Writer Vs. Director

Posted on June 29, 2006

Trouble is brewing among screenwriters over who gets to be called the auteur of a film: the writer or the director? A new book by David Kipen called The Schreiber Theory asks movie lovers to consider films to be authored by the screenwriter, not by the director.

The legendary movie mogul Irving G Thalberg put it most succinctly. "The writer is the most important person in Hollywood," he once said. "But we must never tell the sons of bitches."
Everyone in the film business pays lip service to his estimation of the importance of screenwriters; the constantly repeated truism is that a film can't be any better than its script. Yet for the past 50 years most of us have thought about films in terms of who directed them, not who actually wrote them. Happily, we can legitimately blame the French for this. A group of critics writing for Cahiers du Cinema, led by Francois Truffaut, first espoused the auteur theory in the mid-'50s, insisting that a film's director was its true "author".
According to these auteurists, the director is god, setting a film's tone and style. But this summer all Hollywood is talking about a pocket book-sized manifesto, written partly in tongue-in-cheek spirit, which reasserts the screenwriter's role.
David Kipen's The Schreiber Theory asks us to imagine a world in which audiences might make decisions about which films to see based on a screenwriter's track record rather than a director's. In this world, films will be known by who wrote them, not who directed them. Thus Schindler's List is a Steven Zaillian film, not a Steven Spielberg film; Eyes Wide Shut is "by" Frederic Raphael, not Stanley Kubrick.

Of course there's another way around this problem for the smart, yet frustrated, screenwriter: become a writer/director. Voila! Problem solved: you now get all the credit.