Direction

AUTHORITY AND CELEBRITY

The history of the producer/director relationship is quite complex, especially throughout the changing infrastructure of the studio system in the United States. In fact, the director's role, responsibilities, and level of authority can shift quite dramatically depending upon the larger industrial organization of filmmaking. As a brief case study, it is useful to summarize the historical transformation of the Hollywood director from cameraman to contemporary celebrity.

Prior to the standardization of multi-shot narrative films around 1905, cameramen such as William K.L. Dickson, Billy Bitzer, and Edwin S. Porter selected the subject matter, arranged, shot, and edited a scenario. Exhibitors' demand for a higher output necessitated a more detailed division of labor among manufacturers. Therefore, between 1907 and 1909, a second individual—the director—was contracted to stage the action while the cameraman was relegated to the purely technical role of filming. During this brief period, in which filmmaking labor began its centralization within studio conditions, the role of the director and producer was synonymous, with individuals such as D.W. Griffith (1875–1948) and Alice Guy (1873–1968) occupying the dual position of both artist and manager. With the introduction of the multiple-reel feature and a more efficient distribution system between 1909 and 1914, a single director could no longer keep up with the technical demands or rapidity of production. Labor became even more departmentalized, with a director heading a small unit working from a detailed continuity script—a procedure developed in 1913 by the first producer-director proper, Thomas Ince (1882–1924), during his tenure at Mutual.

As the classically structured, multiple-reel feature became the norm, the director's technical responsibilities and managerial decisions actually decreased. Encroaching upon the director's administrative capacities, the "central producer" came to ascendancy as the Hollywood system achieved consolidation between 1914 and the late 1920s. These "efficiency experts" assumed managerial control of planning and controlling a continuity script, with the director relegated to the task of its execution. Creative decisions once wielded by the director were now coordinated by a central producer in advance of the director's involvement in the filmmaking process. Such figures as Allan Dwan (1885–1981), Cecil B. De Mille (1881–1959), and Lois Weber (1881–1939) became studio functionaries who no longer legally controlled the product on which they labored; instead, they worked under the direct orders of a studio's central producer (such as MGM's production chief, Irving Thalberg).

By 1931, production was relegated to a number of generically specific units under the supervision of a production chief responsible for overseeing six to eight films a year. If there were author-figures in classical Hollywood, then it is these producers who best occupy the role, as they held the ultimate authority over a film at every level of production from script development to final editing. Contract directors were often quite literally reduced to a glorified stage director, chiefly responsible for supervising the dramatic action of the performers and largely adhering to predefined "house" styles. Assigned by studio executives to six different pre-planned projects a year, a director might have only one to two weeks to prepare for shooting.

The director's creative fortunes changed only after the Directors Guild's first president, Frank Capra (1897–1991), threatened to call a general directors' strike in 1939. An executive decision was made to create the "hyphenate" category of "producer-director" in order to placate the guild. From then on, those elite filmmakers who could select their own writer, cast, and cameraman and were allowed to supervise production at all levels held the designation of producer-director. Preparation time and salaries were increased, and A-list directors were responsible for making only two to three films a year—either as freelance directors, or as the head of their own in-house independent units. Capra, Hitchcock, Fritz Lang (1890–1976), and Leo McCarey (1898–1969) all held this quasi-independent status in the late 1940s.

With the development of the package-unit system in the mid-1940s, directors were granted even more creative autonomy. As the studios sought to cut their overhead expenses, especially following the court-ordered divestiture of their theater chains in 1948 and declining boxoffice receipts, the shift from in-house units to a more decentralized system was accelerated. As the majors now had to distribute their films on a film-by-film basis, directors became important means of pre-selling and differentiating their product. Films were "packaged" by producers, and increasingly by talent agencies, both of whom could draw on an industry-wide pool of talent to produce a film. A director would lead a production company that was assembled on a short-term basis and dissolved after their work was completed. Interestingly, many of the major Hollywood stylists beloved by French and American auteur critics emerge during this period, including Max Ophüls (1902–1957), Vincente Minnelli (1903–1986), Otto Preminger (1906–1986), and Douglas Sirk (1897–1987). In other words, the authorial "signatures" of so-called Hollywood auteurs emerged and were subsumed within the economic logic of disaggregated (rather than centralized) film production.

Since the absorption of the studios by major media conglomerates in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the director has become an even more valuable commodity in a production horizon dominated by blockbusters and franchises designed to generate profits in multiple ancillary markets. As labor is now almost exclusively outsourced, a director frequently acts as a lynchpin within a temporary, electronically maintained network of technicians, programmers, and artisans—many of whom he will not even meet in person. In order to remain visible within a highly differentiated and hit-driven market, a commercially savvy,

freelance director is encouraged to develop an ostentatious style that will attract a younger and lucrative demographic. Examples include the flamboyant, but ultimately superficial post-classical aesthetics of such "shooters" as McG (b. Joseph McGinty Nichol in 1970), Brett Ratner (b. 1969), David Fincher (b. 1962), Michael Bay (b. 1965), and Gore Verbinski (b. 1964). For these music video alumni, "style" is no longer regarded romantically as an indication of personal expressivity; instead, it is motivated by a commercial logic (the acquisition and retention of work) and its value is purely fiscal.

The current prominence of the director's position is underlined by the substantial financial compensation awarded in the United States. In 2004, for example, the minimum salary of a director working on a film whose budget exceeded $1.5 million was $13,423 per week. Of course, salaries can climb much higher depending upon the profitability of the director's past films. Warner Bros., for example, paid Peter Jackson over $20 million against twenty percent of the grosses to write, direct, and produce the 2005 remake of King Kong. Other commercially successful Hollywood directors whose fee runs into eight figures include Robert Zemeckis (b. 1952), M. Night Shyamalan (b. 1970), and Steven Spielberg (b. 1946). However, as an indication of the rising star power of the director, it has become a frequent practice for such commercially successful filmmakers to negotiate deals that consist of low upfront fees compensated with higher percentage points from their film's gross profits. As the "hyphenates" continue to gain power and influence, their business acumen has become as important as their creative powers.

Moreover, as Warren Buckland argues, contemporary Hollywood directors achieve the status of auteur not simply because a recurring personal style is manifested in the treatment of his or her material; rather, they wield control over the production, distribution, and exhibition of their work. By "vertically integrating" all three stages of filmmaking, they exert considerable influence over the external conditions of their authorship: finances, talent, and distribution. Spielberg and George Lucas (b. 1944)—the premier twenty-first century filmmakermoguls—are notable as directors, producers, owners of filmmaking facilities, and holders of lucrative franchises because their integrated labor is personally, rather than externally, controlled.

Thus, the contemporary celebrity director has become a brand image based on singularity, familiarity, and reliability. Hollywood has found the myth of the auteur highly congenial to contemporary business practices in that it promotes a sense of product continuity. Yet to invoke the director's name is not necessarily to invoke an author; a manufactured authorial signature merely evokes a series of pleasurable expectations on behalf of the viewer. Attributing a film to a single creative individual is a strategy designed to remind viewers of a previously enjoyed product in the hopes that they will pay to repeat a similar experience. Major studios care little about ascribing creative authority to the director's name. Indeed, studios are quick to stress multiple authorial sources if they believe such emphasis will contribute to a film's marketability—hence the contemporary proliferation of promotional taglines that link a film to the past commercial successes of unspecified "creators," producers, and even writers.

While the conception of "style" and its relation to "personal expression" retains residual romantic connotations in the international art cinema tradition, the "author-value" of the director has become increasingly commodified in a global marketplace. With exhibitors in most countries importing over 85 percent of their films from Hollywood, international festival circuits are emerging as the primary means for art films to secure distribution. In North America, art cinema has been perceived as a "director's cinema" since the 1950s, when films directed by Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), Federico Fellini

(1920–1993), Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998), François Truffaut (1932–1984), and others achieved substantial box-office success in the emerging art house scene. However, the cultural cachet of the "name" director has assumed even greater prominence, as the star status of the director is now the imperative that largely drives the economics of the art house market. Certainly, to promote such names as Pedro Almodóvar (b. 1949), Catherine Breillat (b. 1948), Jane Campion (b. 1954), Hou Hsiao-Hsien (b. 1947), Mohsen Makhmalbaf (b. 1957), Mira Nair (b. 1957), Idrissa Ouedraogo (b. 1954), Walter Salles (b. 1956), or Lars von Trier (b. 1956) is to portend a unique cinematic experience, attributed to the artistry of a singular filmmaker. Yet one must also recognize that this authorial status is both a political and economic strategy maintained within the high-stakes business of a global culture market. Now more than ever, the director is a conflicted figure, owing a divided allegiance to the demands of both art and commerce.