Are you an aspiring screenwriter who dreams of creating magical and intimate moments that simply teem in human behavior? If you answered “yes”, then Jon Bernstein might be the instructor for you. “My classes strive to master the ‘rules’ only so that we may creatively break them,” says Bernstein in his bio for his upcoming screenwriting course at UCLA.
The course listing also provides a handful of respectable writing credits for Bernstein, including crafting the screenplays for 2000’s Beautiful, the Jerry Springer vehicle Ringmaster, and Disney’s Meet the Robinsons. But it’s his claim of working as a contributing writer for Disney’s Tangled that has the film’s co-director, Nathan Greno, tied up in knots.
“We never worked with the guy on Tangled,” said Greno in a recent public post on Facebook. The post, not surprisingly, has only generated more skepticism about Bernstein’s professional claims as Greno’s friends and co-workers point out holes in the writer’s IMDB page and compare professional notes. In regard to Bernstein’s credit for writing Meet the Robinsons, screenwriter Michelle Bochner Spitz pointed out, “Jon Bernstein wrote the first draft(s) of Meet the Robinsons, and then had nothing to do with the movie when it was rewritten several times over for more than three years.”
Hollywood credits work in quirky ways, and Bernstein could have a legitimate, legal claim to the Tangled credit, which he also used to sell his 2011 script workshop, The Inspired Screenplay. But according to Greno, Bernstein didn’t seem eager to shed any light on the appropriation when he was contacted. “I brought up this ‘credit concern’ to Jon on his (personal) Facebook page and was I quickly deleted/blocked,” Greno wrote on Facebook. “I credit all of the writing on Tangled to our actual writer, Dan Fogelman… and so does IMDB.”
If Bernstein wishes to set the record straight on Cartoon Brew and allay Nathan Greno’s concerns, we welcome hearing his side of the story.
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