Hollywood is full of unions and stipulations. Sometimes it works in favor of the actor or director, and then there are times when it works against them. Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins and Geoff Johns actually wrote most of the finished script for the film, but the screenplay credit went to Zack Snyder and Jason Fuchs. Whether this is fair or not, it’s the business of Hollywood. How could this actually happen?
In an interview with Collider, producer Charles Roven talks about how Jenkins and Johns actually did the majority of the work on the screen play, but wasn’t able to receive any credit for actually writing the final script. According to Roven, this had to do with the writer’s guild rules:
“Really early on, before Patty came on the project, we put our toe in the water with two writers. They took completely different approaches to the material. One was the Crimean War and one was World War I, but a completely different World War I experience. We had quite a Writers Guild arbitration with a number of writers because we had a lot of writers. Then there were the preceding writers and the other incarnations of the development of Wonder Woman.
Image: Warner Bros.
But for our Wonder Woman, we didn’t like the ultimate take on those scripts, even though they’re talented guys, and Zack [Snyder] and Allan Heinberg then collaborated on a story. We had a different director on at that time, and that director — which was OK’d by the studio — brought a number of writers on. We had more writers working with — everybody had knowledge because you can’t do it with the Writers Guild without telling everybody what you’re doing and everybody has to be OK— but we had more writers working at the same time than I’ve ever done. In the history of all the movies that I’ve done, it never worked out that way before.
While there are things that most of [the other writers] contributed that are in the script, there wasn’t anybody who ended up making such a contribution that they were able to get a credit. A guy by the name of Jason Fuchs got the third position in the ‘Story By’ so it’s Zack Snyder, Allan Heinberg, and Jason Fuchs. But Allan Heinberg got the full screenplay credit.
Image: Warner Bros.
Even though after he wasn’t able to finish working — he had to go back to the TV series that he was working on — [DC Films head] Geoff Johns and Patty did a tremendous amount of collaboration. But again, based on the rules they weren’t allowed to get any credit. They did a lot of writing that stuck. So, that’s the long-winded version of the answer. We had a basic arc of a story, but scene to scene it really came together when Patty got involved.”
Roven went on to say that big elements of the final script were all additions made by Jenkins. These included the fish-out-of-water comedy, and Diana being naive.
