For much of that time -- certainly until the late 1950s -- most actors were under contract to their studios; it was the studio that decided who got top billing, who was billed above the title and so on. When the studio system collapsed, it was only natural for actors and their agents to fight for billing on a film-by-film basis, and by the 1970s most stars were writing into their picture contracts a description of how they were to be billed.
This wasn't a problem as long as only a few stars had the power to control the billing for any particular film. Perhaps your name was the only one with glitter enough to go above the title, though if my name was also a draw, it was pretty easy to advertise us as "you and me" (above the title) in (the film's name here). But then, in the 1980s, things got complicated. Stars began to write more things into their contracts, such as that their name had to be advertised above the title, but in letters no smaller than those of the title itself. Well, OK, that could be handled. But what if each of us had the same clause in our contract? And what if our names had more than, say, two letters, which has been known to happen? What if, say, our names were @RenΘe @Zellweger and @Leonardo @DiCaprio? Could they both fit on one line in the ad and be the same height as the letters in the film's title? Not unless the film's title was as long as, say, "The @Unbearable Lightness of Film Credit @Machinations," and the distributor bought six consecutive pages in the paper to advertise it.
So here's where the new designers came in. They found a way to make type faces so skinny, but with letters so tall, that they could fit the very longest names into a space no larger than a studio accountant's heart. Still, if you work in the industry, either above- or below-the-line, and you see your name up on the screen, it makes all the hard work and effort seem entirely worthwhile.
