Few people have too many fond memories of 1994’s The Flintstones movie. Notwithstanding the excellent live action take on the cartoon’s opening credits, and the pretty pitch-perfect casting, the rest of the film was a bit of a mess. Some, as I’ve learned in the past, have warmed to it a lot more than I. But for all the box office dollars it pulled in on its original release, The Flintstones was critically savaged, and for once, I was on the critics’ side at the time.

In the build up to the movie’s release, however, there was something else quite remarkable about The Flintstones, and that’s the sheer number of writers fighting to be credited on the project.

Having umpteen writers on a film is nothing fresh, of course (Catwoman, notoriously, had up to 28 people working on it). The dark arts of the Writer’s Guild of America, which arbitrates over who gets final credit on a film, are unknown to all those but the people within the organization’s inner sanctum. But it became clear fairly quickly that some serious work would be needed to get the number of credited screenwriters on The Flintstones down to a number that would fit on the bottom of the poster.

Thus, when the movie was released, the final credit went to Steven E, de Souza, Jim Jennewiein, and Tom S Parker. That said, some early cinema standees, before the final credits were locked down, were listing seven or eight writers.