Cryptic credits

A week after being castigated for omitting the writers’ credits from its annual “Sneaks” edition, Calendar in part atones by running David Kipen’s “The Pen Is Mightier,” [Feb. 5] billing itself as “a first step toward challenging auteurism with a powerful schreiberist countermyth.” While I wholeheartedly applaud the author’s wish to honor the screenwriter, Kipen’s exemplary list, by starting off with James Agee, demonstrates the difficulty in pinning down exact credits. Kipen claims that a “robust anticlericalism” thematically unites the adaptations of “The African Queen” and “The Night of the Hunter,” citing “Agee’s choices, both of materials and accentuation.”

Critic-essayist-poet Agee was a very important writer, but only an intermittent screenwriter, of whom it could be said that his projects chose him, not the other way around. What’s more, it is no longer a secret that when Agee turned in a ludicrously over-length first draft of “The Night of the Hunter,” the whole thing had to be rewritten by first-time director Charles Laughton. Alas, a “countermyth” is after all still just another myth.

PRESTON NEAL JONES

Los Angeles

Jones wrote “Heaven & Hell to Play With: The Filming of ‘The Night of the Hunter.’ ”