The Newest Wave

Here we go again. Patrick Goldstein’s “The New New Wave” piece last Sunday is another contribution to that stubbornly persistent myth that directors are the authors of the films they direct. Let me pass over Goldstein’s relegation of Mssrs. Scorsese, Pollack, Reiner (Rob) et al to the slag heap in his rush to praise the new wave. That’s the subject of another letter. It is his claim that these “New New Wave directors” are “storytellers” that is both absurd and insulting to the people who are, in fact, the storytellers--the screenwriters who write the scripts that these so-called “storytellers” film.

Of the 15 or so directors mentioned in the article and Kathleen Craughwell’s “Extreme Team” sidebar, about half are writer-directors. And they are never referred to as “writer-directors” but merely as “directors.” It is as if these writer-directors never wrote anything at all; they just turned the camera on and were spontaneously relevant and brilliant.

But it is in their attribution of authorial skills to the non-writing directors that your writers really go off the rails. Danny Boyle’s style is characterized as a “clever, profane, ultra-violent look at criminal underworld.” Excuse me, but all three of Boyle’s films cited (“A Life Less Ordinary,” “Trainspotting,” and “Shallow Grave”) were written by John Hodge. It is Hodge’s profane, ultra-violent look at the criminal underworld that Boyle has adapted to film.

Spike Jonze is credited with “quirky, philosophical humor.” There is no mention that it was Charlie Kaufman’s quirky, philosophical and humorous screenplay that made “Being John Malkovich” quirky, philosophical and humorous. And then there is Bryan Singer, who is anointed as the author of “fast-paced, ironic thrillers.” That fast-paced ironic movie “Apt Pupil” was written by Brandon Bryce, from a Stephen King story; and let us not forget that the film for which Singer received great acclaim, “The Usual Suspects,” was made from Christopher McQuarrie’s Academy Award-winning screenplay.

Why can’t somebody finally get it right? Writers write. Directors direct.

PETER LEFCOURT

Los Angeles

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Bravo to Paul Thomas Anderson for insisting on cutting his own trailer for “Magnolia” and doing it without giving us every beat of the story.

Most times there’s no point in going to a movie after seeing it all in the trailer. Perhaps if marketing execs thought about trailers as sex, they’d realize a little mystery is enticing.

CRAIG STORPER

Pacific Palisades