Dear Delphine: The Director Keeps Taking Credit for My Ideas
Delphine writes back as if it’s still 1925 – a decade when the rules were still being decided, and nobody agreed on what a working woman was and wasn’t allowed to want. All letters are fictional. The advice, we’d argue, is not.
Welcome to the very first Dear Delphine letter – the one that sets the tone for everything after it. If you’re new here, she answers letters as though it’s still 1925, mostly about ambition, romance, and knowing exactly who deserves to be quietly outmaneuvered. This week, it’s a script girl with a director problem.
Dear Delphine,
I am a script girl at one of the larger studios, and for the better part of a year I have been quietly fixing scenes that don’t work. A line here, a bit of business there – small things, but they add up, and everyone on set knows it, including the director.
Everyone, that is, except whoever reads the trade papers, because in every single interview, he describes these fixes as his own instincts. “I have an ear for what a scene needs,” he told one reporter last month, describing, word for word, a change I made on a Tuesday afternoon while he was at lunch.
I don’t want his job. I would simply like it acknowledged, once, in a room where it matters, that I am good at mine. Is that too much to ask, or am I meant to be grateful for the paycheck and keep my mouth shut?
— Uncredited in Culver City
Dear Uncredited,
It is not too much to ask. It is, however, apparently too much to expect from a man who has confused proximity to talent with possessing it, so let’s set that particular disappointment aside and talk about what you can actually do with the year you’ve already spent proving yourself.
First: stop fixing things quietly. I don’t mean stop fixing them – clearly you’re the only one on that set who can – I mean stop doing it in a way that’s invisible to everyone but the man currently taking credit for it. Start saying, out loud, in front of other people, “I think this scene needs-” before you make the change, not after. Let the room watch you have the idea. A man can only steal a fix that happened where no one was looking.
Second: find yourself a witness who isn’t the director. A script supervisor, a cameraman, another writer – anyone with eyes and a memory who will remember, months from now, who actually solved the problem on that Tuesday afternoon. Credit is a rumor before it’s a fact, and rumors need more than one source to spread.
Third, and I say this with real affection: a man who needs to borrow someone else’s instincts to sound talented in an interview is not, whatever the trade papers imply, actually the smartest person in that room. You already know this. The trouble isn’t that you doubt your own talent – it’s that you’ve been waiting for someone else to notice it before you’re allowed to act like you know it’s there.
Stop waiting.
The studios are full of men who’ve built entire careers on being first to say someone else’s good idea out loud. The only difference between them and you is that they stopped being quiet about it a long time ago.
— D.
This column runs on fictional correspondence, written the way we imagine 1920s studio politics might have actually sounded behind closed doors. More letters – on ambition, heartbreak, and knowing exactly who deserves to be quietly outmaneuvered – live in Letters from the Lot.
