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.
