Author versus auteur.

THE SCHREIBER THEORY: A RADICAL REWRITE OF AMERICAN FILM HISTORY

BY DAVID KIPEN

HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY: MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING, 2006

172 PP./$12.00 (SB)

"The writer is the most important person in Hollywood," claimed legendary film producer Irving Thalberg, "but we must never tell the sons of bitches" (69). Not to worry. As any screenwriter can attest, it is still Los Angeles's best-kept secret. Today, directors get all the respect--from both Hollywood studios and academic film scholars. Even when a director does not write, produce, shoot, or edit a movie, it is still billed as "his." Film critic David Kipen is out to change all that with his audacious new book, The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History.

Kipen aims squarely at the well-entrenched auteur theory of film. As he explains, "the auteur (rhymes with 'hauteur') theory would have us believe that directors are the principal authors of their films" (24). To Kipen, this seems as absurd as shelving library books by their editor rather than by their author. With a wry wit that saves it from being strident, The Schreiber [Yiddish for "writer"] Theory proposes nothing less than "a radical rewrite of American film history." Kipen suggests that, instead of studying a director's oeuvre, film scholars would learn more by categorizing and evaluating films according to their screenwriters. It is an intriguing idea, but Kipen goes too far when he muses, "Could it be that, like astronomers before Copernicus, cinephiles have been looking the wrong way all along?" (78).

To make his case, Kipen challenges nearly half a century of film theory, going back to French critics like Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Francois Truffaut. ("America sends France movies, and France sends America theory," he quips [46]). Kipen slyly suggests that the French's fervor for auteurism may have been influenced by their own later realized ambitions of becoming directors themselves.

The book's concern, however, is not so much with the French as with later American critics like Andrew Sarris, who supposedly failed to realize that "auteurism, historically, works much better with certain French movies than most American ones. Of course it makes sense to look at Godard's Breathless [1960] or Truffaut's The 400 Blows [1959] as auteurist headbirths. Their directors wrote their own scripts" (46).

Not so with the average American studio film. Few big-budget directors write their own material. Kipen willingly grants the auteur label to polymaths like Woody Allen or today's indie writer-directors but bristles at the possesssory credit (i.e., "a film by ...") that non-writing directors now routinely demand. In Kipen's view, these credits can "award sole authorship of a film to a director-for-hire who may have had little to do with it other than call action and cut" (64).

However, Kipen does more than just grouse. He willingly tackles the most compelling argument against his own theory: how can you evaluate a writer's contribution when so many films have more than one screenwriter? After snidely observing that several classic films had more than one director, Kipen proposes a whole new field of literary film analysis: "Any critic worth his salt ought to be able to look at a multiple-author script and tease out themes common to each of its writers in turn ... just as any self-respecting rock critic can tell whether a Lennon-McCartney song really owes more to McCartney or Lennon. Collaboration doesn't preclude analysis; it compels analysis" (29). (Carrying the Beatles analogy further, he notes that if music followed the auteur theory, all songs by the Fab Four would be attributed to George Martin, their master producer.)

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To jump-start its proposed revision of film history, The Schreiber Theory helpfully devotes eighty pages to listing the oeuvres of master screenwriters (a format that mimics the reviled Sarris's classification of director auteurs). What is more, Kipen presents a list of changes that the Hollywood Writers Guild of America needs to institute to make films more writer-centric.

It is a bold vision. Kipen not only wants to turn academic criticism on his head, but he also wants "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" (38). He believes that if screenwriters were held accountable for their films, they would be less likely to accept hackwork, and the overall quality of cinema would improve. Writers would also get more respect. They might even start getting invited to the premieres of their own movies.

LISA HUNTER is an arts journalist and author of The Intrepid Art Collector: The Beginner's Guide to Finding, Buying, and Appreciating Art on a Budget (2006).