Spoiler alert! If you haven’t yet seen “Up In The Air” there are some plot details here that you’re probably best not knowing until they’re revealed in the film. Proceed with caution.
Over the weekend, “Up in the Air” writer-director Jason Reitman and his credited co-writer Sheldon Turner won Best Adapted Screenplay at both the Broadcast Film Critics Awards and the Golden Globes, but what should have been a great weekend for the pair, now presumptive Oscar favorites, was marred by an article in the LA Times, which talked about a lack of acknowledgment for credited writers on some of the biggest movies of the awards season.
While Michael Tolkin, who went to Anthony Minghella’s family to strike a deal to share credit with the late writer/director on “Nine,” and “Shutter Island” scribe and James Cameron protege Laeta Kalogridis, who performed uncredited writing work on “Avatar,” both feature in the piece, the bulk of it is given up to the relationship between Reitman and Turner, whose previous produced films were the prequel to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and Adam Sandler’s remake of “The Longest Yard,” as well as the now-buried “X-Men Origins: Magneto.”
The project was originally being developed by “Meet the Parents” helmer Jay Roach, whose writers struck out, at which point Turner, who had written a draft of an adaptation of Walter Kirn’s book on spec, sold it to Dreamworks, with Jason’s father Ivan Reitman set to direct. Turner was replaced fairly swiftly by Ted Griffin (“Ocean’s Eleven”), who retains a producer credit on the finished film, until eventually Reitman, a fan of the novel, took the project on.
According to the LA Times, several of Turner’s inventions survive in the finished film, including Anna Kendrick’s character (although the character was originally a man; the gender was changed by a later writer, most likely Griffin), the plot point of a fired worker committing suicide, and George Clooney’s firing spiel about ‘founding empires.’ When it came to the arbitration process, Reitman allegedly refused to share credit with Turner, until the WGA forced it on him.
Reitman doesn’t necessarily do himself any favors in public — his Twitter feed can be self-indulgent, his interview technique can be less than charming, and the face he pulled when “Avatar” won Best Picture at the Globes last night wasn’t particularly gracious (although perfectly understandable — we’d probably look the same if our film got beaten by the Blue Man Group in space). But we’ve got to say, we sort of side with him on this one. Turner’s previous credits don’t inspire a great deal of confidence in him, and the examples that his supporters have quoted to the LA Times seem to be quite minor (it doesn’t take William Goldman to realize that, if your character is travellng around on planes for most of the movie, he’s going to need someone to talk to, so the invention of Kendrick’s character isn’t exactly a smoking gun, particularly in the wrong gender). Plus, if you find Reitman’s attitude snotty, Turner’s doesn’t exactly seem a man of the people — his opening line in an interview with Script magazine says “Look, I can’t even fire my maid.”
Added to this is the fairly broken nature of the WGA arbitration process, which requires a writer-director to prove that he’s responsible for over 50% of a screenplay in order to get a writing credit at all. Which is fair enough — after all, it’s designed to protect writers from control freak auteurs, but the system currently doesn’t work, as proven by the case of “The Hangover” this summer. Original writers Jon Lucas & Scott Moore received sole credit for the screenplay of the sleeper hit, despite the fact that the draft we have (dated September 30, 2007) contains almost none of the most memorable elements; the tiger, the baby, the police car, Mike Tyson. Zach Galifianakis’ character is absent in all but name — there is an Alan, but he bears no resemblance to the final character. This is because the WGA judged that Todd Phillips, and his co-writer Scot Armstrong, hadn’t achieved the necessary level of changes to be granted any credit at all.
The first writer on an adaptation will tend to be given credit, because, when working from the same source material, it’s more likely that two independent screenplays may look similar. Now, it’s possible that Turner’s drafts are close to the film (and if anyone has a copy, we’d love to see it with our own eyes), and we’re sure he contributed to the film in some degree, but our gut tells us that the writer received credit more from WGA loopholes than from an influence on the finished movie. Yes, Reitman could be a little more mature about it all, but the whole story stinks of publicist-planted “A Beautiful Mind” style Oscar season Swift Boating to us.
