk aptly
summarises the negotiation climate that ensued in 2001:
In the negotiations for the 2001 MBA, the WGA
unsuccessfully attempted to limit the use of the possessory
credit. Although the DGA expressed concerns about the
proliferation of possessory credits by producers, ultimately
the WGA, the DGA, and the companies were unable to reach
an agreement that respected the DGA's desire to
institutionalize the use of the possessory credit for directors,
to limit and regulate the use of it by producers, and to sharply
limit it, as sought by writers.
163

Since 1995, the WGA has settled for a preamble in all of its subsequent Minimum Basic
Agreements, up to and including the one most recently finalized in 2008. With this
preamble, as articulated at this chapter’s outset, the more informal meanings that subtend
the possessory credit—meanings that have been explored throughout this chapter—finally
made their way into the WGA’s official employment record: the writers Minimum Basic
Agreement signed with producers. In 2004, the DGA unilaterally gifted some concessions
back to the writers guild; first time directors would not be allowed to have the “A Film by...”
credit on films, except in special cases where they were directly involved in its development.
The DGA also implemented a series of non-binding guidelines “for Employees to consider
when they are weighing whether to grant the possessory credit.”
164
These statements are
rendered in good faith, but contain no weight of authority or provisions for enforcement.
While possessory credit has ceased to be a negotiating obstacle in Hollywood it is an
issue that still rankles the Writers Guild and at least gives pause to the Directors Guild. The
possessory credit dispute was responsible for a new wave of DGA-WGA ill feeling in the
middle of 1997. On May 30
th
and June 1
st
, DGA and WGA membership gathered at the
292
Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel for their annual “Words into Pictures” summit, which
was designed to strengthen ties between the guilds through various panels. One symposium,
“Whose Picture is it Anyway?—Writers, Directors, the Auteur Theory, the Possessory
Credit” was intended to mollify inter-guild disagreements over “A Film by…” but instead
only served to further exacerbate the controversy. After former DGA president Gene
Reynolds failed to make his promised appearance, Dale Launer, writer of Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels (1988) and My Cousin Vinny (1992), and member of the panel, took umbrage.
Quoted in the Writers Guild magazine, Written By, Launer called Reynolds “a fucking
coward,” for failing to show up and debate the issue as promised, and then offered to
physically fight him, “Marquis de Queensberry rules, bare knuckles, nine inch chains,
whatever.”
165
Launer’s vitriol boiled over into subsequent issues of Written By, where it was
echoed by other Writer’s Guild members
166
and caused rounds of verbal barbs to be traded
between WGA and DGA members. Clearly, even though the two sides have reached an
uneasy détente, it is an issue that still occasionally flares tempers.
As befits an ongoing employment conflict, there is still no tidy resolution to the
possessory credit controversy; in all likelihood it will rear its head during every subsequent
Directors Guild and Writers Guild negotiations, respectively, with the AMPTP. The first
recorded disputes over which film artists should be allowed to use “A Film by...” and its
three variations, provide valuable insight into the nature of intra-guild politics, labour-
management negotiation, artistic attribution, and authorship during the 1960s and beyond.
While the Writers Guild argued for possessory credit in line with theatrical stage traditions,
directors prosecuted their case along lines more grounded in the specificity of the film
293
medium, and more in sympathy with Sarris’ critical evaluations—motivated by the writers’
lessening esteem in the Hollywood hierarchy. Claiming that the cinema has always been first
and foremost a director’s medium,
167
the DGA’s preliminary injunction asserted a
longstanding right to the director’s possessory credit “at least as early as 1915 with the
advertising of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.”
168
Directors reiterated this view in the
popular press. They established their case for directorial authorship and the right to the
possessory credit within a specific version of cinema history: since DW Griffith, the cinema’s
great pioneer and founding father,
169
was gifted the possessory credit over 50 years ago, it has
been intrinsic to cinema history and production practice. The possessory credit therefore
could not and should not be blithely bargained away by a sister guild. Given this historical
precedent, the directors argued, the Writers and the AMPTP could not unilaterally limit the
presentation credits of other unions.
170
Speaking to this issue, an unnamed WGA spokesman
“accused the DGA of howling ‘now the shoe is on the other foot.’”
171
To further undermine
the Directors’ Guild position, the WGA also reminded—less than gently, it must be said—
that Griffith also the authored the scenario to Birth of a Nation. Under the 1966 WGA
MBA, he would not be denied possessory credit in any event. The directors were therefore
implicitly debating the writers’ position for them. Using alternate language, the DGA argued
that famed auteurs such as Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni would also
suddenly find themselves unable to claim for themselves the credit that has long been their
contractual and creative due. In this vein, the Directors’ possessory credit position was
painted not merely as a cravenly commercial one, but a stance that would protect the rights
of art-house creators whose interests transcended the financial. Countering the directors’
294
position, the WGA also excoriated them for their suit’s narrow scope, and gave a rejoinder
to the directors’ high-art aspirations. Of the approximately 160 films that received special
presentation credits in the previous 50 years, only 13 would need to be changed under the
new credit regime;
172
moreover, of those highly prized directors whose moral, artistic rights
would be “trampled”—“Richard Brooks, [Frederico] Fellini, Antonioni, Joseph Mankiewicz,
Bergman, [Roman] Polanski, John Huston, Blake Edwards”
173
—none of their credits would
change because they had at the very least co-authored their screenplays.
174
However, these
remaining 13 disputed credits involved films directed by Otto Preminger, John
Frankenheimer, Preston Sturges, Fred Zinneman, and Alfred Hitchcock,
175
luminaries all
who wielded significant power in Hollywood. Accordingly, the 1966 Writers Agreement
would have been seen as undermining the stature of the film industry’s most powerful and
influential directors.
Historically, very few directors have successfully negotiated for the possessory credit.
It has generally been granted to directors following a proven history of commercial
success,
176
and is a credit studios usually concede grudgingly, because once granted, it is
nearly impossible to strip away. The possessory credit crucially elevates a director’s status in
a film production, and so gives him greater bargaining power during subsequent negotiations.
It denotes a proven track record, and, as a reasonable predictor of future success, allows the
director to command a higher salary. While it is in Paramount’s or Warner Bros.’ best
interests to promote the fact that Alfred Hitchcock is directing one of the films they are
distributing, it is also beneficial to temper this box-office benefit with the knowledge that
Hitchcock can negotiate for greater profit participation and wages commensurate to his
295
stature in the Hollywood community once he receives the possessory credit. (Indeed, the
first silent film producers negotiated the publicity benefits versus financial costs of the first
screen stars. Knowing the star’s name would enable companies like Biograph to exploit their
stars in advertising; simultaneously, though, such naming of stars would escalate their salaries
because of their increased visibility and name-brand recognition. For this reason, Florence
Lawrence was known only as “The Biograph Girl” when she worked for the studio.)
177
A
director’s stature is roughly reflected by the size and prominence of credits, all of which may
be negotiated within certain parameters. The order of credits, by contrast is firmly
prescribed in Guild bargaining; the Director’s name must at minimum appear on its own, on
“the last title card appearing prior to principal photography.”
178
The 2005 DGA Minimum
Basic Agreement makes no explicit provisions for possessory credits. Very few directors have
the right to any possessory credit, yet the DGA was willing to press its case because it spoke
to larger concerns over film authorship—knowing full well that such a posture could
jeopardize industry relations and many film productions.
Credit is one of those seemingly obvious (non-)issues that the public and even
academics, take for granted. Opening credits and final crawl are transparent, routine, and
predictable parts of every motion picture we see; as such, they seem hardly worthy of even
passing consideration. As this chapter has demonstrated, credits are subject to the most
strident and pedantic negotiations, both at the level of collective bargaining and personal
contracts. Part of this value is certainly financial. Because credits certify a filmmaker’s bona
fides, they guarantee his career, meaning that credits have a special financial value for
creative professionals. Simultaneously, the possessory credit dispute demonstrates that
296
credits have assumed a value that surpasses the financial. Industry stakeholders perceive
them as having more than economic importance, and as such they are willing to forego
compensation in order to secure the right to certain forms credit for themselves and their
peers. To a writer, an apostrophe gifted to a director robs her of the esteem that comes with
being the author of the film, in line with the traditions of the theatrical stage. A director
denied that same apostrophe feels it derogates from his status as the film’s primary creator. A
producer who grants the apostrophe to one creative guild gives it elevated stature at the
expense of another guild—perhaps to retain some of her own clout in business transactions,
or perhaps to keep the proliferating power of rival talent in check. For nearly three decades,
from 1967 to 1995, none of these considerations are documented in the official bargaining
regimes circulating amongst writers, directors, and producers. They took on importance by
virtue of the conventions that surrounded Hollywood film production culture, and
circulated within that community of filmmakers. Such considerations only came to light
because of the possessory credit dispute, when a legal claim over credit rights brought these
more arcane and subtextual understandings of directors’ and writers’ into a public sphere. In
this case, word “subtextual” is used advisedly, because the possessory credit dispute shows
that film credits are a deeply coded matrix to film credits that deserves to be read, and read
closely. There exist meanings to be gleaned from credit that surpass their superficial value.
Yet these significations cannot be divined according traditional methods of reading a film
text, because their meanings are not immanent or immediately apparent. They are contained
within the common custom of a filmmaking community that are articulated to a broader
public by way of intercessory journalists, or else reside the more specialised information
297
channels of legal documents and guild newsletters. Their status is a more occult form of
knowledge, which indicates that credits are more properly understood as being directed
inwards, towards the community of film professionals, rather than outwards, towards an
unspecialised, un-indoctrinated, film audience.
From an industrial standpoint, decisions made by writers, directors, and producers
are subtended by economic considerations, but the non-economic considerations found
within the possessory credit speak to the complexity, and difficulty in assessing decision
making within the creative world of American commercial filmmaking—motivated by the
high degree of uncertainty of Hollywood business practices, both present and future, in post-
Paramount Decrees Hollywood. Three little words open up wide realms of enquiry in
discourses formal—economic, managerial, contractual—and informal—creative control,
artistry, authorship, and more. Three little words can speak untold volumes. Three little
words almost shut down Hollywood.

298
Chapter Three Notes

1
Also variously known as the possessive credit, the presentation credit, the presentational credit.
2
The same cannot be said when two or more unions are competing to represent the same
membership. Perry and Perry’s A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement chronicles the
difficulties of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) to enforce the
solidarity of its own strikes in the early 1920s due to competing efforts of the AFL-CIO, which
sought to represent the same below-the-line workers that were under IATSE’s auspices. See pp318-
361.
3
Mike Nielsen and Gene Mailes, Hollywood’s Other Blacklist: Union Struggles in the Studio System
(London: British Film Institute, 1995), 27.
4
By contrast, there have been numerous lawsuits and disputes between two unions or guild who are
trying to represent the same body of workers (i.e. the WGA competing with the “Screen
Playwrights” for writer representation in the 1920s).
5
Dave McNary, “WGA Issues Demand List,” Variety (D), 21 May 2007, 1.
6
Dave McNary, “Scribes Write Off DVD,” Variety (D). 14 October 14 2004, 1.
7
“Details of New Writers Guild Pact Disclosed,” Los Angeles Times. 4 July 1970, 15. The self-
published internet history of Writers Guild of America, West is organized around seminal dates
when residuals were secured for the first time—1953, Television; 1970, foreign television markets;
2000, internet—or increased—1960, theatrical pictures; 1977, television.
(http://www.wga.org/history/timeline.html; accessed 2 May 2010)
8
John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film
and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 49-68 and 150-196.
9
It was not until 1995 that the WGA officially wrote its grievances against directors taking
possessory credit into the Basic Agreement it signed with producers. Until that point, the possessory
credit and its importance had circulated less officially within the culture of the Writers Guild of
America.
10
Harry Bernstein, “Battle Over Apostrophe May Cause Film Directors’ Strike,” Los Angeles Times.
5 February 1968, 3.
11
As of this writing, the 2011 Basic Agreement is in force, under a Memorandum of Agreement.
However, the final version of said agreement has not yet been published. The 2008 Basic
Agreement is therefore my frame of reference.
12
Writers Guild Of America - Alliance Of Motion Picture & Television Producers Theatrical And
Television Basic Agreement 2008 (Los Angeles: Writers Guild of America 2008), 52. Accessed 19
April 2010. http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/MBA08.pdf 52.
13
WGA Minimum Basic Agreement 2008, Schedule A, Clause 1, 263.
14
WGA Minimum Basic Agreement 2008, Schedule A, Clause 8, 266.
15
“Preamble Regarding So-Called ‘Possessive Credits’ ” WGA Minimum Basic Agreement 2008, 1-
2.
16
WGA Minimum Basic Agreement 2008, 1.
17
WGA Minimum Basic Agreement 2008, 1.
18
Or producer-writer or director-writer hyphenates who also author a considerable portion of the
screenplay.
19
“Gary Ellingsworth Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West.
Inc, Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior
299

Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 11. See also: Section BB of the 1963
WGA Minimum Basic Agreement; Kathleen Sharp, Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew
Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire (New York: Carrol & Graff Publishers, 2003), 296-7;
Murphy, A.D. “DGA Sues to Nip Writers Pact.” Variety (D). 10 May 1967, p1.
20
Dave Kaufman, “Avert Screen Writers Strike,” Variety, 13 December 1966, 1.
21
“Ellingsworth Declaration,” 2.
22
“Ellingsworth Declaration,” 2.
23
“Ellingsworth Declaration,” 2.
24
“Saul Rittenberg Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 2.
25
“Writers Out-Fox Directors: DGA Awakes to ‘No Top Credit’.” Variety (D), 3 May 1967, 3.
26
Ted Elrick, “A Film by:” DGA Magazine. June/July 1998, Accessed 22 April 2010,
http://stage.dga.org/thedga/cr_gi_wga.php3
27
“Directors Guild Feels Suit Against Scribes’ Pact Clause Won’t Jar Own Negotiations,” Variety
(D), 12 May 1967, 1.
28
“Plaintiff’s Memorandum,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 2.
29
“Plaintiff’s Memorandum,” 3.
30
The Credits Manual, published for WGA members in 1951, proclaims at its opening that “A
writer’s position in the motion picture industry is determine for the most part by his screen credits.
His salary status depends on the quality and number of pictures that bear his name.” (Writers Guild
of America Theatrical Agreement, Writers Guild of America (Los Angeles: Writers Guild of America
1951), 1.)
31
Vance King, “Writers, Producers Win Round,” Variety (D), 19 May 1967, 1.
32
Catherine L. Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due: The Law and Norms of Attribution,” Georgetown
Law Journal, 21.1 (Fall 2006): 50.
33
Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 51.
34
Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 57
35
Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 61
36
Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 62
37
Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 65.
38
As Jack Stillinger notes, in Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, these arguments
are ultimately moot, because the idea of solitary genius, and romanticized appeals that bolster
auteurism, are themselves highly circumspect. He demonstrates how Keats, the Romantic poet par
excellence, was aided and abetted in his stylistic maturation by an embedded network of editors,
literary advicers manuscript transcribers, and publishers, all of whom materially affected and
influenced genius traditionally understood to be solitary. Stillinger also similarly destabilizes
conceptions of works by John Stuart Mill, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. If these solitary figures, so
often celebrated for rising above the fray/the dross of being in the humdrum world, what does it say
about a medium that is, from first principles, inescapably collaborative? (Jack Stillinger. “Keats and
His Helpers: The Multiple Authorship of Isabella.” Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 25-49.)
300

39
Here used as an umbrella term to indicate films produced under the auspices of major studios,
minor companies, and independent producers, whether or not their production actually takes place
in Southern California.
40
For more on the precise mechanics of how these credits are negotiated and allocated, see Robert
Davenport, “Screen Credit in the Entertainment Industries,” Loyola Entertainment Law Journal 10.1
(1990): 154-160.
41
Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 77.
42
Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 79.
43
Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 77.
44
Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 67
45
“Story by” denotes responsibility that the original idea for a story, but not rendered in screenplay
form. “Screenplay by” indicates who wrote the screenplay based on the story idea. “Written by”
denotes that the same writer conceived the original story idea, and wrote derivated screenplay.
(“Section III: Guild Policy on Credits. Subsection A: Definitions.” Screen Credits Manual: Effective
for Notices of Tentative Writing Credits submitted on or after August 1, 2008. (Los Angeles: Writers
Guild of America, 2008), Paragraphs 1-10, Accessed 21 April 2010,
http://www.wga.org/subpage_writersresources.aspx?id=171)
46
“Section II: Credit Determination Procedure. Subsection D: Arbitration,” Screen Credits Manual,
2008.
47
These other eight are: “A John Director Presentation”; “John Director’s Production of...”; “John
Director’s Presentation of...”; “A Production by John Director”; “A Production of John Director”;
“A Presentation by John Director”; “A Presentation of John Director”; “John Director Presents...”
(Rittenberg Declaration, 2.)
48
“Rittenberg Declaraion,” 2.
49
“Fred Zinneman Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 1.
50
For more Bourdieu’s construction of the reciprocal nature between economic and cultural capital,
please see the Introduction, pp29-30.
51
There is no small irony that Zinneman is holding forth on a form of credit that is not prohibited
by the WGA Basic Agreement, nor is it being disputed in this lawsuit. “Fred Zinneman’s Film of A
Man for All Seasons” indicates that the film is an interpretation of the script, and therefore not the
final, definitiver version of Robert Bolt’s play.
52
“Frank Capra Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 4.
53
“Sherrill Corwin Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 1-2.
54
“Zinneman Declaration,” 2.
55
“Zinneman Declaration,” 4.
56
“Capra Declaration,” p4.
57
Robert Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), 97-99.
301

58
See Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, especially “Reshaping a Legend,” which is a
particularly deft account of how Hitchcock shaped his reputation through the popular press and
interviews with François Truffaut.
59
“Alfred Hitchcock Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 2.
60
“Hitchcock Declaration,” 3.
61
“Hitchcock Declaration,” 5.
62
“Zinneman Declaration,” 3-4.
63
“King Vidor Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 2.
64
“Vidor Declaration,” 2-3.
65
“Delmer Daves Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 3-4.
66
For a thoroughgoing explanation—and debunking—of the tropes of the romantic genius, see Jack
Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. Stillinger persuasively argues that
even a “genius” like the poet John Keats, traditionally understood as the lone fount of (and solitary
heir to) his own creativity, was aided and abetted in his stylistic maturation by an embedded
network of editors, literary advisers, manuscript transcribers, and publishers, all of whom materially
affected and influenced that genius.
67
“Daves Declaration,” 2-3.
68
Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press,) 5.
69
“Joseph von Sternberg Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West.
Inc, Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior
Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 2.
70
Kapsis, Hitchcock, 97-99.
71
“Memorandum of Points and Authorities of Defendant Writers Guild of America, West, Inc. in
Opposition to Order to Show Cause,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West.
Inc, Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior
Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 2
72
“Ellingsworth Declaration,” 2-3.
73
“Charles Boren Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 1-4.
74
William Tusher, “Writers Claim Early Round in Both With Directors on Credits,” The Film
Daily, 11 May 1967, 1.
75
“Sidney Kingsley Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 2
76
“Kingsley Declaration,” 3.
77
Alternately, Death of a Salesman was given the following credit when it debuted on the Broadway
stage in 1949: “Elia Kazan’s production of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.” Kazan’s stage
302

credit would have been permissible under the Writers Guild 1966 MBA, had it applied to
Brodway productions.
78
Christopher Dudley 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, 1973), 20-22.
79
William Froug, “Interview With Lewis John Carlino,” The Screenwriter Looks at the Screenwriter
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 17-18.
80
William Froug, “Interview With Walter Brown Newman,”The Screenwriter Looks at the
Screenwriter p74-75
81
Caves, Creative Industries, 127; Wheaton, A History of the Screen Writers Guild, 58-61.
82
Caves, Creative Industries, 104.
83
The property is always shown as “Edward Albee’s” at 100%, equal size of the title, in both screen
credits and print advertising; it was known as an “Ernest Lehman production of.” The billing sheet
also indicated that in large posters, full-page newspaper advertisements and the opening titles
Virginia Woolf was to have the credit “Produced on the Stage by Richard Beer and Clinton Wilder,”
no doubt a benevolent (and unnecessary) gesture by Albee to his Broadway collaborators. Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Production File, Warner Bros. Archive, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, CA
84
“Hitchcock Declaration,” 3.
85
“Defendants Memorandum,” 4.
86
“Michael Franklin Declaration B,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West.
Inc, Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior
Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 13.
87
“Kinglsey Declaration,” 4.
88
“Franklin Declaration B,” 10.
89
“Defendants Memorandum,” 3.
90
“Walter MacEwen Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 1.
91
“MacEwen Declaration,” 1.
92
“MacEwen Declaration,” 2.
93
“Samuel Briskin Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 1.
94
“Frank Ferguson Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 1.
95
Ferguson Declaration, 2.
96
“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands:
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.” –Iago. Othello. III, iii. l 155-161.
303

97
The understanding and responsibilities of this position has changed over the years, and will be
the subject of my third chapter. This chapter will explore the evolution and proliferation of various
screen credits.
98
Charles Boren, “Notice to All Studios, Subject: Use of Term Director.” Appendix to Franklin
Declaration C, 1.
99
“Title IV” 1964 Directors Guild of America Minimum Theatrical Agreement (Los Angeles:
Directors Guild of America, 1964). Section 8 a) & b).
100
“WGA Slaps DGA Over Film Credits,” The Hollywood Reporter. 17 May 1967, 1.
101
William Tusher, “Writers Claim Early Round in Both With Directors on Credits,” The Film
Daily, 11 May 1967, 1.
102
“Appendix to Franklin Declaration B,” 1.
103
“Defendants Memorandum,” 2.
104
“Franklin Declaration B,” 14.
105
“James Poe Declaration,” Directors Guild of America v. Writers Guild of America, West. Inc,
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Inc., et. al, 909,265 (1967). Superior Court of
the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, 2. A portion of this statement was also
reprinted in the Hollywood Reporter Article, “WGA Slaps DGA Over Film Credits.” The Hollywood
Reporter, 17 May 1967, 1.
106
Union writer dude outlining how/where/why this was common.
107
Caves, Creative Industries, 107.
108
Caves, Creative Industries, 127; Wheaton, A History of the Screen Writers Guild, 20-22. Murray
Ross, Stars and Strikes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 58-61; “Franklin
Declaration B, 3”; 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.
109
“Franklin Declaration A,” 3
110
“Franklin Declaration A,” 9.
111
Fisk, “Credit Where It’s Due,” 67-68.
112
“Writers Out-Fox Directors. DGA Awakes to ‘No Top Credit’,” Variety (D), 3 May 1967, 3.
113
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, (New York,
Dutton: 1968).
114
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture. 13.3 (Winter 1962): 1-
8. (Reprinted in Film Culture Reader, ed P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000)
115
Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture Reader, 132.
116
Pauline Kael, “Circles and Squares.” Film Quarterly 16.3 (Spring, 1963): 12-26.
117
It should be noted that Sarris’ translation into English is somewhat misleading. As Ernest
Callenbach, a who reviewed Directors and Directions, for Film Quarterly and Pauline Kael, in
“Circles and Squares” noted separately, “politique” does not translate to “theory,” but is rather, is
closer to “policy.” (Ernest Callenbach. “Recent Film Writing: A Survey.” Film Quarterly 24.3
(Spring 1971): 11-32.) Accordingly, Cahiers du Cinema, which published Truffaut’s article in
1954, adopted the “politique des auteurs” as an editorial credo. They treated the director as a film’s
primary creative animus, and, despite the avowedly collaborative nature of film, to consider them the
authors of the cinematic works they assemble. Auteurism is thus better thought of as sympathetic to
Orson Welles’ statement of journalistic principles for the Chicago Inquirer newspaper in Citizen
Kane; its elevation to the status of “theory” is Sarris’ own intervention. (François Truffaut, “A
304

Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” Movies & Methods, Vol. I, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976), 224-237.)
118
The auteur theory had many explicit (Cahiers du Cinema, Eugene Archer, James Stoller, and
Roger Greenspun) and implicit practitioners (Film Comment, much subsequent newspaper film
criticism), but Sarris was clearly its American fountainhead.
119
William Tusher, “Writers Claim Early Round,” 1.
120
Michael Blankfort, “Letter from the President,” WGAw Newsletter, May 1968, 3.
121
Blankfort, 3.
122
Blankfort, 3.
123
“Franklin Declaration D,” 3.
124
A.D. Murphy, “DGA Loses 1
st
Court Round Vs. Writers,” Variety (D), 19 May 1967, 1;
Vance King, “Writers, Producers Win Round,” The Hollywood Reporter, 19 May 1967, 1;
“Directors Lose Suit on Movie Credits,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 19 May 1967, A-9.
125
“DGA to Speed Up Film Credits Suit,” The Hollywood Reporter, 6 June 1967, 1; “Directors
Press For Trial of Suit Vs. Writers, Producers,” Variety (D), 6 June 1967, 1.
126
“Directors Give AMPTP the Brush,” Variety (D), 29 May 1967, 1.
127
“Directors Guild Feels Suit Against Scribes’ Pact Clause Won’t Jar Own Negotiations,” Variety
(D), 17 May 1967, 1.
128
The writers, for their part, took the DGA to task for its stance on various occasions, as noted
above.
129
DGA legal counsel Howard Fendler declared that “Writers are jealous of directors and
producers.” In reply, judge blithely Nutter countered, “Let us stipulate that both have egos.” (From
Vance King, “Writers, Producers Win Round,” Variety (D), 19 May 1967, 1.
130
“DGA Votes to Bypass AMPTP; Will Negotiate Directly With Companies,” The Hollywood
Reporter, 29 May 1967, 1.
131
“Directors Guild Feels Suit,” Variety (D), 1
132
“Directors Give AMPTP the Brush,” Variety (D), 29 May 1967, 1.
133
Peter C. Cramton, “Bargaining with Transaction Costs,” Management Science, 37.10 (Oct
1991), 1221-2.
134
Brian Bercusson and Bernard Ryan, “The British Case: Before and After the Decline of
Collective Wave Formation,” Collective Bargaining and Wages in Comparative Perspective, eds. Roger
Blanpain, Thomas Blanke, and Edgar Rose (Amsterdam: Kuwer Law International, 2005), 74.
135
“DGA to AMPTP: No Pact Talks,” Variety (D), 26 January 1967, 1.
136
William Tusher, “Producers Firm Against DGA,” The Film Daily, 5 February 1968, 1.
137
Harry Bernstein, “Battle Over Apostrophe May Cause Film Directors’ Strike,” Los Angeles
Times, 5 February 1968, 3; Thomas M. Pryor, “Directors’ Drive to Upset Writers’ Credit Gain
Could Rack Industry,” Variety (D), 14 February 1968, 1.
138
“Producers Notify Mediation Services On DGA Stalemate,” The Hollywood Reporter, 1 April
1968, 1.
139
Dave Kaufman, “1
st
Directors Strike Looms,” Variety (D), 1 April 1968, 1; “Nationwide Film,
TV Director Strike Seen,” Hollywood Citizen News., 2 April 1968; Harry Bernstein, “Directors
Strike May Close Industry,” Los Angeles Times, 2 April 1968.
140
“Let’s Set the Record Straight,” The Hollywood Reporter, 8 April 1968.
141
Denise Mann, Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 66-7.
142
Caves, Creative Industries, 93-4.
305

143
Caves, Creative Industries, 2.
144
Paul Monaco, The Sixties 1960-69. History of the American Cinema, Vol. 8 (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 20-23.
145
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 287
146
Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 15.
147
Toby Miller, Nitin Govil et. al, Global Hollywood 2 (London BFI Institute Press, 2005), 133.
Monaco, The Sixties, 11-12.
148
Monaco, The Sixties, 40-42.
149
John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film
and Television, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 49-68.
150
Tom Kemper, Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley
University Press, 2010), 6-7, 35.
151
In 1967 at the time of the DGA injunction, AMPTP members included the “Big Five Studios”
plus Walt Disney Productions, Roger Corman’s American International Productions, The Mirisch
Corporation, the Stanley Kramer Corporations, and a handful of others besides. It did not represent
the great many independent producers that worked in Hollywood at the time. (“Directors’
Injunction,” 1)
152
William Tusher, “Producers Firm Against DGA” The Film Daily, 5 February 1968, 1
153
William Tusher, “Writers Claim Early Round in Both With Directors on Credits,” The Film
Daily, 11 May 1967, 1.
154
Dave Kaufman, “1
st
Directors Strike Looms,” Variety (D), 1 April 1968, 1.
155
“Directors Strike Called Off,” Variety (D), 10 April 1968, 1.
156
Sharp, Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood, 297.
157
Sharp, Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood, 297.
158
Jesse Hiestand, “Whose Movie is it Anyway?” The Hollywood Reporter, 29 March 2005, accessed
27 April 2010, http://www-lexisnexis-
com.libproxy.usc.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/?verb=sr&csi=12015
159
“Details of New Writers Guild Pact Disclosed,” Los Angeles Times, 4 July 1970, 15; Harry
Bernstein, “Strike by Movie and TV Writers Almost Certain; Critical Issue Is Future Business of
Videotape Cartridges for Home Use,” Los Angeles Times, 17 June 1970, B1.
160
Harry Bernstein, “Writers Guild Signals Tentative Agreement,” Los Angeles Times, 17 March
1973, C16.
161
Hiestand, “Whose Movie is it Anyway?”
162
2008 WGA MBA Preamble.
163
Fisk, “The Role of Private Intellectual Property Rights,” 257-58.
164
Michael Apted, “President’s Letter.” DGA Magazine. 28.6 (February 2004), accessed 26 April
2010. http://www.directorsguildofamerica.net/news/v28_6/dept_prezreport-204.php3
165
“Words into Pictures,” Written By, July 1997, 12-13.
166
Patti Morrill, “More Fallout,” Written By, October 1997, 5.
167
Gene Handsaker, “The Age of the Director,” Action!, April-May 1968, 22-25.
168
“DGA Injunction,” Paragraph 12.
169
A theory whose unassailable “truth” has been challenged by recent alternative film histories.
170
“ ‘Presenter Status’ Stirs Suit by DGA,” The Hollywood Reporter, 10 May 1967.
171
William Tusher, “Writers Claim Early Round in Bout With Directors on Credits,” The Film
Daily, 11 May 1967.
306

172
“WGA Slaps DGA Over Film Credits,” The Hollywood Reporter, 17 May 1967, 1; “Writers
Guild Files Court Denial of Directors’ Charges,” Variety (D), 17 May 1967, 1.
173
“Writers Guild Files Court Denial of Directors’ Charges,” Variety (D), 17 May 1967, 1.
174
In his declaration before the court, MGM legal counsel Saul Rittenberg also avowed that “It’s a
Wonderful Life, a Frank Capra Production”; “Exodus an Otto Preminger Film;” “A John
Frankenheimer Film Grand Prix”; “The John Frankenheimer film Seconds”; “In Harm’s Way an
Otto Preminger Film” would all remain unchanged under the new possessory provisions.
(Rittenberg DEcaration, p3).
175
“Writers Guild Files Court Denial of Directors’ Charges.” Variety (D). 17 May 1967. p1.
176
The major exception is John Carpenter, who rose to a level of cult prominence with his third
feature film was titled John Carpenter’s Halloween, and has held the possessory credit ever since.
There is nothing in his prior low-budget filmography to warrant equal status Hitchcock or
Preminger. Carpenter’s previous films—most notably Assault on Precinct 13 and Dark Star—have
been retroactively given the possessory credit for DVD releases to harmonize with post-Halloween
films, but did not contain the familiar wording in their original theatrical release.
177
Richard DeCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2001) 2.
178
“Screen Credit,” Directors Guild of America Theatrical Agreement (Los Angeles: Directors Guild
of America, 2005) Section 8-201.
307
CHAPTER FOUR: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY: A HISTORY OF THE FINAL CRAWL
Introduction
In the American narrative cinema, there are two additional facets virtually
guaranteed as certain: the “final crawl” of credits that follow the film, and the critical
discourse that condemns their excesses. In the middle of January 2004, the New York Times
published an article about the latest impropriety to surface in the Hollywood film industry.
The final credits had become far too long. The culprit deserving the greatest censure was
Peter Jackson’s closing installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Return of the King
(2003)—an already overlong film, lasting three-and-a-half hours, made even longer by
credits that dragged on for precisely 9 minutes and 33 seconds. By the time the credits were
over, Randy Kennedy wrote, “John Rodriguez, a subway track worker, was the only person
left in the theatre;” and by the time the house lights came up, even the cleaning crew had
already come and gone.
1
For Kennedy, these credits’ unending parade of names, began with
the acceptable, moved to the grudgingly tolerable, but then decayed to the completely
ridiculous:
It took five minutes for the names of all the actors,
producers, editors, gaffers, grips, best boys, dialect coaches,
wigmakers and steelworkers to crawl by. Next came the less
familiar show-business occupations like stable foreman, horse
makeup artist, horseshoer [sic] and the two guys in charge of
the chain mail.
At eight minutes, the moviegoers still in the theater were
watching a scroll of completely inscrutable titles like
“wrangler manager” and “compositing inferno artist.” Of
course, the caterer had to be immortalized too.
2

Given his supercilious tone, it is difficult to discern which of these job titles are factual, and
which are fabrications, created by Kennedy to rhetorically support the dim view that he
308
takes of overlong titles. For Kennedy, the final crawl is a physical manifestation of
Hollywood egos “suffering from inflation,” and their insatiable need to be recognised for
their film work. And when this need is displayed on screen, it “push[es] the bounds of
propriety and audience patience,” because they find the intrusion frustrating. Kennedy
moreover constructs this as a contemporary trend, with the number of film personnel
recognised seen as completely unreasonable and out of touch with a bygone studio period
when credits “used to last an average of three to four minutes,” or indeed the halcyon days of
“early…motion pictures when credits were nearly always at the beginning of movies and
were handed out so sparingly that they rarely took more than two minutes of screen time.”
3

Film critic and historian David Thomson, whom Kennedy quotes liberally, sympathetically
believes the length of the final crawl is “monstrous,” and “one of those signs of the
decadence in our film business altogether.” But it is not merely film critics who believe that
credits are excessively long. For Rick Sparr, vice president of Pacific Title and Art, the design
studio contracted to make many of these sequences, the final crawl is “really out of control.”
From within the industry and without, the final credits are construed as a scourge not to be
tolerated, but given the established traditions of “union rules, copyright laws, and lots of
good old-fashioned favoritism,”
4
not likely to change in the foreseeable future.
Kennedy’s editorial is noteworthy on several fronts, especially for his hauteur and
nostalgic yearning for a golden age of cinema past, but mostly for the fact that his writing is
historically unremarkable; nothing contained therein is fundamentally new. In the past
century, few things have marked film criticism so constantly as condemnation for “credit
creep,” or the phenomenon that, since the inception of film, the list of people enumerated
309
on screen for having contributed to a motion picture has continually grown in length. In
1992, the Los Angeles Times criticised Spike Lee’s Malcolm X for its final crawl list, which
numbered over 1,200 names, job titles, and production companies.
5
In 1984, a New York
Times editorial singled out Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for particularly harsh
opprobrium, stating that “screen credits these days are getting as long as the movies
themselves.”
6
The year 1972 saw the Boston Globe opine that the number of minor credits is
overlong and furthermore irrelevant because “the man whose name means most on a
picture’s credits” is the producer.
7
In 1956, Variety proclaimed that the “knotty problem of
screen and advertising credits….has reached ridiculous and Frankenstein proportions,”
though at their zenith to that time, they numbered less than one hundred.
8
Another Los
Angeles Times piece, this from 1930, decried that in the current film production climate
“practically everyone who walked across the set had his name appear on the titles,”
9
even
though the 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland from Paramount Pictures featured a paltry
53 names in the credits
10
—the most for its time, though modest by contemporary standards.
And in 1918, a letter written to the New York Tribune asked aloud of credits, “Why not
hold up to ridicule some of the preliminary bunk that producers persist in peddling to
audiences before actual motion pictures are finally placed upon the screen?”
11
The question
of whether credits are too long (or even ought to be eliminated on film prints altogether) is a
discourse almost as old as the cinema itself, and that discourse is overwhelmingly negative.
Sources both inside and outside the industry, regardless of the historical moment in which
they write, are dismissive of contemporary credit mores, and yearn for the conventions of
previous eras when credits were shorter. These individuals seem altogether unaware that
310
even these nominally unsullied prior historical eras of film production themselves
complained about credit creep. Since the middle of the silent film era, credits have been
largely construed as risibly long, distractingly obtrusive, and present on screen only to
assuage the pervasive culture of Hollywood egotism—a construction that continues to the
present day.
This chapter’s purposes are to flaunt that tradition of popular writing that
summarily dismisses credits and instead treat them as an object of serious enquiry. It will do
so by fashioning a history of the final crawl in American cinema. Such a history is necessary
because, though the final crawl has been marginalised in circles both popular and academic,
credits contain a wealth of information—industrial, employment, aesthetic—that merits
greater explication. In recent years, roughly the mid-1990s to the time of this writing in
2013, final credits have been more properly “readable,” in the sense of a decipherable text, as
companies such as Pixar Studios included simulated “blooper” reels explicitly manufactured
for the final crawl, or else included extended artistic explorations during the end credits.
Marvel Studios has also introduced “stinger” scenes into their final crawl, in which we see
glimpses of narrative material. But even before this more contemporary development, the
number, order, and form of end credits have historically been semantically rich. The problem
with “reading” credits per se lies in the fact that they have a semantic code very different
from the film proper, and must be interpreted by mechanisms equally distinct from it.
First, this contemporary turn notwithstanding, the final credits have traditionally
been less visually complex than the film that precedes them, consisting of words—jobs titles
and the individuals that fulfilled them—superimposed upon a black screen. They must be
311
literally read like literary texts. This is in contradistinction to the “reading” of an image,
which is a literary equivalence applied to the cinema in order to express the visual
assimilation and interpretation of images to give them a semantic understanding.
12
The
meaning of credits derives not in decoding the meaning of camera movements, mise-en-
scene, cinematography, or actors’ performances, but in the actual reading of job titles’
written text. Secondly, the interpretive particulars of this written text are not open to the
interpretation of lay audiences. The interpretation mechanisms bequeathed by New
American Criticism, a literary tradition of interpretation, suggest that a film can be
interpreted irrespective of authorial intent or historical circumstances, and can be
understood without any intervening devices to decode the text; the meaning of a film is
inherent to that film, or as Robert Stam argues, its meaning is “immanent.”
13
Credits by
contrast, are almost completely opaque to general (which is to say non-professional)
audiences, and therefore require some codex or interlocutor in order to be understood by
that audience. The meaning of the terms “Gaffer,” “Best Boy,” and others besides are by no
means immediately apparent, and there is nothing in a film’s credits—or indeed its
diegesis—that communicates the parameters and descriptions of those job titles to a lay
audience. In order to understand the work of a Best Boy, a spectator requires either some
insider knowledge based on work in the film industry itself, or needs the intervention of a
third party in order to communicate the meaning of those jobs. Indeed, journalists have
periodically taken on that responsibility through film history, and communicated the
meaning of these esoteric job titles by writing explanatory articles, which are built on
interviews and conferences with film industry professionals. (I would also argue that that
312
collective understanding of the work performed by a prominent creative position such as a
director is largely a result of the innumerable column inches devoted to demystifying the
craft, from the auteur theory on down.) Thirdly, as a corollary to the second difference, the
semantic vectors of the final credits are turned away from the audience and turned towards
film professionals. Their very opacity, as explored in the second point of departure between
the film proper and its credits, indicates that their meaning is not directed outwards towards
a general audience, but inwardly towards a professional one. The vectors of transmitted
meaning circle from the creators of a film back to that selfsame community of film
professionals. This is opposed to the traditional vectors of meaning, which move from the
creators of a film to a general, non-professional audience, who are tasked with interpreting a
film’s meaning. As explored in this dissertation’s second chapter, the work of Gerard
Genette and his subsequent proponents have attempted to assimilate para-textual
information into a continuum or flow with the narrative proper, and argued that a film’s
opening titles should be considered partially separate and autonomous from the diegesis. In
sympathy with that argument, a study of the final credits is important because the crawl
represents an aesthetic and semantic break from the main narrative, and is further
disconnected from the narrative proper than even the opening titles. These radical
differences in the textual positioning of the final crawl with respect to the diegesis—and its
subsequent marginalisation as an object of academic enquiry—means that the mechanisms,
form, and function of final credits are in need of serious scrutiny.
Before proceeding, a few notes concerning methodology and terminology are
necessary. When I speak of final credits in this chapter, I am generally referring to the
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contributions of personnel considered “below the line” in film industry parlance. Studios and
production companies have long organised these different working contributions to film and
television productions along the rubric of “The Line.” Vicky Mayer, in her book Below the
Line, has written extensively about The Line, and its relevance both in financial and
rhetorical terms. It began as a practice where “studio accountants used this line physically on
their budget sheets to separate upfront production costs from expenditures made during
production,”
14
but has since taken on greater rhetorical significance. The Line elevates the
esteem of certain inputs and at the same time lowers others. Mayer argues that the work of
professionals deemed above the line is also gifted with the understanding that their work is
highly creative; professionals located below the line perform work that is largely humdrum or
physical. “Professionals located ‘above the line,’ Mayer writes, “managed themselves and
used their intellectual capacities, as opposed to trades-people, artisans, and others ‘below the
line,’ who used their manual skills under the control of managers” (emphasis mine).
15
Above-
the-line contributors are artists and below-the-line contributors are more commonly
considered as labourers or workers. This rhetorical significance then parlays into financial
concerns, because above-the-line workers are more able to set the terms of their
employment via personal services contracts. These contracts guarantee them compensation
and special working conditions (first class transportation, extra per diem expenses, etc.)
above and beyond the minimums secured by their guilds or unions. To further this rhetorical
divide, above-the-line workers like actors, directors, and writers, are represented by guilds,
which give their work a more artistic or artisanal bearing. Below-the-line workers are
represented by unions, which cast their work more in the realm of labour.
16
Below-the-line
314
workers have very little ability to secure working terms above these minima. Thus the
esteem of above-the-line artists is reflected in the fact that their inputs are considered to be
variable costs, subject to individual negotiation; below-the-line workers are held in lower
financial esteem because their costs are fixed and known.
Germane to the chapter at hand, above-the-line workers have been historically more
likely to have their names credited on screen and in advertising credit than below-the-line
workers. Directors, writers, cameramen, and actors, all above-the-line workers
17
were
amongst the first film professionals to be credited for their contributions in the early days of
silent cinema; below-the-line workers have encountered much greater resistance to being
credited, and have had to push much harder (and for much longer) to have their
contributions recognised. As discussed in this dissertation’s introduction, different unions
and guilds have differential levels of influence in the American film industry, which in turn
has resulted in higher levels of credit recognition for more prominent film personnel. The
visibility of an actor means that they do not require the same degrees of recognition as the
below-the-line workers, because their labour is plainly written on the screen. Paradoxically
however, they, along with other esteemed “artists” of their ilk have been able to secure the
most prominent credit positions because of their clout, thus creating a mutually reinforced
circle. At the same time, those with the least power to negotiate screen credit need it the
most, because the evidence of their labour is erased from the screen—occluded by the
mechanisms of disavowal that characterise most ideologically dominant film production.
18

This chapter is mainly concerned with those workers considered “below the line.” It is
motivated by the fact that their work has frequently been absent from the film record, and
315
appears visible only via credits. As such, the record of labour can be found only in the film’s
final credits, motivating the need to recuperate that record over the course of this chapter.
Since film studios and production companies have been historically slow to grant
credit to these below-the-line workers, this history must also briefly explore the credit
histories of above-the-line labour. Recapitulated from this dissertation’s introduction, it will
serve as a necessary preface that lays the foundation for below-the-line crafts and the times in
which they received credit. I will then trace the history of final credits onwards from the
studio era, where they first emerge, and are subsequently threatened by the exigencies of
wartime scarcity, to the Post-Paramount Decrees era, where credits attain their first
widespread import. In these periods they function as an increasingly necessary mechanism for
building professional careers when the institutional memory of studios liquidated along with
their vertically integrated holdings. In the era of the conglomerate blockbuster, final credits
have become a wild profusion in response to technological developments both in visual
special effects and sound, and are embraced as a prominent demonstration of high
production values and technical prowess. However, their proliferation also becomes an
object of parody within the films themselves, ridiculing both the studios who indulge credit
creep, and the audiences who would linger to watch them. The narrative scenes included in
the final crawl of motion pictures also blur the lines between the final crawl and the
narrative proper. During the subsequent era of contemporary transmedia, final credits
become a creative venue par exellence, embedded both with visually complex material and
staged vignettes. The latter are used to create cross-linked narrative worlds and used for
unique film promotion possibilities. Not only does the contemporary moment represent the
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apotheosis of the final crawl as aesthetic media, these post-credit “stingers” obscure
traditional distinctions between textual and para-texutal material. This overarching history
of credit proliferation will also be interspersed with smaller case studies detailing the
emergence of two film industry job titles that evidence the increasing prestige of below-the-
line job titles as they appear in screen credits: the Art Director/Production Designer; and the
Sound Editor/Sound Designer. Through these parallel panoptic and microscopic histories of
the final crawl, two countervailing forces work against each other. Credit growth, both in
number and prestige, represent achievements by labour in terms of attaining greater
recognition from within the industry. At the same time these gains also prompted
newspapers, trade journals, and even spectators at large to level charges of egoism and self-
aggrandisement from without. Thus any gains in official credit were tempered by a
diminution of rhetorical prestige. The final crawl is far from a marginal afterthought to film,
and represents highly contested zone—in terms of film narrative, aesthetics, and labour.

A Pre-History of the Final Crawl (1897-1929)
The first major film to prominently feature a final crawl was The Wizard of Oz in
1939, which devoted to crediting a majority of the cast members after film’s conclusion. In
contrast to this prominent example from Hollywood’s golden age, the origins of screen
credit, as discussed in this dissertation’s introduction, were devoted primarily to securing
copyright protections.
19
Trademarks of individual production companies adorned title cards
as early as 1897, accompanied by a copyright statement, and by 1907, these company cards
were sometimes placed on placards attached to décor. In 1909, the Edison Company was
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the first to list cast members on some of its opening title cards (but this practice appears to
have been far from ubiquitous as late as 1913), and Edison was also responsible for adding a
screenwriter’s name to credits in 1912; camera operators (usually under the credit “Camera”
or “Photography”) were soon to follow. By 1918, film patrons were already writing angry
letters into the New York Tribune decrying the fact that credits were too long. During this
period, credits were properly understood to be actors’ credits, because as Richard
deCordova argues, the actor was “the principal figure in the enunciative apparatus”
20
of film,
though even such films as The Birth of a Nation (1915) included title cards indicating that a
list of players was printed in the program given to patrons. In the early days of the studio
system, final credits were almost entirely absent; the common practice was generally to
conclude a film with “THE END,” accompanied by the studio’s trademark. In the mid-
1920s, as the various Hollywood studios began to truly coalesce, Warner Bros. inserted the
first truly “readable” end title card when it included an image of its production offices in
addition to its trade mark at the end of films, thus localising responsibility for the
productions. As criticism mounted against increasing numbers of screen credits—the writer,
the director, the cinematographer (usually under the heading “photography”), the art
director and the electrician (the first “below-the-line” screen credit given) were commonly
credited by the early 1920s. Sound technicians were generally spared this general
opprobrium against Hollywood egotism. Because their contributions were begrudgingly
viewed as necessary for the execution of this newly developed, technologically sophisticated
breed of synch-sound films, their credits were allowed to stand.
21
As the so-called Golden
Age of American film matured, the number and type of credits recognised on screen had
318
increased to include a number of below-the-line personnel such as set decorators and camera
technicians, but the vast majority of crafts professionals still received no public recognition.
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.

The Later Studio Period (1930-1948)
As the Hollywood studio system reached its pre-war heyday, final credits, if they
appeared at all, involved only actors names, and only at the discretion of the studio, which
could vary its policy from picture to picture, or even director to director. Universal tended
to favour listing actors, as with the Invisible Man (1931), which only listed the players, but
not the roles they played; and The Mummy (1932), which playfully acknowledged the
redundancy of its opening and closing credits by listing its actors beneath the banner “A
Good Cast is Worth Repeating…” Paramount’s A Farewell to Arms (1932), directed by
Frank Borzage, featured a list of characters at the end. The films that Mae West acted in for
Paramount routinely included final credits. In Night After Night (1933), the cast of
characters appears on the title card immediately following the THE END, which is
superimposed on the snow-capped Paramount mountain. I’m No Angel (1933) performs a
gesture that is even more complicated. In the film’s last scene, West takes Cary Grant into
her arms, and sings the film’s titular song, “I’m No Angel” while running her fingers through
Grant’s hair. The song’s musical accompaniment continues during the transition to the final
title card, and as THE END fades away, West moves on to sing the song’s next verse; she
croons over top of the cast list, and the song ends with an instrumental flourish as the film
319
fades to black. Mae West’s other films for Paramount from this period—She Done Him
Wrong (1933), Belle of the Nineties (1934), Klondike Annie (1936), My Little Chickadee
(1940)—feature cast lists on closing title cards, but this was not necessarily guaranteed for
other films. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), directed by Sam Wood, does not have any
closing titles beyond Paramount’s logo; neither do any of Josef von Sternberg’s films for the
studio. Columbia’s His Girl Friday (1940) and Penny Serenade (1941) included a cast list, but
the practice appears not to have been common to all of its films. So too with MGM: The
Wizard of Oz (1939), listed the major speaking parts—including Toto and “The Singer
Midgets as the Munchkins”—after the end, but elected not to do so with many of its other
films. A list of such great pedantry could go on ad nauseam, but suffice to say that both the
major studios (Paramount, Loews/MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., and
RKO) and minor studios (Universal, Columbia, and United Artists) pursued a patchwork
arrangement for final credits. If such credits did appear, only actors received recognition; per
union regulations, films would only be required to list technical credits at the end of the
picture if and only if names and job titles did not appear at the beginning.
Such was the case for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent
Ambersons (1942), two of Welles’ many unorthodox approaches to final credits. Because the
beginning featured only the RKO title card, the Mercury Productions company title card,
and the title Citizen Kane; the entirety of the company’s credits were obligated to appear at
the end: Special Effects, Art Director, Editing, (Sound) Recording, and so on. Outside of
these union and guild regulations, Welles also used the end credits to unique effect in his
films. After THE END of Citizen Kane, Welles used the final crawl as on occasion to
320
introduce the actors of his production company, “The Mercury Theatre,” most of whom, a
title card proclaims, “are new to motion pictures.” Welles introduces his most prominent
actors, including Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, and others, emblazoning their names
across the bottom band of the screen while replaying scenes from the film proper. Welles
reserves a less prominent acting credit for himself along with seven other bit players, which
appear on the first title card following these smaller vignettes. Welles also subtly recognises
the collaborative contributions of Gregg Toland by allowing the cinematographer to share
the same title card as Welles’ Directing and Producing credit; the common custom for
directors of the time was to take such a credit card alone.
22
Welles’ next feature, The
Magnificent Ambersons, similarly lacks opening credits save for the company title cards and
the title of the film. In Ambersons, Welles takes his unorthodoxy one step further by vocally
narrating the final credits. Save for an image of the original Booth Tarkington novel and the
RKO copyright card at the end, there is nothing to read onscreen. Instead, Welles speaks
the titles out loud, and in the past tense—e.g., “Stanley Cortez was the photographer”—
while displaying imagery appropriate to the job at hand: a camera for photography, plan
drawing for set design, sheaf of script pages for the Assistant Director, etc. After casually
23

naming the actors over their moving image portraits, Welles takes personal responsibility for
the film that preceded the credits. Over the image of a boom on a microphone, he says. “I
wrote the script and directed it. My name is Orson Welles. This is a Mercury Production,”
and the boom moves up and away from the camera, to be replaced with a card featuring
RKO copyright.
321
Orson Welles was able to pursue these radically different approaches to credits
because RKO granted him a degree of autonomy “virtually unheard of in the industry at the
time,”
24
when he signed a two-picture contract with the studio in 1939. His deliberately
unorthodox approach to credits in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons is no doubt
due to his position as a relative Hollywood outsider, and to his well-documented contrarian
spirit,
25
but these off-kilter final credits also reflected a more sustained commitment to
recognising the contributions of his collaborators in fashion that drew attention to itself.
26

Even as MGM was promising a “drastic whittling” of distractingly cluttered credit rolls for
the 1941 production year,
27
Orson Welles took out a full page ad in Variety thanking
“Everybody Who Gets Screen Credit for Citizen Kane” but also “Thanks to All Who Don’t.”
He generally listed “the actors,” who would more properly have been credited, and “the
crew,” some of whom would receive public recognition, but also “the office,” “the
musicians,” in fact “Everybody” whose names would generally not appear on screen (See Fig.
1).
28
Welles’ gesture recognising to all manner of the film’s personnel, creative or otherwise,
is unprecedented for the time. And despite private feuds to the contrary, Welles’ approach
advocates for an expanded understanding of collaborative effort on a film’s production. By
publicly recognising “the office” and “Everybody,” Welles goes beyond the purview of whose
names are written on celluloid, and gives deference to those behind the scenes workers that
make a film production possible.
29

As debates raged in critical and professional circles over the proper allocation of film
credits, these discussions promised to be rendered moot in 1942, because the greatest threat
to screen credits on film came from without the industry, not within: World War II. The
322
effects of the Second World War on the American film industry are manifold and well
documented. These included a loss of overseas markets which reduced distribution outlets
for the studios, and a number of personnel leaving Hollywood to contribute to the war
effort, either through fighting overseas (Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart); by making films for
the War Department (Frank Capra); or by appearing at War Bond rallies (Carole Lombard,
for example, who died in a 1942 plane crash returning to Los Angeles after such a rally).
30

Simultaneously, other forces in Hollywood determined that the industry could do more to
support the war effort. And this could be done by eliminating unnecessary screen credits.
The suggestion came from the Film Conservation Committee (FCC), convened by the
studios, and presided over by MGM executive Bob Goetz in 1942 to determine how best to
reconcile a fundamental tension within the film industry. Film productions required a great
number of resources deemed essential to wartime production, but their pictures also were a
vital boost to wartime morale. The Film Conservation Committee proposed that studios
eliminate all screen credits except for that of the film’s title, a move it was estimated would
save approximately 10 million feet of film annually.
31
The credit cut was couched in the
rhetoric of wartime exigency, and of a semi-superfluous industry performing its patriotic
duty. But I would argue its effects, if enacted, would have done disproportionate harm to
film employees, and would have benefitted film producers. The organisations and individuals
on the producer-employer side of the equation would benefit from eliminating screen
credits, because doing so reduces the stature of employees and effectively mitigates their
bargaining clout. Eliminating credits thus represented a potential cost savings to their below-
the-line labour inputs. The Film Conservation Committee, organised and arbitrated by
323
studio executives, proposed an elimination of screen credits, but trenchantly revealed a
public relations poison pill for its signatory film professional organisations. For this credit
reduction agreement to take effect, “studio unions and guilds with contractual rights
involving screen credits [would] be asked to waive them.”
32
The burden for assenting to the
removal of credits, would be disproportionately borne by creative personnel—the individuals
for whom credits were vitally important to professional development and reputation. While
the Film Conservation Committee’s goals were couched in the language of patriotism, the
discourse presented by the Committee also worked to effectively limit the options available
to crafts unions. Agreeing to the credit limitation proposal would be detrimental to its
membership; rejecting it meant risking charges of being unpatriotic.
As a concession, the Film Conservation Committee’s proposal also included a
peculiar geographical dispensation: film prints screened in Los Angeles and its environs
would be allowed to keep regular opening titles. It was an allowance to the fact that these
lists were of greater importance to film professionals, who valued them for their careers in
Los Angeles, than they were to the rest of the country. The political climate surrounding the
proposed elimination of screen credits is somewhat difficult to parse, because of the way
journalists subsequently reported the credit cut proposal. Variety positioned this wartime
sacrifice as a blow to Hollywood “vanity,” painting an unflattering picture of “the elite of
celluloid drama shuddering as they approach an era of incognito, as anonymous as the voice
of an off-screen frog in an animated cartoon” (original emphasis).
33
The special Los Angeles-
area dispensation was further derided as a concession to the
324
boys and gals of the film arts [who] may enjoy the fleeting
pleasure of a glimpse at their own names and
accomplishments. But the customers in Mobile or
Minneapolis will never know who whittled the sarongs or
who painted the prop palms in the authorless screenplay,
Passionate Island, based on an anonymous novel.
34 ,

As framed by these journalists, credits were seen as a salve to particularly disagreeable brand
of ego found only in Hollywood. Such published rhetoric also worked to occlude the
importance that credits have in the careers of film industry professionals. The implication is
that inhabitants of the Midwest or the South would never demean themselves to seek that
same kind of recognition for their own work.
35
Thus the film conservation proposal is
constructed as a double boon in that it contributes to the war effort and punctures
overinflated Hollywood egos. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times was much more
measured in his response, though still very supportive of the Film Conservation Committee’s
suggestions. The elimination of screen credits, Crowther wrote, was “not too much to ask,”
seeing as it was a “blessing in disguise”: this could be a graceful elimination of one of the
cinema’s major annoyances in the name of patriotism. “Not that these folks are
unimportant,” wrote Crowther, “but the average patron just isn’t interested in them. And
the consequence is that their inclusion at the beginning of a film not only bores most people,
but sets the picture off on the wrong foot.”
36
It is under Crowther’s more tempered rhetoric
that we arrive at a justification for credit limitation that most likely mirrors that of the
general public’s: credits disrupt the narrative. At the same time, an industry-centric
motivation for cutting back on film credits is equally plausible. Given the enhanced
recognition and reputation accorded to those crafts professionals who receive credit,
325
producers have a vested interest in curtailing them. Under the veil of wartime scarcity and
good artistic sense, it is likely that producers supported this ideal with a goal of trying to
reset the employment clock back to zero by eliminating credits—which would, by
association, limit the power of unions and guild membership. In light of this potential
bargaining power limitation, talent guilds and crafts unions had an equally strong motivation
to maintain credits, and it is this stance that ultimately prevailed. Fearing that temporary
credit erosions would lead to a broader contractual expansion to limit their rights to screen
recognition, the Directors’ Guild refused to allow their credits to be eliminated.
37
The
proposal thus died on the vine, and the industry sought other ways to reduce film footage
expenditures.
38

Case Study No. 1: The Production Designer Credit
At the same time that producers, their employees, and film critics were bickering
about the proliferation of screen credits for crafts professionals, the Hollywood film industry
also bore witness to the invention of a new screen credit: the Production Designer. William
Cameron Menzies, the man with whom the credit would eventually become synonymous,
was elevated from Art Director to Production Designer for Gone With the Wind (1939). In
so doing, David O. Selznick, who conceived the credit, wrought a seemingly small difference
that would have a significant impact on the structure and function of the film art department
for years to come.
While the Production Designer credit gave Menzies an unprecedented level of
control on Gone With the Wind, the title was initially a catchall for a more commonplace job
326
at Selznick International Pictures.
39
At least by 1938, the production designer at SIP was an
integral part of the process of conceiving the overall look of a film. Production designers had
typically worked as drafting assistants, in service to the head of the art department, but
without any true level of creative control. Dorothea Holt was the first publicly recognised
production designer, but her job was none-too-subtly gendered, and understood as part of
SIP’s assembly line. She was emphatically positioned by the newspaper The Hartford Courant
as a “girl” working “in a new kind of film job,” a unique specimen because she had decided
not to pursue the traditionally feminine work of being an actress.
40
And though she had
apparently “smashed the heavy-barred gates of Hollywood” and secured a job in the
overwhelmingly male production design department, she was still described as a “pencil
pusher,” responsible for creating production sketches. Holt was praised for her work, but
still remained in a position no higher than an assistant to the head of the art department.
41

Her work as a production designer in 1938 was more synonymous with drafting blueprints
or sketching designs than with the more expansive responsibilities the Production Designer
credit William Cameron Menzies would assume.
Against this backdrop, a year prior to the release of Gone With the Wind, the broader
responsibilities of the production design department were beginning to take shape at
Selznick International Pictures: in this department at SIP, “every possible camera angle is
sketched beforehand,” wrote the Courant, “to prepare a sort of working blueprint for the
cameramen. In this way, the studio saves millions of dollars by avoiding sets that might not
work in actual film.”
42
Itself a Selznick creation, the production design department adopted
a production strategy that was very similar to that of animation companies. As early as 1932,
327
Disney Studios pre-planned its productions via storyboard sketches,
43
and Disney was
understood to have greatly influenced SIP’s pre-production strategies.
44
In 1938, the
Production Designer had not yet achieved the level of creative control that it would assume
for Gone With the Wind, because these sketches were intended mainly as a guide for the
cameramen, not as a final determinant of how a particular shot would look. Storyboard-like
drawings were intended more to prevent the costly construction of unnecessary sets and
backdrops. When Selznick gifted the Production Designer credit to Menzies, its influence
would be more palpably felt, broadening to cover many creative disciplines.
As created by Selznick and enacted by Menzies, the Production Designer would
assume a level of creative control unprecedented for any other Art Director, because his brief
exceeded even that of Gone With the Wind’s directors (the production employed three over
the course of its production, though only Victor Fleming was credited). On July 29, 1937,
Selznick wrote the following memo to the art department, describing the job that he first
envisioned Menzies would do:
I would like to see him actively take charge of the physical
preparation of Gone With the Wind, including advance work
on the sets, handling and selection of location shots, process
shots, etc.; layouts and effects, etc. for the mass action scenes;
investigations and suggestions leading to the proper handling
of the street sets without an inordinate expense; and a dozen
other things leading to proper organization of the great and
troublesome physical aspects of Gone With the Wind.
45

So construed, Menzies would perform duties properly under the purview of the Art Director
(work on sets and sketches, etc.), the Special Effects supervisor (layouts and effects), and
also what would be known in subsequent years as the Second Unit Director (“handling and
328
selection of location shots, process shots…for the mass action scenes”). The overtures to the
“handling of the street sets without an inordinate expense” tasked Menzies with something
similar to that of a Line Producer or Unit Production Manager, credits that would not be
codified until decades later. But Selznick did not stop there; on August 12, 1937, he mused
in a memo that he “should go further than this and have [Menzies] do a complete cutting
script with sketches from the first shot to the last on the entire job with Gone With the
Wind….I feel that he may be the answer to what I have long sought for, which is a pre-cut
picture.”
46
Selznick had a legendary need for absolute control over his pictures, which he
enacted with a prodigious series of memos on every film he produced,
47
and that need is
highly evident here.
By employing Menzies, who would plan nearly every part of the film’s visual
structure down to the most minute detail, Selznick hoped to minimise the vagaries of
actually producing the motion picture by providing its director, George Cukor, with a firm
production template. In yet another memo barely two weeks later, Selznick would again
expand Menzies’ purview, through the screen credit of Production Designer, which would
give him the most autonomy of anyone on the film set. Selznick envisioned the Production
Designer’s job in a way that it wrested power away from the directors, and gave most of the
responsibility for the production short of Selznick himself to William Cameron Menzies. On
September 1, 1937, Selznick wrote:
When [Menzies] gets the complete script, he can then do all
the sets, set sketches, and plans during my absence, for
presentation to me upon my return, and can start on what I
want on this picture and what has only been done a few times
in picture history (and these times mostly by Menzies)—a
329
complete script in sketch form, showing actual camera set-
ups, lighting, etc. This is a mammoth job that Menzies will
have to work on very closely with [director George] Cukor.
There is also the job of the montage sequences, which I plan
on having Menzies not merely design and lay out but also, in
large degree, actually direct. In short, it is my plan to have the
whole physical side of this picture…personally handled by
one man who has little or nothing else to do—and that man
in Menzies. Menzies may turn out to be one of the most
valuable factors in properly producing this picture. One of
the minor problems with this arrangement is the matter of
Menzies’ credit. Menzies is terribly anxious not to get back
to art direction as such, and of course his work on this
picture, as I see it, will be a lot greater in scope than is
normally associated with the term “art direction.”
Accordingly, I would probably give him some such credit as
“Production Designed by William Cameron Menzies” or
“Assistant to the Producer.”
48

Selznick gestures to collaboration with the film’s first director, George Cukor, but as a result
of Selznick’s assignment, the overwhelming majority of the creative decisions in Gone Wind
the Wind flowed through Menzies. In exchange for these additional responsibilities, Menzies
demanded a different credit, one that semantically spoke to his broader overall visual
conception and fashioning of the film over less expansive work he did in the art department.
Menzies was doing much more work than was expected for an Art Director, and expected to
be credited as such. His desire to be called a Production Designer over Art Director was also
likely related to furthering his career’s upward trajectory. Menzies won the first Academy
Award for art direction for his work on both The Dove (1927) and Tempest (1928), and
parlayed that success in the art department into a burgeoning career as a director. His first
features were somewhat mediocre, but after receiving spectacular reviews and around-the-
block lines for Things to Come (1936),
49
Menzies would have a vested interest in making
330
sure that his credits in no way appeared a step down from his status as an up-and-coming
directorial talent. An Art Director is subordinate to a Director; a Production Designer has
connotations of a broader scope and vision on matters related to how Gone With the Wind
was visually constructed. Menzies would have appeared to work more in collaboration with
a director, not subordinate to one. The Production Designer credit would therefore
represent a step-sideways for Menzies, not a step down, and so preserve his professional
reputation.
Hiring Menzies was also a boon to Selznick, because it allowed him to take creative
control away from his directors. There is little evidence to support that Selznick employed
Menzies with the intention of stripping Gone With the Wind’s first director, George Cukor,
of his power—in the above memo, Selznick after all does speak of Menzies “working close
with Cukor”—but it did allow him to replace his director at will. Cukor, the film’s original
director, lasted a mere fourteen days on set before being very publicly replaced by Victor
Fleming,
50
who would go on to be film’s credited director. (When he collapsed on set,
Fleming himself was temporarily replaced by Sam Wood,
51
and even after Fleming returned
to the set, the two directed side by side for three weeks thereafter.
52
) Because Menzies
provided both pre-production planning of camera angles and lighting setups, Selznick was
free to remove Cukor from Gone With the Wind, secure in the knowledge that his
Production Designer would be able to maintain visual consistency across the work of more
than one director. On this theme of visual consistency, Menzies also provided a bulwark
against the intruding effects of Technicolor representative Natalie Kalmus, whom her ex-
husband, Technicolor President, Herbert Kalmus, mandated must serve as “Technicolor
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Consultant” to every Technicolor feature as a condition of using the vaunted technology.
53

As described by Aljean Harmetz in On the Road to Tara: The Making of Gone With the Wind,
contrary to the demands of the “intrusive representatives of Technicolor [likely Kalmus]
who demanded bright, harsh lighting,” Selznick explicitly gave Menzies final say on all
decisions related to colour, and so thwarted any outside meddling into the film’s visuals.
54

When it came time to publicise Gone With the Wind, moreover, mentions of any
directors were conspicuously absent, and in that vacuum, Menzies was thrust to the fore.
Months before the film’s release, Vivien Leigh was attributed to have written an article that
described what it was like to play Scarlet O’Hara,
55
and in March 23, 1939, during the
middle of production, The Atlanta Constitution printed a feature detailing the minutia of
assembling the production unit of GWTW. This second article is a scrupulously in-depth,
focussing on set preparation, costume construction, script revisions, and set construction,
and even extras wrangling. The prose glowingly hails Menzies, “rated one of the ablest
technicians in the professions,” for the breadth and depth of his visual constructions, and for
his collaboration with Lyle Wheeler, head of the art department, as well as with Selznick
himself.
56
Yet, for all the talk of actors and technicians coordinating their work into a
cohesive and functional whole, the director—any director; Cukor, Fleming, or Wood—
receives nary a mention. Menzies is accorded the lion’s share of responsibility for the film’s
look and feel. The article gives the impression of the journalist scrupulously avoiding any
direct mention of directorial contributions. This impression is deepened when considering a
photo opportunity provided to The Pittsburgh Courier a couple of weeks later, on April 8,
1939: Victor M. Shapiro, Selznick International Pictures’ director of publicity sits at a table
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pointing out a drawing to two flanking members of the Pittsburgh press. Behind them all
stands not Victor Fleming but Menzies, benignly surveying the scene.
57
As communicated to
a broader public, William Cameron Menzies, subordinate only to Selznick was constructed
as bearing the true creative responsibility for Gone With the Wind.
Subsequent to Gone With the Wind, Menzies sought to explain the meaning of the
“ambiguous term, Production designer,” by writing a first-person account of his work in the
New York Times in 1940, and so gave the job some shape and definition. Outside the
domain of Selznick International Pictures, the Production Designer assumed a decisively less
autocratic role. “As a production designer,” Menzies wrote, “it is my job to dramatize the
mood of a picture and to keep it ‘in character.’ This is done simply by coordinating every
phase of the production not covered by dialogue and action of the players. Camera work,
settings, decorations, costumes, all must be carefully planned in advance so that each
contributes in its own way to the desired effect of the whole.”
58
As described by Menzies,
the Production Designer does not have a purview quite so expansive as conceived by
Selznick. It is a job that operates within the framework of the established divisions of
Hollywood labour. Menzies leaves the dramatic elements—actors, editing, etc.—to the
director, but notably reserves the pre-planning of camera setups, normally the
cinematographer’s domain, to the Production Designer. Thus Menzies establishes the
Production Designer in the hierarchy of responsibilities below the director, but above all of
the other visual heads of department (art director, director of photography, costume
designer, etc.) meaning that all visual decisions made by those professionals must receive
Menzies’ assent.
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So authored by Menzies, the Production Designer entered the working lexicon of
Hollywood art departments, though outside of the jurisdiction of Society of Motion Picture
Art Directors (SMPAD), the IATSE local that governed the terms of art department
employment. The SMPAD, founded in May 1929 as the League of Art Directors and
Associates,
59
took it upon itself to govern the job titles assigned to its members. Their early
incorporation documents and ledgers, found in the Art Directors Guild library, feature many
letters from art department employees of various studios that list their responsibilities and
credits. From those letters, the League of Art Directors executive would determine how best
to categorise and credit their work. For instance, a Mr. Reinhard Guyot, whose
contributions have otherwise been lost to history, described his work at First National
Studios, and duly had his credit promoted from “Draftsman” to “Set Designer,” a
considerable promotion in terms of esteem.
60
The Production Designer credit, however,
posed a problem to the Society of Motion Picture Art Directors because it existed outside of
the Society’s scope. Since its incorporation in 1929, the Society had governed the credits of
Supervising Art Directors, Art Directors, Draftsmen (from Chief down to Apprentice),
Renderers, and Set Designers.
61
The Production Designer was not officially recognised by
the SMPAD, and Menzies was not a member of the Society, appearing nowhere in their
membership roles for over a decade. Both of these facts provided a challenge to its authority
and autonomy. Menzies’ was amongst the most lauded art directors working in
Hollywood—only Cedric Gibbons, working at MGM, truly rivalled him in esteem. And
while Menzies was hailed in newspapers and trade journals for his work, this praise was
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heaped upon a non-member of the Society using a non-sanctioned Production Designer
credit.
62

As described by a fellow art director, Ted Haworth, the SMPAD recognised the
benefit that Menzies would have to the Society, but Menzies had no interest in joining the
organisation’s ranks. Menzies relented only when offered a lifetime honorary membership in
1951. Says Haworth, “the minute that Bill joined, all of the art directors suddenly became
production designers. Now they…owned the title, because Bill was a member of their
society.”
63
When Menzies finally did join in 1951, it had the effect of both giving the Society
of Motion Picture Art Directors legitimacy as a governing body, and also of allowing its
members to garner the higher prestige of Production Designer credits. For one, Henry
Bumstead twice claimed the Production Designer credit, but 18 years apart: for Rhubarb:
The Millionaire Cat (1951), and for Topaz (1969), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Writing
about Menzies’ accomplishments in the Society of Motion Picture Art Directors Bulletin, Leo
Kuter proudly and retroactively hailed him as “our first Production designer” (emphasis
mine),
64
and even claimed Walt Disney as “probably the most genuine and prolific of all
Production Designers” because his aspirations of pre-planning all phases of a production
were very similar to the work done by art department professionals in the non-animation
world.
65
The Disney-Menzies axis, illuminated above during the preparations for Gone With
the Wind, had come full circle. As understood by the SMPAD, the work of a Production
Designer was considered more esteemed than an Art Director, as it connoted a broader
scope and creative vision, and now the work of esteemed creators such as Disney were
retroactively constructed as unknowingly doing the job of a Production Designer. In the
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world of guilds and unions, it is usually these labour organisations that dictate the terms of
credit and employment between producers and film professionals.
66
And credit is used as a
barrier to entry into certain guilds. For example, the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s
required at least three years worth of steady film credits as a condition for entry,
67
thus
controlling the prestige for its membership. In the case of William Cameron Menzies and
the Production Designer credit, the reverse trajectory was true: a talented outsider, his job
redefined by a producer, lent legitimacy to an entire professional guild by virtue of a single
credit. The Society of Motion Picture Art Directors’ members were free to take the
Production Designer credit when Menzies joined the guild in 1951, and were able to garner
for themselves the enhanced prestige associated with that job title.

The Post-Paramount Decrees Era (1948-1969)
In the era of Hollywood filmmaking following the Paramount Decrees, credits
assumed a far greater importance than in previous eras because court-mandated studio
divestiture caused the production community to become much more diffuse and loosely
knit. When the Department of Justice won its lawsuit against the major studios in the form
of consent decrees in 1948, it marked the beginning of the end for an oligopoly of film
companies that were profitably engaged in a number of restrictive business practices,
including: maintaining a system of theatrical clearances, block booking of films, and fixing
admission prices. The decision, known as the Paramount Decrees, also mandated divestiture
of vertically integrated theatre circuits, and a “disposal of individual theatres in towns where
the majors had a monopoly on exhibition.”
68
This process of enforced theatre divestiture had
336
major consequences for the studios. Without a system of theatres or a distribution network
to provide a relatively reliable flow of income, the major studios could not afford to keep as
many physical assets on hand. Secondly, without these theatres requiring a continuous flow
of product, large studio back lots and the infrastructure required to keep film production
running were no longer required. Accordingly, studios began to either sell off their assets in a
piecemeal fashion or rent them out to independent production companies to cover overhead
costs.
69
In this era of higher fiscal uncertainty, the studios were also less willing and less
financially able to keep continuously employed pools of creative talent on hand. The
studios—and the independent production companies that rose to compete with them—
moved into an era of film production characterised by fewer routine, stable working
relationships. Filmmaking in the post-Paramount Decrees period was characterised more
and more by ad-hoc and one-off collaborations formed specifically for individual projects,
which were disbanded once production was done. More frequently, former studio employees
became freelancers, under no contract to any particular organisation and able to sell their
labour at large.
In the post-Paramount Decrees era, with ad hoc production arrangements becoming
more common, screen credits achieved greater importance. While working for Warner Bros
a below-the-line crafts worker such as a carpenter would not have to worry about securing
screen credit because knowledge of the quality of his or her work would circulate amongst
the very small community of filmmakers and producers found within the confines of the
Warner Bros. studio lot. When that community diffuses outward into a larger network of
independent contractors, knowledge of that certification and expertise becomes harder to
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disseminate and harder to prove. Filmmaking jobs are aspirational in nature because of the
allure of the industry and the higher pay scales for unit hours of work, meaning that the
industry was flooded by far more personnel than filmmakers could ever employ, personnel
whose bona fides were at best difficult to verify.
70
In absence of a personal testimonial from a
former employer, screen credits are the only guarantor of a film professional’s prior work
experience and expertise. Accordingly, screen credits assume far greater importance in the
post-Paramount Decrees era. It was in this era that some credits, usually those of the cast
began to migrate towards the end of films, thus inaugurating a tradition of incorporating
“crawl” or “final crawl” credits. This term was borrowed from television, which itself began
to contend with the unpopular proliferation of credit creep.
71
As alluded to in the second
chapter, title design in the mid 1950s onwards also assumes greater importance; in addition
to the flourishing of more aesthetically complex opening titles designed by Saul Bass,
Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, Pablo Ferro, and others, in this era, the final crawl also
begins to receive a more complex visual treatment. Along with this more aesthetic impulse,
final credits become established as a routine practice within the American film industry.
Final credits as a commonplace entity in American film did not truly begin until
1956 with the Michael Todd production, Around the World in 80 Days, and the mechanical
necessity of final credits was accompanied by an aesthetic gesture. In chapter two, I discuss
how production companies employed graphic designers to create visually arresting opening
title sequences and how during this period, final credits also became the site for aesthetic
exploration. As argued by Bass and others, the practice of making opening titles an aesthetic
object achieved two goals. Bass explicitly “approached the titles with the objective of making
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them sufficiently provocative and entertaining to induce the theatre inhabitants to sit down
and watch, because something is really happening on screen,”
72
thus compelling audience
members to pay attention to a part of a film they had heretofore generally ignored. Secondly,
even as title designers made audiences pay attention to the credits, complex visuals work also
distracted audiences away from the long list of names, a list that Bosley Crowther wrote,
“sets the picture off on the wrong foot” because it intrudes into and delays the start of the
film narrative.
73
Visually intensive credits thus served an ancillary benefit of minimising
audience annoyance, because they partially (and paradoxically) directed audience attention
away from long credit lists. Final credits furthered this ancillary benefit by removing a
majority of the opening credit disturbance to the end of the film—predominantly in the
form of the cast list. Around the World in 80 Days takes this practice of final credits and
pushes it to a logical limit, banishing all cast and crew listed to the end of the picture. This
was an uncommon gesture for a film of this (or indeed any) time. Around the World in 80
Days is also unique in that it does not even display a title, in the traditional sense. Edward R.
Murrow appears on screen to start the film, and after a homily on author Jules Verne’s
future predictions and the growth of modern technology, delivers a prologue—something
that Vanessa Schwartz points out in It’s So French! would become common to the tradition
of grandiose “roadshow” movies, such as The Ten Commandments (1956) and The Agony and
the Ecstasy (1965).
74
Murrow then announces the film by name, but Around the World in 80
Days contains no literary front matter at the beginning. Names and job titles appear only at
the end.
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To soften this somewhat radical gesture, and to captivate the attention of audiences
unaccustomed to lingering after a film’s completion, producer Michael Todd hired graphic
designer Saul Bass to design an elaborate animated sequence for the closing credits. Bass’s
sequence promises to show “Who was seen in what scene…and who did what.” The closing
title cards, lasting almost six minutes in length, recapitulate the plot of the entire film. Via
Bass’s familiarly jaunty animation style, the final credits require some prodigious memory
recall from the audience. The actor Cantinflas is associated with a drawing of a penny-
farthing bicycle, which the observant spectator would recall was ridden by his character,
Passepartout, in the film’s opening sequence. Noel Coward is associated with a deck of
cards; David Niven with an anthropomorphic clock with legs, and so on. The credits list the
name of the actor along with a visual condensation of the scene s/he appeared in, but not the
name of the character she played, requiring feats of memory from the audience—and also
presuming familiarity with even some of the lesser-known actors on screen. Three minutes
into the credits, one screen shows all credits (job titles and names), for makeup, foreign
locations, second unit direction, cameramen, props and technical advisors. As the credits
progress, groups of cast members alternate with more technical credits—the composer,
orchestration, and director of photography credits occur about four minutes into the crawl.
The art director, editor, choreography and technical credits do not appear until minute five.
There is little rhyme or reason to the order of credits, except that, as a gesture toward their
importance, the credits of producer Michael Todd, and director Michael Anderson are
respectively the penultimate, and final credits to appear, at least for living individuals. (They
are superseded by an original story credit to Jules Verne, the very last to appear on screen.)
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Todd appears to be banking on the fact that audiences will be captivated enough by Bass’s
visual designs to stay until the very end to witness the producer’s and director’s names.
Around the World in 80 Days marked an end to the patchwork system of final credits that
existed from the early 1930s until the mid-1950s—but it took an aesthetic contribution by
Saul Bass, one of the industry’s most celebrated graphic designers to normalise final credits
and make them an accepted part of film production practice.
It is unclear how Todd was able to procure special dispensation for Around the
World in 80 Days film, because others seeking the same exemption—for another film made
in the Todd-AO process, no less—had been previously stymied. In 1955, producer Arthur
Hornblow, Jr., had wanted to remove the opening credits to Oklahoma! Hornblow’s attempt
was justified on the grounds that the widescreen Todd-AO process was so immersive that
opening credits would provide a disruption to audience engagement with the narrative.
75

Members of the Writers, Actors, and Producers Guilds and the Cinematographers Society
all acquiesced, but the Directors Guild provided the final stumbling block because its
minimum basic agreement with producers contained contractual stipulations guaranteeing
that a director’s credit must be the last to appear before the commencement of the picture.
Directors insisted that their credit be the first to appear at the end of the film. The other
guilds were willing to have their members appear after the credits because they would be
considered subordinate to directors.
76
The plan was scuppered, despite Hornblow’s
compensatory offer to provide printed programs identifying cast and crewmembers to all
audiences, “just as the Playbill is handed out in the legitimate theatre.”
77
The apparent
improvement to immersion into the narrative of Oklahoma!, and enhanced prestige garnered
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by reverting to the enumeration practices of “legitimate [i.e., live] theatre,” were both
insufficient to overcome collective bargaining norms. Directors were guaranteed to always
have the last credit before the start of the motion picture. But their bargaining regimes were
insufficiently flexible to deal with the altered semantics that arose when credits appeared at
the end of a film. Minimum Basic Agreements negotiated by producers with directors,
writers, and actors, respectively, had codified the order of credits in the opening titles, but
had not done the same for final credits. Whatever Todd’s individual ability to secure special
provisions for Around the World in 80 Days, split credits became more and more common in
feature films, including Oklahoma! (1955); West Side Story (1961), which also had no opening
credits; Mary Poppins (1964); Fail-Safe (1964); Oliver! (1968), and others besides, including
every James Bond film from Dr. No (1962) onwards. The James Bond films also climaxed
with a promotional blurb for the subsequent film in the series: after all the credits had rolled,
the phrase “James Bond Will Return…” usually with the name of the movie mentioned,
became a fixture for the entire series, beginning with From Russia With Love (1963).
Just as the presence of final credits became more common in post-Paramount
Decrees American cinema, the number and type of film credits began to expand. This, I
argue, reflected the importance that credits had in this new era of film production
arrangements. Without the institutional memory of studios to retain knowledge of their past
work as illuminated above, technicians relied more and more on official screen credits.
Increasingly, different crafts unions and other traditionally unrecognised personnel pressured
producers, seeking codified, contractual guarantees for screen credits that had formerly been
absent from the screen: backup dancers unsuccessfully, in 1955;
78
editors, sound effects
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creators, and assistant directors, successfully in 1963;
79
publicists, unsuccessfully in 1964;
80

musicians, unsuccessfully in 1968.
81
These groups, and likely more besides, amplified
pressure on producers during contractual negotiations, and requested that the Alliance of
Motion Picture and Television Producers admit more below-the-line credits onscreen. This
added pressure could be attributed to this anxiety that their work would be lost from the
film industry’s record in a more diffuse production culture. And during the 1960s and early
1970s, their fears were well-founded.
To address concerns regarding the decay of institutional memory, the Society of
Independent Producers and IATSE adopted a proposal to preserve credits with the
formation of the “Contract Services Administration Trust Fund.” Founded in 1964, The
Trust Fund’s original purpose was to help fund apprentice training for crafts unions;
82
soon
thereafter, the Trust Fund took over responsibility of creating and administering a
permanent database for all below-the-line credits, whether they appeared on screen or not.
The intent was to create a permanent archive for professional resumes that would be in
“circulation to member producers and other union agreement signatories…to aid those
workers whose works appeared meritorious…for future employment.”
83
The list was
therefore meant to benefit employers and employees mutually; workers would have their
résumés certified, and companies could draw from a pool of reputable, dependable labour.
The benefit was also understood to help the unions and guilds at an organisational level.
With the Trust Fund keeping track of credits, IATSE would stop pressuring producers and
studios for credit guarantees on behalf of its membership. The Trust Fund would remove
another obstacle to collective negotiations, because as long as IATSE’s membership received
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appropriate internal recognition, they would not have to seek it publicly, which is to say on
screen. Well-intentioned though it was, the system ultimately failed sometime during 1971
after only a few years of operation. A Variety article printed in 1974 retrospectively revealed
that the Trust Fund’s credit recordkeeping efforts failed, because the ledger of credits was
too expensive to maintain, and the necessary information collection system too cumbersome.
Producers tended not to supply full information on their credit lists, and without sufficient
penalties for non-compliance, the Trust Fund could not compel its signatories to provide the
missing credits.
84
The Trust Fund’s dissolution demonstrates the difficulty in maintaining
and disseminating below-the-line employment information in the post-Paramount Decrees
era. Fledgling or minor film productions go out of business with reliable (yet unpredictable)
frequency, putting in jeopardy the employment records of untold numbers of below-the-line
film workers. The failure of the Trust Fund’s credit database shows that screen credits are
vital, because they provide the only reliable guarantor of employment records. With studios
heavily invested in preserving their film archives, film prints are more assiduously cared for—
and with proper storage generally enjoy a shelf life longer than—the careers of individual
creative professionals. Thus, even though screen credits have been considered to be an
endemic (and sometimes obnoxiously unavoidable) part of the film text, they also serve an
extra-diegetic function: credits become a relatively stable record of film industry
employment. Their ever-increasing length, especially in the wake of the Paramount Decrees,
is justified because they serve an archival function that the industry at large is incapable or
unwilling to perform.
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This change in film credit traditions brought them into line with television credits
(from whom the movie world borrowed the appropriately lugubrious phrase “credit crawl”),
whose length was being perceived as a problem for the TV industry in the early 1950s. In
1952, ABC television announced a new television credit policy, favouring larger type and a
slower movement of words up the screen, so as to combat the “rapid unfolding of names
which can be hardly read by viewers,” to make sure that technical credits, such as those for
lighting and sound personnel, would not be “sloughed off,” as had commonly been the
case.
85
This pro-craft union stance on credits was diminished by television critics, who
bemoaned the fact that for certain instalments of the Lux Video Theatre on NBC, “the
credit crawl at the program’s finish took three minutes which could have been better used
for programming.”
86
This critique had no small resonance, as it was lumped into a general
condemnation of the whole cluttered “flow” of television broadcasting in 1961:
The combination of credit crawl, the “house ads” (on the air
promos), the principal commercials for the programs sponsor,
the accompanying tail-end for the alternate sponsor, the trailer
on next week’s attraction, the succession of station break
commercials, fore and aft of each show, to which can also be
added the voice-over on the show’s final crawl which permits
the network an additional promo…[are] a blatant and fragrant
gang-up that leaves the viewer confused, frustrated, and ready
to throw in the towel. Where it leaves TV is somewhere on
the edge of ridiculum.
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The above article, aptly subtitled “How to Ruin a Television Show,” decried all of this
promotional detritus as disruptive for the home viewing experience, but its writer, George
Rosen, also found that the clutter did industry professionals no favours. “When a show has
run over,” Rosen writes, “the speedup on the final craw winds up as a comedy sequence,”
345
because the resultant credits are completely illegible, making the credits of use to no-one:
not to irritated audiences, and not to the workers being identified.
88
Moreover, as another
Variety television article reported the criticisms of Joe Layton, a stage choreographer who
migrated to television, that the credits used for the medium were apparently nonsensical.
The credit “musical numbers staged by” has no meaning because television is a different
medium than the legitimate theatre; the credit “musical numbers and dances conceived and
choreographed by” was a clumsy and overly wordy approximation for Layton, who should be
properly termed a “musical director”—disallowed because DGA regulations prohibited
anyone but their members from taking a “director” credit.
89
Truly, television crawl credits,
this critic opined, were “nonsensical misnomers that can obfuscate the true credits,” which is
to say the ones that truly to the individual responsibilities performed during a television
production.
90
In the late 1960s, ABC television took up the problems of credits and the
other “clutter” that inevitably accompanied all network broadcasts. Its president, Thomas
Moore, made a commitment to “Clean Airwaves” as a centrepiece of its 1967-68, promising
to reduce network promotions, and eliminate occurrences where the colour ABC logo (but
only the colour version) appeared on air. Vital to this effort, Moore also promised to work
with agents, unions, and series producers to reduce the length of “over-long” screen
credits.
91
Finding no common support within the other broadcast networks on credit
reduction, and failing at attempts to get the National Association of Broadcasters “to revise
the commercial time and interruption standard of the NAB code,” Moore deepened his
commitment to cleaning up the airwaves of its detritus. He proclaimed that ABC would go
it alone, and enact its airwaves cleanup in absence of any other cooperation.
92
Moore thus
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attempted—ultimately futilely—to distinguish his network’s programming from others by
having more of what viewers wanted on screen (programming) and less of what they didn’t
(promotional spots, and credits). Even though the film and television industries were in
competition for audiences during this period, they were at least united in their
condemnation of excessive screen credits.

Conglomerates and Blockbusters (1970-1995)
Characterising the period that followed the post-Paramount Decrees era is difficult,
because the changes it wrought on the American film industry moved production practices
away from one monolithic business model into a period of myriad different and competing
practices—with differing narrative worldviews to match. The growth of independent
producers and production companies in the 1960s presented a fracturing of both industrial
practices and story conventions, creating a receptive climate for the directors of the auteurist
“Hollywood Renaissance” of the 1970s—an unofficial cadre of directors whose films did not
hew to the more conservative ideological and narrative norms of the studio. Yet at the same
time as American cinema seemed poised to cast off its hidebound traditions, other forces
during the 70s emerged that would effectively blunt any narrative progress made by the
Hollywood Renaissance.
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In the 1960s, larger corporations bought out the same studios
that had once themselves sat atop entire vertically integrated empires, and so Universal,
Paramount, Warner Bros. and MGM each became but one branch of broader diversified
companies.
94
Within these frameworks, larger conglomerates were induced to pursue novel
release schedules that represented a significant break from the past. As David A. Cook writes
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in Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979, the
studios would release fewer big-budget releases (known as blockbusters or tentpoles), “any
one of which could produce windfall profits and send their stock soaring on Wall Street—
with the expectation that the rest would break even (25-30 percent) or fail.”
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This is not to
say that big-budget “tentpole” films were the only films being made during this period, for
the work of directors such as Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, Bob Fosse, and to a certain
extent Francis Ford Coppola experimented with markedly different narrative structures and
ideological leanings. It is rather to acknowledge that, beginning with Jaws (1975), cemented
with Star Wars (1977), and copied in films from Superman: The Movie (1978) onwards, the
“blockbuster strategy” has been in commercial ascendance since the 1970s until the time of
this writing. And it created an environment that tolerated—and indeed even welcomed—
expanded technical credits in the final crawl.
Germane to this chapter, the growth of expensive, special effects laden, technically
complex films was ultimately responsible for the proliferation of final crawl credits in the
1970s. They established a paradigm for final credits listing a great number number of below-
the-line personnel, a paradigm that is now firmly ensconced in the production culture
contemporary to this writing in 2013. At this historical moment, the order and form of final
credits was not codified, and these aforementioned movies listed them in a rather haphazard
fashion.
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Though Jaws, Star Wars, and Superman all required a great degree of technical
expertise to make them, their producers take very different approaches to which personnel
were given pride of prominence. Companies releasing films were relatively free to do so in
the 1970s because end credits, a relatively new development in the industry, as will be
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demonstrated shortly, were not governed by any strict guild or union obligations. The order,
and type of personnel given credits in the final crawl was left as a matter for negotiation
between producers and the individual below-the-line professionals. Therefore the order of
credits indicates the weighted preference of creative inputs, with certain work prized more
highly than others, dependent on the film in question. In deference to the importance of its
ever-malfunctioning, but highly important mechanical shark,
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Jaws lists the production
designer’s and special effects supervisor’s credits immediately after the narrative ends; the
film also recognises the couple who filmed “live shark footage,” and gives thanks to the
National Geographic Society for their narrative consultation before fading to black. But
neither the director Steven Spielberg nor the film’s producers are anywhere to be found in
the final crawl. When Star Wars: A New Hope ended, (a film that had no opening titles save
for the 20
th
Century Fox Searchlights and a Lucasfilm card) the first crawl credit card is
“Written and Directed by George Lucas,” cementing his personality as primarily responsible
for the entire preceding film, followed by a list of the 142 other technical credits. The
Superman crawl begins with the words “An Alexander and Ilya Salkind Production,” a
recognition of the fact that Ilya and his partner Pierre Spengler purchased the rights to the
Superman franchise in 1974, and his father Alexander financed the film.
Superman’s final crawl credits number 457, a record for the time,
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and are a baroque
jumble of job titles that seem to redundantly overlap one another. Colin Chilvers is the
Creative Supervisor & Director of Special Effects (not to be confused with Denis Rich,
responsible for Special Visual Effects Design); Roy Field is the Creative Supervisor of
Optical Visual Effects; Les Bowie is the Creative Supervisor of Mattes & Composites; Denys
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Coop, the Creative Director of Process Photography. Across the crews in England, the
United States, and Canada, there are seven assistant directors (listed initially plus another
eleven added later on); fourteen 2
nd
Assistant Directors; eight people responsible for
continuity, a phalanx of additional photographers; legions of camera operators; and countless
other assistants and technicians. At approximately seven minutes in length, the Superman
credits would appear to be the very apotheosis of excessive, egoistic film credits.
Superman’s filmmakers appear to have been inured against charges of below-the-line
self-aggrandisement, however, which featured so prominently in newspapers and trade
journals in previous years. Instead, the lengthy, sometimes obscurantist credits are tolerated,
even heralded as a mark of the film’s technical prowess. “With so many chores to be handled
expertly,” Variety gushed, “it’s impossible to cover all the accomplishments…. Though the
stars played brightly, the game here was one in the technical trenches by the long list of
craftsmen.”
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And Gene Siskel, writing in the Chicago Tribune, mused “the director’s role in
an undertaking this large is part foreman, part traffic cop,” begrudgingly acknowledging the
expertise and prowess required to both create and wrangle such an effects-heavy
undertaking, even if he believed it did saddle Superman with a dearth of emotion.
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Their
attitude was similar to that maintained by critics and creators when faced with the coming of
sound over fifty years previously: if producers wanted to create these elaborate special effects
films, then they would have to accommodate more extensive technical credits in the final
crawl as a recognition of the uncommon and vital contributions made by crafts workers. The
visual design of the Superman credits also evinces pride in their presentation. Instead of the
familiar trope of simple type on a plain black background, the final credits replicate Robert
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Brownjohn’s opening title aesthetic. Words crawl up the screen, flying through a tunnel of
infinite stars, rendered in blue type, each letter with a drop-shadow that telescopes away
towards the vanishing point. An ostentatious demonstration of the time, talent, and money
required to assemble such a technically complicated film, the Superman final credits draw
attention to themselves: a sight to behold, not to ignore. They are an overt show of just how
many people in how many countries were responsible for assembling such a lavish,
technically complex production.
More to the point, the producers of Superman were under no legal obligation to
recognise these technical contributions, because the film does not bear the IATSE seal.
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Since 1937, IATSE guaranteed the studios to place its seal on every motion picture released
in the United States, a provision forced upon the industry by racketeer-cum-IATSE
president, William Bioff.
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Their power eroded with the breakup of the studios and
runaway production; for the latter especially, IATSE’s jurisdiction did not extend overseas,
meaning that credits could take largely any shape and form (save for those whose guilds, like
editors, guaranteed certain positions) for those films produced outside the United States.
But even this backing would not have helped the majority of those below-the-line workers,
because IATSE has historically taken a hands-off approach to the particular form and type
given, even as recently as its current contractual negotiations. In IATSE’s 2009-2011 Area
Standards Agreement, with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Article
18 states
Title credits may be given to all department heads and key
employees in accordance with standard industry practice. The
form in which screen credits are given need not conform to an
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employee’s classification and no presumptions shall flow from the
form of such credit. The Employer shall give title credit to the
IATSE by displaying its official seal in accordance with
standard industry practice. (Emphasis mine.)
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Clearly, very little has changed since Bioff’s extortionate demands in the 1930s. IATSE’s
only contractual mandate with producers is that the union seal must be displayed
somewhere in the credits, usually in the final crawl, usually at the very end, in common with
“standard industry practice.” This standard means something very different for the individual
job titles granted, however. The union does not require credit guarantees from producers for
the names of its rank and file, and has a very laissez-faire approach to what form these credits
should take. The clause that credits “need not conform to an employee’s classification and
no presumption shall flow from the form of such credit” means that whatever job title a
below-the-line worker may have held previously does not officially dictate what title they
will hold next. And those meanings, per “no presumptions shall flow from the form of such
credit,” do not speak to any official standing within the industry.
In other words, work for those below the line is catch-as-catch-can: such employees
can receive credit only insofar as they have the power to individually negotiate for it. In the
years since Superman, those types of credit have become relatively stable, but at this
relatively early juncture of 1978, we witness, as illuminated above, a wild profusion of
overlapping, contradictory, and sometimes redundant job titles. This I argue is
representative of an industry adapting to technology and deciding on the most accurate job
descriptions through the changing semantics of screen credits. Because special effects
technologies and techniques had changed quickly and radically during the mid-1970s, the
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pre-existing frameworks of credit were incapable of adapting to these changes, there existed
great uncertainty as to how to codify these jobs, and in what form. In subsequent years, a
similar negotiation over how to credit computer generated imagers (CGI) workers would
take place over the increasing prevalence of computer-generated imagery in film.
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The
above discussion has primarily focussed on the visual changes wrought by technological
innovation in film during the 1970s, but cinema’s soundscape was changing equally rapidly
during this decade. Advancements in sound technology changed the way that practitioners
understood the role of film sound, and gave rise to a new screen credit: the Sound Designer.

Case Study No. 2: The Sound Designer Credit
While visual and special effects proliferated during this period of the mid- to late-
1970s, the film soundtrack also underwent a significant evolution. This change is embodied
in the growth and evolution of the Sound Designer credit, separate from—and of greater
importance than—that of other sound professionals. In the heyday of the studio system,
members of the sound department were minimally credited. A survey of screen credits shows
that two or three personnel were credited at most, and were allowed the credit “Recordist,”
“Sound Editor,” or sometimes simply “Sound.” But as sound technologies increased in
complexity and recording fidelity, soundtracks too became more intricate, and the
contributions of “Sound Effects” or “Foley Effects” personnel began to be appropriately
recognised. The greatest technological evolutions of the 1970s found their genesis in the
1950s with the invention of multi-track (later known as “Surround”) sound. As described by
Gianluca Sergi in The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood, prior to the mid-
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1950s, film soundtracks were almost exclusively mono (or monaural), with a single audio
channel fixed to the centre of the picture, with no splitting of the channel left and right.
With the development of widescreen formats in the mid-1950s such as Cinerama, Todd-AO
and 70mm film, these larger prints could accommodate a magnetic sound strip capable of
playing multi-track, sound, with audio channels carrying information around the theatre
independently of each other.
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With these two developments, sound in film achieved
greater complexity, with the many different elements on the audio track layered
simultaneously on top of one another, and those elements capable of veering sound across
the screen, both left and right. Converting theatres to Cinerama or Todd-AO was far too
expensive for all but the biggest and most profitable movie houses, meaning that film sound
in the 1960s and early 1970s regressed almost exclusively back to mono.
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But the founding
of Dolby Laboratories in the late 1960s permanently changed the soundscape of films, and
re-established the multi-track sound systems that had first debuted with Todd-AO. Through
the work of its founder, American engineer and physicist Ray Dolby, the fidelity of recorded
film soundtracks (i.e., the ability to reproduce sounds with a high degree of accuracy), and
the number of multi-track theatres increased markedly. The “Dolby Stereo System”
consisted of four “quadraphonic” audio channels: one each to the left and right of the screen,
and one directly in the centre; the fourth channel carried ambient sound, arranged so as to
spread effects around the theatre. While theatre conversions to Cinemascope cost in the
neighbourhood of $45,000, the same conversion to Dolby Stereo cost a paltry $5,000,
which was within the means of most first-run movie houses.
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As more theatres were able to install sophisticated multi-channel sound systems,
studios had a greater incentive to create soundtracks that would take advantage of these new
technologies. A handful of titles were released in Dolby Stereo in the mid-1970s, including
Tommy (1975) and A Star is Born (1976), but Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) demonstrated
the process’ true potential. Dolby consulted with George Lucas during the pre-production
of Star Wars in 1975 (sound professionals had traditionally been brought in during post-
production) and Lucas hired Ben Burtt to create the soundtrack, meaning that the auditory
shape and structure of Star Wars was considered from the very beginning.
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Given a freedom
rare for that era, Burtt created a highly complex soundtrack, with dialogue, music, and
multiple sound effects steering into the four channels, each woven together to create an
immersive sound environment. As Sergi describes it, Burtt’s soundtrack demonstrated the
viability of the Dolby process, and contributed to its wider installation in theatres: “Star
Wars opened in 46 Dolby Stereo-equipped theatres in the USA. Only two years later,
Superman opened in over 200 theatres with Dolby Stereo sound, and by 1981, over 2,000
theatres in the US were equipped with the new technology.”
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By the dawn of the 1980s,
Dolby was well on its way to being standard for first-run theatres, and large special-effects
intensive films were all but expected to feature more sophisticated Dolby Stereo. Moreover,
as multi-track sound systems found their way into larger theatres, the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences gave the creative energy put into a film’s sound track an official
imprimatur. The Academy began to routinely give out an award for “Sound Effects Editing”
starting in 1981, an award that had only been given out sporadically since 1960.
110
Dolby
Laboratories developed technologies that allowed moving images to be accompanied by
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complex soundtracks, and the Lucas-Burtt working paradigm, which commenced work on
the soundtrack at the beginning of the film production process—instead of after the film’s
completion, which was the norm—created a production climate accorded greater
importance to film sound.
111
The soundtrack, or more properly the parts of the soundtrack
that did not encompass voice and music, were receiving more attention than ever before.
Into this creative-industrial environment, the Sound Designer emerged.
The Sound Designer credit was first given to editor Walter Murch for Apocalypse
Now (1979). It was a designation made possible by the production culture of the mid- to
late-1970s—a result of the aforementioned changes in technology as well as in the working
environment of sound technicians. Unions, whose structures and strictures, in turn dictated
this working environment, also indirectly caused the creation of the Sound Designer credit.
Francis Ford Coppola began toying with film credits in 1969 with The Rain People, the last
feature film he directed prior to rising to prominence with The Godfather (1972). As
described by Coppola in an interview with author Michael Ondaatje, Walter Murch created
the sound mix for The Rain People, and in return for his efforts on that film (as well as the
jack-of-all trades work he had done for Coppola’s company, American Zoetrope) Coppola
wanted to give Murch the credit Sound Editor. The designation was proper, at least in terms
of job description for that era, but Coppola experienced a stumbling block. Murch was not a
member of the Motion Picture Editor’s Guild at the time, and its minimum basic agreement
explicitly forbade anyone outside the guild from receiving that credit, Murch included. To
circumvent this restriction, Coppola and Murch settled on the credit “Sound Montage,”
112

and thus the hegemony of the Editors Guild was subtly broken.
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The change in credit here is partially one of strict translation—montage is merely
French for “editing”—but it also contains pretentions to a higher creative regard. Its
references to the dialectical materialism of Soviet Montage, or filmmakers in continental
Europe, suggests that the contributions of Walter Murch’s “Sound Montage” are more than
mechanical reproduction of the auditory world. Rather, it is an artistic refashioning of it. A
Sound Montage artist’s work is sophisticated, creative, and therefore superior to that of a
commonplace Sound Editor, a subtle yet definitive step up from that job title. Murch would
receive the same Sound Montage credit for THX 1138 (1971), American Graffiti (1973), The
Conversation (1974)—all films that explored the texture, and contour, and potentialities of
the auditory environment in cinema, and in the case of American Graffiti and The
Conversation, deconstructed the importance and resonance of sound in the physical (which is
to say, extra-diegetic world). Given the textual and meta-textual sonic explorations of a film
such The Conversation, the Sound Montage credit is an appropriate reflection of the way that
it uses sound as both grist for the dramatic mill, and as a reflexive rumination on the
technical apparatuses used to create the film soundtrack. Murch received his last Sound
Montage credit for The Godfather Part II (1974), whereupon he graduated to the credit
“Sound Designer” with Apocalypse Now in 1979.
The appearance of the Sound Designer in American film productions was more than
a difference in semantic prestige—it was accompanied by an evolution in the way that the
art and craft of creating film soundtracks was rhetorically understood. Walter Murch saw
himself occupying a different creative space than sound editors or even those responsible for
“sound montage,” who knitted the pre-existing components of the soundtrack together.
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Prior to Apocalypse Now, Murch argued, the film industry perceived soundtrack creation as
“a mechanical operation, comparable to work in a laboratory, comparable to properly
developing a film so that the exposures are correct, and the colours are true; you must make
sure the sound is correct…but there’s no possibility of creativity.”
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In contradistinction,
Murch saw his work as highly creative, as he was tasked broadly with giving form and shape
to the soundtrack in general, executing the film’s auditory component according to a pre-
conceived concept. (The term used by the French magazine Positif is “concepteur-son,”
which generally understood to be “sound designer,” but translates more directly to “sound-
conceiver”).
114
Murch also likened himself to a “production designer,” because he took
responsibility for the broader shape and contour of the soundtrack,
115
just as William
Cameron Menzies was in charge of the overall visual look and texture of his films.
Murch saw similarities in their supervisory capacities. Murch charged himself with
coordinating inputs of sound recordists, Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR), sound
effects, Foley Effects, thus putting his contribution at the level of a creative recombination
and arrangement of those more humdrum inputs to achieve his auditory “vision.”
116
In fact,
Murch’s understanding of his work took on a highly visual understanding, one paradoxically
created by the surround Dolby “Stereo” technology. Because the Dolby that allowed sounds
to emanate from different parts of the room and create an auditory ambiance, sound was no
longer conceived in terms of the traditional understanding of stereo sound, split between left
and right. Murch reasoned that he was responsible for creating “an architecture of sound in
three dimensions,” extending outwards from the plane of the screen into the far reaches of
the theatre. According to him, those who didn’t work in Dolby Stereo or similar surround
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sound technologies could not properly deem themselves “Sound Designers” because they
only worked in the two dimensions, instead of in quadraphonic sound.
117
Sound designers
were capable of shaping sound, giving it volume, and depth, taking into consideration the
three-dimensional acoustics of the theatre, and the effects rendered by the precise placement
of sounds. Associating the work of Sound Designers with architects was a clear gesture by
Murch towards his (and the profession’s) higher cultural cachet, because it was framed
amongst the higher echelons of properly creative mental acuity. In so doing, the Sound
Designer’s artistry was elevated above the more commonplace craft of sound editors or
recordists.
Walter Murch’s concept of sound design was spatialised but also highly specific to
Apocalypse Now. He considered it appropriate only to the work that he performed for
Coppola—he never again took the credit on any of his subsequent films—with little thought
to how the credit would have any traction within the American film industry.
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But have
traction it did; Ben Burtt, who worked with Lucas on the soundtrack to the original Star
Wars trilogy, was accorded the credit “Special Dialogue and Sound Effects” for Star Wars,
but was known as “Sound Designer” on The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of The
Jedi (1983), both of which were released after Apocalypse Now. Burtt most likely attained
these credits to maintain the same level of professional esteem as Walter Murch. Burtt also
espoused his own understanding of the work of a Sound Designer, sympathising with
Murch’s idea of “sound architecture,” but described this work in terms more familiar to
music composers. The true sonic “architects” were the sound effects creators, because they
had to fashion sounds for the images on screen, oftentimes having to “build” sounds for
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things, à la Star Wars—creatures, as well as weapons, like Light Sabres and laser blasters—
that didn’t exist. This “sound architect” Burtt argued, is “less a sound recordist with
responsibilities to create sounds analogous to the real world than a creator of sound effects,
an effects designer, somewhere between the Foley artist
119
and the musician.”
120
For Burtt,
this sound effects architecture is not three dimensional in nature, as Murch understood the
work of the Sound Designer in Dolby Stereo, but rather in the layering of individual pre-
existing sounds to create novel ones that encapsulated the auditory feel of certain moments.
Like Murch, Burtt understood the Sound Designer as the awkward French translation “the
sound-conceiver,” responsible for coordination and creative collaboration with input from
his subordinates, “more comparable to the special effects supervisor or the director of
photography.”
121
Whatever the specific valence, Walter Murch and Ben Burtt both elevate
the esteem of the sound department in general, and the sound designer in particular, an
esteem bolstered by the more expansive sonic palette afforded by developments in surround
sound technology. What began as Sound Montage, a credit designed to circumvent union
prohibitions, the Sound Designer became the apotheosis of giving film sound technicians a
measure of creative prestige. The credit turned the soundtrack from an apparatus of
mechanical reproduction into a venue for artistry and artistic vision.

Conglomerates and Blockbusters (1970-1995, Continued)
By 1977, the presence of the final crawl in films had become common enough that
Walter Kerr in the New York Times, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his theatre criticism in
1979, wondered in print where a film’s credits properly belonged: at the beginning or at the
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end?
122
Yet for every instance of praise or acceptance for long final credits—the Variety
review of 1941 (1979), directed by Steven Spielberg, proclaimed that the “six-minute end
credits crawl should be the ultimate validation that film is a collaborative art”
123
—several
others still trafficked in the derision that final credits had become such an established fixture
in film. But for all this continued (and by this historical juncture, expected) scorn, I contend
that increased technical below the line film credits provided an unexpected boon to film
critics. Several feature articles to this effect were written in major newspaper during the
1980s, asking and answering: what does a gaffer do? Why is he named a best boy? Does she
have to be called a script girl? Is the work of a grip really that difficult? In contradistinction
to earlier critics, who merely griped about unchecked credit creep and called for its
abolishment, this more recent mode of writing enabled film journalists to enhance their
stature. They appeared as interlocutors between the industry and their reading public,
decoders of the secret insider language of film production, which was then communicated
through column inches.
124
This refrain of ridicule in the 1980s also spilled over into films
themselves, as the credits became a venue to make fun of the industry’s tendency to
excessively recognise itself. The Leslie Nielsen parody film Airplane! (1980) credits
“Generally in Charge of a Lot of Things: Mike Finnell,” and cites one crew member as being
in charge of “Gripology.” The final crawl includes a Magic Consultant, and the credit line
“Author of Tale of Two Cities: Charles Dickens.” (Post-credits, we also return to a scene
from the film’s very beginning, where a passenger, abandoned curb-side at the beginning,
waits in a cab for his driver to return). Airplane II: The Sequel (1982) goes further with its
final crawl, which includes the credits “Gaffer (What’s a Gaffer?)” and “Worst Boy: Adolf
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Hitler,” a clear parody of the Best Boy credit, a position that indicates the Gaffer’s principal
assistant. Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I ups the ante considerably after flashing
THE END, and creates an elaborate and humorous closing sequence of coming attractions
in the never-to-be made History of the World, Part II, the most riotous of which is the faux-
musical Jews in Space, replete with an armada of spaceships built in the shape of the Star of
David, blowing up goyim starfighters and doing elaborate choreography against a blanket of
stars. The film then ends with a final crawl that overtly copies the slanted blocks of text that
prefaced the Star Wars films. More than a mere curiosity, this set of films marks the first
prominent instances of recent film history where filmmakers began to insert semantic
content into their works after THE END.
The trend of placing content into the final credits, which proliferated at the dawn of
the 1980s, is characterised by a fraught push-pull in its relationship to film audiences. The
crawl both induced spectators to watch the end credits and then chided them for doing so.
This is exemplified by the 1979 The Muppet Movie, the first full-length theatrical feature
involving Jim Henson’s well-known creations. Immediately after THE END flashes on
screen, the large (and large-haired) Muppet, Sweetums, crashes through it. In a wonderful
moment of reflexive metonymy, Sweetums tears both the screen and the narrative illusion,
and serves as a reminder that the film began with the Muppets assembling in a projection
room to watch their recently completed feature. Credits are displayed on top of panning
shots of the Muppets, still in character, bantering with each other and arguing with
Sweetums, their words only vaguely audible underneath the musical soundtrack. After the
last credits—the AMPAS and IATSE seals—appear, the camera settles onto the face of
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Animal. Staring into the camera, Animal yells “Go Home! Go Home!” before passing out—a
none-too-subtle rebuke for those who had stayed until the very end. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
(1987) performs a similar gesture. After the main narrative ends, we are treated to a second
denouement: the school principal, bedraggled and downtrodden from having been bested by
Ferris Bueller, trudges along a suburban Chicago street, and is picked up by a yellow school
bus full of his students. The scene plays out on the left half of the screen, while on the right,
the film’s credits scroll from bottom to top. A few seconds after the scene and the credits
end, we see a shot down a house hallway. Matthew Broderick emerges from screen left, clad
in a bath robe and t-shirt. Broderick walks towards the camera, and asks, bemused, “You’re
still here? It’s over. Go home. Go.” breaking the fourth wall, like he had so many times
previously in the diegesis, with a dismissive flick of his wrist. Both The Muppet Movie and
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are instances where the filmmakers give with one hand and take away
with the other. The credit sequences are designed to make spectators stay in the theatre,
more as an overture to the below-the-line workers rather than to audiences, because more
patrons would attend to the final crawl in the presence of added entertainment.
Simultaneously though, in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the scene on screen left actively detracts
from the credits on screen right, undercutting any promise of broader recognition for those
oft-ignored workers. Moreover, those who do stay until the end are told off—humorously,
yes, but told off nonetheless—for having done so.
The Muppets Movie and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are physical enactments of a debate
that was also taking place in critical circles, vis-à-vis watching final film credits. The
aforementioned New York Times Walter Kerr reported on the palaver in the pages of a “a
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magazine intended and mainly written by film buffs” that he deigns not to mention, “and,
my goodness, what a turmoil was there!” nearly burned my fingers, I swear.” The
“donnybrook” in question was over final credits, and
the chap at bat was in a fury over the practice of unrolling all
those vital names after that ultimate freeze-frame that so
clearly announces a film’s conclusion. It seems that he can’t
read them. He wants to, but is utterly frustrated by the fact
that all of the people in front of him are now getting to their
feet and straggling ever so slowly into the aisles….Even if he
stands up to get a glimpse of the screen, which of course he
does, there are heads and bodies moving this way and that
between him and the information he so ardently desires, and
though he bobs and dodges and behaves in general like a kid
outside a ballpark searching for alternate peep holes, it’s all in
vain. By the time the exodus is over, so is the film, credits lost
forever (unless, perhaps he wants to come back to the next
showing and sit in the front row the balcony, a solution I’m
surprised he hasn’t thought of down the passionate years).
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Kerr paints this fury, summoned by anyone over something so small, as most unbecoming.
From no less a light than the New York Times theatre critic, the behaviour of one who
attends closely to the final credits, is severely condescended to as immature and childish.
Kerr’s emphasis that this debate appeared in a magazine both by and for “film buffs,” is also
significant. It localises an excessive, inappropriate investment with the closing credits within
a community or type of film spectator whose approach to film is on the whole excessive and
inappropriate.
Here, scholarship that explores cinephilia—a type of spectatorship that has often
been constructed as abnormal—helps further Kerr’s position on credits. Paul Willemen and
Noel King, spoke of cinephilia in “Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered.”
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There, Willemen argues that the cinephile watches films in a manner very different from the
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average spectator. To crystallise this observation, King and Willemen discuss a scene from
On the Waterfront, where Eva Marie Saint repeatedly attempts to retrieve her glove so that
she may leave, but Marlon Brando prevents her from doing so. Despite the dramatic tension
and plot development inherent in that scene, all King can do is focus on the number of times
of times Brando stops Saint; it is not the manner in which Brando and Saint act out the
scene that has meaning for King, but an incidental numerical detail, that would, by all other
accounts, be insignificant. In these moments, Willemen writes, “what is seen is in excess of
what is being shown,”
127
arguing that the cinephile is fixating on minutiae that inherently
have no meaning, to the point where such minutiae become overwhelming. In his book on
the subject, Cinephilia and History; or, The Wind in the Trees, Christian Keathley further
argues that “the extraordinary pleasure [a cinephile] takes in this moment would be classified
as a kind of fetishism…but then it is likely to be dismissed with a condescending snigger.”
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Taken together, Willemen & King and Keathley create the cinephile as someone who
watches film in a way that is altogether inappropriate when compared to normal spectators,
because they place an excessive, almost fetishistic investment in—and derive a goodly degree
of pleasure from—elements on screen that are trivial and unimportant. The anger betrayed
in Kerr’s above example, a spectator unable to read credits over the heads passing by, is the
negative verso of that pleasure principle. The individual who sits in the theatre through the
end of the credits sits in the same company as the cinephile, if not a cinephile already: a
spectator who excessively, improperly fixates on the part of the film that inherently has no
meaning, and ought to be derided for it. While credits have meaning and import for
professionals within the film industry, or perhaps their relatives and friends, the identity of a
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key grip matters very little to anyone outside those circles. Those who do pay close attention
to the “trivia”
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of closing credits in a manner that is immature, abnormal, and ought to
“Go Home!” So say Animal, Ferris Bueller, and the theatre critic of the New York Times.
Over the past thirty-odd years—the early 1980s until the time of this writing—
narrative content appearing during or after credits became more common, though it could
hardly be called ubiquitous. Film critic Roger Ebert labelled these sequences the “Monk’s
Reward…so named because it usually takes a monklike [sic] devotion to sit through the
credits.” They have also been variously labelled “credit cookies,”
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Ebert’s appellation for
the rare treat they provide the audience, or “stingers,” for the common recurrence of scenes
that induce shock or surprise.
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The presence or absence of stingers appears to be a matter
of preference for individual directors, producers or studios/production companies, though
they do hew to certain trends or genres. Building from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, John Hughes
was fond of using the credits to resolve the plight of characters forgotten or left behind
during the course of a narrative—Adventures in Babysitting (1987); Planes, Trains and
Automobiles (1987)—and countless comedies have used the credits to show a blooper reel of
cast members flubbing their lines, beginning with Cannonball Run (1981) and continuing
through Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). Though these features have more
recently been relegated to the extras on DVD releases, they are gestures that break down the
closed off nature of the diegesis by showing the takes that were never meant to be printed.
Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan used credit sequences to reveal the danger inherent in
the stunts for his films, showing stunts both successful and gone wrong, from Police Story
(1985) through Rumble in the Bronx (1995). These outtakes are both a demonstration of
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authenticity, proving than Chan does his own stunts, and also of physical prowess and
machismo—in Rumble, we see Chan break his ankle in one stunt, cover his cast in a fake
shoe to perform another, and then direct the rest of the film’s stunts while on crutches.
Chan brought the tradition of outtakes from Hong Kong when he moved into American
productions with the Rush Hour series of films (1998 to 2007), which feature both comedic
and stunt outtakes. The increased presence of these credit (or post-credit) sequences is
remarkable, and they can be read more than just as humorous codas—a “cookie” in Ebert’s
words, gifted to audiences as a token reward for sitting through the final credits’ drudgery.
By way of a series of narrative (or rather failed narrative) gestures, they enact the same thing
that the final credits do in general, which is to break down and reveal the artifice inherent in
filmmaking.
As argued earlier in this chapter and during the introduction, credits implicitly
acknowledge film as a constructed object and in the case of non-documentary films, as a
work of fiction. The presence of names and job titles at the beginning or the end of a given
text reveals the forces of production at work behind the creation of that text, and signals it
as a work of human labour—not as an autonomous work of fiction. These cracks and
fissures occur outside the diegesis, but they are cracks and fissures nonetheless. And the
presence of outtake reels serves to deepen them. As actors flub lines or give alternate
readings that never made it into the film, we see cinema as a process of trial and error—of
takes and retakes. Behind the camera personnel respond in kind, and body-less, source-less
laughter often erupts from off-screen; occasionally, an assistant director comes onscreen to
cut the outtake with a clapboard. Both of these moments reveal the presence of an elaborate
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unseen pool of labour, commanding assemblages of motion picture machinery that fringe the
screen, and serve as a reminder of the physically embodied work that goes on in the service
of making films. In the conglomerate-blockbuster era of American film production, credits
became longer to accommodate and reflect the growth in visual special effects and sound
credits—and increasingly were accompanied by ancillary scenes and jokes. This marked the
beginning of final credits as an element worthy of audience interest, even if the kinds of
audiences watching these scenes were constructed in less than flattering terms. More
recently, in the era of what I would call contemporary transmedia, or the period in which
narrative texts have played out across a number of media venues, credit sequences have
become more ubiquitous and deepened in their purpose, moving beyond their status as mere
“monk’s reward.”

Contemporary Transmedia (1995-Present)
In more recent years, “stingers” have become increasingly common in larger budget
films, particularly animation, and been embedded in part of these films’ marketing and
promotional strategies. Pixar and Marvel are two studios that have taken particular
advantage of the expanded aesthetic and fiscal possibilities afforded by credit sequences.
Pixar studios embraced prior traditions of final crawl outtakes, but did so with a far more
technologically and economically complicated gesture. The studio produced a series of
animated “outtakes” for the credits to A Bug’s Life in 1998. Responding to their popularity,
Pixar commissioned a second set of outtakes three weeks after the film’s initial release to
coincide with the Christmas season,
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most likely designed to bring back repeat patrons to
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the theatre. With the advent of DVD, these blooper reels became relegated to the discs’
extras sections; the DVD release of Toy Story 2 (1999) contained a similar blooper reel, as
did the theatrical credits for Monster’s Inc. (2001). These blooper reels are semantically
complex; they manufacture “outtakes” through the laborious and fastidious process of
computer animation, requiring both animated scenes to be created, and actors to play out
the lines. In A Bug’s Life, the queen ant “breaks character” and laughs at the head
grasshopper’s lines; she keeps breaking over consecutive takes, like a human actor would,
unable to shake the giggles, suggesting a continuity of filming in time and space. Some
characters in the Monster’s Inc. blooper reel knock over “cameras” that do not actually exist,
and others hold clapboards, to mark the scene and take number; when the “take” goes
wrong, sometimes a boom microphone dips into the frame. In so doing these outtakes create
a winking fiction that animated films are constructed according in the same manner as of
non-animated ones, with camera operators, boom operators, and assistant directors all
hovering off screen. The frisson of delight from watching them arises out of their
impossibility—an insider’s knowledge that the image of production culture they create is a
patently absurd construction.
These Pixar final crawl scenes also serve a secondary function in that they build
linkages between narrative worlds, creating a semi-permeable universe of the studio’s
characters. In one credit outtake, when Flick, the lead character in A Bug’s Life, prepares to
leap off a dandelion head, holding onto a feathery pappus, he shouts “To Infinity and
Beyond,” the catchphrase of Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story films. To a cacophony of
offscreen laughter, Flick admits sheepishly “I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. Really, can you blame
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me?” In the Toy Story 2 bloopers, two characters from A Bug’s Life, Heimlich the caterpillar,
and Flick stand on the branch of a leafy plant. After some dialogue, the camera pulls back
and reveals they are part of a larger Toy Story 2 scene, as Buzz Lightyear barges his way
through the underbrush. Monsters, Inc. also featured a blooper reel in its credits and in one
moment the toy plastic dinosaur from Toy Story auditions for a bit part. A good measure of
these instances of characters moving between films is due to Pixar’s general playfulness as a
studio. Since its first major theatrical feature, Toy Story, the company has included insider
references, or “Easter Eggs,” throughout its entire slate of films. The yellow and blue ball
emblazoned with a red star from an early Pixar short, Luxo Jr. and the delivery truck from
the Toy Story restaurant “Pizza Planet” have occurred in virtually every film over the past 15-
plus years. Yet I argue that including characters from different feature films—films that
otherwise have no connection to each other—serves to build connectivity between these
texts. Though only weakly narrative in nature, these connections and establishe the
prominence of both the Pixar brand and the characters it has created. In addition to its
obviously pleasurable effects, these sequences also serve as a reminder of Pixar’s reputation
for making a certain quality and type of animated feature films, and suggest that there are
sympathies between the films. And even if they occupy nominally different diegetic worlds,
the presence of Easter Eggs throughout the universe serves to subtly strengthen the
recognition of different Pixar films and create a relatively homogeneous worldview across a
number of different texts.
When not cross-pollinating its world with different film characters and insider
references, Pixar has also embedded the final crawl with some noteworthy aesthetic
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experiments. Underneath its closing credits, Finding Nemo (2003) displays fully rendered
scenes of ocean life in its final crawl, replete with shimmering pools of limpid light reflecting
off particulate matter, slowly undulating sea anemone, and shoals of circulating fish, amongst
others. These shots conspicuously show off its aesthetic prowess, a clear demonstration of
the lifelike realism capable of Pixar artists and their impressive array of computer animation
technologies. (As the crawl begins, fish from the main film interact with each other, and also
engage in silent comic vignettes.) The Incredibles (2004) concludes with a credit sequence
highly reminiscent of the kinetic and jagged animation style that Saul Bass developed as his
trademark in the 1950s and 1960s. The final crawls to Ratatouille (2007) and Up! (2009) are
unremarkable—the former includes a number of food-related gags involving animated rats;
the latter is a still photography epilogue of the main characters’ adventures, post-diegesis.
The 2008 feature Wall-E (2008) features a conclusion that is far more sophisticated.
The diegesis ends with a human spaceship-cum-arc returning to earth in 2805 after 700 years
travelling the cosmos. Its morbidly obese travellers re-settle a planet that has all but been
taken over by the trash and rubble left over from previous centuries of excessive
consumption; as the ship’s captain supervises water being poured on a seedling, the
overweight passengers waddle blearily out into a brave new world and an uncertain future.
The climax of the film effectively begins the history of the human race de novo, which is then
recorded in the final credits through a historical chronicle of global artistic movements. That
art history begins atavistically, with the arrival of the space-ark rendered after the fashion of
the Chauvet (or similar) cave paintings, replete with the flickering torch lights playing
variegated shadows on the wall; the crude line drawings continue as the human race
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appropriately discovers agriculture and how to create fire. Developments in irrigation are
depicted in Egyptian heiroglyphs; the invention of crop rotation is rendered in the style of
Greek Black-figure pottery drawings; the discovery of fishing in Byzantine mosaics; the
growth of the marketplace in da Vinci’s line drawings, and so on. The subsequent narrative
of the human race hits a number of technological highpoints rendered in canonical Western
aesthetic movements: Italian neoclassical architecture, French Impressionism, Seurat’s
pointillism, and Van Gogh’s sunflowers. The final credits truly represent the zenith of Pixar’s
experimentation with the final credits, because they do far more than serve as a prologue to
extend the narrative past THE END. These vignettes recapitulate both human and aesthetic
history as intertwined with one another, suggesting that the understanding of an historical
past cannot be extricated from its aesthetic rendering of it. (Indeed, the Chauvet caves
demonstrate that the first historical chronicles were pre-verbal, and fundamentally visual and
animated in nature). Moreover, the scenes depicted also create a continuum between the
visuals of the narrative (and Pixar) and the visuals contained in the credits—the final crawl is
an aesthetic evolution that lays the groundwork for, and leads directly into, the computer-
generated animation of Wall-E, positioned as its artistic apotheosis. For Pixar Studios’ films,
the final credits are a venue for light-hearted amusement, but also work for brand and world
building, as well as for aesthetic experimentation.
Over the past five years—roughly 2008 onwards—Marvel Studios has also operated
in a vein very similar to Pixar, in that it has taken the final credits and used them as vehicle
to create brand linkages. Marvel has also gone one step further. The studio has embedded
scenes in the final crawl to build a more totalised narrative universe, and as a way to
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promote future film instalments set in that universe. Post-credit material has long been used
by film franchises to build anticipation for upcoming releases, since the James Bond films in
the early 1960s. Beginning with From Russia With Love (1963), each part of the series has
concluded with the words “James Bond Will Return…” usually naming the film (Goldfinger
followed From Russia With Love, for example), but at bare minimum promising that another
film featuring the character would be forthcoming. The production companies Eon
Productions and United Artists thus planted the seed for future Bond films, generating
anticipation for the next episode at the same time that the current one was coming to an
end. (This is also no doubt familiar from the days of serialised dramas, which promised the
conclusion to The Perils of Pauline or Flash Gordon, but only in the very next episode, thus
keeping a captive audience.) In more recent years, films from other literary forms, usually
comic books, have used stingers as a way to similarly, if more obliquely, promise sequels.
Often as not, these promises have come to nothing: Daredevil (2003), Fantastic Four: Rise of
the Silver Surfer (2007), and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), for example, used post-credit
scenes to hint at subsequent films, none of which have been made due to their lack of box-
office success. The spate of Marvel Comics films released from 2008 onwards, by contrast,
have made good on those stinger promises, and used stingers to create cross-pollinated filmic
worlds and an expanded narrative universe.
The initial promotion of an expanded cinematic universe was achieved chiefly
through canny use of the final credits, and coincided with Marvel’s decision to establish for
itself an independent production future, after years of relying on deals struck with the major
studios. In April 2005, Marvel Studios, the production arm of the comic book company,
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established its financial independence by securing a $525 million line of credit with Merrill-
Lynch to distribute a set of films via Paramount.
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In contrast to the “series of unfavourable
deals struck in the 1990s,”
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which dispersed its characters to a number of other studios,
and left the company with relatively meagre profits, Marvel now controlled a number of
character properties under one production umbrella. Marvel leveraged this newly
independent position by creating a series of productions that presented the same characters
across a number of different films. Beginning with Iron Man (2007) these semi-autonomous
texts ultimately built towards the release of The Avengers (2012), which featured all of the
major characters from the previous films—Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Nick Fury, Black Widow,
and Hawkeye—working together in a common cause.
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President of production Kevin
Feige would eventually call this the “Marvel Cinematic Universe,”
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(MCU) and it was
established largely through a series of stinger scenes that appeared in the final credits. After
the conclusion of Iron Man (2008), the first MCU film, Samuel L. Jackson makes his first
appearance as Nick Fury, the character who leads the so-called “Avengers Initiative,” to
speak to Robert Downey, Jr., who plays Nick Stark. Stark then appears at the end of the
next MCU instalment, The Incredible Hulk (2008). Iron Man 2 (2010) concludes with a
stinger revealing a Norse god’s hammer inside an impacted desert crater, leading into Thor
(2011). Thor bears a post-credits scene showing a cosmic cube (and the fact that a main
antagonist is still alive) that paves the way for the first Avengers (2012) film.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe builds the relationships of characters over a series of
films, and the post-credit stingers are a semi-essential bridge indicating where the story will
progress next, by announcing certain characters and revealing telling plot details. These
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details are by no means indispensable, and can be gleaned simply by watching only the main
diegesis of each film, but the post-credit sequences make the intertextual linkages between
films much stronger, by providing additional back-story elements. The true value of these
stinger scenes, however, is largely promotional. In addition to functioning as a “cookie” to
reward loyal filmgoers, the stinger also builds anticipation for the subsequent film in the
series at the very moment that the current one ends. Marvel is able to speak to a captive
audience and market its forthcoming releases in an indirect fashion. The presence of post-
credit scenes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become so prevalent that they have
become part of the films’ horizon of expectations. It is all but guaranteed that a Marvel film
will have at least one scene during or after the credits—and in some cases, two. In the
middle of the final crawl to The Avengers, a scene foreshadows its forthcoming sequel; at the
very end, an unnecessary “cookie” shows superheroes sitting around a table, eating falafel.
From Pixar Studios to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, credits have evolved from being an
incidental, unwanted part of film because of its detraction from the art of filmmaking, to one
that is actively embraced, both for the narrative scenes they contain, and the worth of those
scenes to filmmaking marketing strategies.

Conclusion
This history of final credits is occupied with illuminating which below-the-line jobs
were recognised, in what form they were recognised, and the industrial forces motivating
that recognition. Credits first appeared on films in the early silent era to protect a
filmmaker’s copyright and prevent a studio’s intellectual property from being pirated, and to
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occasionally recognise film actors only when the vagaries of the film market make them
financially expedient. Opening credits grew in the late 1920s in response to the addition of
sound to film, and served as a way to highlight the technical expertise required to make this
more complicated genre of films, but they occlude much of the actual labour that goes into
film. Further into the studio period, crafts credits evolve according to the individual
importance of various positions. The Production Designer title, granted to William
Cameron Menzies by David O. Selznick, emerges out of Selznick’s desire to maintain as
much creative control over the film as possible, but the credit is subsequently used by the
Society of Motion Picture Art Directors as a way to legitimate its guild, and to grant greater
esteem to the Hollywood art department in general. Until the mid-1950s, credits are almost
exclusively limited to the beginnings of films; experiments like those by Orson Welles, where
he reads the final credits aloud, were tolerated only because of Welles’ extraordinary ability
to secure creative control from RKO. Credits become far more important during the post-
Paramount decrees era, when the routinised production arrangements of the studio era
break down into more freelance, ad-hoc productions—collaborations formed in service of
individual films, and then dissolved and reformed with different personnel for subsequent
projects. Without the institutional memory of studios to keep track of individual below-the-
line contributions to a motion picture, credits after the Paramount decrees become the only
reliable record of crafts workers’ professional achievements, prompting many below-the-line
guilds to pressure for greater credit recognitions. Credits again grew in the 1970s in response
to the higher demand for sound and special effects; over the next decade, filmmakers began
to insert semantic content into the final credits, either in the form of parody credits, or
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smaller vignettes directed towards audiences. Though they originally took the form of
“outtake” reels or short skits parenthetically related to the main narrative, these so-called
stingers assumed greater importance in the mid to late-2000s and were used, especially by
Marvel, as a way to build narrative and promotional linkages between different films. Thus
credits have come full circle: beginning with copyright protection to increase profits, moving
towards greater recognition of labour at greater expense to studios, they have now been
recuperated as a way to display film content that will indirectly help a film’s bottom line.
Studying below-the-line credits is primarily a study of industrial and artistic labour
practice, but a more nuanced theoretical underpinning ultimately subtends it: the
relationship of the final crawl both to the film proper, and to the constituencies that watch
them. The first I would call the credits’ semantic imperative, and the second its audience
imperative, but the two are enmeshed with one another. The final crawl is generally
understood as semantically impoverished with respect to the narrative proper, and is, with
very few exceptions, given even less aesthetic consideration than even the opening titles
(which themselves are not always given design treatment equivalent to a Bass, Binder,
Brownjohn, or Ferro). Listing primarily below-the-line workers, the final credits possess
comparatively little interest for a lay public, and accordingly critical discourse—whether
coming from audiences at large, or from journalists—has been overwhelmingly against their
presence in films. As the number and type of credits shown on screen increased over the
years, so too has the spleen vented against them, with many column inches written criticising
the arrogance of film professionals with the gall to seek public, onscreen recognition for their
work. There are momentary exceptions to this trajectory; credit creep is tolerated insofar as
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it advances the cinema’s technical artistry. The emergence of credits for sound in the late
1920s, colour in the 1940s, special effects in the late 1970s, and computer-generated
imagery in the late 1990s were generally tolerated because they somehow enhanced the
experience of watching movies, suggesting that labour that produces overt spectacle is valued
far more than labour that does not draw attention to itself. Yet the overwhelming discourse
within the industry and its critics is firmly against increased recognition for below-the-line
professionals. Overwhelmingly, gains made by crafts workers having their work credited are
offset by a public relations setback; an increase in professional recognition and esteem within
the industry is inevitably accompanied by charges of prototypically Hollywood egotism.
When below-the-line credits appeared at the beginning of motion pictures, this discord is
perhaps understandable. Opening credits present a delay of the narrative commencing, and
intrude into the diegesis, because they break the fictional illusion of the screen. Yet the
vitriol against their presence continued more or less unabated even beyond the mid-1950s,
when crafts credits migrated from the beginning of the film to the end and presented no such
narrative disruptions. Expressed another way, staying until the very end (well after THE
END) is a purely voluntary exercise. There is no external compulsion to make general
audiences or film critics sit through an extended litany of barely decipherable job titles and
their accompanying names, so I would argue that the vitriol extended is far in excess of the
actual, tangible annoyance experienced by any individual audience member. The rhetoric of
disenchantment far outstrips any actual disenchantment.
This vitriol has expanded as the type of credits granted to people during the final
crawl moves further and further away from a direct and tangible contribution to the film at
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hand. On the one hand, when credits in this contemporary moment have expanded to
include personnel who work in the relatively recently created fields of computer animation
technology, the expansion is apparently tolerable. But when credits evolve to include those
not “properly” considered a necessary part of the film’s production, that tolerance
disappears. At the outset of this chapter, I recounted how Randy Kennedy wrote with great
opprobrium in The New York over the number of new credits that had appeared at the tail
end of certain films. He cited Rick Sparr, a vice president for the now-defunct Pacific Title
and Art Studio, the company responsible throughout its history for assembling many of
cinema’s opening titles and final crawls. Kennedy writes that Sparr “and other in the
business have wondered where it will end,” referring to the proliferation of credits that had
begun to appear, including: drivers, craft services, a masseuse (for The Matrix), a helicopter
pilot (“most big budget productions nowadays seem to have one”), a Romanian Army liaison
aid and a food stylist (for Cold Mountain).
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A figure like a masseuse seems to have little
direct and quantifiable contribution to the picture, because they work indirectly, tending to
the bodies of actors and stunt performers who appear on screen. Yet an argument could be
made for a masseuse’s inclusion, because without their physical therapy, these performers
might not be able return to work after injury, thus delaying the progress of the picture.
Whatever the discourse that surrounds their inputs, production companies have clearly
decided that it is in their interest to recognise these contributions, likely because it is
expedient. Film history is populated with stories of people outside the film industry willing
to contribute various goods and services in exchange for nothing more than film credit. Janet
Maslin, for one, wrote in the New York Times of The Kennedy Galleries in Manhattan that
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made a practice of loaning art works to films, most notably The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985),
in exchange for nothing more than screen credit. Screen credit has frequently become a form
of payment in and of itself, and therefore have become part of the working economy of the
film industry. Established credits hold the promise of a future date when these services might
be rendered in exchange for money, and as such are tolerated as good as (or in lieu of money)
by those seeking entry into the film industry. To this expanded register of peripheral film
contributors in the final crawl, we might add another curious list that have no financial
considerations whatsoever, this from the ranks of Pixar films: production babies. The first
list of production babies, i.e., children born to cast and crewmembers or their spouses during
the production of a given film, appeared at the end of Toy Story (1995), and Pixar has done
so for every film since. Ideologically, it creates Pixar as a company considerate of the private
lives of their employees, recognising that their lives are more than the sum total of their
professional work. As one of Pixar’s directors, Lee Unkrich noted, “If you ask any of us
which movie we were making when one of our kids was born, we’ll be able to tell you
instantly. It’s like our family lives are permanently woven into the movies,” thus establishing
a family-friendly credo for a studio notable for creating family-friendly films.
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These
children, significantly I argue, are listed by first name only, and the names of their parents do
not appear; from a semantic standpoint, because of their manifest non-specificity, these
names would only have meaning to those who are involved in the production. This creates a
different regime of reading and interpreting final credits, because they are clearly not directed
to a general public audience, but rather to the specific community of filmmakers that
worked on a specific film. While the purpose of listing Production Babies is plainly evident,
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the individual names themselves are of no import to outside audiences (except, perhaps for a
child ostentatiously named “Bosco,” whose name in the above article was gently ridiculed by
the San Francisco Chronicle
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). Admittedly, this is an extreme example, but it is a fulcrum to
leverage reconsider the intended audience for, and the textual semantics of, the final crawl.
A study of final credits is important because it changes the vectors of semantic
reading in film. The theoretical models that seek to understand the structure and function of
film credits—most notably, the literary paratextual model bequeathed by Gerard Genette,
and subsequently adopted to the cinema by Leo Charney and others—presupposes that
credits operate in continuum with the film proper. They maintain that credits are important
for welcoming audiences into the diegesis and easing the ruptures in transition from the
diegetic to the nondiegetic world; credits are therefore in continuum with the film proper,
and part of the same syntactic-semantic framework.
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In this framework, film producers are
creators of a film syntax directed outwards towards audiences, who are responsible for
decoding its semantics; both credits and diegesis are directed outwards to a broader public. I
argue instead that credits create a sublte break in the seamless continuum of semantics
emanating from creators to audiences. In light of the importance to professional careers
credits are instead turned semantically inwards, not outwards, meant to be meaningful
primarily to those within the film industry. The creators of film produce a syntax in credits
that moreover does not need the same level of decoding, because the semantics of various
job titles and credits are already very well known to those with established careers. (Two
other chapters of this dissertation have also established a framework for different semantic
vectors. Chapter Two presents title sequences, which are a case of mixed syntax—credits
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directed inwards towards the industry, and artwork directed outwards to a general public so
as to make the credits palatable. Chapter Three explores the esoteric internal semantics of
writing and directing credits that arose during the possessory credit dispute.) The anger and
opprobrium brought forth by writers and the lay public over film credits is symptomatic of
misconstruing the fundamental syntactic-semantic register. These groups are bristling about
being “forced”
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to watch a progression of names largely not intended for them. In fact, the
contemporary trend
142
of inserting creative content into the final crawl is intended to direct
some of its semantic register back towards the audience so that they will partially attend to
the litany of names scrolling up the screen. But these fragments of textual information are far
less relevant than the ostensible drudgery of job titles and the names associated with them;
these credits are far more important to industry professionals than they are to lay film
audiences. With these observations in mind, scholarship on credits should resist assimilating
the final crawl into a rhetorical continuum with diegesis, or indeed the opening credits. Its
semantics are directed inwards, towards a completely different audience. Credits are a
concession to the needs of crafts workers, and are intended almost exclusively for them.

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Chapter Four Notes

1
Randy Kennedy, “Who Was That Food Stylist? Film Credits Roll On,” New York Times, 11
January 2004, N1, N21.
2
Kennedy, “Who Was,” N1.
3
Kennedy, “Who Was,” N1.
4
Kennedy, “Who Was,” N21.
5
Jane Galbraith, “X File: Those Credits Keep Going and Going and Going and…”, Los Angeles
Times. 22 November 1992, 22.
6
Chris Chase, “What’s a Gaffer, Anyway?”, New York Times, 3 June 1984, H1.
7
Marjory Adams, “Behind it All, the Producer,” Boston Globe, 30 May 1972, 20.
8
Joe Schoenfeld, “Time and Place,” Variety (D), 19 July 1956, 2.
9
Jacob Cooper, “Credit Titles Turn Problem: Studios Tackle Elimination of Names Preceding
Film,” Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1930, B11.
10
Gordon Trent, “Screenalities,” The Billboard, 28 October 1933, 23.
11
Glendon Allvine, “Releasing Our Copy According to Film Methods,” New York Tribune, 10
November 1918, C5.
12
Jacques Derrida, writing in Echographies of Television, says 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.)
13
Stam also posits that there are other approaches that have caused the current state of textual
analysis to be fraught and contested: “biblical exegesis, ninteenth-century hermeneutics and
philiology, the French pedagogical methods of close reading….Umberto Eco’s study of the ‘open
work’, Roland Barthes’s distinction between ‘work’ and ‘text,’ Althusser’s and Macharey’s
(Freudian) notion of ‘sympotmatic reading,” etc. But I would argue that the New Criticism turn is
most relevant to and productive for the period of film that I am studying—mid-20
th
century
onwards, because it allowed the textual apparatus to be levered open and interpreted without the
overwhelming hegemony of historically or biographically deterministic readings. (Robert Stam, Film
Theory: An Introduction, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 185.)
14
Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Cultures in the New Television Economy
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.
15
Mayer, Below the Line, 4.
16
For more, see David Prindle, The Politics of Glamour. (Madison, WI: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 1988). Prindle illuminates that when film actors chose the Screen Actors Guild as
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their name, “guild” was deliberately used because it “harked back to medieval associations of artisans”
(22), and thus elevated their craft above the dross of mere “work.”
17
Camera operators eventually became below-the-line workers, as the importance of the image gave
way to the primacy of the voice in actors’ performance, but cinematographers are generally more
known as above-the-line personnel, as they straddle the line between artistry and technical craft.
18
As Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener have argued, the cinema “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.”
(Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 18.) And as their “profuse presence” is “noticed as little as possible,” the work of
Hollywood labour is effectively minimised or erased from the screen.
19
The following history is explored in greater detail in the introduction.
20
Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2001), 80.
21
“More Credits,” The Hartford Courant,14 October 1928, E3.
22
Robert L. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1996), 39.
23
Welles says “Here’s the cast.”
24
Carringer, p1.
25
See especially Welles 1958 interview with Andre Bazin and Charles Bitsch in Orson Welles:
Interviews, ed. Mark W. Estrin (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2002), 34-47
26
His feud with Herman J. Mankiewicz over the screenplay credit for Citizen Kane
notwithstanding.
27
“Cutting Credits,” Variety (D), 1 January 1941, 5.
28
“Citizen Kane Advertisement,” Variety (D), 8 May 1941, 5.
29
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), directed by William Dieterle, has a similar democratising
gesture. After the opening title card “A William Dieterle Production” disappears, all of the
prominent cast and crew members are lumped into two categories: “In front of the camera…” and
“in back of the camera…”, with all these names scrolling in block of text on screen. Yet none of the
individual actors or crewmembers identified with their role or job title, respectively. Instead, the
opening titles merely say that “all collaborated on the picture,” giving equal credence to creative
professionals, regardless of their official rank. In order to fulfil its contractual obligations, the roles
and job titles are shown prominently at the end of The Devil and Daniel Webster.
30
For a more detailed account, see Thomas Schatz, “The Motion Picture Industry in World War
II,” Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997)
131-168. Rick Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood 1929-1945 (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2007), 26-34. Thomas Doherty, “Hollywood’s War,” Projections of War: Hollywood,
American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993),1-15.
31
“Ban All Film Credit Titles,” Variety (D), 12 June, 1942, 1, 5.
32
“Ban All Film Credit Titles,” 5.
33
“War’s Vanity Blow—Credits to Vanish From Pictures as Film Saving Move,” Variety (W), 17
June 1942, 2.
34
“War’s Vanity Blow,” 2.
35
This heavy handed screed, with its derision for virtually all film craft, echoes a letter that was
written more than a decade earlier to the Indianapolis Star: “In the movies…a succession of
384

meaningless names is flashed on the screen in large letters. This prominence may flatter some
Hollywood temperaments, but it bores a Hoosier audience.” (Quoted in “Too Many Screen
Credits,” Billboard, 5 October 1929, 22.
36
Bosley Crowther, “Not Too Much to Ask,” New York Times, 21 July 1943, X3.
37
“Talent Groups Mull Credits to Conserve,” Variety (D), 17 June 1942, 1, 9.
38
“Industry Proposals to Conserve Raw Film Stock, Other Materials, Fail to Satisfy WPB; More
Huddles,” Variety (D), 1 July 1942, 7.
39
The timing here is a little difficult to parse, because there seem to have been two different
conceptions of production design operating simultaneously at SIP. Selznick contemplated giving
Menzies the credit “Production Designed by William Cameron Menzies” in an internal memo dated
September 1, 1937 (see below). However, that credit did not appear on screen until the film’s
release, in December of 1939. A year earlier than the release date, The Hartford Courant published
an article describing the job in different terms, in December 1938.
40
“Girl ‘Stars’ in New Kind of Film Job.” The Hartford Courant. 4 December 1938. p D1.
41
“Girl ‘Stars’,” D1.
42
“Girl ‘Stars’,” D1.
43
Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2006), 186-187.
44
Indeed, the New York Times wrote that Menzies and Wheeler, “as the scenes began to shape up
verbally…commenced their series of 3000 sketches almost after the Disney technique, indicating
background, camera angles, close-ups, and long shots, and the colors employed. (“Gone With,” Etc.-
- Or The Making Of A Movie,” New York Times, 10 December 1939, 139).
45
Quoted in Aljean Harmetz, On the Road to Tara: The Making of Gone With the Wind (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996), 99.
46
Quoted in Harmetz, On the Road to Tara, 99.
47
So prolific was Selznick’s memo output that Rudy Behlmer edited a collection demonstrating his
writing modus operandi, entitled Memo from: David O. Selznick (Hollywood, CA : Samuel F.
French, 1989).
48
“Letter from David. O. Selznick to Jock Whitney, 1 September 1937,” Jock Whitney Papers,
142.27 (“Selznick, D.O. Corr[espondence] July-August-September”). Harry Ransom Center,
University of Austin, Austin, TX.
49
“Things to Come Advertisement,” Variety (D), 29 April 1936, 4-5.
50
“Fleming Becomes Director of Gone With the Wind in Place of Cukor,” New York Times, 15
Feburary 1939, 20. “Ole ‘Woman Trouble’ Split Selznick-Cukor,” The Atlanta Constitution, 15
February 1939, 1. Philip K. Scheuer, “Gone With the Wind Rumors Fill the Air,” Los Angeles
Times, 5 March 1939, C2.
51
Harmetz, On the Road to Tara, p100.
52
Harmetz, On the Road to Tara, 158.
53
Jewell, Golden Age of Cinema, 104.
54
Harmetz, On the Road to Tara, 194.
55
Viven Leigh, “How it Feels to be Scarlett O’Hara,” Los Angeles Times, 3 September 1939, H3.
Given the machiniations of various studio’s publicity operations, it is possible the article was ghost-
written.
56
Annie Laurie Fuller Kurtz, “Work and Fun in Filming Gone With the Wind,” The Atlanta
Constitution, 26 March 1939, SM3.
385

57
“Press Representatives Discuss Wind,” The Pittsburgh Courier, 8 April 1939, 13.
58
William Cameron Menzies, “Production Designed by—”, New York Times, 1 December 1940,
X5.
59
This is gleaned from the Incorporation Ledger and Correspondence books at the Art Director’s
Guild Library. The scraps of documents and letters begins April 1, 1929, and moves through their
incorporation in May 1929. LADA Incorporation Ledger and Correspondence. Art Directors Guild
Library, Studio City, CA.
60
“Letter to Reinhard Guyot from the Executive Board of the League of Art Directors & Associates,”
12 October 1929, LADA Incorporation Ledger and Correspondence. Art Directors Guild Library,
Studio City, CA.
61
“Questionnaire,” 1 May 1929. LADA Ledger, 3.
62
Members of the SMPAD appear to have been prohibited from taking the production designer
credit on American productions, but MGM Art Director Cedric Gibbons was seemingly allowed to
take the credit on non-American films De frente, marchen (1930), La fruta amarga (1931), Révolte
dans la prison (1931), and La veuve joyeuse (1935.
63
Vincent LoBrutto, By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers (Westport, CT: Preager,
1992), 22.
64
Leo Kuter, “Production Designer?”, Society of Motion Picture Art Directors Bulletin 1.3 (March
1951): 11.
65
Kuter, “Production Designer?”, 11.
66
The Directors Guild of America has very strict definitions of who should be called a “director” in
its Minimum Basic Agreements, and has long denied the proliferation of the term in credits—music
director, dance director, etc. See Chapter Three, pages 272-3, for more on the predatory nature of
director’s credits.
67
“Seek 75% of Members Before Going to Equity,” Variety (W), 1 August 1933, 48.
68
Michael Conant, “The Paramount Decrees Reconsidered,” The American Film Industry, ed. Tino
Balio (Madison, WI: Universtiy of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 540-1
69
Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 93-4.
70
Louis Perry, and Richard Perry. A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement, 1911-1941 (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 320-3.
71
“Latyon: Why Don’t Credits Say What They Mean on TV?”, Variety (D), 28 April 1965, 42.
72
Saul Bass, “Film Titles—A New Field for the Graphic Designer,” Graphis. 16.89 (1960): 209.
73
Crowther, “Not too Much to Ask,” X3.
74
Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 197.
75
Thomas M. Pryor, “An Oklahoma! Impasse,” New York Times, 23 January 1955, X5.
76
Pryor, “An Oklahoma! Impasse,” X5.
77
Pryor, “An Oklahoma! Impasse,” X5.
78
“Film Dancers Work ‘Like Truck Drivers’,” The Sun (Los Angeles), 4 September 1955, SO12.
79
“Wolper’s IA Pact,” Variety (D), 23 October 1963, 45.
80
“P.A.’s Seek 10-Week Minimum If Prod. Budge Exceeds $500,000; Also Yen That Screen
Credit,” Variety (W), 11 November 1964, 3.
81
“Musicians Ask for Bigger Movie Cut,” The Sun (Los Angeles), 17 March 1968, D14.
82
“Society of Indies Reps on Trust Fund,” Variety (W), 12 May 1965, 20.
386

83
Vance King, “Crafts Workers Credit Check Goes Down the Drain by Default,” Variety (D), 14
May 1974, 1.
84
King, “Crafts Workers,” 1, 8.
85
“New Policy for Screen Credits Is Evolved at ABC-TV; No Sluffoff,” Variety (W), 29 October
1952, 32.
86
“The Black Angel Review,” Variety (D), 2 April 1957, 14.
87
George Rosen, “TV Crawl, Promo & The Plug: How to Ruin a Television Show,” Variety (W),
29 November 1961, 27.
88
Rosen, “TV Crawl,” 27.
89
For more, see the case of Ray Heindorf in Chapter 2, also: “Music Director Names Studio in
$220,000 Suit,” Los Angeles Times, 19 October 1954, 22.
90
“Layton: Why Don’t Credits Say What They Mean?”, Variety (W), 28 April 1963, 42.
91
“ABC Chief Gives Boost to ‘Clean’ Airwaves,” Los Angeles Times, 22 June 1967, D13.
92
“ABC to Combat Clutter Even if NAB Code Won’t,” Variety (W), 5 July 1967, 25.
93
See: Robert Sklar, “Nadir and Revival,” Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the American
Movies (New York: Random House, 1994), 321-338.
94
For a thorough treatment on this period, see the introduction to David A. Cook, Lost Illusions:
American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979, ed. Charles Harpole (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000), 1-24.
95
Cook, Lost Illusions, 1.
96
Now, the only codification contained for final credits resides with the DGA: the Unit Production
Manager (UPM) is traditionally the first person credited in the final crawl; the DGA dictates who is
allowed to receive UPM credits. Eve Light Honthaner,The Complete Film Production Handbook
(Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2010), 470.
97
Sklar, Movie-Made America, 325.
98
Bill Cosford, “Movie Titles: Time to Give Due Credit,” Boston Globe, 26 July 1981, A13.
99
“Superman Reivew,” Variety, 13 December 1978, 3.
100
Gene Siskel, “Too Many Cooks Spoil the Froth: Sloppy Superman is a Fun But Fumbling
Film,” 15 December 1978, E1.
101
Superman was filmed in London, England; Alberta, Canada, and Los Angeles, California,
meaning that IATSE did not have sole jurisdiction over below-the-line labour that worked on the
film, and therefore had no claims to having its logo emblazoned in the final crawl.
102
“Bioff Takes Credit for Film Union Labelling,” The Washington Post, 26 October 1943, 8.
“Bioff Testifies He Forced Union Label on Films,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 26 October 1943, 3.
103
Theatrical and Television Motion Picture Area Standards Agreement of 2009. IATSE-AMPTP.
New York: Fox Printing Company, 2009.
104
Aljean Harmetz, “Technology Brings New Film Credits,” New York Times, 8 November 1982,
12. Kennedy, “Who Was,” M1.
105
Gianluca Sergi, The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (New York: Manchester
University Press, 2004), 11-35.
106
Sergi, The Dolby Era, 17.
107
Sergi, The Dolby Era, 20.
108
Sergi, The Dolby Era, 25-6.
109
Sergi, The Dolby Era, 29.
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110
The Academy gave out awards for Best Sound Effects from 1963 to 1967, and sporadically gave
out Special Achievement awards in 1975, 1977 (including Burtt for Star Wars and Frank Warner
for Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and 1979, but no such award was granted for the years in
between. “Oscar Legacy,” Accessed 12 November 2012
http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/legacy/index.html.
111
Sergi, The Dolby Era, 25-6.
112
Francis Ford Coppola, “I’m not going to mix the picture upside down!” in Michael Ondaatje,
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (New York: Borzoi Books (Alfred A.
Knopf), 2002), 52-54. Coppola misremembers, and claims the credit “Sound Designer” was
established here, but the film credits read “Sound Montage.”
113
François Thomas, “Entretien avec Walter Murch «Sound Designer»,” Positif-Revue mensuelle de
cinema, January 1989, 21. My translation.
114
Thomas, “Interview with Walter Murch,” 18. My translation.
115
Thomas, “Interview with Walter Murch,” 18. My translation.
116
Thomas, “Interview with Walter Murch,” 21. My translation.
117
Thomas, “Interview with Walter Murch,” 18. My translation.
118
Thomas, “Interview with Walter Murch,” 21. My translation.
119
Bruiteur; literally “noise-maker” or “sound-maker.”
120
Thomas, François. “Dessiner le son: apropos des premieres Rencontres europeennes cinema/son
à Nice,” Positif - Revue mensuelle de cinema, Apr 1989, 48-49. My translation.
121
Thomas, “Dessiner le son,” 49.
122
Walter Kerr, “Where Do a Film’s Credits Belong?”, 27 September 1977, 35.
123
“1941 Review,” Variety (D), 13 December 1979, 3.
124
These included: Bill Cosford, “Movie Titles: Time to Give Due Credit,” Boston Globe, 26 July
1981, A13. Fred Rothenberg, “Movie Credits: Who’s Who?” Los Angeles Times, 29 August 1982,
16. Harmetz, “Technology Brings,” C12. Jay Sharbutt, “Credit Where Credit is Overdue,” Los
Angeles Times, 29 November 1987, K2.
125
Kerr, “Where Do a Film’s Credits Belong?”, 35.
126
Paul Willemen and Noel King. “Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered,” Looks
and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 237.
127
Willemen and King, 237.
128
Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees, (Indianapolis, IN:
University of Indiana Press, 2006), 2.
129
John Corry, “TV Review; A Drama on Channel 5, Trouble With Grandpa,” New York Times, 13
August 1984, C22.
130
Roger Ebert, Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary (Kansas City, MO: Andrews MacMeel, 1999),
128.
131
The last of these, the “stinger” has been familiar as early as Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), where
the film’s antagonist, Professor Rathe, presumed dead in the finale when he falls into the icy
Thames, is revealed to be alive. He signs his name as Holmes’ familiar nemesis, “Moriarty,” in a
hotel ledger, perhaps foreshadowing a sequel that never materialised.
132
“Disney/Pixar to Premiere New Set of Animated ‘Blooper’ Outtakes for A Bug's Life in Theaters
on Dec. 18,” Business Wire (Entertainment Editors), 14 December 1998, 1, Accessed 18 November
2012.
388

http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/?url=http://search.
proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/446759956?accountid=14749
133
Pamela McClintock, “Marvel Touts Par’s Hero Worship,” Variety (D), 29 April 2005, 1.
134
Sharon Waxman, “Marvel Wants to Flex Its Own Heroic Muscles as a Moviemaker,” New York
Times, 18 June 2007, C1.
135
Borys Kit, “Marvel Outlines Slew of Superhero Projects,” Hollywood Reporter, 28 April 2006, 1.
136
Chris Hewitt, “Patriot Games,” Empire, Mar 2011, 58
137
Kennedy, “Who Was,” N21.
138
Peter Hartlaub, “Pixar Delivers, Babies Get Credit,” SF Gate, Accessed 29 November 2012
http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Pixar-delivers-babies-get-credit-3185717.php.
139
Hartlaub, “Pixar Delivers, Babies Get Credit.”
140
Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 1-5.
141
The number of times that writers take issue about being “compelled” to watch credits is
somewhat surprising, given that, in the case of the final crawl, no one is obliged to watch them.
142
Roughly 2000 to 2013, as of this writing.
389

Fig. 1: Citizen Kane advertisement. Variety, 8 May 1941, 5.
THANKS TO
EVERYBODY WHO GETS SCREEN
CREDI T FO R "CITIZEN KANE"
AND THANKS TO THOSE WHO DON'T:
TO ALL THE ACTORS
THE CREW
THE OFFICE
THE MUSICIANS
EVERYBODY
AND PARTICULARLY TO MAURICE SEIDERMAN,
THE BES T MAKE-UP MAN IN THE WORLD.
390
CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION

This dissertation, Film Credit, has taken marginalised or discarded elements of the
film text—the opening titles and final crawl—and shown them to be elements worthy of
serious academic enquiry. Out of this effort, we come to understand that credits are not
merely the brackets to the diegesis, but can be parsed and deconstructed on their own terms.
They are inflected with legal, aesthetic, and political economy discourses that remain
somewhat indecipherable to the lay public, for although credits are plainly displayed on the
screen as textual inscriptions—which is to say, as written names and job titles—the great
importance of seemingly small semantic differences plays out in the semi-private and private
arenas of union collective bargaining and individual contractual negotiations. During the
course of these transactions, various stakeholders in the film industry assume bargaining
positions related to credit that are poorly understood by those outside the film industry, and
equally misconstrued even by those interlocutors, such as trade paper journalists from Variety
or The Hollywood Reporter, whose responsibility is to communicate the intricacies of film
business to a broader public. For these reasons, credits have come to be widely understood
as a craven conceit unduly fixated on by creative professionals, who, as far as public discourse
is concerned, desire them to assuage over-inflated egos. Such a rhetorical environment
surrounding credits forestalls any investigation of their mechanics and closes off debate. It
denies the fact that credits are vitally important to the careers of creative professionals, and
draws attention away from the variegated and complex aesthetic experiments that credits can
display. This dissertation seeks to re-invigorate this debate, and come to understand a film’s
opening credits and final crawl as objects which are multi-textured and semantically rich in
391
their own right, notwithstanding differences in the form and content of the narratives they
surround.
This dissertation has used film credit to re-examine some of the settled truths of
cinema studies scholarship. In arguing that credits should be read and interpreted according
to different semantic strategies, this work’s goal is to inaugurate academic reconsideration of
approaches to film texts, especially the sense of where the textual object begins, and where it
ends. The opening titles and final crawl challenge the established wisdom that the beginnings
and endings of films—that is, the material that appears on screen before the narrative starts,
and the content that lingers after THE END—are not ancillary artefacts or superficial
addenda, but rather elements that reveal a great deal about the film and television industries.
Credits help us to understand what these industries value and what they diminish, what they
champion and what they leave behind. Simple changes in the semantics or ordering of
credits—as in 1995, when writers leapfrogged producers in the opening titles and became
the last credit to appear before the director’s
1
—indicate more than just a petty fight
amongst egotistical professionals. They communicate the ascent of one creative input
(writers) at the expense of another (producers), and ultimately a bargaining reversal for the
writing profession, which has traditionally found itself at the mercy of producers. As opposed
to more top-down more formulations focussing on the practice of filmmaking at an industry-
wide level, delving deeply into the historically evolving meanings of credits gives a more
thoroughly nuanced understanding about how media industries work, and provide greater
insight into how film texts are created: through the fraught push-pull of negotiations
between employers and employees. Credits are an under-appreciated determinant in—and
392
motor of—many media industry practices. This dissertation has ventured to incorporate
their effects across the entire professional ecology of creative labour that works both above
and below the line.
There still remain areas of film credit that warrant further exploration. From an
aesthetic standpoint, opening titles developed significantly since their modern incarnation in
the 1950s with Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Pablo Ferro, but many
other designers produced work that is equally worthy of study. Stephen Frankfurt for
example, briefly alluded to at the conclusion of Chapter Two, made significant contributions
to both title design and film publicity, and was instrumental in further developing the
convergence between these two realms with the films such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968),
Network (1976), All That Jazz (1979), and Sophie’s Choice (1982). Others, including
Canadian animator Richard Williams also made valuable contributions to title design, as did
DePatie-Freleng Enterprises,. Another chapter could be written about their work. The last
twenty years has also witnessed particularly acute growth in the art and business of opening
titles, both in the form of individual practitioners and production companies commissioned
to create title sequences. Beginning with Goldeneye (1995), Daniel Kleinman assumed the
mantle of designing the James Bond titles from Maurice Binder, and has created sequences
for six out of the last seven Bond films (excepting Quantum of Solace) through Skyfall (2012);
Kyle Cooper has distinguished himself with a number of opening credit sequences, including
Seven (1995), Mission: Impossible (1996), The Mummy (1999), Spider-Man (2002), Iron Man
(2008) and over a hundred more. Cooper founded the company Imaginary Forces in 1996 to
capitalize on demand for his services after Seven,
2
and is widely credited with being
393
responsible for this more recent demand for title sequence design and designers, from the
mid-1990s to this writing in 2013. In this period, titles evolved from an artisanal bearing,
where optical shots and effects predominated, to an era characterised by reliance on
computer generated graphics, imagery, and effects, assembled by industrially-minded
production houses. Numerous other companies have formed to meet this demand, including
Picture Mill and MK12. A burgeoning fan culture has mushroomed alongside this increased
importance and prevalence of titles in feature films. Websites such as the “Movie Titles Stills
Collection” curate an ad hoc history of film main titles from 1920 to the present,
3
while “Art
of the Title” and “Forget the Film, Watch the Titles”
4
dedicate themselves to a looser
collection of “the best in title design,” and present best-of/year-in-review lists that chronicle
the year’s cinematic offerings, but only in terms of opening credit sequences, irrespective of
the films they introduce. The growth of these informal communities firmly establishes credits
as a highly pleasurable part of film spectatorship. Title art has also been given a more official
imprimatur with the Museum of Modern Art’s event “Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design” in
November 2011,
5
and the Los Angles County Museum of Art’s exhibition on Bond titles,
“… is James Bond,” that displayed June to September, 2013.
6
These Internet archives; the
fan culture that visits them; and the high culture, prestigious forums of MoMA, LACMA,
and other art museums, have enacted in the sphere of public reception what this dissertation
asserts within academic discourse: credits have truly become autonomous objects to be
consumed, circulated, and celebrated for their own logic and aesthetics.
From the standpoint of media industries labour and its concomitant legal discourses,
the internecine conflicts over credits have by no means abated. In 2004, the Directors Guild
394
of America relaxed some of its claims on the possessory credit when it ensured that first-time
directors would not be allowed to claim the credit “A Film By…” and enacted a series of
guidelines for studios when weighing whether or not to grant the possessory credit to
established directors.
7
Still, these guidelines’ non-binding status means that the DGA and
the Writers Guild of America remain at odds on their respective positions vis-à-vis who
should be allowed possessory credits. Both guilds claim for themselves the exclusive right to
grant or deny possessory credits, and the WGA moreover continues to proclaim its
opposition to directorial possessory credits as a non-effecting boilerplate for its minimum
basic agreements.
8
Suffice to say that as long as there are competing claims over professional
reputation and prestige, (and their associated financial compensation) in the media
industries, credits will continue to be a fraught and contested space in the discourse of film
employment. Such contestation was dragged into public prominence in 2008 with
arbitration over the film Leatherheads. When George Clooney was denied writing credit on
the film—in arbitration, the WGA determined that only original writers Duncan Brantley
and Rick Reilly should receive credit—he did everything he could short of quitting the
WGA. Clooney went “fi-core,” or financial core, which means, “a member is still technically
a member of the WGA, but has limited rights within the guild.”
9
Quitting the WGA would
mean that Clooney would have been ineligible to work on future guild productions, thus
going “fi-core” was a way for the otherwise pro-union actor/director to express displeasure
with the WGA while still remaining under its auspices. Such a situation articulates the
delicate position of détente that many artists have with respect to credit, and recalls
Winston Churchill’s dictum regarding democracy, which is “the worst form of government,
395
except all those others that have been tried from time to time.”
10
Credit, especially as it is
wrapped up in arbitration within guilds, and contested between unions from without,
conjures deep ambivalence amongst industry stakeholders. Yet it despite its flaws, the
regimes of who gets credit for what work (creative or otherwise), and in what form still
persist, borne on the momentum of years of common custom.
This dissertation has framed the discourse of credit predominantly in terms of film
labour, namely those who are the employees of film industry.
11
Work still remains to be
done on the role of the producer credit in Hollywood filmmaking, a job title that has been
under-defined within the film and ill-understood from without. As early as 1950, film
producers attempted to organize themselves into a collective bargaining organisation, the
Screen Producers Guild,
12
and in 1962, merged with television producers to form the
Producers Guild of America (PGA).
13
Such a move was curious on two fronts: first, the
Producers are already represented by the Association of Motion Picture and Television
Producers (AMPTP), a body that negotiates rates and employment conditions with talent
guilds and labour unions; second, their designation as a guild seems to be at odds with their
status within the film industry. By laying claim to the “guild” title, producers rhetorically
align themselves with employees of the film industry like actors and directors, and yet the
producer’s work is more properly sided on the employer’s side of the equation, because they,
by and large, hold a film production’s purse strings. The variations in the types of producers
as officially codified—executive producers, associate producers, assistant producers, line
producers, and co-producers—and also as more colloquially understood. Sarah Cray, writing
in “Produced by,” the PGA’s quarterly magazine, wrote of the distinction between those
396
who championed the efforts of “creative producers,” and those who believe that the work of
a producer should not be considered creative at all.
14
More recently, the Academy of Motion
Picture of Arts and Sciences has become embroiled in controversy over producer credits. In
2005, the Academy reduced the number of producers allowed to receive “Best Picture” by
one, from four down to three, which touched off a controversy as to who should receive
statuettes for the Paul Haggis film Crash (2006).
15
Such limitations similarly embroiled the
producers of The Hurt Locker (2008), which prompted the Academy to invoke a special
provision allowing four producers to be credited—four producers who eventually received
Best Picture Oscars.
16
(Indeed, much research also remains to be done into the filmic side of
what David F. English called “the economy of prestige” that surrounds credits and the
Academy Awards given to (or denied) credited (or uncredited) creative professionals.)
Credits are thus a prime entry point into understanding the role that producers play in film
and television production—roles that have heretofore been insufficiently scrutinised in
academic literature.
These possible future explorations have coalesced around the commonplace notion of
film and television professionals being granted credit, yet there also exists realms of industry
employment where individuals are denied credit—or indeed, jobs where their employ is
explicitly predicated on a shadow economy of individuals not receiving credit. For example,
Vicki Mayer has written in her book, Below the Line, about casting agents, whose labour
does not appear in the credit lists of reality television shows, largely because doing so ruins
the impression of immediacy and truth that is nominally the rhetorical register of the
genre.
17
Script doctors too are a vital contributor to motion pictures, but their labour is
397
systematically erased from films’ public credit records. Prominent figures such as Joss
Whedon,
18
Quentin Tarantino, John Sayles,
19
Carrie Fisher, and even Billy Wilder
20
have
been employed to perform “punch-ups” on various films whether to improve dialogue, clarify
character motivations, or change story elements. They usually perform the work for a flat
fee, traditionally sign away their rights to screen credit, and generally decline to discuss even
the identity of the films they have polished. But even so, knowledge of their work tends to
circulate through the film industry; Whedon for instance, script-doctored Speed (1994),
which he then parlayed into a $100,000 per week job polishing Waterworld (1995), despite
receiving no public recognition for his work.
21
The arrangement is mutually profitable for
both the studios and the writers themselves. Producers are able to maintain the fiction of
authorship because the details of script doctoring rarely become public, and the writers
themselves are highly paid for a relatively short period of work. The tradition of regimes
where creative professionals are denied credit, especially script doctors will prove very fertile
ground for further studies.
Framed against all of these more sober discourses, we should be reminded that credits
are places in film that generate considerable moment of visual and auditory enjoyment. In
that surpassingly short moment between the curtain drawback and the drama’s beginning,
the opening titles present a moment of pure possibility. Much like a trailer, the titles present
the best, most kinetic version of the film they point to, and builds a frisson of anticipation
that has yet to be tarnished by an awkward cut, a poorly executed camera movement, or a
sub-standard actor’s performance. The kaleidoscope of imagery and cascade of music in the
opening titles can frequently—and sadly—be the best part of a movie; in other words, rare is
398
the film that can live up to the enthralling potential promised by its opening titles. The final
crawl too works in service to the narrative just passed, the denouement that follows the
denouement—a moment to ease from the diegesis back into the real world, the closing
credits forming a twilight to ease from silver screen’s drama to the humdrum world that
awaits outside the theatre. And though very few stay until the end of the final crawl, those
who do are rewarded with a small morsel for their troubles, in the guise of Roger Ebert’s
“Monk’s Reward” which functions as a small token of the producers’ thanks. The “credit
cookie” (also Ebert’s) at the end is recompense for a spectator who has stayed to watch the
only evidence of the contributions made by the hundreds of professionals who labour semi-
anonymously in the service of a motion picture. As this dissertation has demonstrated,
credits, seemingly straightforward and transparent, display complex visual experiments, are
organised by intricate legal manoeuvrings, present the evidence of occluded Hollywood
labour. But underneath it all, a film’s credits can also be instruments of considerable
pleasure.
Credits have also been the subject of considerable acrimony, between individuals
engaged on the same film project; between professionals and the guild that organises them;
and even between guilds that negotiate on behalf of various competing groups of talent.
These debates have consistently been framed in the most unseemly rhetoric, because
arguments over credit wording semantics lend themselves far too easily to charges of egotism.
This dissertation moves the discourse of credits away from this more mercenary aspect—to
temper charges of petty squabbles by directing attention to how such infighting is brought
about by the strictures of media industries, and in turn influences how those industries. Yet
399
this highly passionate investment in credit by film and television professionals, is the subject
matter of this dissertation. Without that libidinal investment in credits, there would be no
court cases to excavate, no press-release invective to chronicle, and no sense of how credit
insinuates itself into the very foundation of the community of media professionals. And as
the landscape of filmmaking and distribution changes to embrace developments in digital
release venues, and as more workers fall outside the purview of traditional union and guild
job titles, the fraught discourse of credits will no doubt remain alive and relevant. The film,
television and new media industries will be debating the meaning and importance of credits
for the foreseeable future, which will afford ample opportunities to chronicle its story for
years to come.

400
Chapter Five Notes

1
Greg Spring, “Producers Bridle Over Who Gets Top Billing,” Los Angeles Business Journal, 17.15
(10 April 1995): 9.
2
Hilary Atkin, “Giving Credit to Title Artists,” Variety, 31 May 2001, A4.
3
“Movie Titles Stills Collection,” Accessed 14 January 2013 http://annyas.com/screenshots/.
4
“Art of the Title,” Accessed 14 January 2013 http://www.artofthetitle.com/. “Watch the Titles.”
Accessed 14 January 2013 http://www.watchthetitles.com/. Watch the Titles has also produced a
two-DVD compendium of exemplary titles designs, and nine short documentaries on prominent
contemporary title designers. Accessed 14 January 2013. http://watchthetitles.com/articles/00194-
Watch_the_Titles_DVD_set_out_now
5
“The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and MoMA Present Saul Bass: A Life in Film
& Design.” The Museum of Modern Art. Accessed 14 January 2013.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film_screenings/13752
6
“. . . Is James Bond.” Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Accessed 14 January 2013.
http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/james-bond
7
Dave McNary, “Studios Back DGA Ban on ‘Film by’ Credits,” Variety, 24 March 2004, 2.
8
For more, please see Chapter Two, “The Three Little Words (“A Film By...”) that Menaced
Hollywood: The WGA, the DGA, the AMPTP and the Battle for the Possessory Credit.”
9
Michael Fleming, “Clooney’s Union Gap,” Variety, 4 April 2008, 1, 18.
10
Winston S. Churchill, Hansard Parlimentary Debates, 11 November 1947. Parliamentary
Debates, Commons, Vol. 444 (1947–48), col 207. Accessed 15 January 2013.
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1947/nov/11/parliament-bill
11
However, the director’s status as employee is certainly up for debate, given the number of
supervisory decisions she has to make.
12
New Producers Guild Sez it Won’t Infringe on AMPP,” Variety, 12 April 1950, 3, 15.
13
“Producers Guild of America History,” Accessed 16 January 2013.
http://www.producersguild.org/?page=history
14
Sarah Cary, “Knowing How to Know What You Know: The Care and Feeding of the Creative
Process,” Produced By, Awards 2006 Issue, 46-51.
15
“Casting Directors Should Crash the Oscars (Editorial),” Back Stage East, 9-15 March 2006, 4.
16
Paul Gaita, “Producers’ Credits Determined for Blind Side, Hurt Locker in Time for Oscars,” Los
Angeles Times Blog, Accessed 24 January 2013.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/awards/2010/02/producers-credits-determined-for-blind-side-
hurt-locker-in-time-for-oscars.html
17
For more, see Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television
Economy (Durham, NC: Duke Univerity Press, 2011), 103-138.
18
Richard Corliss, “Whedon: Miracle Surgery,” Time, 25 July 1994, 60-62.
19
Rachel Abramowitz, “To the Rescue?” Los Angeles Times, 27 October 2002, E1.
20
“Billy Wilder: What Price for 007?” Variety, 12 May 1965, 3.
21
“Rewrite Whizkid,” Variety, 1-7 August 1994, 4.
401
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