Who gets artistic control and credit for a movie (e.g. a film, a television show)? Here are the candidates I’ve identified:
Producer (money): As far as I can tell, there’s one kind of producer who’s only job is to get money for the thing. You’ll often see them at the beginning of a film with something like “Francis Ford Coppola presents…” Needless to say, I don’t think these guys should get artistic control.
Producer: Another kind of producer is the one who is sort of CEO of the film, making sure everybody is doing their job and things are working smoothly. Sometimes these people get artistic control, but shouldn’t it go to someone more directly involved in the creative aspects of the film? This producer could just handle the day-to-day details so the artist can get on with the artistic stuff.
Writer: The writer writes the script for the movie. This is my personal favorite — a movie is nothing without writing. However writers often seem to be quiet and live in solitude, a disposition that is perhaps not best for the hustle and bustle of making a movie. Still, they can get other people (the producer, the director) to act as their mouthpieces. On television, writers generally are the artists. But on movies, perhaps because people don’t care about making good movies, writers are treated as interchangeable, repeatedly rewriting each other’s drafts.
Director: The director coverts the text of the script into physical activities. Scripts often say unfilmable things like “Hero felt glum”. The director decides what physical actions will go on so that the audience can tell Hero is feeling glum. On movies, the directors are almost always the artist. This appears to be because they’re the only ones telling the actors what to do, which ultimately defines what can be in the film, so you might as well put them in charge anyway. (Unlike on TV, there’s no next episode coming, so there’s no need to be faithful to the writer.) On television, though, directors are largely interchangable, directing things in a world that’s largely already built and structured.
Editor: The editor cuts the footage together to make the final movie. This means the editor is the final, and in some sense most powerful, guy. But I guess cutting together footage is really boring and not that difficult so editors appear to never get any real credit and only very little artistic control.
Then there are the components:
Director of Photography (aka Cinematographer): The D.P. makes the movie look good. Somewhat analogous to a book designer, the job is mostly orthoganal and in some way doesn’t really effect the content of the movie (or book). But yet, in another way, it’s really important and good cinematography can make a good movie really great (and a great movie even better).
Music: Again, this is somewhat orthoganal, but good music is an even more important part of making a movie good. But the best music is usually done by the artist himself, even though the score is nominally farmed out to someone else. It also seems good music people are really hard to find and perhaps somewhat sporadic in quality.
Actor: I almost didn’t include this one because it’s so mostly irrelevant to the quality of the movie. But I guess because the actor is the face people see, they give them extra importance. Anyway, successful actors seem to almost never make good artists.
There are some artists who will take up a number of these jobs. And I guess there are probably some artists who take up none of them, although I haven’t heard of any (probably because their work sucks). It seems the more jobs you take up, the better the work is. TV writers will often direct the first episode. Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin often do their own music. And in two critically-acclaimed short-season pain-based comedies, The Office and Curb Your Enthusaism, one person (Larry David and Ricky Gervais, respectively) writes, directs, stars, and edits the show. (Gervais even wrote his own song once.) But I guess that’s going a little far.
UPDATE: It ocurred to me today that the question of a director's authorship is a little more complicated than I presented it. One can imagine a spectrum stretching from a James Cameron-type scenario where a director has a vision and hires a writer to come up with a story and a script for it, to the television-type scenario where a director is given a script and bound to film it. In the first scenario, one can imagine the director having some significant degree of authorship: they can fire the writer, hire better ones, insist certain sections be rewritten, decline to shoot portions, etc. While the writer is still writing the script, they're writing someone else's vision. The second is a case where the script is actually binding on the director, and while they have total control over the making of the movie, what the writer wrote significantly constricts what they can do. (2009-12-26)
posted June 18, 2004 03:16 PM (TV) (6 comments) #