Producers bridle over who gets top billing; new pact would give writers prime credit treatment.

Even as writers signed off on a new pact with movie and TV producers, a group of producers has filed suit over a provision that dictates who gets higher billing in screen credits.

The Writers Guild of America's membership has approved new contracts with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the three major networks, clearing the way for the three-year deals to be finalized.

However, a recent lawsuit filed by motion picture producers over the placement of on-screen credits in feature films could threaten to block implementation of part of the AMPTP agreement.

Last week, members of the 10,500-strong writers union voted to ratify the Minimum Basic Agreement contract which sets minimum standards for wages, working conditions and other issues - with the AMPTP by an 8-2 margin. Some 96 percent of the union's members voted to ratify a similar deal with the ABC, CBS and NBC networks.

The contracts grant an average increase in writers' pay of about 3.5 percent a year for each of the next three years. Writers will also get a bigger piece of the pie for work that is reused in interactive forms of entertainment. The financial elements of the new contracts will take effect May 2.

Credits controversy

But the new pacts also give scribes a higher profile in on-screen opening credits, moving the writer's name up to a spot just before the director's.

Typically, the producer's name has gone in that coveted spot, and this proposed change irked enough producers that a group of 40 producers filed a lawsuit against the WGA and the AMPTP - which represents 250 production companies, not the producers themselves - to eliminate that clause from the contract. No legal challenge has been made against the agreement with the three networks.

The producers also won a Los Angeles Superior Court temporary restraining order against the WGA and AMPTP to keep them from implementing the clause which was not set to go into effect until May 27.

But the union and AMPTP got the case moved up to federal court, where on March 27, U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real dissolved that temporary restraining order.

Larry Stein, an attorney with the Santa Monica-based law firm of Stein, Kahan & Rosenberg, which represents the group of producers suing the AMPTP and WGA, has filed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to get the case brought back to state court for an April 10 hearing.