The Auteur theory of filmmaking was based on a series of articles in the Cahiers du Cinema (Movie Notebooks). Within the pages of that magazine were critical analysis' of certain trends found in cinema, notably within the cinema of the United States. (It was also here that the genre known as film noir was coined.)
The Auteur theory was: the director of the film is its author, more so than the screenwriter. It was the unique vision of a given director that marked their films. Both Howard Hawks and Sir Alfred Hitchcock were used as examples, and for the most part this theory has remained, along with genre criticism, as the foundation of film theory.
For the most part, there is a good, solid foundation for this. The filmography of certain directors show a tendency to various patterns: Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and others, all created films (and some continue) that had a unique stamp, not only visually but in all manner of the presentation. The dialog, the music, the editing and, of course, the camera work and editing.
What caused me to post this was the work of various directors whose work is largely uneven, sometimes brilliant, sometimes merely pedestrian and sometimes... the only term that is appropriate would be Epic Fail. Joel Schumacher immediately comes to mind. His brilliant 8MM and flawless Falling Down are superb, A Time To Kill is good, solid filmmaking but hardly a work of lasting art as is his rendition of the Weber version of The Phantom Of The Opera, and his two entries into the Batman series are, at best, regrettable.
It was, however, in looking at his career that I started to wonder. Why? Why so uneven?
I began to notice how certain directors were also stuttering along, one moment grand opera and the next barely a cut above porn.
Here, then, is a little background.
In what was once called The Studio System, the studio (usually in the form of the producer) would assign certain films to certain directors. This was due to a track record of success; Hitchcock made thrillers and mysteries, Hawks made westerns. As the director grew in terms of monetary return to the studio, that given director would be given a little more authority over the film (or product) and some (certainly not all) directors began to thrive.
Hitchcock made few Epic Failures, but one that comes to mind was Jamaica Inn, an attempt to do a period piece. It is wretched. That last three word sentence is overly kind.
Be that as it may, as the auteur theory took hold, and Hollywood saw that the directors were growing in stature, the reins began to loosen. Granted, at the same time, the Studio System was faltering, but the era of the Auteur that was self-aware of the Auteur theory began. From this era, we got: Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Allen, Altman. The list goes on and on, but more interesting is what was happening underground.
In the cheapie, grade Z movie industry, certain studios (much smaller than the majors) were still using the old Studio System, even if they weren't completely aware of it, but also tagging young directors and giving them a certain freedom, if only on a restricted budget.
From here, then, we find Bogdanovich being allowed to make a film so long as he included Boris Karloff. This gave us what may be one of the best films of his career, Targets.
As the years have gone on, and the director became weaker in authority (losing final cut privileges, for example: the studio can hack and re-edit without consent of the director), and the free agent style of actors and directors wandering from studio to studio, the films of the United States as a whole started to take on a different feel.
While a film can be (and sometimes is) a work of High Art, it must never be forgotten that a film is, first and foremost, a product. It is meant to make money, pure and simple. What this mindset has birthed is the idea of using an audience survey prior to releasing a film. This is nothing new: Stan Laurel (of Laurel & Hardy) would often preview a film before an audience. The difference was, though, that Stan stood at the back of the theater with a stopwatch and would time the laughter, so that he could then return to the editing and tighten up the comedy.
Now, however, the audience dictates editing. Sometimes to the point of rewriting the entire film.
On the DVD release of Final Destination, the producer, director and screenwriter all talked about using the audience preview to make changes in the film. Of importance here was that the film was completed, but the audience reaction was such that nearly the entire film had to be rewritten, re-shot and re-edited.
As making a film has become an expensive endeavor, and as the director has become less powerful, what is starting to happen is that the group effort in making a film has become paramount. There is no one particular voice, but rather a group.
This leads us to M. Night Shyamalan.
While his very first film, Praying With Anger is sadly not available for purchase, his second, Wide Awake is, and there, in that film, there is a significant difference between it and that which follows. Wide Awake is the last film he has made that uses someone other than James Newton Howard as the music director.
Newton Howard creates a score for Shyamalan's films that never cease to be anything other than brilliant, making a good film great, and a great film classic. Think of Hitchcock with Hermann, or Lucas with Williams (or Spielberg with Williams), or Burton with Elfman.
This is a gestalt, a group of separate minds gathering together, and adding their own touch to an overall work.
When we, the intended audience, are brought in, which is becoming more and more the norm, to witness the "finished" (if not released) product, then the gestalt widens, and the zeitgeist, the collective unconscious begins to alter the direction of the film. Here, everyone is involved, if only loosely.
When this works, it is unmistakable, the film ends up making a dent in the minds and psyche of the viewing populace that was not involved in the creative process. When the film makes a return grand enough to inspire the studios to continue in a similar vein, then the process repeats itself, as if the zeitgeist demands more, the collective consciousness of the global brain says to a smaller, more selective few: Here, this: this is what we want, give us more.
Coming to mind also, then, was the fact that two separate novels had been written and released within months of each other, and each was optioned by different studios. One was The Glass Inferno (by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson) and the other was The Tower by (Richard Martin Stern). Both novels dealt with the same premise: fire breaks out near the top of a superstructure and the stories of the people trying to survive as well as the efforts of the rescue workers to get them out and stop the fire. Rather than release two competing films of the same nature, the two studios joined to cover production costs and split the returns and the resulting film was the entertaining and rather flawed film, The Towering Inferno.
Armageddon and Deep Impact were released the same year by differing studios as were Volcano and Dante's Peak. The first two deal with an impending impact of a meteor /comet, and the second pair deal with the results of a volcanic eruption.
Some of this is mere happenstance of course, but there is also that sense of multiple minds gathering to create one, new fable, a story that wants to be told.
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