TV Show credits: Written by , or Teleplay by...Story by...

We've all seen credits on TV shows that usually are along the lines of "Produced by...", "Written by..." and "Directed by..."

I've seen many shows over the years where instead of the "Written by..." credit, it's "Teleplay by..." and "Story by..." instead.

Can someone explain that to me - what exactly does that mean?
Also, does it have to be phrased that exact way due to some Union regulation?

 

Sometimes the creator of the story, for whatever reason, doesn't actually write the script. But it's his story. Hence, "story by...". The person they hire to create a script from the story writes the teleplay. He gets "teleplay by...". And there's any other number of possibilities involving union rules, contracts, etc when dealing with writers who wrote a script that wasn't up to snuff and was turned over to someone else for a rewrite.

 

Ego and power at play too

 

You'll often time see written by if the writer originated the story as well as worked on the script. There's also writers that never get credited as well who might work on dialog, rewrite scenes, etc.

The rule of thumb I was told was that for every writer credited imagine three more who weren't.

Teleplay usually means it's adapted from another medium or another script thst served only as the story and the teleplay writer may have done more than just a rewrite--there's a significant amount of new material as well.

Story could be an actual story, script outline that served as the springboard for the script.

 

The Writers Guild of America has very specific rules on what "Written By," "Story By," and "Teleplay By" actually mean:

http://www.wga.org/subpage_writersresources.aspx?id=181

You get a "Story By" credit when you come up with the barebones idea with minimal dialogue, usually just a treatment of 3-4 pages (sometimes more). A "Teleplay" credit goes to the person who expanded the story into a script. If you came up with the original story idea and wrote the script, then you get the all-encompassing "Written By" credit. What's tricky is when the scriptwriting chores are split between multiple people. When there's an ampersand ("Joe Blow & Jane Smith"), they write together and split the money. If there's multiple writers, they get equal chunks depending on whether they're part of the team. For example, for "Written by Jimmy Jones and Joe Blow & Jane Smith," Jimmy Jones would get half and Joe & Jane would each split the half that's left.

I know of cases -- most famously, with Superman -- where a new writer came in later on and completely rewrote the original script, but they couldn't credit this writer as a writer per se due to preexisting contracts. So they'd give him the title "Creative Consultant" along with a boatload of cash. In some cases, writers are given titles of "Producer" for doing extensive rewrites. "Created by," "Developed by," and "Based on Characters by" also guarantee the creative people a certain amount of money (and sometimes residuals) for laying the groundwork for dozens or hundreds of episodes that follow.

As one example: it's widely known that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld literally rewrote every comma, semicolon, and hyphen in every script of Seinfeld since day one, but they only were generally credited as co-creators and producers. However... they also got the lion's share of the cash. There are also staff writers who are not given episodic credits but are still part of the writers room, shaping and refining the script to keep it consistent with past episodes. My joke is, there's always a "Buddy Sorrell" joke writer needed on the staff to drop in a snappy one liner here and there... even on a dramatic series.

This is a complicated area, and I don't think writers are necessarily egotistical or difficult at all. I think they have among the hardest jobs in show business, since they're starting with a blank piece of paper and literally creating every single thing you see on screen. Without them, you got nothing.