When Being There (1979) reached the thorny business end of Hollywood authorship, Robert C. Jones — who had substantially rewritten the screenplay during production — was initially credited by the studio (United Artists–Lorimar Productions). What followed was a bruising, formal arbitration with the Writers Guild of America that culminated in an unexpected reversal: the WGA awarded sole screen credit to Jerzy Kosiński, the author of the novel on which the film was based. For Jones, a respected film editor-turned-writer, the decision was devastating. He later said that losing that credit was a turning point — “a dark day in my life” — and believed that his writing career would have been dramatically different had the studio credit stood. The dispute is a classic example of late-1970s credit wars, when studios, authors, and the guilds collided over the commercial and career value of a single name on the marquee; the fallout effectively pushed Jones back toward editing for the remainder of his career.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
The Writers Guild Arbitration That Stripped Robert C. Jones of Screen Credit on Being There
Being There (film) / Robert C. Jones / 1970s
When Being There (1979) reached the thorny business end of Hollywood authorship, Robert C. Jones — who had substantially rewritten the screenplay during production — was initially credited by the studio (United Artists–Lorimar Productions). What followed was a bruising, formal arbitration with the Writers Guild of America that culminated in an unexpected reversal: the WGA awarded sole screen credit to Jerzy Kosiński, the author of the novel on which the film was based. For Jones, a respected film editor-turned-writer, the decision was devastating. He later said that losing that credit was a turning point — “a dark day in my life” — and believed that his writing career would have been dramatically different had the studio credit stood. The dispute is a classic example of late-1970s credit wars, when studios, authors, and the guilds collided over the commercial and career value of a single name on the marquee; the fallout effectively pushed Jones back toward editing for the remainder of his career.
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