Tom Arnold is the latest star to answer Chuck Lorre's memoir "Sitcom," denying the claim that "Roseanne" writers were told to put Arnold's name on the front page of scripts "as if Tom had written them," per Deadline. Arnold's version: he "never would put my name on a script" he didn't write.
The memoir is doing its work, which is the part everyone should be afraid of. Lorre wrote that a writer's job was to write the real scripts and sign them with the famous deadpan guy's name. That is a sentence that reads like a heist: who, the giant of the writers' room, stealing credit? The joke writes itself, and the joke is that in a writers' room everyone's fingerprints are on the show and nobody's name is on the wall.
Arnold's side has its own heist math. He told EW that he insisted every writer get their name on a script every year, and when a friend's credit went missing, the fix was "put Joel's name on it. You're the head writer, you make a lot of money, put his name." That is not a producer, that is a credit accountant. "Every writer's fingerprints were on it" is the showbiz version of the pot was passed around, nobody is getting it back.
The rebuttal wave keeps rolling. The Faris side's "yikes" verdict landed two days ago, Pressly is defending the "Mom" cast, and now Arnold is in with a thirty-year-old writers' room memory and a dead face. A memoir is a press release with a hardcover budget, and the hard part was never the writing. The hard part is the replies.
YOUR TURN: If everyone's name goes on everything, what exactly is a credit for?
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