"A film by ..."

The WGA, the screenwriters' union, cringes when the director's name comes on the screen after the designation above. The root artist is the screenwriter, not the director, goes the argument. And for decades I was on the screenwriter's side of the argument.

But the more I experience making digital short films this summer, the more I feel myself moving toward the director's side of this argument. Consider the ending of Scrapple. I edited the ending today and love it -- but it's not the ending that's in the script. Indeed, the ending never worked during readings, and at the shoot we played with it and I overshot everything. Putting it together in the editing software, I cut a lot of lines and rearranged others, resulting in something that same "in spirit" but pretty different in detail from what my "screenwriter self" had written. The director won this argument, or the editor, because what results is stronger than what's on the page.

I just have fine-tuning to do in Scrapple now. I need to put it in three parts for YouTube, then assemble it whole for DVD. I like it, a definite improvement over the last one. This is the name of the game, improvement. Onward.