Why does the director get all the credit for a movie?

Cafe Society
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RealityChuck: Credited or not, Hitchcock worked as a scriptwriter (and, arguably, as a DP and editor as well.) The question is not, “can a single person be both a great screenwriter and a great director?”–there are many examples that show this is true.

The question is, “can a great director take a crappy script and turn it into a great movie purely by virtue of his directing talent?” I contend the answer to that is “no,” and that therefore a decent script is a prequisite to a great move. (As is, almost always, a good director.)

For the readers out there: If you think the answer is “yes,” then what would be an example of a great movie with a below average script? (Bear in mind RickJay’s warning that a good script is more than good dialogue: 2001 has almost no memorable dialogue, but has a great script nonetheless.)

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I consider one example of this to be “Desperado” by Robert Rodriguez. The basic story is a standard revenge flick. Stuff blows up, guy gets girl, bad guys die. It could have easily been B-movie schlock. The plot wasn’t exceptional and the actors’ performances weren’t Oscar worthy. But I think it’s a great film. It’s so beautifully put together.

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This doesn’t really help answer the question, but FWIW, I’ve always wondered the same thing.

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I’m seeing arguments all over the board, and that’s because the final product is not always based on the director’s vision (unless the director has one, and the spine to enforce it), nor the writer’s vision (unless the script survives the studio politics and the collaborative process). For every director like Hitchcock, who oversaw all aspects of production to such a degree that, to him, actually doing the work of filming it was somewhat boring, you could point to movies where the director did a pedestrian job and it was the actors, script or special effects that made the movie (I’m thinking particularly of “Ghostbusters” here).

The dynamics of a film production are so varied that at times it’s unfair to say “An Alan Smiffee Production” because to put old AS in the same position as Alfred Hitchcock is like comparing a Raelian priest to Pope John Paul.

At the very least, you can say that the director has the final call on everything, whether he exercises it or not (apart from those responsibilities that belong to the producer). Everything else is details.

One more point to bring up, the main reason why you see the credits the way they are is because that’s how the various unions thrashed out the rules. There are specific instances where the credits have to open with “An Alan Smiffee Film” and who gets called a producer, an executive producer or a line producer. There are rules for screenplay credits, such as the difference between “Screenplay by Alan J. Paluka and Bart Simpson” and “Screenplay by AJP with Bart Simpson.” And these rules have nothing to do with an artistic judgment about the value of a person’s work.

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Wupus, I know you don’t want to hear this, but writing is probably the worst job in the business. And it’s that way for a reason. Screenwriting is probably the most misunderstood part of a film.

Writers write their scripts and then throw them out into the world. A script is not a pure or finished thing unto itself. Chances are it will be interpreted and reinterpreted beyond recognition. For the most part writers relinquish control of their scripts when they sell it. From then on it becomes someone elses baby.

A screenplay is generally not what most people think. They do not include a lot of descriptions of settings, for example. And the best roles are the roles with the fewest lines. A screenplay is a pretty barebones affair. It’s a framework that the rest of the crew procedes to drape a movie around. The worst thing a screenplay can be is overwritten.

There is a reason why writers have to be distant. When you are dealing with two creative people with the kind of egos that creative people have, theres gonna be a lot of conflict. A writer will rarely be happy with what has been done with her work, because it will never fit her vision exactly. So you have to have some professional distance. We can all see what happens when people don’t have that distance. When people adapt popular books, there are always complaints. Imagine if all those complainers were walking around the set telling the director what to do. The movie would never get made, or it’d turn out to be a dual-personality mess. (the exception is when you have a strong writer-director team that can work together well, which is pretty rare).

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Note: none of the stuff I said is out of disdain for writers. Some of my best friends are writers :slight_smile:

This is all stuff my screenwriting teachers told us to prepare our selves for the harsh harsh world of professional screenwriting.

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There’s a reason why a David Fincher film always looks like a David Fincher film, and it’s not the writer.

Have you ever wondered why Home Alone and Harry Potter both sucked?

Also, a director does many of the things that a writer would normally do in other media (for instance, a novel).

The director is hugely responsible for characterisation, for instance. They dictate how the dialogue will be said, the tone of the film, how the audience percieves the character and ultimately, this has a far greater effect than the words a screenwriter sets down originally.

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Couple of corrections here.

First, there are no rules about who gets labeled a producer vs. executive vs. associate etc. Please see my “what does a producer do” link above.

Second, the details on screenplay credits are like this. If the credit reads “written by ___ & ___,” that means the two writers worked together. If it reads “written by ___ and ___,” that means they worked separately, i.e. one of them finished, and the other one rewrote that script.

This gets complicated, as in the case of, say, There’s Something About Mary, where the credit reads, “written by ___ & ___ and ___ & ___.” That means the first two writers worked together, and the second pair also worked together, but the two teams did not collectively work together.

The process of deciding who gets credit for writing is handled by the writers union (the WGA). Generally, the production company will propose a credit, and if any writer appeals, the WGA does a review. They look at all the drafts and try to decide who contributed what. Note that dialogue is not enough to get a credit; the writer must contribute materially to structure and story to warrant a credit, since that’s his main job. (Many people mistakenly associate “script” with “dialogue.” That’s the least important thing a writer does.)

After this review process, it’s possible for the writer to get either a “written by” credit, or, if almost all of their work other than the bare-bones overall structure has been replaced, they might just get a “story by” credit. It’s also possible for the writer to not get credited at all, depending on what he did. There are, I believe, six people credited onscreen for the script of Armageddon, but at least half a dozen more did polish work on specific characters or scenes. And I seem to remember The Flintstones had at least three dozen writers taking whacks at it over the years; only a couple of them made it to the screen.

And what’s the difference between “written by” and “screenplay by,” you ask? The latter is used instead of “written” in two general situations:

First, it’s an adaptation of existing material, like a book or play or whatever. (Example: Wonder Boys, “screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by Michael Chabon.” Since Kloves didn’t write the original novel, it would be inappropriate to say the movie was “written by” him. Occasionally the original writer will adapt his own material, and sometimes the credit in that situation will read, “written by ___ based on his novel.”)

Second, the writer may have had a crappy agent or otherwise didn’t have enough power to keep from getting jerked around. Maybe the director wanted to inflate his own importance, and relegating the writer, even the original total script creator, to a “screenplay” credit is important to his ego, to make it look like the writer did less than he did. Or maybe there was a contractual clause that the writer would get paid based on credit; theoretically, if the script has to be rewritten a bunch, the original writer’s contribution isn’t as “valuable” (in the mind of a studio exec, of course), so he would get paid less, but obviously if the writer isn’t paying attention the studio can cheat him out of a few thousand bucks by changing his credit and then pointing to the buried clause.

Reading movie credits is an extremely arcane skill, to say the least.

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I heard Glenn Close talk about this on “Actor’s Studio,” and her take was that motion pictures are a director’s medium. He/she is responsible for getting the story (in whatever carnation) on the screen. The director has the final say. They may not deserve all the credit, but it is the director’s responsibility to take all of the artistic elements and get the story on the screen.

According to Close, plays are really more of the actor’s domain. The director still has control over the artistic elements, but the actor has to get the story across to the audience in an immediate situation.

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Oh, right, that reminds me, I was going to talk about that concept also: that film is a “director’s medium.”

Consider:

An writer writes a scene. There is one version of the scene in the script.

An actor performs the scene in front of a camera. The director requires the scene to be performed X number of times (five, or twenty, or fifty). Of those X performances, the director orders N to be printed.

The camera is then moved, and the scene performed again Z times, with the director again ordering N[sub]1[/sub] prints based on those Z performances.

Repeat as necessary, until you have completely recorded the scene.

There are now N[sub]N[/sub] recordings of that single scene. Each of these takes will be different: there will probably be more than one angle, the quality of light may have changed slightly if it’s an outdoor scene, the actor’s emotional intensity and timing will vary, the cinematographer (or camera operator) might have handled the camera in a different way to capture the variations in performance, and so on.

Extrapolate from that single scene to the whole film. For any given scene, there are available from five to thirty (on average) recordings of it. (This is, incidentally, where the term “shooting ratio” comes from, i.e. a film shot at ten to one or whatever. If you assume a 90 minute movie, a ten-to-one ratio means the director and editor go into the editing booth with 900 minutes of film. Low-budget movies try to keep the ratio down, say to four or five to one, so they aren’t wasting money. Big-budget movies can shoot at fifty to one or more.)

Now. The director looks at all of this material and, with the editor, begins cutting the film together. (Depending on schedule and budget, the editor may assemble a preliminary cut without the director’s input.) For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume the director printed five takes of every scene. In other words, for scene A, we have takes A[sub]1[/sub], A[sub]2[/sub], A[sub]3[/sub], A[sub]4[/sub], and A[sub]5[/sub], and for scene B, we have takes B[sub]1[/sub], B[sub]2[/sub], B[sub]3[/sub], B[sub]4[/sub], and B[sub]5[/sub], and so on.

In take A[sub]1[/sub], the main actor has a lot of emotional intensity, crying, shouting, throwing things, etc. In take A[sub]2[/sub], they tried an alternate version that’s quieter, softer, more still. The other takes have similar slight differences. The director makes a preliminary choice that A[sub]1[/sub] is the best one.

Now he has to decide which of the B alternatives follows best, for emotional flow, continuity (of performance as well as detail), and so on. Say that the actor’s performance in B[sub]1[/sub] is cold and detached, in B[sub]2[/sub] is weepy and weak, etc. Maybe, in trying them all out, he decides that none of them really works. However, take A[sub]4[/sub] is almost as intense as A[sub]1[/sub], and dovetails quite nicely with B[sub]2[/sub], and gives the sense that the character is quite volatile, given to flights of anger followed by withdrawal.

The point is, with five takes of scene A and five takes of scene B, there are 25 possible assemblies of just those two scenes. The effect is subtle, but by picking and choosing throughout the film, the director creates the actor’s emotional throughline in the editing room. The actor does some of it on the set in front of the camera, but the director has tremendous amount of leeway in manipulating the actor’s performance.

(Note I haven’t mentioned that longer scenes can be further chopped. Say the director likes the first half of A[sub]1[/sub] and the second half of A[sub]2[/sub]. It’s a simple matter to cut it in half and use a cutaway to another shot to bridge the transition. This gives the director and editor almost an infinite number of possible assembly options.)

In fact, Jack Nicholson, a very skilled film actor, is well-known in Hollywood for slightly varying his performance from take to take for exactly this reason. He knows he has very little control over what the director and editor will sculpt in the editing process. However, because he knows how this sculpting works, he is careful to give them as much variety of material as possible, because, paradoxically, he comes off better as a result. If the director and editor know what they’re doing, they can take the wealth of material given them by Nicholson and craft a sublime performance out of it. Obviously, as an actor, he’s managing the overall emotional arc in its broad strokes, but he gives the director a number of alternative interpretations they can use to fine-tune the overall performance.

So, to recap: The writer writes one scene. The director and actor create multiple versions of that scene on the set, and then the director and editor pick and choose from these multiple versions to construct a single overall film. Which one has greater input on the final result? In fact, the more you know about how film works, the more you suspect that the editor is just as important as the writer.

Does all of that make sense?

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I still can’t get over the feeling that the writer is just as important as a director. Without a script, you have * nothing *. Everything ultimately comes from the script, and a lot of what the director does is interpretation. (Of course, when the director influences the script, this doesn’t apply so much).

It’s strange that people don’t have this same problem in play. It’s always Shakespeare’s Hamlet, not whoever the modern director is.

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Apparently Woody Allen doesn’t rely on a script. He has one, but the actors are encouraged to imrpovise just so it goes in the general direction of where he wants the storyline to end up.

Without a script you have nothing? Well, without lighting you have a ver dim film, without cinematography you have wobbly-cam, without the grips all your equipment falls over.

But the Director’s job is to pull everything together so that the film gets made. He ‘directs’ it to it’s final form. The writer merely initiates with a story.

And I think it obvious that when a writer is really good, they do get acknowledged for that, and real film buffs are fully aware of writer credits and their skills.

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Just as the director may direct ten takes of a scene, and then has to choose which one will make the final movie, or combine elements from several different takes to make one scene – so the writer also may write ten drafts of a scene, and may end up combining parts of several drafts to create a final coherent whole.

The writer is an editor too.

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Let’s assume that, for narrative film, the screenwriter is as important to the final product as the director. Then the question becomes this: which writer?

For every 100 films that come out of Hollywood, I’d guess that 5 or fewer haven’t had more than 1 writer work on them. Most scripts are worked over by one or more addtional screenwriters who make contributions of greater or lesser importance. The Writer’s Guild arbitrates who gets screen credit, but they’re not infallible. (I’ve heard that John Sayles’ script revisions to Apollo 13 “should have” gotten him screen credit, for one example, but the WG didn’t give him an on-screen credit.)

On the other hand, most films that come out of Hollywood have one director. (There are exceptions, of course, but they’re infrequent.) And that director is, by the nature of the job, the person ultimately responsible for what gets put into the initial cut. The director may be a control freak who personally supervises every detail of the production, or the director may be a light touch who gives his technical professionals a broad idea of what he wants and lets them work their magic with little intervention. It’s still his responsibility, and he’s still one guy.

(Producers, screening audiences and the MPAA have a say after that initial cut, but barring major creative differences or personality conflicts, the director’s still the one who decides exactly what will be cut or reshot and how those changes will work into the film.)

An individual screenwriter rarely, especially in Hollywood, has enough involvement with the final film (let alone clout) to have it end up as a real represention of his or her voice. It’s the nature of the profession, which is why so many screenwriters want to become writer/directors.

I’m not knocking screenwriters. They’re significant elements of any narrative film. But it’s incredibly rare for the singular vision of one screenwriter or screenwriting team to make it to a multiplex near you. They contribute a lot, but they do it early, and many other hands get to alter the movie before it’s done.

Two other points:

As Cervaise indicated, people have argued that the three major “voices” in a film are the writer(s), the director…and the editor. I know that’s why John Sayles learned how to edit – his recent films are some of the only ones where one person wrote, directed and edited them. They’re true “a film by…” pieces.

And, interestingly enough, television is considered a much more writer-friendly medium than movies. TV directors are usually less concerned with visual style and other “cinematic” elements than getting the story told. That’s in part because of the production schedule – episodes need to be produced and on the air too quickly for the writer’s vision to be substantially altered, once the final draft is turned in.

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Yea, I went overboard. Firstly, I should have added editor. Secondly, I was exaggerating. Most of the time the director is the most critical aspect. Other times they are foremen.