Gross Behaviour - by Leonard Klady

The Auteur Limits

Toward the end of his life, I struck up a friendship with Raoul Walsh with the thought of writing a book on the legendary director. Walsh's Hollywood career dated back to Griffith who employed him to double Pancho Villa and play John Wilkes Booth in Birth of a Nation. He directed the Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad and What Price Glory in the 1920s and his sound career highlights included High Sierra, White Heat, Battle Cry and dozens of other movies.

A towering and commanding figure with a famous eye patch, Walsh was a fabulous raconteur though not particularly verbose about a gestalt, technical rules or how to work with actors. One day, growing a bit impatient with the writer's queries, he gave me a long look and said: "we were making it up as we went along, there were no rules other than making good pictures."

Walsh would delight in telling tales about the famous or providing anecdotes about even his most arcane work (Lost and Found in the South Seas). However, I noticed that whenever I asked about one of my personal favorites, the psychological western Pursued with Robert Mitchum, he would always find a way to change the subject. It evolved almost into a game. I'd bring it up in conversation; he'd segue into a lark about trying to get contract player Ronald Reagan (then Governor of California) drunk with Errol Flynn during the making of Desperate Journey. Or, he'd turn the tables, asking if I was familiar with a writer named Walter Hill who'd sent him a very nice letter about stealing the opening of High Sierra for his script of The Getaway.

I was convinced there was some dark secret about Pursued and over dinner with Jean Demarquise - a French journalist who knew Walsh very well - asked him what he made of it. He just laughed and said: "don't you know why?" Obviously, I didn't. "It was a flop and that was a cardinal sin."

Walsh mostly made hits and had an enviable run at Warner Bros. where he was Flynn's favorite and worked regularly with Cagney, Bogart, Gable and Cooper. He had a wonderful life making movies and was genuinely surprised and tickled that people remembered him and the films. But he would ask about "this auteur thing." What was it the French and increasingly the young Americans were talking about?

All attempts to clarify that the director was the ultimate author of a motion picture were met with incredulity. Walsh would say: "but I didn't write it." Often he simply was handed the script of his next film and given a few days to prepare. Generally at least the starring roles were cast and he might request a cameraman but usually had to use whomever was available. He didn't supervise the post production and often was too busy on a new film to do reshoots. Walsh also might be shanghaied into bailing out another film - as he did on In This Our Life with Bette Davis - when he was between pictures.

In the Hollywood of the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s that Walsh knew all too well, he had a position of privilege. He wasn't a star and rarely was sought out for plum assignments. When the studio was looking for someone to get the job done, he was on the short list. Every studio had several such filmmakers whether it was W.S. Van Dyke at MGM or Irving Cummings at Fox. Walsh just happened to be a little better at getting the best out of his cast and crew and that fact becomes more pronounced with the passage of time. However, it doesn't change the conditions involved in the making of those movies.

A couple of months back, an agent whose career of spotting raw talent is close to non pareil, called up wanting to know what directors had the best commercial winning streaks. It seemed an odd question coming from someone marked by a career of handholding idiosyncratic sensibilities. But the bosses at the agency were pressing to sign up people that commanded top dollar and had resumes with $100 million hits.

After a brief pause, I offered up this advice. Scan a list of the top grosser of the past five years and pick out all the movies with big box office where you can't immediately remember the name of the director. My short list included Peter Segal, Jay Roach and Tom Shadyac. Now I'm not begrudging the success of the trio or the quality of the films they've helmed. However, personally I'd be hard pressed to identify a distinct signature in their work and would argue that most of their assignments neither required one nor would have commercially benefited from imposing it on the movies. These guys are the go-to group for contemporary comedies, I'm not certain there's a comparable selection of people if you want to make a thriller or something in the action genre but perhaps one might consider Andy Davis or Martin Campbell.

Without reviewing the movies of this handful, I'd still be quite surprised if any opted not to take the "a film by" credit. Like so many things in the industry, what was once something one earned by experience, guile or cunning has evolved into a de facto, often meaningless imprimatur. The Directors Guild successfully waged and earned the right to take this credit of possession for its members and it doesn't matter whether the individual was a last minute hire or developed, wrote and sweated blood for years to get the film produced.

When the credit A Film by Peter Macdonald appeared on Rambo III, the notion of auteurism took a mighty hit. Macdonald replaced another director on that production several weeks into filming. So, he did not cast, select the crew, scout locations or prep the film in any way. He was a hired hand and ably served that purpose. Conversely, we all know that Clint Eastwood personally acquired the film rights to the book Mystic River, hired and supervised a screenwriter, prepared a budget, chose locations, sought out a cast, etc. Whether or not he deserves to be credited as the author of the film or not, it's inarguable that his influence on the release version of that film was far greater than that Macdonald's on Rambo III.

The history of the possessory credit dates back to the silent era and embraces both directors such as D.W. Griffith and producers including Mack Sennett and Hal Roach. Basically it was based upon Hollywood's golden rule and those with the gold made that determination. For decades power and marketing were the key factors in employing a behind the camera name such as Hitchcock or Selznick as a sales tool. There was nothing in the guild contracts that even allowed a director or writer to approach the studios for name above the title position. It was simply wrangled on a case-by-case basis between the individual and the company.

Then in the 1960s, the French critics popularized the auteurist approach to movies. There's no question that some American directors including Chaplin, John Ford and Ernst Libitsch had a distinct signature that set many of their movies apart from their contemporaries. However, as much as I like and admire many movies directed by Michael Curtiz or Henry Hathaway, my suspicion is that I'd be hard pressed to identify one of their programmers as part of a unique oeuvre. The filmmakers that come to mind with the sort of unique and singular signature that's unmistakable don't work in America - Fellini, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Bresson, Bergman, Dreyer, Satyajit Ray, Godard, Fassbinder and, more recently, Tarkofsky and Kieslowski.

Someone with a decent knowledge of movies can identify work by any of these names within a few minutes as a result of what and how they shoot, their use of music or an acting ensemble. American films of the studio era were about conformity, so the notion that Walsh, Howard Hawks or William Wyler would direct material in a fashion radically different stylistically from their peers was unthinkable. The directors were on staff or under contract just the same as writers, actors, cameramen, art directors, costumers and everyone else involved in the production of a motion picture. You punched a clock but the office was a soundstage and some rose higher in their craft and position than others but a professional community evolved in this factory environment.

No one above or below-the-line made the argument that they were making a film by anyone other than a studio and when that entity dissolved and the companies no long had an army of contract employees, the age of the free agent emerged. For many who strattled the two eras, the sense of losing one's home was extreme and alienating. It was particularly calamitous for in-house producers and the majority of their ranks simply couldn't weather the transition to independent status. Editors still edited; recordists continued to capture sound and continuity kept everything in order.

The position that changed most was that of the director. His role became more all encompassing. As producers increasingly tended to focus on business issues, the director began to oversee all the creative departments. It wasn't perforce, just endemic. And the paws on nature of the two jobs allowed directors and producers - the two positions with constant access to the new studio chiefs - to negotiate presentation billing or possessory credit. Screenwriters who do not direct or produce rarely get the film by credit, but authors such as Stephen King and Neil Simon will be positioned in front of the title and often have no direct involvement in the production. Again, marketing and/or power trump all other considerations.

Film is often referred to as a collaborative art form and apart from some true primitives and Robert Rodriguez it takes many hands to fashion a motion picture. But movie making Hollywood style has always been an abject case of class struggle. The halcyon days of the studio system operated like an assembly line whereas present day operations as part of massive media conglomerates have turned the often-microscopic film making operation into a plantation. There is less seeming room for benevolence and a lot more use of the whip. A film by may or may not have any real substantive proof and, in and of itself does not accrue a prescribed reward. It is a symbol that divides people; provides solace and comfort to a chosen few and is the stuff that dreams are made of.