Wealth & Money Quote by Nigel Kneale

Kneale lands a clean jab on Hollywood math: the more names you can fit on the credit, the more the machine can pretend the work was inevitable. In “the land of big money,” authorship becomes less a fact than a liability. One name implies a singular vision, a clear line of responsibility, and, worst of all, leverage. Four or five names? That’s dilution as strategy. It spreads risk, defuses ego, and makes any one writer replaceable.

The intent isn’t just complaint; it’s diagnosis. Kneale, coming from a British tradition where the writer could be a public-facing creative authority (especially in television), is pointing at the studio system’s preference for committees and revisions that can be billed as “development” rather than indecision. Multiple credited writers are a status signal: money was spent, opinions were gathered, the product was “worked on.” It’s a bureaucratic aesthetic.

The subtext is about power. Hollywood’s fear isn’t that one screenwriter will fail; it’s that one might succeed on their own terms. A single name can become a brand, a bargaining chip, a potential “difficult” artist. Five names turn the script into a corporate artifact, a thing that belongs to the process, not the person.

There’s also a sly acknowledgment of credit as politics. Credits aren’t merely recognition; they’re narrative control. Hollywood prefers stories where no one individual can credibly claim they wrote the thing that made the money.