Substantially Similar--A Blog on IP Issues, Writing and Film

Movie End Credits May Not Be a Waste of Time After All

by John Aquino on 07/12/12

Movie closing credits are really, really long.

I know because as an attorney and a writer about fact-based films, I, and my very patient and lovely wife, sit through them, if only to read the disclaimer that appears at the very end—“Although based on fact, some of the characters and events have been fictionalized….” The end credits for the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, for instance, run over nine minutes. I promise you, by the time the credits end my wife and I, the two people cleaning up for the next show, and a few other lawyers who are usually looking for their names in the credits are the only ones there.

The reason people leave as soon as the credits start is that they think the endless list of names is boring. And it often is. But there’s a recent trend to give you reasons to stay and watch the end credits, and in the hands of some filmmakers the closing credits have actually become an integral part of the film.

In movies made before 1965 or so, a film’s closing credits, if there were any, were usually limited to the cast of characters. Opening credits were typically brief—under three minutes. Almost everyone connected with the movie was a studio employee, and so only the “major” participants received a credit. But the breakup of the studio system in the 1950s resulted in a great number of independent contractors working on movies, with separate contracts and demands. This growing power of key film participants along with union requirements caused opening credits to run longer, and soon the bulk of the credits were pushed to the movie’s end. Today, not only the key grip and gaffer but everyone connected with special effects, stunt people, caterers, and the stars’ and director’s drivers and hair stylists receive a credit.

However, some filmmakers have actually used the end credits to, for example, either continue or restate the movie’s story. The 1955 film Marty, which won the best picture Oscar that year, ends promisingly but inclusively, just as the Paddy Chayefsky teleplay that he used as the basis for his screenplay had: Marty is in a phone booth calling Clara, whom he met at the dance, to ask her out. But then over the closing credits, in which the actors are identified and shown without dialogue in brief moments from the film, a song with Italianate music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Chayefsky is sung by male voices representing Angie and Marty’s other friends lamenting his absence: “What happened, what happened/Hey, Marty!/ Hey, whatever happened to you,” ending with the conclusion that Marty must be in love. The song continues the story, telling the audience that Marty has indeed happily stayed with Clara.

More recently, after Jimmy (George Clooney) and Lexie (Renee Zellweger) drive off on his motorcycle in the 2008 Leatherheads , the end credits are interspersed with photos that include their wedding picture and a portrait of crooked agent C.C. Frazier (Jonathan Pryce) sitting with Babe Ruth, showing that, having been banned from football, he did end up in baseball just as he promised. The credits at the end of X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008) suggest what ultimately happens to Mulder and Scully, and the beginning of the end credits for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) shows a birthday party that suggests redemption for the major characters.

The closing credits to the three-hour-long, all-star extravaganza Around the World in Eighty Days, the 1956 Oscar winner, liven up the process, giving the credits the title “Who Was Seen in What Scene” and Who Did What” and then showing an animated, seven-minute recap of the entire movie, identifying the actors in the order in which they appeared and the crew by functions. Another movie that recaps the entire film at the end is the 1941 Citizen Kane directed by Orson Welles, one of the greatest U.S. movies, and one in which the closing credits become an extension and a characterization of the film.

Kane ends with the camera tracking back through the fence with the “No Trespassing” sign, showing us the billowing smoke from the chimney at newspaper magnate’s estate Xanadu, and affirming our realization that this man who appeared to have everything died having nothing that mattered to him. After this gloomy end, the music by Bernard Hermann switches from funereal tones to a sprightly melody based on Kane’s campaign song in the film and, since there were no opening credits, identifies the cast and crew. The cast is shown in brief scenes from the movie, and so again the entire film is re-enacted in a few minutes. But these are not clips but restagings of the scenes. Racing through the entire movie in this manner has a comic undertone.

In the final restaging, George Coulouris playing the banker Thatcher does the scene in which Thatcher reads the letter from the young Kane. But while in the movie proper the line “I think it would be fun to own a newspaper” is read with a growl of disgust, in the credits Coulouris reads the line, repeats it, rolls his eyes to the heavens, and sighs comically

In ancient Greek theatre, the actors who performed tragic trilogies such as the Orestia followed it with a “satyr play” that satirized the themes of the tragedies. The closing credits of Kane become a satyr play for the film. It’s the reverse of the Stephen Sondheim song from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: “Tragedy today, comedy tomorrow.”

All of this is supported by Hermann’s music which has a vaudeville panache—a steady, foot-tapping beat with the brass going higher and higher. It’s as if he, Welles, the actors, and crew are telling us, “Yes, it’s a serious film. But it’s only a movie!” Welles was in a way telling William Randolph Hearst, on whose life the film was seemingly based, not to be upset by it. But it didn’t work?-Hearst attempted to have the film destroyed, literally and figuratively, probably because he didn’t stay for the closing credits and get the message.

End credits like those of Kane can characterize a film. Burt Reynolds’ comedic films like Hooper (1978) and Cannonball Run (1981) ran bloopers or outtakes during the credits. But end credits can also mischaracterize. The late Peter Sellers insisted that he did not receive an Oscar nomination for his performance in Being There (1979) because during the credits the filmmakers ran outtakes of him laughing uncontrollably. Sellers said this made Being There appear it to be a different film than it was, with another crazy, over-the-top Peter Sellers performance rather than the quieter, subdued portrayal he gave.

The last minutes of Airplane (1980) continue its wackiness with “crazy credits” sprinkled among the real ones like “Generally in charge of a lot of things—Mike Finnell;” “Author of Tale of Two Cities—Charles Dickens;” “Forseez—A Jolly Good Fellow;” “In case of tornado—Southwest corner of basement.” Mama Mia ‘s (2008) closing credits run while the principals reprise ABBA songs from the movie in 1970s getups.

Additional scenes have been sometimes added during the credits. After the credits of Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) the mystery continues as villainous schoolmaster Rathe is revealed to have survived his drowning and taken as his name that of Holmes’ future nemesis Professor Moriarty , and the villain Bullseye in shown at the end of Daredevil (2003) to be still alive although in a full body cast. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) shot two post-credit sequences to be released to different theatres.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1978) perpetuates its irreverence when after the credits Bueller (Matthew Broderick) comes out of the bathroom and says, “Are you still here? It’s over. Go home.” The musical version of Mel Brooks The Producers’ (2005) has a voiceover during the credits of Will Ferrell playing the comic Nazi Franz Liebkind telling the audience they can buy Mein Kamp on amazon.com; it follows the end credits with a musical number “Goodbye” that concludes with Brooks telling the audience to “Get out!”

An ulterior motive of the use of bloopers, additional scenes, and “crazy credits,” at the end of movies is that by keeping you in your seats there is a chance to sell you something. If nothing else, you get implicit advertising when you read about all the companies who provided products for the film during the movie. Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010) both end with a scene introducing a new character for a spin-off film.

Just like a film’s beginning usually tells you the type of film it’s going to be, a movie’s end credits can reaffirm the type of film you’ve just seen. I’m not saying this just because it’s lonely in the theatre during closing credits, but you might find something interesting if you stay.

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INDEX OF BLOG ARTICLES PUBLISHED SO FAR

by John Aquino on 07/06/12

For those of you new to this website, here is a list of articles published so far. To find a particular article, just scroll down to the title and date.

08/01/12 On the Death of Gore Vidal--Who Really Wanted to Be Mickey Rooney

07/17/12 What and Why Is Law and Literature?

07/12/12 Movie End Credits May Not Be a Waste of Time After All

07/05/12 Irreconcilable Approaches to Dealing with Early Onset Alzheimer’s

07/03/12 Legal Conference Panels and “If You Don’t Respect Your IP, No One Will

07/02/12 Our Own History Tells Us Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays

06/07/12 The Rights of Old Movie Stars

05/29/12 A Soldier's Medals: A Tribute to Robert Curren

05/24/12 Permission Fees for Use of Copyrighted Material Can Be a Big Deal

05/21/12 Life Story Rights: Do You Need 'Em?

05/21/12 Who Owns the Copyright in an Interview?

05/07/12 Using a Copyrighted Character in Internet Fan Fiction

04/30/12 Question and Answer #3: Using Copyrighted Material When the Owner...

04/25/12 Old, Unpublished Works—Who’s Got the Copyright?

04/19/12 Question and Answer #2: New Lyrics for Copyrighted Songs

04/12/12 Alan Cranston, Proud Copyright Infringer

04/11/12 Questions and Answers, #1: Recipes

03/26/12 1950: A Bad Movie Year When Filmmaking Changed Forever

03/20/12 Legal Problem Solving: It's a Wonderful Life

03/16/12 Still More on Creativity and the Open Faucet

03/11/12 Thoughts on the HBO Film "Game Change"

03/09/12 More About Artists as Teachers and Fame and One of My teachers

02/29/12 Seeing Moments of Truth on TV and Film

02/17/12 Those Who Can Do, But Should Those Who Can Teach?

02/06/12 Joint authorship: It All Comes Down to Intention

02/03/12 Campaign Songs and Copyright Infringement?

02/03/12 Salinger v. Colting: New Standard, More Questions

01/31/12 Creativity--A Primer

01/31/12 Why You Can't Really Say, It's Only a Movie

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Irreconcilable Approaches to Dealing with Early Onset Alzheimer’s

by John Aquino on 07/05/12

I am going to vary my usual procedure of writing about intellectual property, the art and practice of writing, and films and theatre, and address something that, unfortunately, too many of us are experiencing and more and more are likely to experience and that is dealing with the diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s Disease for a loved one. My perspective is that of an attorney and journalist who writes about health issues and what I write is based on personal experience with a loved one.

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive, ultimately fatal, disorder in which certain types of nerve cells in particular areas of the brain degenerate as a result of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs to treat Alzheimer’s are cholinesterase inhibitors that break down acetylcholine and offer a temporary delay in the worsening of cognitive symptoms for 50 percent of Alzheimer’s patients. They do not, however, stop the underlying neurodegeneration. Researchers have found that development of plaques and tangles may represent a fairly late-stage in the disease process.

The diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s is relatively new and is entirely dependent upon the experience, skill, and style of the physician or physicians. The problem with the diagnosis is that no one will be able to tell if it is correct until the autopsy of the patient. Through skill and experience, some physicians feel they are pretty good at telling if a patient has Alzheimer’s. Some doctors decline to give the early onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis, distrustful of the lack of certainty.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has reported that the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease is incorrect 20 percent of the time. A 2011 global study put that number at over 50 percent. Sometimes frontotemporal dementia is misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s. That’s actually not good news for the patient because FTD is actually worse than Alzheimer’s—it strikes earlier, the patients die sooner, and there is no treatment. Or it could be normal pressure hydrocephalus, or NPH, a progressive brain disorder that so closely mimics Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases that many doctors are said to miss it 5 to 10 percent of the time. NPH has been known to be treatable through surgery.

In April 2012, the FDA approved a test to detect the presence of proteins in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer’s. The absence of the proteins indicates that the patient likely does not have Alzheimer’s and that the symptoms are related to something else. The presence of the proteins may or may not indicate that the patient is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease since the proteins have also been found in non-Alzheimer’s patients. The test uses a chemical called florbetapir, known by the brand name Amyvid, which is a radioactive agent that tags clumps of a sticky substance called an amyloid. Amyloid proteins are hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. The chemical, which costs $1,600 per dose, then is detected using a brain imaging technique called positron emission tomography, known as PET scans. The test became available in limited quantities in June 2012. Most insurance companies do not currently cover it.

Our loved one was diagnosed in 2009 with either early onset Alzheimer’s or “an early onset of the forgetfulness we all experience as we get older.” He immediately began telling people that he had Alzheimer’s. I remember my brother Jerry, who is also an attorney, saying that our loved one acted as if the train had already hit him. Our loved one received the cholinesterase inhibitor drugs, which appeared to have little or no effect. In 2011, his immediate family put him in an assisted living facility. His situation has deteriorated. One physician said he may not live a year.

Some of the members of the family, including me or maybe even especially me, urged his immediate family to seek second and third opinions and to pursue clinical trials. We mentioned the misdiagnosis statistics. The immediate family responded that they had complete confidence in the doctors to do the right thing, that those of us who suggested it might not be Alzheimer’s had on rose-colored glasses and were self-delusional, and that we had no idea how hard seeing their loved one deteriorate was on them.

It’s been very difficult for all of us, this tension.

I came to the conclusion that there are at least two types of people in encountering such a diagnosis on behalf of other people. The first, call it Type A, tries to make sure that every possible avenue for recovery has been explored.

My father was a Type A. When his sister-in-law Mary was diagnosed with breast cancer in the early 1960s, he spent weeks at National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. talking to doctors there. Then, the only treatment for breast cancer was a mastectomy, radiation, and hope and prayer that the cancer didn't return. Aunt Mary's did. Physicians were just starting wider use of chemotherapy, and they were exploring other treatments at the NIH. My dad tried and tried to find another avenue to explore for Aunt Mary--who was a wonderful woman--and ultimately--he failed. Aunt Mary died, and Dad was very frustrated and disappointed. Dad was the lawyer in the family, and he felt it was his responsibility.

The 2010 movie Extraordinary Measures describes the true story of another Type A who also moved heaven and earth to find a treatment for his children's genetic disorder. FDA approved the enzyme replacement therapy Myozymeto treat Pompe Disease in 2006.

Another type, say Type B, trusts the doctors, has good reason to believe that the doctors are most likely right--as to Alzheimer's diagnosis, 80 percent of the time according to the FDA--and knows that spending time and energy and hope to find a solution the doctors did not find is likely to lead to great frustration and disappointment, as it did for my dad. And there are other types that are variations on A and B, I am sure.

Both Type A and Type B are reasonable approaches to a difficult situation. Unfortunately, they are irreconcilable.

As for me, I guess I’ll always be a Type A, although failure is more than likely.

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Legal Conference Panels and “If You Don’t Respect Your IP, No One Will”

by John Aquino on 07/03/12

I had been planning to speak at a legal conference on a panel on copyright issues later this summer, but I no longer am. I agreed to be part of a panel that evolved from a webinar to a panel at a Washington, D.C. conference to a conference in the Midwest. I was going to discuss some aspects of copyright law that I have highlighted in these blogs. As the prospect of traveling 2,000 miles got closer to becoming a reality, panelists started to withdraw and there was no longer a “there” there, so I withdrew as well.

Sessions at a professional conference can be a mixed bag. For some, you rehearse like you’re doing out of town tryouts for a Broadway show. I was part of an intellectual property panel for the American Society of Association Executives Law (ASAE) Symposium in 2008, and we had a really good group of dedicated people. We had conference calls and a lunch, and we sent each other our presentations and gave each other comments. When the day finally came, our panel was to go on at 10:00 a.m. after the executive director of the association gave his address at 9:00. Our group of four waited expectantly in our assigned room at 9:45, then 10:00, then 10:15. One of us went out to see what was happening. He came back and said, “The staff says the executive director is really on a roll.” People finally started coming in at 10:25, and an association staffer told us, “You’re going to have to compress your hour to a half hour so we can make lunch.” So for all our hard work and plans, it was a rushed affair.

For other panels I’ve attended, it was clear that the panelists just sort of showed up and were grudgingly willing to answer questions, or at least the exceptional questions. This requires the moderator to be really, really good, if not dazzling. I’ve seen moderators all but do handsprings to keep the momentum going for a recalcitrant if not bored panel.

I moderated one particular law conference panel, and the presenter was prepared, but for a conference several years before. He opened up his briefcase at the dais, and I could see he had manuscripts that were clipped together with discs for slides attached. He asked me what the topic was, and when I said copyright he reached in and pulled out a packet labeled “copyright.” He was the first speaker for an hour session with four panelists. After 20 minutes, I handed him a note that said, “Wrap up.” After 25 minutes, I handed him a note that read, “WRAP UP NOW.” After 28 minutes, I handed him a note that said, “I have a gun and I know how to use it. STOP.” After 30 minutes, he ended saying, “And so we must go forth, navigating the puzzles, tunnels, and mazes of U.S. copyright law.” He left the dais as people started to applaud, walked down the center aisle, left the ballroom, and we never saw him again. I think he caught a cab and went right to the airport. For him, it was just one of many gigs.

Finally, there are those speakers whom you never forget. When I was a young boy, my mother used to literally drag me to the literary lecture at Library of Congress in Washington. And I still remember these somewhat frail poets speaking about literature with a conviction that comes that even a 12-year-old boy could recognize. I’ve heard president and prime ministers speak, and some of the finest legal minds that ever existed. It’s been like seeing words turn into electricity.

Not that I’ve ever been part of anything that good. But, since I’m on it, I’m going to include some of that ASAE presentation that was crammed into just a few minutes.

I have experienced the worst thing that an author can—his work being sent to oblivion. So my message, if that is what it is, is that an author must make sure that the publications or associations you write for will respect your work. If they don’t, it could simply disappear forever.

I was the editor of a trade magazine for an association. The magazine had been a big money-maker when I came on board, so big that a number of other publications had come into the market to get a piece of the pie. The competition and price cutting was fierce. Our revenue stayed level in spite of it, we remained number one in the industry, and we won numerous national editorial awards. But the association wanted more revenue to fund its other projects and activities. I told the board that if they wanted more revenue we’d have to have more funds to market the magazine. The board would agreed, the marketing money would be in the budget, we’d increase our revenue projection accordingly, and then at the last moment the marketing money would be cut, but not the increase in revenue projection.

We fought on and on, and we were still number one, but it was clear the association really didn’t want to be in the magazine business. The owner of one of our competitors, the number three magazine in the industry, determined that the only way they could beat us was to buy us and made a very good offer. Even thought it meant unemployment—the deal was for our magazine to be merged with the publisher’s at its headquarters—I encouraged the association to take it, thinking that the big publisher would take care of the magazine. With my magazine acquisition experienced, I helped the association improve the deal.

The sale was made. And then two things happened. The big publisher acted as if our magazine was the number three magazine in the industry and not number one. It cut staff, reduced the number of editorial pages, and cut the paper weight. Within four months, the ad revenue had fallen 60 percent. The big publisher ultimately sold the magazine to another publisher and got out of the business of magazines that had editorial content, but not before it did the ultimate damage.

We had had all eight years worth of our content on the Internet and backed up on discs. We turned the discs over to the new publisher. Within a month, the big publisher replaced our Internet content for the previous eight years with the contents of its own magazine, and the content we had created ceased to exist on the Internet. It was like George Orwell’s 1984, and the articles we wrote and published had never been published. The big publisher had always wanted to beat us, and they really did.

I contacted the new publisher and offered to buy the discs myself if they didn’t want them, but they told me they had inadvertently been destroyed. Now the big publisher still owned the copyright, but without the electronic/digital content in this electronic/digital age, the hundreds of articles our magazine had created—some of which I had written, staff writers and outside writers (many of them association staff and executives) had written the rest—were effectively lost forever. Hardcopy exists in libraries, but putting the content back on the Internet would means scanning all eight years, which I can’t imagine anyone doing. (I even went to the Internet Archives Wayback Machine by which you can locate “lost” Internet material and was able to find a dozen or so articles, but that’s probably five percent of what was lost.)

I was told by the big publisher that it had told the association it was going to do this and the association said it no longer owned the magazine and that the big publisher could do whatever it wanted. As I've pointed out, the association lost a great deal of its history (articles by staff and members, conference reports, photo galleries) in the whole process.

And so virtually eight years of editorial content was destroyed and no longer exists.

Message to writers: make sure your publisher respects your work.

Message to associations: your intellectual property has value, respect it, because if you don’t, no one will.

That’s what I told the ASAE, in a briefer manner.

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Our Own History Tells Us Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays

by John Aquino on 06/28/12

As an attorney, as a writer, as a student of the theatre and films, and as a husband of a Shakespeare scholar, I have never understood those who claim that the plays should be attributed to someone other than William Shakespeare. The most prominent candidate, as elaborately dramatized in the 2011 film Anonymous, is the Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Some people I respect fervently believe this. I have heard the actors Derek Jacobi, who appears at the beginning and end of Anonymous, and Michael York argue that “actors know the type of man who wrote these plays, and it was not this uneducated fellow from Stratford-upon-Avon.”

Shakespeare as Woody Allen?

That’s what the “Oxfordians” are claiming. They say Shakespeare was De Vere’s front—just as Allen played a man who took the credit for the work of blacklisted television writers in the 1975 movie The Front. These claims reflect the conspiracy theories that are part of U.S. history in the late 20^th century. But it is the same history that clearly shows that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Shakespeare himself.

Oxfordians contend that the poorly-educated Shakespeare basically “fronted” for De Vere, who could not lend his noble name to products of such a disreputable enterprise as the theatre. Those who insist that Shakespeare wrote the plays—Stratfordians--claim that the Oxfordians are being elitists by arguing that only a formally-educated person could write these plays. In our own time great 20^th century playwrights such George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neil, and Neil Simon did not graduate from a university either. These Stratfordians observe that De Vere died in 1604 while Shakespeare’s plays continued to premiere for nearly ten more years—in response, the Oxfordians suggest—as shown in Anonymous--that either De Vere may have had a stockpile of manuscripts that his friends dribbled out for performance over the decade or that the dates Stratfordians give for Shakespeare’s later plays are simply wrong. The Stratfordians note that no one questioned Shakespeare’s authorship in his lifetime and not for over two centuries after his death.

Finally, the Stratfordians ask why, since De Vere published poetry under his own name in his lifetime and the poetry that was published under Shakespeare’s name—including Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece—and the poetry of the plays--is so superior to De Vere’s, wouldn’t a man publish his best poetry under his own name and not his worst?

But the case for Shakespeare and not De Vere is really proved by a reasonable assessment of the actions of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and a look at how similar situations were handled in our own time.

For the Oxfordians to be right, Shakespeare’s colleagues had to either be in on the “conspiracy” or not very bright. The Oxfordians argue that De Vere arranged for Shakespeare to take credit for De Vere’s plays. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death and 20 years after De Vere’s, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and partners in the Globe Theatre John Heminge and Henry Condell published 36 of the plays under Shakespeare’s name in what is now called the First Folio; until then, the plays had either lain in stacks in a backroom of the theatre or been issued in quarto--similar to a paperback--editions. If De Vere wrote the plays, Heminge and Condell would have had to be “in on” the conspiracy with De Vere or ignorant of it. But if they were indeed in on it, why did they continue to honor the conspiracy two decades after De Vere died? If they were in on in, they weren’t just complicit, they went out of their way to perpetuate the Shakespeare fraud by gathering the plays together and attributing unpublished plays to Shakespeare. Why would they do this after so long? Did De Vere’s estate continue to pay them off? Why would De Vere’s estate care one way or the other?

Or Heminge and Condell could have been ignorant of the conspiracy, but they certainly acted as if they believed that Shakespeare wrote the plays. They described his writing process at length in the First Folio preface: “And what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” As actors, they were part of the process of plays being performed there. Either Heminge and Condell were telling the truth based on their knowledge or they would have had to have been making all this up for reasons unknown.

Heminge and Condell and Shakespeare’s other fellow actors would have known if this William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. Otherwise, it would mean that in the 20 years that Shakespeare made believe he had written these plays, no actor ever asked him, “What did you mean by that line?” or “Would it work better if my character did this rather than that?” or, if they did ask these questions—which any actor can tell you usually come up in the first production of a new play—Shakespeare would had to have been smart enough to fool them but not smart enough to write the plays.

And not only would Heminge and Condell had to have been conspirators, but so would Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary dramatist, who wrote the epistolary dedications to the First Folio—or he would have to have not been smart enough to detect it. Jonson was many things, but he was not stupid. So, again, if Jonson was in on the conspiracy, why did he perpetuate it after both Shakespeare and De Vere’s deaths in his poems for the First Folio and even do so in his private papers? In these papers, published after his death, Jonson makes fun of some of Shakespeare’s lines, derides his “little Latin and less Greek,” and, drawing on Heminge and Condell’s claim that Shakespeare never blotted a line, wishes that he had “blotted a thousand.” But while Jonson, a rival of Shakespeare, privately makes sport of him, he never for an instant indicates that Shakespeare did not write the plays and instead gives every indication that he did.

For the Oxfordians to be right, Shakespeare would have had to fool virtually all of London and our history with 'Fronts" suggests how hard that is. Shakespeare lived in London. Undoubtedly, just as they do today, people would have come up to this playwright and ask him, “Why did Ophelia have to die?” For 20 years, from 1593-1613, Shakespeare would have had to have answered convincingly about things that he did not write.

But do fronts stay secret? During the McCarthy era of the 1950s, certain Hollywood screenwriters and actors were blacklisted on the claim that they were communists and so could not be hired. Some blacklisted screenwriters paid ‘fronts” to take credit for their work, just as the Wood Allen movie shows. The thing about these fronts is that people in the film industry knew about them. Ian Mclellan Hunter "fronted" for the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo and received an Oscar for best story for Roman Holiday in 1953. Anyone who was acquainted with the writer Pierre Boule knew that he didn’t write the screenplay that was based on his book The Bridge on the River Kwai because Boule didn’t speak English; the screenplay was written by blacklisted writers Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. If fronts weren't used, pseudonyms were. A Robert Rich received screen credit and the 1956 best story Oscar for the movie The Brave One; at the awards ceremony, Jesse Lasky Jr., vice president of the Writer’s Guild, accepted for Rich, claiming that Rich could not be there because his wife was having a baby. There was no baby, no wife, and no Robert Rich. Rich was a pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter. Lasky and the Writer’s Guild knew this, and within a week the deception was all over the trade press.

The point is, the film industry knew at the time about these and other fronts and pseudonyms, and now, sixty years later, everyone knows since the screen credits in all prints for many of these films have been changed to reflect their actual authors. But the Oxfordians will have people believe that the Shakespeare-De Vere conspiracy fooled Shakespeare’s contemporaries for nearly 400 years.

For the Oxfordians to be right, Shakespeare would have had to fool Queen Elizabeth and King James and their spies. There is a story, probably apocryphal, that Queen Elizabeth herself asked Shakespeare to write a play about the fat knight Sir John Falstaff--from Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV--in love, and this became the play the Merry Wives of Windsor. Whether or not that happened, Shakespeare did mix with royalty: he and his company were invited to perform his plays at court.

The Elizabethan and Jacobean periods were a time of court intrigue and spies. There were concerns that the Catholics would rebel—and in 1605 renegade “papists” plotted to blow up Parliament and the Royal Family—or that court secrets would be leaked to England’s enemies. The ministers of Queen Elizabeth I and her successor King James I developed an elaborate network of spies. The Oxfordians would have us believe that the Shakespeare-De Vere conspiracy fooled these spies or that the court, informed of the deception of its spies, allowed this Stratfordian fake to mingle with royalty.

In short, the Oxfordian conspiracy would have had to have been so vast that it included actors, other playwrights, audiences, an elaborate spy network, and the crowned heads of England and to have succeeded far better than the “fronts” conspiracies of our own history. The alternative makes more sense. Shakespeare wrote “Shakespeare’s plays.” His contemporaries thought so. Why don’t we?

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