The Weakness Of The Auteur Model In Movies And Politics
People like me who like digging deeply into movies, including how they are made, are very familiar with the debates around the auteur model of filmmaking. If you look at the work of some of the best classic movies by directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergei Eisenstein, François Truffaut, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, and others, and more recent movies helmed by Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, Greta Gerwig, and the like, they seem superficially to be the product of a single artist with a singular “vision.” Often, these directors exert very close control over the planning and execution of film production: Hitchcock and Kurosawa, for example, storyboarded in detail their movies before production started, instead of figuring out how to film them on the set or on location. As a result, the movies have very distinctive feels. You’re keenly aware, from the visual style, plot elements, and editing, that you’re likely watching a Kurosawa movie, whether it’s set in traditional Japan or the 20th century. Similarly, you really know when you’re watching a Wes Anderson movie from the storybook-like visual elements, plot elements, and voice-over narration.
This led many film scholars and filmmakers to argue that you can’t really make great movies without this sort of commanding presence at the heart of each movie, controlling every element of planning, production, and editing. Just as the Mona Lisa wasn’t created by a committee of artists, Citizen Kane wasn’t created by a committee of directors.
Unfortunately for the auteurists, this is flatly wrong. Take Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train, which I re-watched a couple of days ago. Hitchcock didn’t write the book on which it was based: the author of the novel was Patricia Highsmith, who also wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley. Nor did he write the screenplay, which was the work of Raymond Chandler (there’s some really juicy backstory on his involvement) and Czenzi Ormonde. Even though he storyboarded his movies, Strangers On A Train was the first collaboration between him and cinematographer Robert Burks, who also gave the same lush look to future Hitchcock films like Rear Window, North By Northwest, Vertigo, and many others. Nor was Hitchcock flying solo on the production of his movies, as evidence by his close collaboration with Joan Harrison. Friends called Hitchcock, his wife Alma Reville, and Harrison as “the Three Hitchcocks.” The classic TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, might not have been made without Harrison taking on many producer responsibilities, since Hitchcock was complaining that the show was spreading him too thinly.
Which brings us to the movie Alien.
Ridley Scott is undoubtedly a very talented director. The original Alien was not only a extremely effective movie, it was also pioneering (for decades, many science fiction movies have consciously imitated its gritty and horrific portrayal of life in space, in contrast to the niceties of Star Trek and Star Wars). It was also technically brilliant in many ways, for people who care about such things. And, as this documentary on the making of the movie makes clear, many elements of the movie would not have existed if Scott hadn’t insisted on them. For instance, the giant “space jockey” at the beginning of the film was a very costly and difficult piece of work, but Scott ensured it would be there to add a space jockey-sized amount of mystery, awe, and weirdness to the film.
But Alien was not the result of Scott’s singular vision. As the documentary shows, the script went through many mutations, with Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett as the chief writers. H.R. Giger famously added many distinctive visual elements of the movie (the xenomorph, the face hugger, the space jockey, and the alien ship), and Ron Cobb added others (the human ship and equipment). The movie was less the imposition of one director’s artistic “vision” on the crew, and more an evolving conversation among creative people, with Scott at the center. Alien would not have been a great film without Scott. But it also would not have been a great film if it had been only Scott in creative control.
Thirty-three years after the release of Alien, its prequel, Prometheus, was released. It is not nearly as good a movie. To be clear, I really loathe it as an unnecessary origin story for the aliens and the space jockeys/Engineers. Ditto for the next movie, Alien: Covenant. Often, the best choice in movies, books, and other media isn’t to explain your antagonist fully, or much at all. We didn’t need an origin story for the Joker, a force of malevolence, any more than you needed to know where the xenomorph came from, or even see it clearly in the first movie.
All problems aside with whether Prometheus didn’t need to be made at all, the movie isn’t nearly as good as the original Alien. The screenplay is full of ridiculous moments, such as the xenobiologist who decides to touch an unknown organism (with predictably horrible consequences), or people who could escape certain death simply by running to the right or left. Without going into all my complaints about the movie, which aren’t necessary for this already-long post, I suspect the problems with Prometheus have something to do with Ridley Scott of 2012 being the kind of now-famous director who could impose his “vision” on the movie. If that’s true, everything — the screenplay, the direction, the need to show things that could have been suggested, the editing — are all worse because of the lack of collaboration.
You can make the same argument about George Lucas. The first trilogy benefited from collaborations with Lawrence Kasdan, Leigh Brackett, Irvin Kirshner, and others, and very blunt feedback on the first movie from fellow directors. The second trilogy, with George Lucas firmly in control as The George Lucas, wasn’t nearly as good.
None of this is to say that movies don’t need a firm hand at the helm. Hollywood has been churning out far too many movies lately that are clearly the product of committees, without a strong director or producer ensuring that a coherent, enjoyable film is the result of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. And there’s also a trend, particularly in the MCU, of deliberately hiring directors with very thin resumes for blockbuster features, to ensure that the studio executives can maintain a firm grip on the reins.
It isn’t the case that you can never be a successful auteur. For example, Ridley Scott himself made many of the creative decisions that led to Blade Runner being just as good, just as ground-breaking, just as iconic as Alien. Instead, trying to be an auteur runs the risk of running up against your own personal limits, and shuts off avenues of creativity that come from other sources. In one interview late in his career, Stephen Sondheim said people treating him with too much awe or fear led to moments when he found himself asking, why didn’t anyone tell me that this was bad? Filmmaking is a balancing act between leadership on the part of directors and producers, and the willingness to cede control to other contributors.
Which brings us, at long last, to politics.
In the last few weeks, we’ve seen two political productions. One was the brainchild of, to use some generous language, an auteur. (Autocrat is a more fitting term, but for the moment, let’s stay focused on the show business-like aspects of him.) The other, less so.
The Republican National Convention was definitely the result of a single person’s vision. The auteur in question controlled the casting (if you were not fully MAGA, no need to even audition), the script, the soundtrack, everything. Even if he did not personally create these elements, the cast and crew, fearful of the wrath of the director, did what they thought would please him, what would fit his authorial vision, such as it is. He keeps the people working for him in a constant state of cowering anxiety: most recently, at a rally, he mused aloud that he should fire his advisors for telling him not to get mean with Kamala Harris in the debate. He is the even more nightmarish version of an Erich Von Stroheim-like auteur, and his work suffers as a result.
Looking at the convention and beyond, his schtick still works very well with a limited audience. Even when he digresses into bizarre topics that no one really strongly cares about (sharks, batteries, windmills, toilets, Rosie O’Donnell, etc. etc. etc.), they still show up for the latest spectacle. They’re the political equivalent of the people who go to bad action movies, just for the pyrotechnics, and say in defense of their favored genre, Just turn your brain off and enjoy the ride.
Unfortunately for him, there’s a larger audience than the MAGA superfans that he needs to please. Equally unfortunately, because of his rage-filled autocratic personality, he’s not likely to get much help finding some new material that would appeal to these other crowds. It’s clear that the replacement of Biden with Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket caused a content creation problem in the Trump campaign. Suddenly, most of the attacks no longer applied. Worse, it seemed beyond his creative capacity to pivot to anything else. No better evidence was his Truth Social posts during Harris’ acceptance speech, including an electronic scream of, “WHERE’S HUNTER?” Meanwhile, Harris now has a slight lead over him in polls, Harris and Walz pack venues where they appear, and her campaign has raised approximately half a billion dollars since it started. If these were streaming audience numbers or ticket sales, this would be cause for the studio executives to be worried.
The shift in audience tastes should raise some big concerns about the Content Creator In Chief for the MAGACU. He seems incapable of changing his schtick, even in front of an audience of black journalists. There are suggestions that some audiences are getting tired of his act. And no one in his entourage seems willing to tell him that his stale formula may not attract a big enough crowd anymore.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Westerns ruled American television screens and movie theaters. By the mid to late Sixties, it was clear that audiences were starting to lose their enthusiasm for the genre. Some actors, directors, and writers were able to migrate to the new types of entertainment that audiences craved. Others, including the most iconic Western actor, John Wayne, were much less successful. While they didn’t disappear off the stage entirely, their fans dwindled, and they found fewer good roles that fit their familiar personas.
Donald Trump may be facing a similar shift in audience tastes. But even if there is no such shift, he still has to find a way to produce something palatable to more than just the enthusiasts who will always show up for the Trump Show. Until a month ago, the alternative was uninspiring. Now, there’s another show in town that’s clearly finding an energized fan base. Trump the auteur shows no sign of understanding this new reality, and no willingness to listen to potential collaborators who might help this entertainer-turned-demagogue make the transition.
Two quick comments
The picture is from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I consider that film to be arguably Hitchcock’s most overrated one. The premise is ridiculous as I wrote when reviewing it at Amazon Prime.
As for Alien, I like it but liked Aliens better. As seen by the Yakuza epic I’m still working on. Two undercover agents are codenamed Ripley and Bishop. Ripley is the main character and she has a daughter late in the ebook and authorities refer to her as Newt.
The plan to get the undercover agent out is called ‘Operation Drop Ship’
I have probably written enough so its time to make a clear declaration here-
Game over, Man. Game over.
Maybe you should have done one post on movies and one on politics, because I think we’ll get comments on both 🙂
On movies, I hesitate to comment as several in our little community know the business intimately. I’ll just say I’ve long regarded movies and TV, and theater, as part of literature. Therefore it all begins and depends on the script.
Yes, a lot else is involved, but a good story and engaging characters are the foundation of everything else.
As to politics, the Weirdo Felon is about to reach the end stage of the Bart Simpson ‘I didn’t do it’ Principle: a one-trick pony may have a successful run, but only until the audience gets tired of its trick.
Auteur theory was often just high-brow French guys inventing esoteric reasons for why they enjoyed His Girl Friday or Singing in the Rain.
Welles’ The Trial or Jacques Tati’s Playtime are better models for a artist expressing their singular vision than any Howard Hawks film.
@Modulo Myself:
Is that the same French who loved Jerry Lewis movies?
@Bill Jempty: Behind the scenes at Outside The Beltway, we’re having problems adding new pictures to the blog. I used the Vertigo picture because (a) it was already in the graphics archive, and (b) I talked about Hitchcock in the post. I really wanted to use a picture of a middle-aged, bulky Orson Welles, but WordPress was having none of it.
@Bill Jempty: Also, I love both Alien and Aliens. Different types of movie, both brilliant. I had the privilege of seeing both on their opening days, with almost no idea of what I was going to see.
@Kathy:
Time permitting this week, I’m going to write another post about why Trump’s schtick has been as durable as it is. There’s also an entertainment industry angle, sort of.
@Bill Jempty:
Jerry Lewis is great, though. I’m never sure why liking him became a punchline.
Being old enough to remember the opening of the show, I found that funny. He did not appear spread thinly.
Speaking of Star Wars and changes for the better, yesterday’s NYT crossword had a clue “George Lucas’ original surname for Luke Skywalker”. WIKI says it was “Starkiller” even into production, but they changed it because of the Tate-LaBianca murders.
Interesting piece, Kingdaddy. There is of course another side to the auteur question. Quite often the collaborators manage to fuck up the vision of the auteur. Bad decisions at one of my publishers have cost me at least a million dollars. A big reason for our success as writers has been that we paid little to no attention to collaborators – editors, agents, and the conventional wisdom of our peer group. In fact we often (not always) actively subverted their efforts to ‘help.’ Why? Because we know what we’re doing and they don’t. ‘They’ collectively drive through life using only their rear-view mirrors. They only know what has been, and we are in the business of trying to avoid everything that has been.
There’s a reason the Hollywood process so often starts with books. A book author is infinitely freer than even the most influential Hollywood director. We don’t have to worry about budgets, or favors we owe, or allegiances, or personnel issues. Put it this way: a producer who gets a note from a studio has to take it very seriously, whereas my default response to notes is, ‘fuck off’, with an occasional, ‘oh, good catch.’
Which brings me to Trump. He’s right and his advisers are wrong. He knows what he’s peddling – his own, personal nastiness, cruelty and rage – and his advisers don’t. He knows he can’t change, they fool themselves into thinking he can. He knows his audience DGAF about policy or governance or anything beyond their own grievances. His advisers don’t understand that. The ‘notes’ his advisers keep passing him are irrelevant.
Trump didn’t get where he is by listening to normies. The reason Trump is golfing away his campaign and contemplating fleeing the country, is because in his shriveled heart he knows his act is old and worn out. He sees the people falling asleep at his rallies. He sees the people leaving early. He sees every empty seat. Trump is a cult leader slowly losing his flock, and his advisers are not just political hacks, they’re hacks so devoid of any decent sentiment they’ll work for Trump. All the leaks coming from the campaign are just ass-covering.
I love Blade Runner and it may be as ground-breaking and iconic as Alien (and Aliens), but it is not as good! If someone was to suggest to me that BR is boring, it is hard to disagree.
I think the comparison of Trump to John Wayne is a good one. They both have huge egos and a very narrow window of talent, which is being themselves (the persona that they want to project) and neither could/can change.
@Kingdaddy:
I’ve never cared for the Alien franchise.
I saw the first movie in the early days of VCRs, because someone at home bought it. I recall watching it with other people. At the time I thought it was like Jaws, but in space. You know, a horror movie with a monster.
And that’s the extent of my issue with it. I don’t care for either monster movies nor horror movies. I think if it had been made in the 90s or later, I wouldn’t have seen it.
Having said that, I think I saw all the sequels (if Winona Ryder was in the 4th and not the third*). I don’t remember exactly why, possibly a dearth of SF movies at the time? I recall little about them. I caught Prometheus on cable years after it played, and lost interest in it except as background noise. I may have seen bits of the other one, also on cable. I have firm plans not to see the upcoming latest one.
*Whichever it was, the one thing I recall from that movie is that Winona Ryder was in it.
For Alien, a lot of credit also has to go to producers Walter Hill and David Giler. It was their draft of the script that got the movie made, and if you read it, it’s got the feel of early Walter Hill scripts — he essentially invented a new form of screenplay prose that was incredibly efficient and powerful, and it really makes you see the film as you read.
As for Prometheus, an earlier draft of the script by Jon Spaihts is online, and it’s got everything that works in the movie — and none of those stupid things you mention. Those only show up in the Damon Lindelof draft, and I think we have to assume that they’re there because Ridley Scott demanded they be there.
@Bill Jempty: ” I consider that film to be arguably Hitchcock’s most overrated one. ”
You are of course entitled to like or not like anything in the world. But “overrated”? What that says is not that you simply disagree with the vast majority of film critics and scholars around the world — which again, fair play to you — but that your opinion is the right one and everyone else is simply not as wise as you. I do hope that’s not what you intended to convey.
There are few words I find as grating as “overrated.”
Would politician or party would be analogous to the studio version of Touch of Evil?
@wr:
Wise? Define that around here. I remember somebody who said Biden shouldn’t be running in November and being told by one after another member of this forum how it would not happen or if it did it would be catastrophic for the Democrats, and told on at least two occasions they themselves should run for President.
Wise? Define that around here.
@Kurtz: In the sense of it being a “B” movie with an “all-star cast?” I think both parties and several politicians would be analogous.
@Kathy:
Trump’s repeated flights on Epstein’s jet and documented parties attended suggests he repeated the same trick dozens of times.
And that Trump’s trick was sleeping with underage women. You know, a Republican: The party of family values.
@Bill Jempty: I’m confused. What you’re saying is not only that your opinion of Vertigo is the only right one and the vast majority of critics and scholars are wrong, but that your thoughts on everything are objectively superior to everyone else’s?
I wish you the very best with your current health issues and hope your books continue to sell. But I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t simply accept that you know more than everyone about everything. After all, there can’t be two who do so, and we already have Lounsbury.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
The restored version they recut based on Welles’s notes about the studio cut certainly elevates it.
@Michael Reynolds: My take is going to be very amateur, but what I was thinking when reading Kingdaddy’s post was: “okay, but this doesn’t generally work for songwriting.” Most songs that stand the test of time were largely written by one person. Yeah, in many cases there were band members who often added to the magic with their own part, but the soul of the song has most often been a lonely one, a sole soul if you will.
I submit that it’s the same with writing a good book. And it’s because, for the most part, a song or a book can actually be created by one person. Try that with a modern movie; it’s basically impossible because it’s too much work, which I think is part of Kingdaddy’s point. If you have to spread yourself too thin, something’s going to give.
And by the way, yes I’m quite aware that a lot of popular hit songs are written by committee these days, I’ve seen the credits on them. One person to come up with a catchy title, another to craft some lyrics, a vocal coach to make sure there are enough vowels in them, another person to choose which of the standard chord progressions to use depending on the market they’re trying to hit, somebody to add a seventh to one of the chords for flavor and don’t forget that special hook, and finally gotta credit the intented performer who thought one note should be different and now everybody will think they’re a “singer/songwriter”. These songs last eleven weeks and then nobody ever hears them again (except on the mega tour). And everybody who helped on them should worry about AI taking over their jobs because there was zero actual creativity involved.
@Kurtz: Never seen it. Only went by what Wikipedia said. (But it seems to me that elevation wouldn’t be much of a feat.
Woohoo! I now have edit!!
@wr: That’s the sense I’ve always gotten from him. I know lots of us hold some affection for him, but he is a touch trollish a lot of the time.
Speaking of movies, any thoughts on Deadpool and Wolverine?
Me, a couple of weeks ago I needed to get out of the house for a few of hours, so I went to see it. For that purpose, it was entirely adequate.
ETA: Edit showed up.
test
edit is here
thanks Matt B.
@Franklin: “Most songs that stand the test of time were largely written by one person”
Got to say an awful lot of songs that stand the test of time were written by two people — Lennon and McCartney, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Burt Bacharach, Holland/Dozier/Holland, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Leiber and Stoller, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the Gershwins…