Chekhov’s Mistess

The Schreiber Theory, by David Kipen

SCMZZZZZZZ.jpg” style=“float:left;padding: 6px;”/> Like it or not, we avid movie fans subscribe to the auteur theory. French for “author,” this school of film criticism focusing solely on directors has permeated the industry since emerging about 50 years ago by critics-cum-directors Truffaut (who coined the term), Godard, Rohmer and others. David Kipen, in The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, says “auteurism has conditioned us to concentrate on the themes and motives common to a given director’s filmography, all at the expense of those poor, obscure hacks who only wrote the damn pictures.”

He’s right. Aside from Charlie Kaufman, I find it difficult to think of any writers whose work excites mention among the press or my friends in the same way a director would. Who says “Have you heard about Steve Zaillian’s latest movie?” You might if you knew he’s credited for writing Schindler’s List, The Falcon and the Snowman, Gangs of New York, and Searching for Bobby Fischer.

Take The Aviator for example, directed by Martin Scorsese and written by John Logan. Roger Ebert’s review doesn’t mention Logan and five other
Directors were the new princes, and for a while their hegemony resulted in some terrific movies – almost all of them from filmmakers with sense enough to recognize the importance of a good script. Only when directors started to believe their own clippings did they later rush into production with underwritten pictures, accelerating the cycle by which yesterday’s auteur becomes tomorrow’s burnout. New auteurs kept supplanting the old, and not until recently have any observers begun to suggest that maybe the whole model is out of whack. Could it be that, like astronomers before Copernicus, cinephiles have been looking the wrong way all along?

Kipen’s beef is not so much with directors, but with the institutionalization of the idea that directors are the dominant creative force in film. In fact, he duly acknowledges the collaborative effort of filmmaking, as critics of auteurism have always done, but wants to put writers – schreibers in Yiddish, the mother tongue of many of America’s first screenwriters – back into the spotlight they deserve.

Unfortunately, Kipen’s solution is more radical than his theory. He quite literally wants to rewrite history, calling for researching and reapportioning credits the way the WGA (Writers Guild of America) did after the McCarthy period. He recommends reforming the WGA’s credit-awarding procedures to more accurately reflect actual efforts (under current rules, the original screenwriter gets credit even if all of his or her scenes are thrown out). He prescribes assigning a WGA trainee to every new film to “research the script’s evolution and monitor its realization…Every new line or scene and its author would be recorded.” And that’s just the beginning. Kipen calls this Quixotic. This outsider thinks that term a bit euphemistic.

But who knows? The Schreiber Theory is a brief, light book. It’s a manifesto; it’s a beginning of his campaign to put things right. Still, no matter where the talent lies, the Titans of the film industry have been entitled for so long that writers, if they choose to join in this crusade, face an adamantine wall.

I think then, that Kipen’s book is partially geared at you and me, filmgoers, perhaps young critics forming ideas and looking for ways to approach their craft. Assuming that things like the possessory credit (“A film by…”) , typically given to directors and always to one person, will continue to be a staple of director’s contracts, then it’s up to activist fans and critics to think beyond directors and not wait for Hollywood.

Constructively, Kipen starts with an appendix of writers in the fashion of early auteur proponents and gives new disciples some basis for thinking about these schreibers. For instance, about Logan, who also wrote The Last Samurai, RKO 281, and Gladiator, he writes, “Originally a Chicago playwright, Logan has plainly carved out a specialty writing outsized, flamboyant characters, often from mythic if not downright mythological models…” This is fairly general stuff, but if you’ve never heard of Logan before it’s some thematic meat to latch onto.

So, did Kipen’s book convince me? As much as I dislike the idea of following any one theory at all (in anything), I can’t say that writers have figured strongly in my thoughts or movie-going decisions and perhaps now when I do my post-movie IMDB/MRQE lookup, I’ll pay more attention to writers, but I tend to like more ‘writerly’ movies anyway.

It’s difficult to say if Kipen’s ideas will take hold in the establishment. I can’t begin to speculate on that, but I imagine that Kipen’s opportunity to influence lies outside of this book. My impression is that he believes the era of the auteur is coming to a close, and while his book will not seal the lid, it might provide a new direction for the disillusioned. Perhaps in 50 years some critic will write a book about the role of editors (or costume designers or actors or casting directors…) in filmmaking and he’ll cite that damn Schreiber theory that ruined it for them in the early part of the century.

***

The Schreiber Theory was just released by Melville House Books. It’s a brief and accessible look at the importance of screenwriters in filmmaking and how, through convenience and bureaucracy, to put it simply, directors have taken primary credit for filmmaking. Kipen’s writing is crisp and entertaining and readers will enjoy the perspective on Hollywood business and the appendix of writers with a list of their films.

See also Matthew Price’s Boston Globe (“Screen Credit” Jan-29) review for a discussion of The Schreiber Theory.

comments

I’ve long subscribed to the idea of relieving the power and influence of film directors. The whole autuer theory is old hat, and even its creators acknowledged this at the end of the 1960s. But the schrieber theory doesn’t sound like the next step. Now the screen writers are the new film authors? There shouldn’t be a film author or a single person responsible for the entire creation of a film to begin with. I don’t think film operates in the same stratosphere as painting or literature, its not something that can be treated as a self-protrait or something abstract. Its like a table top or a ceiling, and countless people are responsible for its creation, not one solipsistic author. The schrieber theory seems like a noble effort, but it doesn’t fall too far from the same problem.

    – Kevin (02/15  at  07:16 PM)

I don’t disagree with you kevin, in fact, I think I covered some of those points (perhaps not too well), but I will say that I don’t think Kipen wants to make writers the new auteurs (in terms of naming one person as the sole creative force), he just wants give them more credit and get scholars/critics to consider writers with the same thematic emphasis as directors.

    – Bud (02/15  at  10:38 PM)

The auteur theory only works well when the director wrote his own picture (Ingmar Bergman, Billy Wilder) or was demonstrably the creator, no matter who wrote the script (Hitchcock)—or when the sensibility of the writer is so idiosyncratic (Charlie Kaufman) that it’s the writer’s picture, not the director’s.

    – Adam Ash (03/02  at  11:29 AM)

I disagree.  I don’t think the auteur theory as I know it was ever intended as a shortcut to understanding the process of movies are really made (which of course is: collaboratively! collaboratively! collaboratively!) It’s a tool for looking at films not as individual objects but as part of a body of work, and in fact the theory may be more usefully applied to non-writing directors like Douglas Sirk or Anthony Mann than to domineering creative personalities like Bergman or Fellini.  The reason why auteurism works (not all the time of course, and I don’t think there’s anybody who thinks of it as the only workable tool) is because directors are usually the ones with responsibility over all the creative aspects of a film, whether they’re coming up with the creative ideas themselves or just organizing the ideas contributed by others.

    – Brian (03/04  at  04:09 AM)

I get the feeling that those who criticize the “auteur theory” understand it the least.  Not only did Andrew Sarris state that not every director is an “auteur” in “The American Cinema”, but in a review of “Freedomland”, Sarris discussed screenwriter and novelist Richard Price as the dominant creative force in films he has been associated with.

I also think back to an article I read by Dominic Dunne who mentioned two screenplays he read, one well written, the other much less promising.  The better screenplay was for Jack Clayton’s “The Great Gatsby”, while the poorly written film was “The Wild Bunch”.

    – Peter Nellhaus (03/04  at  11:16 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: February 14, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:5
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