The pen is mightier

By David Kipen

Feb. 5, 2006 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

TO enter a parallel universe, just dial (323) 782-4591. A blithe female voice speaks the titles of half a dozen or so current movies, the dates and times they will screen at a certain private auditorium in Beverly Hills and, finally, the names of the filmmakers responsible. The titles are largely familiar. The names, to any but the most uncommon cinephile, are not. Lately, the recording has alerted callers to showtimes for such pictures as Tony Kushner and Eric Roth’s “Munich,” and Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan’s “The Producers.”

Hasn’t there been some mistake? Didn’t Spielberg direct “Munich”? Didn’t Susan Stroman direct “The Producers”?

Yes, as a matter of fact, they did. They just didn’t write them. And to the Writers Guild of America and its Film Society, whose number you’ve just dialed -- if to practically nobody else in the filmgoing world -- directing isn’t everything. As for whether there’s been some mistake, in fact there has, and too many people have been making it for far too long. It’s called the auteur theory.

As developed by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and other mid-20th century French film critics who, not coincidentally, would soon become directors, the auteur (rhymes with “hauteur”) theory would have us believe that directors are the principal authors of their films. Its adherents contend that the best directors are those whose personalities assert themselves -- despite the interference of studios, producers and other presumed philistines -- recognizably from film to film.

Alfred Hitchcock, for example, belongs in what the pioneering American auteurist Andrew Sarris called his “pantheon” because his films betray consistent preoccupations -- in Hitchcock’s case, largely with themes of guilt, paranoia, mistaken identity and treacherous blonds. John Ford, whose pictures typically explore ideas of honor, manhood and the changing face of the American West, bunks in the pantheon for similar reasons. Similarly, Howard Hawks gets the nod because of his unfailing interest in masculine camaraderie, teasing sexuality and professional pride.

Unquestionably, these men have their names on a lot of great movies, but to read the more careless auteurists, greatness somehow counts for less than a one-track mind. A wiseacre might suggest that the surest way into the pantheon is, therefore, to make the same picture over and over. Such stylistically consistent directors as Hitchcock, Ford and Hawks are all titans, but is their late work any better than -- or even thematically much different from -- their mature early stuff? Did these directors grow, especially? Change? Did Hitchcock’s 1956 “The Man Who Knew Too Much” really mark all that much of a creative leap beyond his 1934 “The Man Who Knew Too Much”?

On the other hand, John Huston never made the same movie twice. He consequently stands outside the pantheon as either a weak auteur or -- it gets a little hazy here -- no auteur at all.

The auteur theory hasn’t stood unchallenged all these years. Notably, in his 1975 book “Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema” Richard Corliss constructed his own revisionist pantheon, peopling it with favored screenwriters who had been locked out of the auteurist shrine. For example, instead of directors Josef von Sternberg (“Underworld”), Howard Hawks (“Scarface”) and Ernst Lubitsch (“Design for Living”), he elevated Ben Hecht, the man who wrote all three pictures.

Then Corliss went looking for the themes and idiosyncrasies each screenwriter’s filmography had in common. Hecht obliged with his trademark cynicism and racy vitality. Similarly, Peter Stone (“Charade,” “Skin Game,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”) repaid Corliss’ interest with a knack for sprightly banter, an obsession with varieties of lying, and his seeming inability to write a character who didn’t have at least two pseudonyms.

There it was: film theory with coherence.

FOR various reasons, Corliss had trouble selling his screenwriter-centered cosmology of film 30 years ago. But it makes so much sense that I propose reviving it -- even though I’m fully aware that it faces the same two obstacles that have felled it in the past. For one thing, there’s the confounding question of credit. A writer may get screen credit for work he didn’t do or go without credit for work he did. In other words, never mind who’s the auteur of a film; it’s hard enough to figure out who’s the author of the screenplay.

In addition to the conundrum of misassigned credits, any screenwriter-based theory of film inevitably has to contend with the challenge of multiple credits. Really, what would you rather try to write a cogent, humanly legible paragraph about? Sydney Pollack’s “Tootsie”? Or Larry Gelbart’s, Barry Levinson’s, Elaine May’s, Don McGuire’s and Murray Schisgal’s “Tootsie”?

And with this, inevitably, we come up against auteurism’s usual trump card. How can anyone ever hope to take screenwriters seriously as the authors of their work when half the time -- and, barring such occasional happy exceptions as “Tootsie,” generally the poorer half --scripts have more than one writer?

Here, where the conversation usually stops, is precisely where it should start. Any critic worth his salt ought to be able to look at a multiple-author script and tease out scenes and themes common to each of its writers in turn -- just as any decent student of comedy can tell an Eric Idle sketch from a Graham Chapman sketch, even though both are credited only to “Monty Python,” or just as any self-respecting listener can tell whether a Lennon-McCartney song really owes more to McCartney or Lennon. Collaboration doesn’t preclude analysis; it compels analysis. Yet if auteurists ruled the world, the master producer George Martin wouldn’t just be the fifth Beatle. Because he had the sole, unshared producing credit, Martin would be the only Beatle.

So, between source material and shared credits and adaptation credits and story credits and uncredited rewrites and on-set improvisation, how’s anybody supposed to give credit where credit is due?

Luckily, this isn’t the rhetorical question it might once have been. Careful scholarship has yielded credible approximations of how the screenplays for such contested classics as “Casablanca,” “Double Indemnity” and “Gone With the Wind” all came to be. There’s no reason to suppose that a cadre of committed film students couldn’t perform a similar service for much of the rest of Hollywood history.

By sifting the drafts and interviewing the surviving principals and recognizing their styles -- in short, by doing the kind of old-fashioned spadework that requires too much patience for most film scholars, and too much time for even the most well-meaning daily reviewers -- the nut could be cracked. But it would take a lot of shoe leather, plus more book advances and tenured fellowships than there are in heaven. Until now, it’s been far easier just to assign credit for a film to its director and hope for the best.

WHATEVER its failings as doctrine, the birth of auteurism represented a masterstroke of nomenclature. Suddenly, a generation of film geeks could now impress girls, and themselves, by dropping a little French into the conversation. Next to the worldlywise Weltschmerz of the politique des auteurs, a “theory of screenwriters” sounds like a homework assignment. To paraphrase a perennial Hollywood complaint, the title needs work.

If not “a theory of screenwriters,” then what? Ecrivainism? No, too derivative. After auteurism, to go with another French locution would be tantamount to surrender. Screenwriterism? Scenarism? Somehow, these lack the exotic whiff that only a foreign language can confer. But if not French, what?

Yiddish, that’s what. What language could better christen a script-based theory of film criticism than the mother tongue of many of America’s first screenwriters, a language as intrinsically funny as French is highfalutin? It naturally follows that the rightful name for this new heresy can only be: The Schreiber Theory.

Schreiber (sometimes shrayber) means “writer” in Yiddish. The schreiber theory is an attempt to explode the director-centric farrago of good intentions, bad faith, and tortured logic that goes by the name of auteurism, and to replace it with a screenwriter-centered way of thinking about film.

One way to describe such a theory would be to envision the world it might create. It’s a world where the audience might make decisions on what to see more on the basis of a screenwriter’s track record than a director’s. It’s a world where screenwriters might therefore take greater care before accepting hackwork, because their reputations, as well as their solvency, might be riding on the outcome.

In short, it’s a world where movies might even measurably improve, since the surest predictor of a picture’s quality -- i.e., who wrote it -- would finally assume its rightful place in the equation.

A filmgoer seeking out pictures written by, say, Charlie Kaufman, won’t always see a masterpiece, but he’ll see fewer clunkers than he would following even a brilliant director like John Boorman, or an intelligent actor like Jeff Goldblum. It’s all a matter of betting on the fastest horse, instead of the most highly touted or the prettiest.

But is it too late for the late-blooming schreiber theory to supplant the hardy, non-native auteurist spore? Not by a longshot. The auteur theory is shakier than ever, thanks to a combination of bad late-career movies by some hitherto-promising pantheon candidates, a lack of productivity from others, and the generalized jejune awfulness of what passes for the American cinema in an increasingly globalized market.

This last point doesn’t bode much better for a screenwriter-centered movie universe than for a director-centered one. If anything, screenwriters have it even rougher in an ever more globalized Hollywood than directors do, because dialogue -- while only part of what screenwriters do -- is still the part that most often gets lost in translation. That’s why we’ve seen the proliferation of predominantly visual drama (action films), and of predominantly visual comedy (gross-out slapstick).

Nevertheless, it’s easy to concoct a long list of screenwriters past and present who have more recognizable signatures, and better batting averages, than all but a few auteurs. The accompanying sidebar gives a sense of what such a list might look like. It’s a first step toward challenging auteurism with a powerful schreiberist countermyth.

The outcome could be -- literally -- epoch-making. In the 1970s, a few directors tried living up to the auteurists’ overstated claims for their profession, and for a while there, it actually worked. Just imagine if screenwriters, with so much greater right to those claims, held themselves to a similar standard.

David Kipen is director of literature at the National Endowment for the Arts. This article is adapted from his book “The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History.” Copyright 2006 by David Kipen. Published by Melville House.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Kipen at REDCAT

What: “Who Cares Who Directed It? The Schreiber Theory and the Politics of Movie Authorship,” a talk featuring David Kipen and Nicholas Meyer

Where: REDCAT / CalArts Theater at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles

When: 8:30 p.m. Thursday

Price: $8 to $12

Contact: (213) 237-2800

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The list, from Agee to Zaillian

How might it work to analyze films based on who wrote them? David Kipen offers a sample.

JAMES AGEE

ONE of the first things to jump out at a viewer of “The African Queen” and “The Night of the Hunter” -- aside from their manifest intelligence, wit, detail and craft -- is their robust anticlericalism. “African Queen” tells the story of a starchy missionary’s slow unbuttoning, while “Night of the Hunter” traces a false preacher’s murderous designs on two children standing between him and a fortune. In the first picture, holy scripture is an impediment to love; in the second, it’s a hypocrite’s prop. Even in his underrated, almost unseen 45-minute version of “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Agee has enlarged and mocked the village preacher’s role compared with the original. Admittedly, these films began life in the imaginations of C.S. Forester, Davis Grubb and Stephen Crane, not Agee. But as with any decent screen adapter, Agee’s choices, both of materials and accentuation, betray the stamp of the true schreiber.

The Night of the Hunter, 1955

Face to Face, 1952

(segment “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”)

Crin-Blanc, 1952

(commentary) (with Albert Lamorisse)

The African Queen, 1951

(with John Huston, Peter Viertel)

The Quiet One, 1948

(with Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, Sidney Meyers)

PAUL ATTANASIO

A former film critic for the Washington Post, Attanasio has credits that include “Quiz Show,” “Donnie Brasco” and a still-unfilmed biopic of Charles Lindbergh. The recurring theme here, what Henry James called “the figure in the carpet,” may be a preoccupation with ideas of assimilation -- whether the narc Brasco’s infiltration of a mob family, or “Quiz Show” contestant Charles Van Doren’s attempt to transcend his WASP caste and ingratiate himself into the American mainstream.

The Sum of All Fears, 2002

(with Daniel Pyne)

Sphere, 1998

(with Kurt Wimmer, Stephen Hauser)

Donnie Brasco, 1997

Disclosure, 1994

Quiz Show, 1994

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

ALSO an accomplished novelist and classicist, the Chicago-born Raphael claims credits including “Darling,” “Two for the Road” and the nonpareil British miniseries “The Glittering Prizes.” Our foremost romantic coroner, Raphael frequently concerns himself with the decay of love -- usually over an extended or fractured time scheme, preferably among the rich, and frequently marked by a stinging facility of language in both dialogue and self-lacerating monologue.

Coast to Coast, 2004

(TV) (from his novel)

Hiding Room, 2002

This Man, This Woman, 2002

Eyes Wide Shut, 1999

(with Stanley Kubrick)

Picture Windows, 1995

(miniseries) (episode “Armed Response”)

La Putain du Roi, 1990

(with Axel Corti, Daniel Vigne)

Women and Men: Stories of Seduction, 1990

(TV)

After the War, 1989

(miniseries)

Oxbridge Blues, 1984

(miniseries)

(from his books “Oxbridge Blues” and “Sleeps Six”)

Richard’s Things, 1980

(from his novel)

The Best of Friends, 1980

(TV series)

School Play, 1979

(TV)

Of Mycenae and Men, 1979

(TV)

Oresteia, 1979

(miniseries)

(with Kenneth McLeish)

The Glittering Prizes, 1976

(miniseries)

Rogue Male, 1976

(TV)

Daisy Miller, 1974

A Severed Head, 1970

Far from the Madding Crowd, 1967

Two for the Road, 1967

Darling, 1965

Nothing But the Best, 1964

Don’t Bother to Knock, 1961

(with Denis Cannan, Frederic Gotfurt)

Bachelor of Hearts, 1958

(with Leslie Bricusse)

STEVEN ZAILLIAN

IN addition to working through his youthful alienation and parental anxiety in a couple of fascinating films (“The Falcon and the Snowman,” “Searching for Bobby Fischer”), Zaillian has to his credit one of the most ingenious screenwriting solutions of recent decades. The picture was “Schindler’s List.” The problem? Oskar Schindler saved more than 1,000 Jews from Auschwitz, and then ... nothing. His postwar biography dissipates into 30 years of penury and alcoholism.

If this were fiction, Schindler would surely have martyred himself for “his” Jews and become a secular saint for his sacrifice. Instead he overstayed his welcome, acting like a man more tormented by conscience than subservient to it. How on Earth do you dramatize that?

Zaillian cracks the problem in just five words: “I could have done more.” You remember. Schindler stands before his assembled workers, gathered in one of Spielberg’s signature curtain-call finales. Schindler’s addressing the Jews he saved, and what does he say? “I could have done more. I should have sold this car. It would have been 10 more if I sold this car. This pen, it would have been five more.... This ring, the gold in this ring, I could have gotten two.... “

It’s a great scene, but why? Because it presents a viable solution to the enigma of Schindler’s postwar collapse: He never forgave himself for the lives he didn’t save. Even more important, it throws the moral question of the movie right into the audience’s lap. As in Zaillian’s other movies about the nature of evil, the challenge suddenly becomes not “What would we have done in the hero’s place?” but “What would a hero do in ours?”

All the King’s Men, 2006

The Interpreter, 2005

(with Charles Randolph, Scott Frank, Martin Stellman, Brian Ward)

Gangs of New York, 2002

(with Jay Cocks, Kenneth Lonergan)

Hannibal, 2001

(with David Mamet, Thomas Harris)

A Civil Action, 1998

Mission: Impossible, 1996

(with Robert Towne, David Koepp)

Clear and Present Danger, 1994

(with Donald Stewart, John Milius)