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Screenwriting double function of anonymity for female authors in Hollywood and critical issues of authorship in cinema: two screenplay case studies: Grace of my heart and Edward Scissorhands

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Screenwriting double function of anonymity for female authors in Hollywood and critical issues of authorship in cinema: two screenplay case studies: Grace of my heart and Edward Scissorhands

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SCREENWRITING DOUBLE FUNCTION OF ANONYMITY
FOR FEMALE AUTHORS IN HOLLYWOOD AND
CRITICAL ISSUES OF AUTHORSHIP IN CINEMA:
TWO SCREENPLAY CASE STUDIES:
GRACE OF MY HEART AND EDWARD SCISSORHANDS.

by
Cristiani Michels Bilhalva

_________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION: CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Cristiani Michels Bilhalva
ii

EPIGRAPH

After the war, I met Man Ray again. He said to me: “But you are speaking!” I asked him:
“Why do you say that?” He answered: “You never said a word formerly.”

– Meret Oppenheim

If we could at least discover in ourselves or in people like ourselves an activity
which was in some way akin to creative writing!

– Freud

iii

DEDICATION

I dedicate this dissertation to my family in Brazil, whose unconditional love and support
never ceases to inspire me.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to begin by thanking my dissertation committee for your vision, for having been
born (first things first!), and for just being who you are. Thank you so much for sharing so
many of your ideas with me, and opening up my horizons. You helped me along this
journey immensely; not only in terms of knowledge, but in terms of my worldview, where
art, film, theories and stories are always more meaningful if someone is passionate about it.

To my chair, Dr. David E. James. I cannot thank you enough for being on my committee,
supporting me, and taking me under your wing during a difficult moment in my life. I have
always felt you were the perfect match for my dissertation! This is because of your love of
poetry and music, your insightful mind, your interest in art and the avant-garde, and a keen
eye for the bigger picture, something that is so important to me. Not only are you a terrific
and distinguished scholar, you are also funny and artistic. Now how usual is that? Not that
usual. So, it is truly a gift to have someone like you in Critical Studies; someone who is
able to mesh film and philosophy with life and art, but can also keep a straight sense of
humor. Your thought process seems so effortless and cutting-edge. Your taste in film,
classes, and your writing are such an inspiration; that it is difficult for me to express its
extent in the small space of a sentence. I will never forget the first time I took your Art
Film class when I was an MFA student. That class had such an impact on me that it
motivated me for this doctoral program. At last I could make a connection between writing,
film and art (i.e. not only Hollywood technique). It was so refreshing to witness someone
v
with your sensibility connecting with an audience on such a deeper level; you bridged that
gap for me. You are amazing. I must also say I know that graduate and undergraduate
students all enjoy your classes immensely: I have never heard a negative comment from
anyone. And the same can be said about your work and writing. Now I can almost hear you
say, “Oh please, stop it,” but this is true. In terms of my dissertation, I feel so appreciative
that the moment you took over as my chair, was the moment my work started flowing.
Your view of the bigger picture is an absolute must, and I am fortunate that it was also in
sync with what I wished to write. Your support gave me the opportunity to express my
ideas in writing in an academic context, so to say that I feel honored and listened to would
be simply an understatement. You have my deepest admiration. And you certainly make
the difference, because you are truly an original! Thank you so much, David.

To my committee member, Dr. Ellen Seiter. I benefited greatly from having learned from
you. Your knowledge about television and so many other topics, including film production
and subjective interviewing, as well as your assessment of what is happening out there in
the world, socially and in technological terms, always carries an unexpected and fresh
perspective. So many times you have noted something like an important detail or aspect of
a subject, and that was something others have completely missed on. The same can be said
about your views on gender and feminism. When that happens, it feels invigorating to have
such thought-provoking moments of recognition with you. You have a sharp mind, and you
are an independent thinker. You helped me think outside the box about media and culture.
And your interdisciplinary outlook makes seemingly disparate, complex and layered
material come alive in an interconnected, accessible way. You are a wonderful professor
vi
and scholar. I greatly admire all these traits in you. Your knowledge and advice have
always been, and will always be, welcome. Thank you so much, Ellen.

To my outside committee member, Professor David Howard. It is truly a joy for me to have
you in my committee again. It brings me all the wonderful memories from my late MFA.
Now my efforts seem to be coming full circle. When you were my advisor in screenwriting,
I was still self-doubting and somewhat insecure. I felt that maybe my writing was not good
enough, something was just not good enough, but I could not quite put my finger on it. I
thought writing was supposed to be about the outcome (and in a way it is), while you
taught me it is about the process. This idea had such a liberating effect on the way I think
about writing today. After all, if life itself is a process, why should writing be any
different? In addition to your calm demeanor and openness, as well as to your lively classes
(where I could sit by the window and also enjoy the sunshine), I remember how much I
enjoyed reading your book. When I asked you how did you get to write a book that sounds
so “realistic” and “natural” – don’t worry, I won’t reveal your secret – you showed me just
how perceptive you are about film and story structure, and above all, in my opinion, about
the fluidity of everyday, present moment language. You have the gift of natural-sounding
dialogue, and character intuition. Any writer ought to admire that. I feel so lucky for having
had the privilege of interacting with you on so many levels. Thank you so much, David.

Outside of my committee, other professors at Critical Studies influenced my work, and I
am greatly indebted to you. To Dr. Curtis Marez: thank you for your conversation and
sharp feedback in the beginning of my dissertation. You were there with me during my
vii
qualifying exams, as well as commented on two of my prospectuses: I am truly thankful.
To Dr. Akira Lippit and Dr. Kara Keeling, thank you so much for your support and
thoughtful reading of my Chapter 2. To Dr. Jan Olsson, Dr. Rick Jewell, Professor Howard
Rodman, and the late Dr. Anne Friedberg, thank you for your viewpoints during the
generative stage of my work. I would like also to thank other professors of the faculty body
at Critical Studies who I had the pleasure of knowing and/or interacting with: Dr. Marsha
Kinder, Dr. Michael Renov, Dr. Priya Jaikumar, Dr. Tara McPherson, Dr. Dana Polan, Dr.
Aniko Imre, Dr. Drew Casper, Dr. Bill Whittington, Dr. Holly Willis, Dr. Jennifer Peterson,
Dr. René Bruckner, and Dr. Miranda Banks. I also wish to thank filmmaker Allison Anders,
professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, who was generous with her time
and afforded me one personal interview. And last but not least, I want to thank Dr. Nam
Lee, ex-classmate and friend, who I had the privilege of being a reader for her International
Cinema class: you awakened in me the appreciation for four international writer-directors:
Agnes Varda, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Abbas Kiarostami, and Bong Joon-ho.

I also wish to thank everyone who works or had worked at the Critical Studies department,
especially Jade Agua, Kim Greene, Linda Overholt, Alicia Cornish, and Sherall Preyer.
Additionally, the department provided me with financial assistance in the form of Teaching
Assistantships for most of the duration of my studies. Thank you for your support. Also
important was the assistance of the School of Cinematic Arts Library during my research,
especially Ned Comstock (who is greatly skilled at finding difficult material); as well as it
was important the assistance of the librarians at the Margaret Herrick Library of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (who were very helpful with my requests to
viii
examine rare manuscript drafts of unpublished screenplays). Moreover, I want to thank my
writing buddy, Dr. Noelia Saenz (we had such a joyful time talking and writing at the
Silver Lake Library), and thank the lively help of my analytical friend Dr. Ayana McNair
(who always nudged and cheered me on even when I worried and felt discouraged). Thank
you also my friend Dr. Veena Hariharan: for your intelligence, wittiness and warmth. I also
thank my fellow classmates and friends: Dr. Jia Tan, Dr. Adan Avalos, Dr. Ioana Uricaru,
Dr. Alex Lykidis, Veronica Paredes, Dr. Chris Hanson, and the late Dr. Jaime Nasser.

And lastly, many thanks and warm thoughts to all my family and friends: who supported
me, and intuitively understood that I had to go into what I call “hermit-mode” in order to
finish writing my dissertation. Thank you so much for not holding a grudge and still talking
to me! My mother, Vera, know that I love you and miss you more than any sunshine. My
sister Jacqueline and Yuri, who just had baby Stella, know how much I have been thinking
of you lately, of your pregnancy, your well-being and the baby’s, as well as recollecting
our ample laughter together. Stella was born about the same time as this dissertation! My
other sister, Margareth, I hope you are having as much fun with Sophia (I am sure you are),
as Jacqueline is having with her newborn, I can’t wait to see you again. I also want to thank
from the bottom of my heart my following friends: Hannah Nahmn, Sona Basmadjian, Kris
Yi, Daiane Minotto, Carole da Cruz, Sean Tomazin, Giselle and Franck de Girolami, Julio
Caetano Costa, Jenick Toomazian, Navid, Noel Hines, Lara and Cassio Tolpolar, Beatriz
Borges, Julia Wiland, Angela Bustos, and Shawn Harris. I am sure someone still remains
unmentioned here, forgive me, I thank you all in advance. I have so much love for all of
you, please know that I will always appreciate who you are and your friendship.
ix

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph ii

Dedication iii

Acknowledgements iv

Abstract x

Introduction 1
Introduction Notes 15

Chapter 1 18
Exclusion of Screenwriters and Female Authors in Auteur theory,
Screenwriting as Counter-Auteur Theory, and Critical Issues of Authorship in Cinema
The Auteur Theory 21
Screenwriting as Counter-Auteur Theory 37
For a Writing Theory of Cinema 72
Chapter 1 Notes 84

Chapter 2 122
Edward Scissorhands: An Outsider Fairytale of Social-Castration
Synopsis 122
Issues of Authorship, Thematics, and Production Analysis 124
Screenplay Analysis 142
Chapter 2 Notes 159

Chapter 3 168
Grace of My Heart: The Female Writer as Outsider from Within the System
Synopsis 168
Issues of Authorship, Thematics, and Production Analysis 171
Screenplay Analysis 188
Chapter 3 Notes 207

Conclusion 215

References 222

Appendix A
The Writers Guild of America and the Issue of Possessive Credit 244

Appendix B
Copyright Law Highlights and Issues of Authorship on the subject of Screenwriting 246
x

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the authorial issue of screenwriters and writer-directors
alongside the production of female authors in cinema. I consider their work to serve a
double function of anonymity in Hollywood, since the director is considered the
preeminent author in cinema, not the writer. In this case, while most films are assigned to
male directors, female authors (screenwriters and writer-directors) have been largely absent
from the spotlight, a historical fact that remains to this day.

Chapter 1 analyzes the historical development of the auteur theory in France and the
United States since the mid-20
th
century, and shows how writing in cinema has been
basically neglected by film criticism, a fact that, nevertheless, has never been completely
accepted by screenwriters. This chapter also analyzes the impact of Pauline Kael’s 1971
book-length essay for the New Yorker on Citizen Kane (1941), where she argued that writer
Herman Mankiewicz was the primary author of the screenplay and not the other way
around (director Orson Welles) as it was the general assumption of the time. The auteur
theory was already fairly established by the 1970s, so when Kael’s essay de-emphasized
Welles’ role in the creation of the film, it generated quite a frenzy of discontent among
critics and academics (including Andrew Sarris), unlike most of her other writings. Later,
Kael ended up publishing her essay in a book, and she included the screenplay with it,
which made this a rare type of publication, since most often screenplays remain unanalyzed
and unpublished material, making most people unaware of their existence when critics
xi
write about film. Kael’s essay, and its “clashing” offspring, at least had the sudden
advantage of forcing critics to look at the screenplay when analyzing Citizen Kane. This
generated a debate, which in itself signified a major gain for screenwriting, because of the
implicit screenwriting function of anonymity in cinema, where the director is considered
the author.

Chapter 1 also relates topics such as the unionization of writers in Hollywood, and the issue
of “possessive credit” usually appropriated by directors in the form of “a film by” on-
screen description so contested by the Writers Guild of America. This chapter examines the
history of cinema and offers that cinema may be a historical anomaly among the other
performing arts, such as theatre and television, where the writer has always been
considered the primary author. Historically, as long as there is a writer, the writer has
always been evoked as the author, except in cinema.

Therefore, Chapter 1 discusses and unveils issues of directorial possessive authorship by
proposing that the writer (or writers as the case may be) is the primary creator of the story,
characters and dialogue, while the director comes second in line, by “adapting” a
screenplay that had already been written and imagined by somebody else. Thus the director
films a screenplay as his own creation, while it has been not been created by him or her on
the page. This proposed writer-based view of authorship in cinema counterpoints the auteur
theory argument (with Sarris focusing primarily on Hollywood directors as auteurs) by
proposing that the writer is the one who creates and envisions the film first – not the
director (who comes in later). Thus, the writer is nearly always the one who creates and
xii
builds the material first, unless the director also writes her or his own material. In which
case, such writer-director should clearly be thought of as an auteur, but only insofar as the
film is written and directed by the same person.

Chapters 2 and 3 complement Chapter 1 with two contemporary case studies. Two
unpublished screenplays from the 1990s are analyzed: one screenplay by screenwriter
Caroline Thompson (for film Edward Scissorhands, 1990), and another screenplay by
writer-director Allison Anders (for film Grace of My Heart, 1996). Passages from both
screenplays are cited and examined in each chapter. Because of the screenwriting
positioning for female authors within Hollywood, the issue of being an “outsider” from
within the system is largely evoked in Anders’ film Grace of My Heart, where the
trajectory of the songwriter and aspiring singer protagonist parallels the auteur struggles
for female writers who aspire to being one day the complete auteur of their own work. In
Edward Scissorhands – merging modern and fairytale symbolic elements – Thompson
portrays Edward, the protagonist, as the “outsider artist” dislocated to an equivalent
feminine position within the home sphere. Feeling excluded in his physical appearance, and
castrated in his dreams of belonging to the real world, which is located evidently outside of
his exotic castle, Edward sublimates all his energy into creating art, all the more removed
even from the home sphere where he has been initially sheltered. Although Edward never
gives up on making his sculptures, his work never becomes exactly visible either.

Therefore, the individual chapter analysis of each of these two screenplays, Edward
Scissorhands and Grace of My Heart, can be read from a feminine marker of the
xiii
screenwriter as an outsider from within the Hollywood system, serving as a double layer
and a function of anonymity for female authors in Hollywood. As I have attempted to
demonstrate, citing from both screenplays and their production history, both films have
creatively originated in writing and from the screenplay first – in other words: in the mind
of the writer, as the intellectual and imaginative creator, who sets up the story through its
authorship roots. In the case of Allison Anders, a complete auteur in the sense that she
writes and directs her own material, she was keenly able to tap into the collective
unconscious (so to speak) of frustrated writers who have auteuristic aspirations, but feel
that they have to adjust to the way the entertainment business works with its division of
labor. In the case of screenwriter Caroline Thompson, not a “complete” auteur as Anders
(at least not in the case of the film Edward Scissorhands), but still the creator of her own
screenplay worldview, the isolated artist depicted through the figure of Edward remains
even more secluded than any of the characters in Anders’ film. The artist at heart is thus
typecast as an “outsider” from the beginning. As I have attempted to make evident, both
stories and screenplays reflect, mirror, and bring to light the notion of the double function
of anonymity in Hollywood for female authors.

1

INTRODUCTION

The author function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way. . . .
In our civilization, it has not always been the same types of texts which have required
attribution to an author. There was a time when the texts that we today call “literary”
(narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put in circulation, and
valorized without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity caused no
difficulties, since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as sufficient
guarantee of their status.
1

Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” (1969)

Appropriating Foucault for my argument purposes, I would like to suggest that the
“function of the author” should be identified with the same question of the discourse of
authorship in cinema. This same question, “What is an Author?” as Foucault puts it,
becomes “What is an Auteur?” In the case of cinema, even though every contributor,
according to copyright laws, gets their respective credit, main authorship status is always
assigned to the director, the person who accumulates the “possessive credit a film by” that
has been historically contested by the Writers Guild of America, as discussed in chapter 1.

The auteur theory, however, will be addressed here not as coming from Hollywood – even
though auteur theorists and Hollywood are related since both consider the director to be the
author – but it will be addressed as the classic auteur theory in cinema as it was formulated
by critics and academics from the 1950s in France, and then re-interpreted in the United
States by theorists such as Andrew Sarris. In the case of Hollywood, the studio system does
reward and pay the director much more than anybody else (certainly more than writers),
thus Hollywood endorses the director not only in income, but, again, with the “possessive”
on-screen credit “a film by.” Even though it is well known that the complex issue of
2
authorship is multi-fold and it consists not only of a tension between screenwriter and
director, but involves also the producer and the entire studio structure – as the French
editors from the Cahiers du Cinéma were well aware about in their collective article “John
Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln”
2
– the director is still seen as the main creator in Hollywood
(and in cinema in general), never mind producers’ higher power in this very studio system.
In the film Young Mr. Lincoln, the ideological message of the film related to the message
of the studio bosses. That, however, does not change the fact that auteur theorists
consolidated the idea that the director is the author.

In that regard, cinema may be considered an anomaly if compared to the other dramatic arts,
such as theatre or television. On television we perceive the author to be the writer-producer
(also referred to as “creator” or “executive producer”), and in theatre the author is
definitely the playwright. A dramatic play by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) will
always be seen as a work by Shakespeare, not by its director, no matter how many times or
differently a certain play has been re-enacted for the stage. In other words, historically we
have always perceived the author to be the writer: the intellectual and imaginative creator,
the one who writes it down first, the one who delivers the characters and the world of the
story. Nevertheless, there is a historical reason for why the director is considered to be the
author in cinema, which is something that is reviewed in chapter 1, under the examination
of the propagation of the auteur theory in the 1950s and 1960s.

In this context, Foucault had claimed by the late 1960s that the “author function”
3
does not
affect all discourses in the same way – because there are texts that exist and are valorized
3
independently of the identity of their authors; their anonymity causes no difficulties in the
popular circulation of those texts.
4
Whether or not we pay attention to who the writer of a
certain film is, it does not make a difference, at the end of the day, in order for us to
appreciate a film, since we tend to think of cinema as the product of a director. Even
though the producer is the one who usually hires the director in Hollywood, the director is
the one person who gets socially constructed as its inherent auteur-as-author above
anybody else. In other words, Foucault claims that certain works (we can think of
screenplays for instance) have somewhat irrelevant authors (writers for instance) who do
not hinder the circulation and consumption of these texts. This is a claim that resonates
with the relative anonymity discourse of “screenwriting” within the larger “directing”
model of Hollywood cinema. By extension, minority writers, or writers who deal with the
minority experience, are also posited as relatively anonymous within the mainstream
narrative model, which has Hollywood as its main point of reference.

History has been constant in its exclusion of minority and female authors from participating
in the auteur identification dream. By extension, history has also been constant in its
parallel and equal exclusion of screenwriters from auteur and authorship theories in cinema.
While both these exclusions facilitate the idolization of the work by male directors as the
norm, this dissertation will, nevertheless, focus on the examination of under-analyzed
works by one female screenwriter and one female writer-director in the more specific
stretch of time of the 1990s. Two screenplays will be individually analyzed, each one as a
separate case study. Chapter 2 analyzes a screenplay written by a female screenwriter:
4
Edward Scissorhands (1990, Caroline Thompson). And Chapter 3 analyzes a screenplay
written by a female writer-director: Grace of My Heart (1996, Allison Anders).

Obviously writer-directors, such as Anders, receive more attention simply because they are
directors; while a screenplay written by a screenwriter, such as Thompson, remains
somewhat under-analyzed work if compared to the critic and academic attention that has
been paid to the director of the film, Tim Burton in that case. This dichotomy is again
revealing of the screenwriting function of anonymity in the creation of cinema, which acts
as an endorsement vehicle for the director. Thus screenwriting developed into something
analogous to a director’s mirror, being seen as a sideways reflection instead of the real
thing. This is a puzzling phenomenon, in and by itself, given historically the written text’s
preeminence, as well as its indisputable presence and creative force. Also puzzling is how
in the current academic field, where every critic and academic is also a writer, so little
attention has been paid to the element of writing as a major part in the creation of cinema,
since cinema has long been looked at as mainly a visual enterprise.

Thus, in studying “texts” of Hollywood – plus of the avant-garde, independent and
international cinema, documentary, television, and popular culture – very small amount of
work has been devoted to the subjects of fictional writing, writing practices, collaborations,
screenplay style, or even to the subject of the industrialization and popularization of
screenwriting in the United States. For example, this industrialization accelerated the
popularization of screenwriting manuals to a larger audience as we have never witnessed
before, an event that suggests a strong collective fascination with the making of a film
5
through the publishing of its screenplay. This allure with becoming a screenwriter
overnight propagates the fantasy that authoring a film is something easy and readily
available to the public – instead of work that has been part of the Hollywood machine since
the beginning. Yet, film critics have overlooked most of these elements, leaving many
questions, problems, and discrepancies understudied.

Another philosophical issue little analyzed in the humanities and the arts is the relationship
between storytelling and the visual: the old question of form versus content. We all have
heard the statement that screenwriters, and other writers for that matter, “write in images.”
Writing requires, above all, “imagination,” which implies “vision,” or to create with the
“mind’s eye.” Therefore, in the field of art we must ask ourselves if images and the visual
don’t entail some sort of ultimate content or narrative at their core.

Last century, playing with the Dadaist notion of “anti-art” and teasing New York audiences
during the 1910s, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) created one of his first “ready-mades” by
appropriating a public restroom urinal and saying that was his creation (Duchamp’s
Fountain, 1917). With this gesture, Duchamp challenged the way we perceive art forever.
By appropriating something as mundane, mass-produced (and masculine
5
) such as a public
bathroom urinal, something taken-for-granted, almost invisible or distasteful in terms of its
aesthetic appeal, and by making this item occupy the museum space as an art object,
Duchamp was indeed engaging in a conceptual dialogue about the nature of art. Does art
really need to be created by drawing, painting or sculpting with one’s own hands? And not
only anyone’s own hands, with the so-called artist’s hands? This elitist (only a certain elite
6
can be labeled as artist) and laborious view of art (boring and unexciting to many) contains
a story that excludes from the perception of “art” everything existing out there in the world
that is not related to “high art,” and which has not been made by a recognized artist who is
part of the established art cannon and status quo (as opposed to a naïve or amateur artist).

Art in this particular case is equated with high-art; the rest is seen as having lower value
(not so much anymore though, since Duchamp helped facilitate the infringement of these
standards). Consequently, both consciously and unconsciously, and at least a few more
times in his life, Duchamp committed a betrayal of his field by ditching the stuffiness of
highbrow art into a lowbrow urinal. A urinal on display made fun of the art cannon, by
accentuating what it refuses to stand for, in the accepted “narrative” of the art world of his
time. Still today, this gesture of rebellion and dismissal of the socially accepted meaning of
art is nothing but a story told with an image, a story that pokes fun of what art means by the
very mass-produced history embedded in its form. In a self-contained act of parody,
indulgence and humor, Duchamp narrative tease is concise and to the point: form follows
content, because the anecdote (the tale) is to be found inside the image.

In the long run, the simple image of a urinal conveys a complex story that is essentially a
commentary about the art world. This commentary is obviously visibly understood by
anyone, even today, a hundred years later. In other words, we instantly “get” what
Duchamp was trying to “say.” This paradox has epitomized a mentality shift in the plastic
arts from its more physical, visual, and artisanal trait to its more intellectual and verbal
trait: a more formalist internal dialogue or concept. Therefore, Duchamp’s Fountain can be
7
read as narrative, or even as a joke, in the mocking of cultural capital as cultural privilege
as Pierre Bourdieu
6
would have described.

With this example in mind, later at the end of the century, Andy Warhol (1928-1987),
another controversial artist like Duchamp, also made an explicit commentary with his
works about the art world. Comparably to Duchamp, Warhol mocked cultural capital as
cultural privilege by blurring the elitist boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow art. In
analyzing the life-long oeuvre of Andy Warhol (in art, film and advertisement), David E.
James makes a similar claim in an article for October (the cutting-edge contemporary art,
criticism and theory journal that has some of its origins with Artforum). In “The Unsecret
Life: A Warhol Advertisement,”
7
James says that “Warhol can be saved for art only by
ignoring his demonstration that there was no longer a position outside corporate capital for
art to inhabit. Less sentimental than his commentators, he recognized that in the period of
its totalized commodification, all bourgeois art ends up as advertisement for capital.”
8
As
Warhol raised in celebrity status like no other artist at his time, he made sure to play the
“art” field card by blurring all boundaries – where advertisement, painting, installation,
avant-garde and more commercial film all occupied the same territory – confusing our
intellectual distinction between commercial art (considered lowbrow) and the world of high
art. David James observes:
While Warhol’s recourse to advertising for his visual imagery while working as a pop artist
during the 1960s was anomalous only in its frequency, and while his early employment in
the advertising industry was anomalous only in its success, his return to advertising after
the establishment of his status as an artist was quite unique; but no more so than his claim
that in his own practice – and by implication in the world at large – the two were
inseparable. This trajectory fulfills the program announced in the famous, summary quote
of the 1970s: “I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After
8
I did the thing called ‘art’ or whatever it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an
Art Businessman or a Business Artist. . . . making money is art and working is art and good
business is the best art.” There is no reason to suppose that Warhol was being any less
disingenuous in this than in anything else he said; yet the lack of any real evidence to the
contrary leaves us with a brazen dismissal of aesthetic autonomy that, confounding the
categories of traditional commentary, has generated a spectrum of critical responses. . .
9

Warhol’s certainly not disingenuous “brazen dismissal of aesthetic autonomy,” in David
James words, can be equated with his no less clear-cut dismissal of highbrow art cues. Both
are a commentary (or narrative if you will) about the state of the arts as an elitist pastime,
more than an act of high art in itself. Because the philosophical meaning of such a thing as
autonomy of “art” is what is being punctured and under scrutiny for Duchamp and Warhol,
who are the most representative icons of our modern narrative of rebellion, what becomes
at stake for them and for us is “content,” not exactly “form.” Form follows content in this
case. In other words, “form” for Duchamp and Warhol follows the “content” of their minds
in whatever they consider or disregard as art or non-art. Their art tells us a story that pokes
fun and expose the mass-produced history embedded in their images.

With these two examples in mind, likewise, abstract art, action painting, conceptual art,
among other art movements, are also rooted in a “story” or historical “narrative,” according
to Tom Wolfe’s argument in The Painted Word
10
(1975). Pointedly, Tom Wolfe implies
that the various modernist movements of the 20
th
century lead the attack on the old art
cannon in the verbal shape of theories and philosophical arguments. Commenting on this
subject, with deep insight but not without sarcasm, Tom Wolfe goes on to describe what an
extreme retrospective of art works from 1945-1975 might look like to an audience in the
future. It would be composed of huge written blocks on display at the museum walls, with
9
all the main written passages from the prestigious art critics of the time (Clement
Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Leo Steinberg) instead of the artists’ images (Jackson
Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns). In this exhibit of the future, artists turn out to
be secondary to the critics’ thoughts and theories: they become a mere “illustration” to the
“word” of the period.
11
Thus the title of Wolfe’s book: Painted Word. Here the art critic
anticipates the work of the artist “in writing.” The artist and the image exist only insofar as
to satisfy the critic’s mental attachments and preoccupations. The critic curates and
displays the artists’ works: images illustrate theories, and not the other way around.

It is no accident that Tom Wolfe’s assertions were oddly predictive of the way museums
and galleries behave today: words, labels, texts, websites and pamphlets permeate
everything, including the white wall. The main point of connection between art and cinema
in terms of what Wolfe calls the “painted word” is that the visual is actually something
mostly based on a story, and not on an image per se. Thus cinema is similar to art. Cinema
is also a kind of a “painted word.” The director paints the words written by the screenwriter,
its intellectual and imaginative creator. The screenwriter comes up with what we really see
on the screen (not the director). The same way: it is not the artist who paints images, in
Wolfe’s argument, but the critic who puts all these narratives in the minds of the artists to
be painted. The painter did not come up with that, the critic did.

Bluntness aside, we have to concede that Tom Wolfe’s argument, although a little unusual,
is not without perceptiveness. His claim bears a connecting point with cinema by its
challenging of the conventional preeminence of the visual over the written word. For
10
instance, not only the work of auteur critics may propel new film trends ahead – which is
something akin to Tom Wolfe’s argument and what the auteur theory is about – we may
extend that influence to the dialogue and stories written by influential screenwriters who
have written the vast majority of movies produced in the United States. These films have
been written by screenwriters such as Anita Loos (Gentleman Prefer Blondes
12
), Howard
Koch (War of the Worlds,
13
Casablanca
14
), Robert Benton (Bonnie and Clyde,
15
Kramer vs.
Kramer
16
), Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy
17
), Robert Towne (Chinatown
18
), Paul Schrader
(Taxi Driver
19
), Melissa Mathison (E.T.
20
), Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing
21
), Callie Khouri
(Thelma and Louise
22
), James Schamus (The Wedding Banquet,
23
), Quentin Tarantino
(Pulp Fiction,
24
Kill Bill
25
), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation,
26
Marie Antoinette
27
), and
Judd Apatow (Freaks and Geeks
28
). While only a few cited here are writer-directors – most
in this list are screenwriters only – what they all have in common is the belonging to a
certain recognizable trend in cinema, what auteur critics would interpret as style: in the
same way that style is perceived in the visual arts and in comparative literature.

On the other hand, cinema is not exemplified only by mainstream movies. Avant-garde
film also occupies a vital niche in film history and in the creation of a new cinematic
vocabulary. In this fashion, aren’t the “visually” oriented “non-linear” films of the avant-
garde also a form of narrative, albeit a poetic or dissenting one, which tells a story in
images and bears a challenge to Hollywood? Some of these disputes can be investigated by
contextualizing the work of a small minority group in mainstream cinema: the group of
female screenwriters. Although Hollywood renders all screenwriters relatively invisible,
the minority status shared by female screenwriters serves to further cast a shadow on their
11
work. Thus, their double anonymity needs to be accounted for and demystified to begin
with, so as to understand any stylistic undercurrents highlighting their writing.

That said, aside from its necessary social contextualization, some of the merits of thinking
about authorship in individualist terms is precisely the accounting for the suppression of
voices, such as those coming from minority and female writers. This is Cheryl Walker’s
argument in “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author.”
29
Walker assigns the idea of the
“death of the author” as often times a convenience for those whose careers are already
established (thus unthreatened), such as those of reputable male authors. Roland Barthes,
who issued “The Death of the Author”
30
in 1968, is under no threat of being omitted as the
author of his own books – what then was exactly killed off by the “death of the author”?
Walker reflects: “third-world women and lesbians have been specially articulate about the
importance of reading the work of authors who belong to disenfranchised groups.”
31

Female writers, minorities, and screenwriters barely started their creative struggle for
authorship recognition, and are in no hurry to see their work killed off just yet.

In the collaborative case of cinema, then again, the most pressing question is not about the
“death of the author,” or even about the “death of cinema,” but about who deserves the
credit of being called the “author of a film.” To this equation, though, very rarely one
thinks of the screenwriter as the author, or even co-author of a film, as it happens in the
medium of television, where writers have a more clearly defined authorship status. We
need to ponder that even reality TV and film documentaries
32
need to be scripted before
they go into production; because for any story there is a need to know what that story is –
12
its narration, map, arc, or a thesis of some kind – which is exactly what the process of
screenwriting is all about. Should we disagree, then, that the director is the only person
who should be afforded the possessive
33
credit as the creative author in cinema? Even
though directors only get credit as a director, not as “author,” saying a film is a “director’s
medium,” or assigning possessive credits such as “a film by” to directors, are all too
obvious signs that exemplify that most of us think of the director as the author. In this case,
should the director get paid differently from everyone else, deserve special recognition,
festival prizes, critic accolades, even when the director is not the writer of his/her own
film? Or even when the director did not create the idea for the film in the first place?

My exploration of the explanation given by most film critics for the focus on directors over
writers is one of the major points I aim to analyze in the “Auteur Theory” section of chapter
1. This intricate issue is put into a historical dialogue with the sections “Screenwriting as
Counter-Auteur Theory” and “For a Writer’s Theory of Cinema” that follow in this same
chapter. These two last sections of chapter 1 posit both a challenge and a thoroughly
detailed historical counterpoint to the view of the director as the main author in cinema.

I propose a “writer’s” reading of authorship that presents the idea that a film is first created
into existence through the writer’s creation of the screenplay. It is only after the writing is
carried over (beginning to end with fresh, speaking characters) that the screenplay gets
“adapted” by the director (who comes second in line). Two possibilities might ensue. In the
case of a professional screenwriter (or more than one writer), the screenplay is first created
by the writer or screenwriters (Edward Scissorhands,
34
for instance, written by Caroline
13
Thompson). Second in line, the screenplay is developed by the director into a full-fledged
film (by Tim Burton in this case). The second possibility is the case of a writer-director
such as Allison Anders. In that case, the writer and the director are the same person (i.e.
Grace of My Heart,
35
written and directed by Anders). I consider this second example, of a
writer-director such as Anders, to be the most ideal correlation to an auteur as it was
originally intended in France in the 1950s. It is true that French critics and cinephiles gave
all their attention to the work of film directors at that time. Yet, at the beginning, those
directors were more exactly French “writer-directors” as a whole, as most international
filmmakers are, instead of directors-only as in the case of Hollywood. Because of the
division of labor sustained by the studio system, usually in Hollywood the writer and the
director are not the same.

In the case of “screenwriting as counter-auteur theory,” after the establishment of the
auteur theory of the director in the United States, and after its establishment in our society
and in academia, a “parallel” dissenting voice started to come into existence and was being
registered at the sidelines without much noise. That was the screenwriter’s point of view.
Since the 1970s, screenwriters and a few critics – such as Richard Corliss and Pauline Kael
– have been concomitantly exploring the subject of screenwriting collaboration, style and
creativity in the field of cinema. And although their points of view have been either heavily
confronted (Kael’s case), or mildly recognized (Corliss work), the fact remains that this so-
called “screenwriter’s point of view” consolidated the trend of a constant re-interpretation
about the overall contents of mainstream auteur theory.

14
With this background, and because of the double exclusion of female authors and
screenwriters in Hollywood, this dissertation will conclude, as already mentioned, with two
illustrative screenplay case study chapters. These two unpublished scripts are examined as
the main pre-existent textual matrix for their respective films. Caroline Thompson’s
screenplay for Edward Scissorhands
36
(1990) is analyzed in chapter 2; while Alison Anders’
screenplay for Grace of My Heart
37
(1996) is analyzed in chapter 3. Both scripts exemplify
different stances in the creative process in cinema; yet they both have in common the
marginal alter-ego positioning of the female writer as someone who experiences her main
characters to be outsiders, to a certain degree, vis-à-vis their development in each of their
social contexts. These characters function, in a way, as an allegory for the screenwriter.

The screenplay for Edward Scissorhands, despite the character’s deep desire to belong,
explores the feeling of social castration of someone in disproportion to the world, an
“outsider” creature flung into the normalcy of American suburbia. In Grace of My Heart,
the screenplay explores the story of a songwriter making a great effort to find her voice in
the male-dominated world of pop music. This is a more realistic outsider depiction, to be
sure, yet this character’s inner-being is depicted in a much comparable way to the poetic
temperament of the fantastic being of Edward Scissorhands – both striving to fit in. An
association of Thompson and Anders in their common feminine position might be
established – in that they both exhibit a familiarity to what it might feel like to be
constrained in their social power as a woman and as a writer – elements which have been
carried out in the psychology makeup of their characters worked out in their screenplays.

15
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
INTRODUCTION NOTES

1
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” essay originally published in 1969 as “Qu’est-ce Qu’un Auteur?,”
in: William Irwin (ed.), The Death and Resurrection of the Author, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002),
pp.14-15.

Note that the block citation contains my italics for emphasis, they are not Foucault’s.

2
Cahiers du Cinéma Editors (as a collective), “John Ford’s ‘Young Mr. Lincoln’,” in: Bill Nichols (ed.),
Movies and Methods: An Anthology: Volume 1, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
pp.493-628.

3
Foucault, p.14.

4
Foucault, p.15.

5
The male urinal, Duchamp’s “masculine” avatar of Modernist anti-art with Dadaist roots, may as well have
been the work of a female artist. In the biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874?-1927), a pioneer
New York Dadaist and friends with Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Irnene Gammel gives evidence that
Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) might have been Elsa’s creation, wich was later appropriated and modified by
Duchamp. However, the study into the original, authenthicity, and the origins of the 1917 work attributed to
Duchamp escapes the scope of this dissertation. For more, read:

Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002),
pp.224-225.

6
Refer to Pierre Bourdieu’s work.

Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel and Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their
Public, originally published in 1969, (Cambridge and Oxford, UK: Polity Press, 1997).

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, edited by Randal Johnson, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993).

Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

7
David E. James, “The Unsecret Life: A Warhol Advertisement,” in: October, (vol.56, spring 1991), pp.21-
41.

8
James, pp.27-28.

9
James, pp.24-25.

10
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, book originally published in 1975, (New York: Bantam Books, 1999).

11
Wolfe, p.98.

12
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928). Directed by Malcom St. Clair. Based on the novel by Anita Loos.
Screenplay and titles by Anita Loos. Titles by Herman Mankiewicz. Written by John Emerson.

16
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Directed by Howard Hawks. Based on the musical comedy by Anita Loos
and Joseph Fields. Screenplay by Charles Lederer.

13
War of the Worlds (1938). Radio Play. Orson Welles and Mercury Theatre on the Air Sunday 8 to 9 pm,
(October 30, 1938). Script by Howard Koch.

14
Casabanca (1942). Directed by Michael Curtiz. Screenplay by Howard Koch, Julius Epstein, and Philip
Epstein. Play by Murray Burnett and Joan Allison. Uncredited, Casey Robinson.

15
Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Directed by Arthur Penn. Written by Robert Benton and David Newman.
Uncredited, Robert Towne.

16
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). Directed by Robert Benton. Based on novel by Avery Corman. Screenplay by
Robert Benton.

17
Midnight Cowboy (1969). Directed by John Schlesinger. Based on the novel by James Leo Herlihy.
Screenplay by Waldo Salt.

18
Chinatown (1974). Directed by Roman Polanski. Written by Robert Towne.

19
Taxi Driver (1976). Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Paul Schrader.

20
E.T. (1982). Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Melissa Mathison.

21
Do the Right Thing (1989). Written and directed by Spike Lee.

22
Thelma and Louise (1991). Written by Callie Khourie and directed by Ridley Scott.

23
The Wedding Banquet (1993). Directed by Ang Lee. Written by James Schamus, Ang Lee, and Neil Peng.

24
Pulp Fiction (1994). Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Written by Quentin Tarantino. Story by Quentin
Tarantino and Roger Avary.

25
Kill Bill, Vol.1 (2003). Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Written by Quentin Tarantino. One character by
Tarantino and Uma Thurman.

26
Lost in Translation (2003). Written and directed by Sofia Coppola.

27
Marie Antoinette (2006). Written and directed by Sofia Coppola.

28
Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000). TV Series. Creator and writer Paul Feig. Judd Apatow has written several
episodes.

29
Cheryl Walker, “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author,” essay originally published in 1990 at Critical
Inquiry, in: William Irwin (ed.), The Death and Resurrection of the Author, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2002), pp.141-157.

30
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” essay originally published in 1968, in: William Irwin (ed.),
The Death and Resurrection of the Author, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp.3-7.

31
Walker, p.156.

17
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !
32
For the Writers Guild of America (WGA) determination of writig credit on documentaries, see sessions:
“Television Schedule D, Appendix A, Documentay, News, and Public Affairs Program Credits,” pp.350-354;
and “Schedule D-1, Documentary Writing Credits Addendum,” p.355.

These sessions are found in:

“WGA, 2008 Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East,
(2008), 452 pages. http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/MBA08.pdf (last accessed
15 March 2013).

33
See Appendix A.

Definition of on-screen “possessive credit” assigned to directors such as “a film by,” as defined by the WGA,
Writers Guild of America, is found at:

“WGA, Creative Rights for Writers of Theatrical and Long-Form Television Motion Pictures: The Latest
WGA Provisions and Overscale Suggestions,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East, (2002), p.33
and 37. http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/creative_rights/creative-rights.pdf (last accessed
15 March 2013)

“WGA, 2008 Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East,
(2008: Effective February 13, 2008 through May 1, 2011), pp.1-2.
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/MBA08.pdf (last accessed 15 May 2013)

34
Edward Scissorhands, film directed by Tim Burton and written by Caroline Thompson, (Century City, Los
Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, release date of 14 December 1990).

35
Grace of My Heart, film written and directed by Allison Anders, (Universal City, Los Angeles: Universal
Pictures, release date of 13 September 1996).

36
Caroline Thompson, Edward Scissorhands, unpublished screenplay, (Los Angeles: Margaret Herrick
Library Scripts Collection, 20
th
Century Fox manuscript copy, 22 February 1990), 116 pages.

37
Allison Anders, Grace of My Heart, unpublished screenplay (Los Angeles: USC Cinematic Arts Library,
studio unmarked copy, 17 August 1994), 120 pages.

18

Chapter 1
EXCLUSION OF SCREENWRITERS AND FEMALE AUTHORS IN AUTEUR THEORY,
SCREENWRITING AS COUNTER-AUTEUR THEORY, AND CRITICAL ISSUES OF
AUTHORSHIP IN CINEMA

In a film, every single person gets credited with some form of authorship – ranging from
directors, screenwriters, writers (adaptation, story, screenplay, etc), producers, editors, CGI
animators, cinematographers, actors, and so on and so forth. But in the highly collaborative
medium of cinema there is only one auteur: the director. The director is the person who
receives the one-sided, all-encompassing possessive credit “a film by”
1
inscribed on the
movie screen that has long been contested by the Writers Guild of America (WGA).
2

The position taken by the WGA, about what they have termed “possessive credit,”
3

supports the notion that the director is not the main agent of composition, as the auteur
theory presupposes. Thus the director, according to the WGA, may not usurp an entire film
with on-screen denominations such as a “director’s film,” or “a film by” a certain director.
The WGA states that they consider “granting possessive credits to directors inaccurately
imputes sole or preeminent authorship.”
4
And in terms of a director who has not also
written the screenplay, they state that “since its founding, the Writers Guild has opposed
the use of the so-called ‘possessive credit’ on screen and in advertising and promotion
when used to refer to a person who is not the sole author of the screenplay.”
5
In that case, if
the director is also the writer, meaning the only writer of the directed film, such as in the
case of Allison Anders’ Grace of My Heart (1996), the WGA has no issue with possessive
credits. The problem arises when a director takes “possession” of a film as a whole without
19
being also the writer. That is what the WGA means by the general “possessive credit” label.
My own position as a theorist and film appreciator doesn’t differ from the WGA in any
significant way, but complements the WGA position; because I don’t believe a director,
who is not also the writer, should be viewed as the primary author and creator of a film.

Because of this history, in the Hollywood case, it follows that the legal battles and
historical discourses on authorship posit the script or the story (the film’s origin) as of
unfixed value, while positing the director (the film’s ending) as the true auteur. In this
context, because our minds resist the idea of the co-existence of too many authors at once,
we start to wonder, “But who is really the author of a film”? This, however, is not exactly a
copyright
6
question, since the director gets credit for directing, the screenwriter gets credit
for writing, and so on and so forth, these credits are legally well-defined. This, instead, is a
belief question imbued with historic and economic implications. The answer to this
question is not factual either (i.e. the director is the author), since there are multiple authors
on a film, one only needs to browse a film’s extensive list of credits to realize this fact.

Ultimately, however, the answer we usually get for the question of who deserves being
celebrated as the author in cinema is a half-truth taken as a fact, as the WGA statement
indicates. Yes, single authors exist in the case of certain avant-garde pieces. Yet, more
often, a film is embedded in a very specific historical context in terms of its authorship;
which means the “author” might signify or involve the Hollywood studio system, the star,
the book writer (adaptations), a powerful producer, or it might even lead us to “irrelevant”
20
authors (when a film title is perceived as a “commodity” rather than an “artistic-entity,” as
in the case of the beginning of cinema or with the pornographic film).

Therefore, we need at least three organizing segments to put the authorship issue in cinema
into perspective. First, we need to understand how film auteur theory came into existence,
circulation, and reached public acceptance; in other words, we need to identify its historical
significance from its earlier days in the 1950s and 1960s to the present time. Second, as
time goes by, we need to understand how screenwriters, as well as writers in general, have
become at least partially doubtful of the idea of an omnipresent director as the perceived
“author of everything” in a film. This is the major counter-argument to the theory that the
director is the author in cinema, which is basically a counter-argument to the auteur theory.
Third, we need to understand the way screenwriters parallel the history of minorities and
women in film as a close account of the screenwriter’s function of anonymity in
Hollywood. It is indeed expected from writers to perform from within this invisibility
function, which makes the director the all-encompassing author in the eyes of history.

This dichotomy puts writers under some kind of social spell to give their labor away (the
script) to someone endowed with a much greater power such as directors through the studio
system. Thus the writer is somewhat knowingly expropriated in his or her labor by these
other agents, such as directors and producers in cinema; while conversely, the writer
remains seen as the author in the history of the other performing arts, such as in theatre and
television.

21
THE AUTEUR THEORY

French and American auteur theory in the 1950s and 1960s disseminated the idea that the
director is the author in cinema. Although French auteur theory, simply stated as “la
politique des auteurs,”
7
supposedly started with François Truffaut
8
and Andre Bazin
9
in the
Cahiers du Cinéma
10
(in which Bazin was one of the founders in 1951); there was one
slightly earlier essay by Alexandre Astruc, “The Camera Pen”
11
(1948), not published in
the Cahiers, that was especially influential
12
over the Cahiers film critics.

Astruc’s essay in the late 1940s probably helped the auteurist interpretation of the director
as the author instead of the writer. For Astruc, the camera in cinema should become like the
writer’s pen. Astruc’s definition of “la camera-stylo” (translated as the “camera-pen”)
alludes to a new kind of “language” through “which artists can express their thoughts.”
13

Astruc notes that this “implies that the scriptwriter directs his own scripts; or rather that the
scriptwriter ceases to exist, for in this kind of filmmaking the distinction between author
and director loses all meaning;” and “direction is no longer a means of illustrating or
presenting a scene, but a true act of writing.”
14
In other words, “the filmmaker/author
writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen.”
15
For Astruc, the “Birth of a New
Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo”
16
(complete title of his essay) is something that rests
between “the pure cinema of the 1920s and filmed theatre.”
17

Much like Truffaut, we should note that Astruc pejoratively calls what he perceives as the
old French cinema of his time as “filmed theatre,”
18
while praising with “several of his
22
friends”
19
directors he sees as neglected by the main film critics. The directors he praises
are Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson and Orson Welles. Despite his contempt for such a goal as
filmed “theater,” Astruc’s essay is telling in that he nonetheless can’t quite escape the
“writing” analogy to promote this new kind of cinema he identifies as the “new avant-
garde.”
20
While he identifies painting, literature and theatre as autonomous art forms, he
claims that this autonomy
21
should be something extended to cinema as well, when he
states “film language is the exact equivalent of literary language.”
22
But is this “language”
any different from written language, if Astruc keeps mentioning words such as “writing,”
“language,” “theater,” “pen” and “thought,” again and again in his essay? In trying to make
cinema an autonomous and separate field, he turns his attention to the director, or to the
writer-director, because he sees cinema essentially as a visual form. However, again, he
can’t quite run away from the very precise writing analogy of the “camera-pen,” so his
whole argument revolves around the idea of how cinema’s thought-process is more easily
identifiable with the visual (the camera) than with words (the pen), which in the end is
hardly the complete truth, so that is why the “camera-pen” compromise.

The late 1940s, when Astruc published his essay, is still an early stage in the perception of
the director as the author, so it is quite obvious that the writer has not been completely
eclipsed from the bigger picture of cinematic authorship yet. Also, we should note, that the
French directors Astruc admires (Renoir and Bresson), as well as the Cahiers cinephile-
critics-turned-directors (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette), were all writer-
directors, who for the most part wrote their own screenplays, stories and dialogue (with an
occasional collaboration or adaptation). Therefore, in French cinema, writing was not
23
completely left out of their authorial pursuits, because they were inherently writer-director
auteurs who wrote their own material. Hollywood, on the other hand, was a much different
story. There is a marked division of labor in the commercial studio-system of Hollywood,
with the jobs of director and screenwriter clearly separated and defined, and even
remunerated differently. However, this detail will not later deter French and American
auteur theorists to increasingly embrace directors-only as auteurs as time goes by, mainly
because of the influence of this Hollywood model.

After Astruc’s premonitory essay, and through publications in the Cahiers du Cinéma, we
can trace that the French were both prolific in trying to promote a new type of French
cinema (promoted in what they called la politique des auteurs, mostly with writer-directors
in France), as well as they were awestruck by Hollywood (mostly by professional directors
such as Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Elia Kazan, and so on). They looked to
mainstream Hollywood movies for inspiration. So instead of bashing Hollywood as
disloyal art, a commercial movie-making machine, with no soul or style due to the
industrialization of the studio system, auteur theorists in France actually embraced the
Hollywood director as a source of creativity and rebellion against what they perceived as a
dying and decrepit French cinema they were trying to resuscitate.

The style of this old French cinema was defined by Truffaut as the “tradition of quality,”
23

criticized as theatrical and novelistic mal-adaptation in his essay “A Certain Tendency in
French Cinema”
24
(1954). Truffaut says, “I simply cannot bring myself to believe in a
peaceful co-existence between the Tradition of Quality and a cinéma d’auteur.”
25

24

Truffaut lists the French auteurs he admires: “Renoir, Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques
Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophüls, Jacques Tati, Roger Leenhardt;” explaining: “and yet
they are French filmmakers, and it so happens – by a curious coincidence – that they are
auteurs who often write their own dialogue and in some cases think up the stories they
direct.”
26
Note how Truffaut, a writer-director himself (although not yet when he wrote this
essay), writes about French film made by writer-directors who “write their own dialogue”
and invent the “stories they direct.” Therefore, Truffaut is not writing about directors per se
in his essay, but rather about writer-directors, the ones he considers true auteurs in his
opinion.

As cited earlier, Truffaut shares Astruc’s position when Astruc says this “implies that the
scriptwriter directs his own scripts,”
27
meaning that both writing and directing should be
required to qualify someone as an auteur. However, soon later, Truffaut also starts to write
about Hollywood
28
professional directors for the Cahiers, mostly Elia Kazan, Howard
Hawks, John Ford and Robert Aldrich, none of whom are particularly known as writers
(meaning that they might have sporadic writing credits to their names, but they work and
are known chiefly as professional directors in Hollywood). Consequently, we can say with
certainty that the influence of Hollywood-trained directors little by little starts to become
quite substantial on French auteurism. Later, when the theory migrates from France to
Unites States with Andrew Sarris, it will all the more grow into a more divisive theoretical
model by its neglect of the writer.

25
So even if auteur French cinema being produced at that time was still mainly the product of
writer-directors, the French still looked to Hollywood (mostly employed as professional
directors only) to justify la politique des auteurs. In other words, as French critics start
writing about French writer-directors, with time they also start noticing Hollywood, so they
turn on a switch and start reviewing Hollywood directors as well. Note, however, that most
likely this was not a discrimination that they were making consciously – between writer-
directors and directors-only, or between two points in time in history: first writer-directors
in France and then directors-only in the Hollywood system – this is a discrimination that I
am making and noting, not them. The French were probably unaware of this formal
assortment of writer-directors and directors-only in terms of their interest. So even though
they noted the quality of French writer-directors, when it was time to turn their attention to
“younger” Hollywood, they had no qualms about it, so they just did. For them that must
have been a matter of French cinema versus Hollywood cinema, not a matter of writer-
directors versus directors-only. This distinction underneath their auteur argument is mine.

Why Hollywood then if, for the most part, Hollywood did not have writer-directors like the
French? No reason, the French just liked American cinema, like everybody else, regardless
if they worked less with writer-directors. Therefore, a blending starts occurring: as the
French turn to American cinema for inspiration, inevitably the work of professional
Hollywood directors, whom they admired, start influencing the making of their own films
and theories. Their own notion of who is an auteur, for the French critics, starts leaning
more towards directors, because of the influence Hollywood exerted on their imagination.

26
For instance, in terms of the impact of Hollywood, who can deny the stylistic influence of
the Hollywood gangster
29
genre, from earlier films such as Howard Hawk’s Scarface
30

(1932), on Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless
31
(1960)? Godard was a contributor for the
Cahiers, as well as one of its critics-turned-filmmakers, whom alongside with Truffaut and
several others helped build the French New Wave. In other words, Hollywood directors
were ardently welcomed by these up-and-coming French cinephiles, and their films were
analyzed in several of their articles for the Cahiers.

One of such articles was Godard’s essay “Tears and Speed”
32
(1959) where he highly
praised the work of Hollywood director Douglas Sirk in A Time to Love and a Time to
Die
33
(1958). Godard was so charmed by Sirk’s emotional portrayal of love and death in
times of war in Europe, as well as by his artistic use of cinematoscope, that he avidly
praised Sirk’s manipulation of the script and characters as the most “honest”
34
and
“masterful”
35
direction up to that moment. For Godard, Sirk “magically”
36
made a high
budget Hollywood movie feel like a self-effacing reporter’s
37
documentary, and that was an
auteur achievement to be studied and admired by the French.

In other words, Godard’s article shows the influence that American cinema exerted on
French cinema in terms of style, and vice-versa, since Americans are also the ones
benefiting from the re-discovery of their own national cinema through the eyes of
enthusiastic French cinephiles. Edward Buscombe in “Ideas of Authorship”
38
(1973) gives
us a more detailed historical glimpse of what was happening in France and the United
States as the auteur theory takes shape:
27
The auteur theory was never, in itself, a theory of the cinema, though its originators did not
claim that it was. The writers of Cahiers du Cinéma always spoke of “la politique des
auteurs.” The translation of this into “the auteur theory” appears to be the responsibility of
Andrew Sarris. In an essay entitled “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” he remarked,
“Henceforth, I will abbreviate ‘la politique des auteurs’ as the auteur theory to avoid
confusion.” Confusion was exactly what followed when the newly christened “theory” was
regarded by many of its supporters and opponents alike as a total explanation of the cinema.
Not only was the original politique of Cahiers somewhat less than a theory; it was only
loosely based upon a theoretical approach to the cinema which was never to be made fully
explicit.
39

Buscombe further details the Cahiers’ interest on both French cinema and Hollywood:
One thing is clear, however. From the beginning Cahiers, and its predecessor La Revue du
Cinéma, were committed to the line that the cinema was an art of personal expression. . . .
At that period (late 1940s) it was inevitable that part of the project of a new film magazine
would be to raise the cultural status of the cinema. The way to do this, it seemed, was to
advance the claim of the cinema to be an art form like painting or poetry. . . Cahiers did not
feel that opportunities of this kind were found exclusively in the European “art” cinema.
Right from the very earliest issues there are discussions of Hollywood directors such as
Welles, Ford and Lang. Cahiers was concerned to raise not only the status of the cinema in
general, but of American cinema in particular, by elevating its directors to the ranks of the
artists. The politique in the sense of a line that will be pursued and provocatively expressed,
really dates from an article in issue no.31 by Francois Truffaut entitled “Une Certaine
Tendance du Cinéma Français.” Truffaut attacks what he calls the tradition of quality in
the French cinema, by which he means the films of directors such as Delannoy, Allégret
and Autant-Lara, and especially the adaptations by Aurenche and Bost of well-known
novels. They are attacked for being literary, not truly cinematic, and are also found guilty
of “psychological realism.” Truffaut defines a true film auteur as one who brings some-
thing genuinely personal to his subject, instead of merely producing a tasteful, but lifeless
rendering of the original material. Examples of true auteurs are Bresson and Renoir.
40

Furthermore:
Truffaut had referred only to French directors, but Cahiers began to give more and more
space to the American cinema. In its special issue nos.150-1 on the American cinema no
fewer than 120 cinéastes (i.e. auteurs) were identified. Yet even by this late date (1964) the
questions of what an auteur is and why the cinema should be discussed largely in terms of
individual artists are ones that are only answered by implication. Clear articulations of a
theory behind the practice are rare and sketchy. But a review by Andre Bazin of The Red
Badge of Courage (no.27) gives a clue. Bazin distinguishes between Hitchcock, a true
auteur, and Huston, who is only a metteur en scène, who has “no truly personal style.”
Huston merely adapts, though often very skillfully, the material given him, instead of
transforming it into something genuinely his own. . . . Such discussions, however, do not
advance much beyond Truffaut’s original position, though they serve to confirm Cahiers’
stance on the issue of personal expression.
41

28

As Buscombe explains, there is a discrepancy between what the French called la politique
des auteurs and what Andrew Sarris called the auteur theory. French auteur theory
migrated to the United States mainly because of Sarris: a professor of Cinema at Columbia
University, a critic for Film Culture, Film Comment, the New York Observer, and the
Village Voice, spouse of fellow film critic Molly Haskell, and someone who worked as
editor-in-chief for the Cahiers du Cinéma in English from 1965 to 1967.
42
Sarris was very
close to his French connection. As Buscombe notes in the passage cited above, in 1962
Sarris attempted to abbreviate “la politique des auteurs” simply as the “auteur theory”
43
to
avoid confusion. But confusion, or discontent, was precisely what happened.

Sarris offered that as far as he knew, “there was no definition of the auteur theory in the
English language,” and that Truffaut has “gone to great pains to emphasize that the auteur
theory was merely a polemical weapon for a given time and a given place.”
44
However,
Sarris’ still wanted to give the “Cahiers critics full credit for the original formulation of an
idea that reshaped” his “thinking on the cinema.”
45
In addition, Sarris complained that in
Hollywood, “auteur criticism has been accused of sentimentality toward old directors”
46

and that everywhere there was criticism made to justify the “simplistic attacks made against
auteurism.”
47
As a response, Sarris had to defend himself in his essays by explaining that
“auteurism is and always has been more a tendency than a theory;”
48
and that it should be
seen as a “theory of film history rather than film prophecy.”
49
In other words, a “pattern
theory in constant flux.”
50

29
Because the auteur theory really did take a strong hold not only in France and the United
States, but all over the world, as the preferred way of seeing cinema, it is also sometimes
resented and attacked as a viewpoint that tries to pass for a “total explanation of the
cinema,”
51
as Buscombe called it. So even though he tried, Sarris had no way of completely
avoiding the after-effects against his auteur theory elaboration, and please everybody. In
actuality, he ended up taking on the same “polemical stance” of the auteur theory originally
intended by the French, which was, in Sarris words, “to be for some directors and against
others.”
52
So, the main difference between Truffaut and Sarris, for instance, is that Truffaut
started reviewing French writer-directors (European art cinema), and then proceeded to
also include American professional directors (Hollywood cinema) on his reviews, most of
them directors-only, as it was Sarris’ preference. So Sarris’ point of view is different from
the French in that he was more specific in his criteria for what is needed to be an auteur.

The main criteria Sarris established in 1962 was that “the auteur theory emphasizes the
body of a director’s work rather than isolated masterpieces.”
53
And its three main premises
are “technique, personal style, and interior meaning,” which correspond to the “roles of the
director” as “technician, stylist, and auteur.”
54
In this “total explanation,” as Buscombe
called it, it made sense for Sarris to call an auteur not only someone who has written and
directed his own films like an Ingmar Bergman for instance (who Sarris initially didn’t like,
together with Billy Wilder), but it made even more sense to call the talented studio-system
directors auteurs. In his essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”
55
Sarris has two
elucidative passages to explain this claim:
30
The Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, and Antonioni promotions have helped push more
directors up to the first paragraph of a review, even ahead of the plot synopsis. So, we
mustn’t complain. Where I wish to redirect the argument is toward the relative position of
the American cinema as opposed to the foreign cinema. Some critics have advised me that
the auteur theory only applies to a small number of artists who make personal films, not to
the run-of-the-mill Hollywood director who takes whatever assignment is available. Like
most American who takes films seriously, I have always felt a cultural inferiority complex
about Hollywood. Just a few years ago, I would have thought unthinkable to speak in the
same breath as a “commercial” director like Hitchcock and a “pure” director like Bresson.
Even today, Sight and Sound uses different type sizes for Bresson and Hitchcock films.
After years of tortured revaluation, I am prepared to stake my critical reputation, such as it
is, on the proposition that Alfred Hitchcock is artistically superior to Robert Bresson by
every criterion of excellence and, further, that, film for film, director for director, the
American cinema has been consistently superior to that of the rest of the world from 1915
through 1962. Consequently, I now regard the auteur theory primarily as a critical device
for recording the history of the American cinema, the only cinema in the world worth
exploring in depth beneath the frosting of a few great directors at the top.
56

And:

The second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as
a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring
characteristics of style, which serves as his signature. The way a movie looks and moves
should have some relationship with the way a director thinks and feels. This is an area
where American directors are generally superior to foreign directors. Because so much of
the American cinema is commissioned, a director is forced to express his personality
through the visual treatment of material rather than through the literary content of the
material. A Cukor, who works with all sorts of projects, has a more developed abstract style
than a Bergman who is free to develop his own scripts. Not that Bergman lacks personality,
but his work has declined with the depletion of his ideas largely because his technique
never equaled his sensibility. Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Billy Wilder are other examples of
writer-directors without adequate mastery. By contrast, Douglas Sirk and Otto Preminger
have moved up the scale because their miscellaneous projects reveal a stylistic
consistency.
57

Sarris counterpoints and lumps together what he calls foreign cinema and/or “writer-
directors,” versus American cinema and/or Hollywood “commissioned directors.” Sarris’
main interest was in Hollywood directors as auteurs because, in his view, their
commissioned work, made under the stresses of the assembly-line studio system, forces
them to reveal a stylistic visual consistency that makes their work stand out as artistically
31
superior (Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, Otto Preminger, George Cukor). However, this is not
just a matter of being a foreigner or an American, because most writer-directors are just not
that interesting to Sarris, never mind if they work in Hollywood or not (Ingmar Bergman,
Akira Kurosawa, Robert Bresson, Billy Wilder).
58
Sarris’ focus has remained the American
Cinema throughout his career, especially Hollywood, and the auteur theory was a way for
him to unveil its assembly-line commercialism into an art form above anything else.

This point is a very important one and it should be emphasized again, since France and the
United States, the two birth-places of the auteur theory, have basically two very distinct
modes of production when it comes to filmmaking. Obviously, Americans also produce
highly praised non-Hollywood cinema – avant-garde and independent films for instance –
however, Europe doesn’t really have anything comparable to a true Hollywood center in
terms of its hegemony and organized structure. Therefore, in Sarris’ argument, because he
says that he has “always felt a cultural inferiority complex about Hollywood,” and would
never think to speak of a “commercial” director in the same level as a “pure” director
before the advent of the auteur theory; that turned out to be the very moment he was able to
claim Hollywood commercial cinema as legitimate as the European art cinema. After all, as
previously mentioned, Sarris’ Cahiers colleagues in France were already enamored of
Hollywood movies despite their own language barrier. In 1977, fifteen years after “Notes
on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Sarris explains how the French were able to perceive a few
iconic Hollywood films on a mythic level (the influence of structuralism and semiotics was
helpful here), while most of their fellow Americans were still lagging behind:
32
The French were able to provide detailed visual analysis of American movies precisely
because they were undistracted by the dialogue. To an American ear Rebel Without a Cause
is still gravely flawed by its undigested clinical dialogue. But one would have to be blind to
fail to realize that Ray has transcended the tedious social worker rhetoric of the film with a
succession of striking initiatory ceremonies all filmed with profound splendor. And it is to
our everlasting disgrace that the French understood James Dean on a mythic level long
before we did. Similarly, they understood how deeply Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo had
influenced Alain Resnais’s and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year in Marienbad. While the
New York critics were honoring Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, the Cahiers critics
were cheering Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. Obviously, their eyes were quicker than our
ears. Although in the long run they could not have the last word on the American cinema,
they gave many of us the first glimpse of this elusive entity. American criticism has not
been the same since. There was a time when movies were judged almost entirely in terms
of an absolute fidelity to social reality. . . . By establishing the notion of individual creation
in even the Hollywood cinema, the French shifted the critical emphasis away from the
nature of content to the director’s attitude toward content.
59

In this essay, named “The Auteur Theory Revisited,” Sarris emphasized that the French
comprehended the film Rebel Without a Cause
60
(1955) on a deep visual level, in a way
that most Americans were incapable of, or slower to appreciate. Since the film is in English,
which is not their native language, the French appeared efficiently unbiased in their more
cinematic visual-oriented understanding. Therefore, Sarris makes it clear, in the above cited
paragraph, that the screenplay or dialogue are of secondary importance to the visual
“splendor” of the film. Because of that, for Sarris, a screenplay is not necessarily relevant;
it is basically a hurdle the director is supposed to overcome. Sarris defends the visual by
discrediting the verbal, from screenwriting, as a mere stumbling block to the director.

These ideas in the 1970s are not new to Sarris, since his essay builds on notions that he has
presented to us before in the 1960s. Notions such as: “the auteur theory values the
personality of a director precisely because of the barriers to its expression;”
61
“the
Hollywood system imposed a useful discipline on its directors;”
62
and that while “the
33
strong director imposes his own personality on a film, the weak director allows the
personalities of others to run rampant.”
63
To Sarris then, the screenplay – and their writers’
conflicting personalities – is a barrier to the director’s expression;
64
it is something to be
conquered by him as an artist, if he is to fully take charge of his movie. Thus, Sarris says,
“the fascination of Hollywood movies lies in their performance under pressure. Actually no
artist is ever completely free, and art does not necessarily thrive as it becomes less
constrained.”
65
The “useful discipline of the Hollywood system,” as Sarris calls it, is one
that makes the visual unit of the director stand out as his signature. That is why when Sarris
analyzes the contribution made by French critics, when examining Rebel Without a Cause,
he says that the French remained “undistracted by American dialogue,” which only had
aided them in formulating a sound unbiased visual analysis of the film.

When Sarris took over the auteur theory from the French, unlike the French, he dispensed
with the idea of the writer altogether (and/or writer-director), and professed the intention to
prove that a professional director should be the author of a film. He had Hollywood in mind.
Some directors had more control of their final product, such as Orson Welles for instance;
while other directors wrestled with the assembly-line nature of the Hollywood studio
system. Precisely because of this barrier, though, it made sense to call the director the
author. This “useful discipline” of the Hollywood studio system, for Sarris, made a great
director greater, since it obliged him to impose his vision over a film in the way of a
personal signature (just like in a painting), and in the form of a personal style (something
visually recognizable). Thus, when analyzed in context to each other, a director’s entire
body of work ends up making sense as a whole.
34

Sarris’ auteur theory, obviously, took root in film criticism and academia. For example, in
the late 1960s and 1970s, “youth-culture material” was being recruited by studios at film
schools, theater and television, as a direct result of the “fresh air” brought by the auteur
theory. David Cook, in “Auteur Cinema and the ‘Film Generation’ in 1970s Hollywood”
66

(1998), remarks:
In this context, the runaway success of the generationally savvy road film Easy Rider
(Dennis Hopper, 1969), . . . convinced producers that inexpensive films could be made
specifically for the youth market and that they could become blockbusters overnight. This
delusion led to a spate of low-budget “youth-culture” movies and the founding of many
short-lived independent companies modeled on [Easy Rider’s] BBS [Productions]. But it
also drove the studios to actively recruit a new generation of writers, producers, and
directors from the ranks of film schools like USC, UCLA, and NYU where the auteur
theory has become institutionalized as part of the curriculum. As Martin Scorsese, one of
the most successful new directors would later remark of this area, “Sarris and the ‘politique
des auteurs’ was like some fresh air.” Reaching out to the youth market . . . did
substantially help create the “Hollywood Renaissance” of the 1970s in which, as Michael
Pye and Lynda Myles have put it, the “film generation took over Hollywood” and
attempted to create an American auteur cinema based in large part on the European
model.
67
(my italics and brackets)

Auteur theory has been institutionalized by the 1970s, including at the university level
through many prestigious film schools such as USC, UCLA, NYU, and Columbia
University. As Cook aptly observes, auteur theory by then has become so widespread that
it was already part of the curriculum that influenced a whole new generation of aspiring
filmmaker students. The same way that the French were influenced by la politique des
auteurs through the Cahiers in the 1960s, launching a new generation of filmmakers who
created the French New Wave such as Godard and Truffaut; Americans were influenced by
the auteur theory through film schools in the 1970s, and we start to witness the emergence
of 1970s Hollywood auteur directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven
35
Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese.
68
The 1990s will witness other powerful auteur directors
such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodrigues, and the not male, thus not so powerful,
auteur Allison Anders (subject of this dissertation), all with some association to the
Sundance Institute, which was created in 1981, and served as an authorial bridge between
Hollywood, film schools, and independent, art cinema.

However, as we observe the establishment of the auteur theory of the director (as an all-
encompassing creative persona), in our common imagination and in the status quo, we
can’t but wonder when exactly it all started. Sarris noted that the tendency to look for
directors to assign authorship in cinema is not something new, intended by the French, or
even invented by Sarris in the 1960s. Sarris gives us a historical overview of the
commonplace assignment of authorship to directors in former times. Sarris affirms:
Similarly, the auteurists of the fifties and sixties did not introduce the cult of the director.
Dwight Macdonald and John Grierson were writing very knowledgebly about Hollywood
directors back in the early thirties. The great majority of film histories around the world
have been organized in terms of the collected works of individual directors. If, as Vidal
implies, all that auteurism represents is an emphasis on directors, this so-called theory
should be banished for its banality. A great deal of confusion has been caused by the
assunmption that auteurism was inseparably linked with the personal tastes of individual
critics. Since I was one of the first two American auteurists (along with late Eugene
Archer), I must bear a large part of the blame for this confusion. Let me state at this point,
albeit belatedly, that auteurism and Sarrisism are not identical. Both have been evolving
over the past quarter of a century on a widening front of scholarly activity.
69
(my italics)

Therefore, Andrew Sarris contends that the classification of film history by directors is not
a new one, neither did it start in the 1950s in France with the Cahiers du Cinéma. I agree
with Sarris on this historical assessment. Like with art history and literature, we need to
classify periods and genres by “artist” at some point, if only for cataloguing needs. In the
36
case of film history, this “artist” persona was embodied in the form of the director. Looked
at it this way, the “director-as-author” is neither a product of French auteur film criticism,
of Andrew Sarris, or of American auteur film criticism. They helped establish and seal the
deal, but they did not really create the idea, which had been happening for quite some time
already.

In spite of this fact, and to borrow Foucault’s terminology, it seems evident again that both
French and American auteur film criticism by mid-20
th
century untiringly made the “author
function”
70
of the (male) director solidified across the globe, accounting for a screenwriting
double function of anonymity for female authors in Hollywood.

Inescapably, Sarris will have to respond to his overall negligence of the contribution made
by screenwriters to American film history authorship. In 1970, he is requested to write an
essay for Film Comment
71
that surveys the contribution screenwriters have been making to
American cinema thus far, and he accepts the challenge. Sarris writes an essay about
comedian writer-director Preston Sturges as an auteur, from the 1930s to the 1950s, a
renowned Hollywood director who presented himself as a writer above anything else.
72

Sarris also theorized that Sturges was one of the first to lead the way of the “writer-director
movement”
73
in Hollywood, which Billy Wilder was one of its most notable examples.
Therefore, Sarris’ auteur theory of the director as the only author slowly and inevitably
starts to cave in at the seams.

37
SCREENWRITING AS COUNTER-AUTEUR THEORY

Herman’s main period of work was at night, after dinner, when he would dictate until
midnight or 1 A.M. Rita would type up the pages immediately and return them to him
before going to sleep. She asked how the story was going to turn out. “My dear Mrs.
Alexander,” Herman said, “I don’t know, I’m making it up as I go along.”
74

A 1944 book, The Pictorial History of the Movies, co-authored by Deems Taylor, an old
Algonquinite, made no mention of Herman in connection with Kane. “Did the actors make
up their lines?” Herman raged. “Did Orson, directing, say, ‘You cross from behind that
chair, and while you’re doing it, suppose you say as follows’? Or did Gregg Toland holler,
‘Lets have a lot of lights on the left foreground, and while we’re about it, I think I’ll put a
sled called Rosebud there to supply a little thread or story’?”
75

Herman Mankiewicz, screenwriter of Citizen Kane (1941)

Something was the matter, all right. I was thinking about that girl of Artie's, that Miss
Schaefer. She was so like all us writers when we first hit Hollywood – itching with
ambition, panting to get your names up there: Screenplay by. Original Story by. Hmph!
Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make
it up as they go along.
76

Gillis, character of screenwriter
portrayed by William Holden in Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Citizen Kane
77
(1941) and Sunset Boulevard
78
(1950) are two iconic embodiments in film
history, both still relevant in subject matter and style. Sunset Boulevard, a deeply troubling
satirical film, portrays what is like to be a screenwriter in Hollywood. It functions almost as
an indictment. The screenwriter struggles not only in his career, but in his emotional life as
well. No accident Sunset Boulevard was co-written by Billy Wilder,
79
a screenwriter turned
director in the classic days of Hollywood. Gillis (played by William Holden) is a struggling
screenwriter much similar to the character of struggling songwriter in another writer-
director’ film, Grace of My Heart
80
(1996), by Allison Anders
81
(analyzed in Chapter 3).
Writer-directors, such as Wilder and Anders, are able to see with clarity the predicament of
38
someone trying to make a living as a writer in the director-dominated field of cinema, as
well as in the larger star-dominated business of entertainment.

Gillis’ character is taken advantage off, and is put into a domestic subaltern position when,
because of a lack of money, he becomes caught into having to work for a narcissistic aging
actress. Since he needs money, he humiliates himself by becoming sexually involved with
her. As the story progresses, Gillis gets stuck in situations where the other characters have
no real understanding or appreciation for the creative work screenwriters do. The
delusional former starlet (portrayed by Gloria Swanson) thinks Gillis can transform her
multi volume memoir into a lean screenplay. She wants the chronicles of her younger days
of fame and glamour to be pre-packaged as a movie for the studios, entirely out of vanity.
She believes audiences are still in love with her, and tries to use Gillis as an editor-
promoter, instead of the screenwriter he is, so that he can revive her long-dead career. On
the other hand, Gillis’ love-interest, much younger Betty Schaefer (above cited, played by
Nancy Olson), tries to climb the Hollywood ladder from script-reader to screenwriter. But
as Gillis observes, what Schaefer fails to grasp is that her life-ambition might be just as ill-
fated as his life-path, since no one pays attention to whom “writes a picture;” people think
the director or actors make it up as they go along.

In the case of Citizen Kane (1941), Herman J. Mankiewicz
82
(1897-1953), its writer, had
left many frustrated records about the assumption that Orson Welles
83
(1915-1985) – a very
young Hollywood first-time-director at the time and later credited as second-writer – had
created the Citizen Kane’s script and was the primary author. The screenplay for Citizen
39
Kane, however, not only was Mankiewicz’s original idea,
84
it was created, written,
completed and re-written by the much older and veteran screenwriter Mankiewicz himself.
Once given to Welles, Welles edited Mankiewicz’s draft (doing some rewriting),
complemented it, cut and edited out scenes, created a few new scenes (such as the breakfast
montage scene
85
that portrays the deterioration of Kane’s marriage to his first wife), but
Orson Welles never sat down and actually wrote this screenplay from scratch. Neither did
Welles produce an “earlier” or “parallel” version
86
as he had claimed several times.

Simply put, Orson Welles initially felt entitled to manipulate the writing credit in Citizen
Kane for himself as he saw fit,
87
because of the fact that he was the director in Citizen Kane,
and because of his formidable creative contract
88
with RKO (with ample freedom to write,
direct, act, and produce under his name, a rare type of contract that most surely caused
envy in Hollywood, and that was obviously offered to Welles because of the success of the
1938 radio broadcast War of the Worlds in the East Coast, another script not written by
Welles, but by the then newbie writer Howard Koch
89
(1901-1995), based on the 1898
original science fiction novel of the same name by H. G. Wells).

Yet to Welles defense, the truth is that he was certainly not the first director to behave this
way within the movie industry. So he is not an isolated case. Welles viewed collaborators
in “his” film as his personal “staff”
90
– writers were viewed as people merely working “for
him” rather than “with him” – and if Welles happened to touch a piece of writing such as a
screenplay, in his mind, that editing/re-writing process magically made the screenplay his
own, since he had the last say on what ends up on the screen anyway.
40

There is a prevalent notion among non-writers that “writers make trouble”
91
for directors
and producers, by wanting and insisting on the acknowledgment of their screenplay credit.
We need to understand, however, that Welles did not originate the Citizen Kane screenplay,
because he was not its first writer, neither its primary author as was Mankiewicz. Welles
imparted a few changes upon the drafts by somebody else (by a professional writer), but
Mankiewicz’s original drafts were complete and complex enough in themselves. That is
why the Writers Guild of America always considers the first writer
92
an important element
in terms of writing credit, a force that cannot be erased or forgotten. Today a first writer
and/or an original writer gets on-screen writing credit no matter what, but that has not
always been the case.

We all have heard perplexing stories about the exploitation of writers: writers being
uncredited in favor of the director, or in favor of the family, friend, or the secretary of
someone in a position of power such as a producer.
93
Yet those stories were not only
outrageous, they were true. They helped push writers towards unionization,
94
not only
because of under-payment, but because of writing credit misappropriation
95
as well. At
long last, Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz ended up sharing screenplay credit on
Citizen Kane (with Mankiewicz’ name billed first and Welles second), which was a fair
arrangement in this situation, given that Robert Carringer had noted in “The Controversy
Over Writer Credit” that “although Welles denies it, the conclusion seems inescapable that
he [Orson Welles] originally intended to take sole credit for the Citizen Kane script.”
96

Carringer details the process of what happened:
41
The principle evidence is in letters written by Arnold Weissberger, New York attorney for
Welles and the Mercury Theatre, to Welles and RKO in September and October 1940. The
precedent for such an action had been established on the radio shows. The contractual
agreements in radio were similar to those with RKO – Welles on behalf of the Mercury,
signed the primary contract with the sponsor. Writers were engaged under subsidiary
contracts with the Mercury, and they assigned all claims of authorship to the corporation.
In this way, a legal basis was created for Welles to claim script authorship regardless of the
nature or extent of his actual contribution to the writing. He freely asserted the privilege:
On the great majority of radio broadcasts, either Welles was given sole writing credit on the
air or no credit was given. Only rarely was another writer mentioned in this connection, and
seldom if ever was the writer a member of the regular Mercury Theatre staff. Mankiewicz’s
contract for work on the Citizen Kane script was with the Mercury Theatre, not with RKO.
It contained the standard waiver of rights of authorship. . . . Apparently, Welles believed
that this agreement gave him unqualified right to decide the Citizen Kane scripting credit as
he saw fit, as he had done in radio. In Hollywood, however, writers had been able to secure
certain countervailing privileges. By industry custom, authorship and screen credit were
treated as separate issues. Though a screenwriter signed away all claim to ownership to his
work, he could still assert a right to public acknowledgement of his authorship of it. A set
of guidelines had been worked out to ensure that those who deserved screen credit got it,
and these guidelines were subscribed to by all the major studios. In certain circumstances, a
writer who felt unjustly treated could submit his case to arbitration. There were unusual
complications surrounding Citizen Kane, but the force of accepted practice was strongly in
Mankiewicz’s favor.
97
(my italics)

Carringer then goes into more detail about the legal advice Orson Welles had been given –
to wait – in terms of asserting writing credit for himself as the sole writer in Citizen Kane
(like what he has tried to do with the War of The Worlds script on radio trough the Mercury
Theatre). There was a very real possibility of bad press for Welles in case he tried to
obliterate Mankiewicz script credit; in other words, just because of the wording of their
contract with each other was slanted towards Welles, it was not a wise move. Besides
fearing a bad press backlash, and not being the sole writer, Welles as a director was trying
to get legal advice and feel the waters by constantly communicating with his lawyer about
the topic of this writing credit. In navigating the credit issue of his first Hollywood film,
Welles needed his lawyer’s opinion about the way film writers inconveniently “make
42
trouble”
98
concerning the (director’s) putative authorship vis-à-vis the writer’s authorship
of the script, after they have written it, if denied credit:
Mankiewicz received his last paycheck on August 3, bringing his total pay for work on
Citizen Kane to $22,833.35. A letter from Weissberger to Welles on September 6 reveals
the course of action they intended to pursue in regard to credits. Weissberger says he has
learned that Mankiewicz will probably try to make trouble over the matter of screen credit.
He does not want to go into details in writing; an intermediary who is returning to
Hollywood soon will explain. He quotes the authorship waiver in Mankiewicz’s contract
and concludes from it that Mankiewicz’s has no claim to any credit whatsoever. He is
looking into the situation further, and in the meantime Welles should say nothing. When
the time comes, he can confront Mankiewicz with his contract. (Weissberger also explains
that he has just learned of possible complications with the Screen Writers Guild. This and
his interpretation of the authorship waiver both indicate how thoroughly unfamiliar he was
with the inner workings of Hollywood.) On September 17, the Mercury office drew up a
preliminary billing sheet on Citizen Kane for review by RKO’s legal department. The
column for the writer credit contains this curious notation: “It has not been determined if
there is to be a credit given for story or screenplay.” This probably indicates that they were
following Weissberger instructions to keep quiet pending further advice. Another
possibility is that they were preparing a fallback position in case Weissberger’s preliminary
opinion failed to hold up: to omit the writer credit altogether, as was sometimes done on
the radio scripts. (Better no credit at all than to share credit – that way at least no attention
would be drawn.) If so, they were not aware that such a course would have been equally
problematic: A request for waiver of screenplay credit would come under a process of
review similar to that for credit assignment. On October 1, Weissberger raised the credits
issue in a letter to RKO’s West Coast legal department. He begins by repeating his
contention that “Mercury legal right to deny credit can be established.” He acknowledges,
however, that Mankiewicz may have recourse within the industry, and he asks for details
on how similar complaints have been handled in the past. He is particularly concerned, he
says, about whether the matter is likely to result in arbitration proceedings and “unpleasant
publicity.” The reply was guarded but clear in its implications: There are no agreements
currently in effect under which Mankiewicz could force an arbitration. A new agreement
with the Screen Writers Guild containing a provision for arbitration has just been executed
and will soon go into effect. Since Mercury is not a signatory to this agreement, it is not
contractually bound to observe it. Nevertheless, RKO would not want to use this
technicality to take advantage of the situation. And, to confirm Weissberger suspicion, yes,
disputes over writer credit generate a lot of publicity.
99
(my italics)

Besides “unpleasant publicity” generated over writer credit disputes, as a last resort, if
denied credit, a belittled writer such as Mankiewicz could always try to request a legal
arbitration from the Screen Writers Guild
100
(founded in 1933 and precursor of the Writers
Guild of America today). At the time Welles was amidst his credit dispute with
43
Mankiewicz, a “writer-producer agreement,” signed by the studios with the Guild, was
soon to go into effect providing this type of arbitration procedure at the start of the 1940s.
Signed but not yet into effect, this agreement was meant to basically uphold writing credit
for writers and screenwriters against the then industry somewhat still common practice of
random assignment of writing credits by producers, directors or studioheads in Hollywood:
If Mankiewicz originally had some kind of understanding with Welles on the credits, the
course of events can only have made him have second thoughts. As Citizen Kane moved
along in production, rumors began to leak out that the early footage was sensational. It
appeared that what some had predicted might turn out to be true – Citizen Kane would be a
high point in everyone’s career. Mankiewicz began to complain openly. With the general
feeling for Welles in Hollywood what it was, support was not hard to line up. In a short
time, Mankiewicz was able to build a full-scale word-of-mouth campaign in his behalf. On
October 3, Hollywood Reporter rated his prospects high: “The writer credit won’t be solo
for Welles if Herman Mankiewicz can keep talking.” Faced with a combined threat of
public exposure and further ostracism from the industry, Welles relented. In a gesture
reminiscent of Kane, he put Mankiewicz’s name first. The proposed credit read: “Original
Screenplay: Herman Mankiewicz, Orson Welles.” When this proposal was submitted to the
Screen Writers Guild for review, an ironic reversal occurred. The Guild pointed out that the
credit proposed violated a provision in the writer-producer agreement that a producer could
not take screenplay credit “unless he does the screenplay writing entirely without the
collaboration of any other writer.” At this point, Mankiewicz joined Welles in an appeal,
whereupon the guild disclaimed jurisdiction because of the nature of the original contract
between Welles and Mankiewicz, and the co-credit was allowed to stand.
101

Although the dispute over the writing credit between Welles and Mankiewicz was finally
settled as co-credit sharing; we should note, however, that despite Carringer’s excellent and
well documented research, Carringer has always, in essence, categorically sided with Orson
Welles as a director.

Carringer clearly endorsed and considered Welles the major driving
force behind the script;
102
and by his explanation above cited that “by industry custom”
103

“authorship” and “screen credit” in fact mean two different things for screenwriters in
Hollywood – he endorsed the idea that even if screenwriters “make trouble”
104
and get
credit, they are not necessarily the author in cinema.
44

However, because Carringer is considered somewhat of an authority figure over the subject
of the remaining seven drafts of the Citizen Kane script – which he painstakingly analyzed
and cross-analyzed in great detail (starting in 1978
105
), together with related documentation
– his assertion that Welles indeed intended to steal writing credit from Mankiewicz is a fact
of undeniable importance that should not be taken lightly due to the scope of his scholarly
research.

Moreover, the most important element to keep in mind is that Carringer,

in all likelihood,
did not have the thought of looking at the Citizen Kane script drafts with the purpose of
researching that for the screenplay’s sake. His interest was not in screenwriting per se.
Carringer in fact defended Welles’ director reputation as the perceived primary author, by
responding, a few years later (again for the first time in 1978),

like several other outraged
critics and academics at the time, to an impassionate article first written by Pauline Kael in
1971 to the New Yorker.
106
Kael’s 1971 book-length article was the one to raise the issue of
the writing credit dispute between Welles (already a legendary name in the 1960s) against
the much less visible screenwriter Mankiewicz.

The idea behind Welles as a self-sufficient “boy-genius”
107
– a “writer-director-producer-
and-actor”
108
all rolled in one (as it was termed in his contracts) – was one that Welles re-
invented the script and dialogue “as he went along” on the set. Any posterior changes
Welles happened to introduce to Mankiewicz’s script were perceived to be so brilliant
109

(note that adjectives applied to Welles tend to be hyperbolic and flattering)

that they were
45
enough to satisfy auteur theory lovers and obfuscate Mankiewicz’s authorial force
altogether. In other words, our present deep-seated auteurist theory reasons that because
Welles is the director in Citizen Kane, he must surely have had a “touch of genius.”
110

This idea relies on a hype seldom applied to screenwriters. Screenwriters are rarely seen as
famous people, nor are they perceived to be geniuses as directors are. Even a small child on
the other side of the planet must have heard of the name Orson Welles, now deceased, but
Mankiewicz? Who has ever heard of Mankiewicz? A screenwriter is hardly ever larger than
life or bigger than a director. Therefore, Citizen Kane is a classic example on the subject of
screenwriting authorship oversight or invisibility – or the arguable assumption that a
director “creates” the movie, the screenplay, and everything else that goes along with it.
This oversight was first significantly brought up to the public attention by film critic
Pauline Kael (1919-2001) in her previously mentioned book-length essay for the New
Yorker “Raising Kane”
111
(1971), as I have argued earlier.

Despite the fact that Welles is a writer-director in most of his films, he was not exactly an
“original” writer by any means. Many people, including Pauline Kael, viewed Welles
112
as
mostly an “adaptor” of major literary works such as Shakespeare (Macbeth, Othello, Henry
VI and V, and The Merchant of Venice), H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds, co-authored
by Welles but written by Howard Koch), Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote), Herman
Melville (Moby Dick), and Franz Kafka (The Trial). Even more daring work such as The
Magnificent Ambersons (1942, written and directed by Orson Welles)

was based on a novel
by Booth Tarkington; and Touch of Evil (1958, also written and directed by Orson Welles)
46
was based on the novel by Whit Masterson – not to mention the collaboration of more
writers on both films.

Mankiewicz’s screenplay, on the other hand, was indisputably fresh, incendiary, original
material. It contained mordant veiled references to the life and newspaper empire of
William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), which were completely intended
113
by former New
Yorker turned Hollywood screenwriter Mankiewicz. He and his wife Sara were frequent
visitors at the tycoon’s “castle” – who had as mistress a much younger actress Marion
Davies (1897-1961) – yet Mankiewicz couldn’t help but scoff at Hearst’s yellow
journalism,
114
conservative thinking and extravagant, wasteful lifestyle. An avid reader of
politics and former newspaperman himself, Mankiewicz devoured all sorts of books and
articles about Hearst, and had nurtured for a long time the idea of writing a movie about the
subject one day.
115

Seen as one of the quickest wits in Hollywood,

despite being an alcoholic and obsessive
gambler, he was a much sought-after presence at the Hollywood parties of the time,
precisely because of his biting humor and charm,

having met and socialized with celebrities
of the likes of Greta Garbo,
116
among so many others. Everyone loved “Mank,” as he was
known by everyone. He was always the life of the party, the “amiable madman,”
117
as
Pauline Kael affectionately called him.

So, when Mankiewicz pitched the idea of a film loosely based on the life of W. R. Hearst to
Welles – because Welles contract with RKO was about to expire,
118
and he had no suitable
47
film in sight to meet his deadline, and because Mankiewicz was so erudite and spirited
about his idea – Welles immediately said yes. Welles invited John Houseman to work as an
editor with Mankiewicz, and make sure he would stay away from alcohol in order to
deliver a screenplay in the short period of three
119
months, so that Welles could meet his
RKO contractual obligations. When the writing was finished, Mankiewicz’s script provided
Welles with a platform and much needed structure for Welles directorial work to shine.

When Citizen Kane won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1942 – the
only award it received, ostracizing Welles as its major force – Richard Meryman cites
Pauline Kael saying, “The members of the Academy probably felt good … because their
hearts had gone to crazy, reckless Mank, their own resident loser-genius.”
120
This is how
Kael describes the Welles and Mankiewicz collaboration in the creation of Citizen Kane:
Welles needed Mankiewicz. Since sound came in, almost every time an actor has scored in
a role and became a “star,” it has been because the role provided a realistic base for
contradictory elements. Welles has never been able to write this kind of vehicle for himself.
Kane may be a study of egotism and a movie about money and love, but it isn’t just another
movie about a rich man who isn’t loved; it’s a scandalously unauthorized, muckraking
biography of a man who was still alive and – though past his peak influence – still powerful,
so it conveyed shock and danger, and it drew its strength from its reverberations in the life
of the period. Mankiewicz brought to the film the force of journalism. The thirties had been
full of movie biographies of tycoons and robber barons, and some, like The Power and the
Glory, were complexly told, but even Preston Sturges, as if in awe of the material, had
taken a solemn, almost lachrymose approach to the money-doesn’t-bring-happiness theme.
Mankiewicz did it better: the prismatic technique turned into a masterly juggling act. There
is an almost palpable sense of enjoyment in the script itself; Mankiewicz was skillful at
making his points through comedy, and frequently it’s higher, blacker comedy than was
customary in the thirties pictures. Welles is a different kind of writer: theatrical and Gothic,
not journalistic, and not organized. His later thrillers are portentous, sensational in a void,
entertaining thrillers, often, but mere thrillers. Lacking the realistic base and the beautifully
engineered structure that Mankiewicz provided, Welles has never again been able to release
that charming, wicked rapport with the audience that he brought to Kane both as actor and
as director (or has been able to release it only in distorted form, in self-satire and self-
humiliation). He has brought many qualities to film – and there was perhaps a new,
mellowed vitality in his work in the flawed Falstaff of a few years ago – but he has brought
48
no more great original characters. In his movies, he can create an atmosphere but not a base.
And without that the spirit that makes Kane so likable a bastard is missing. Kane, that mass
of living contradictions, was conceived by Mankiewicz, an atheist who was proud of his
kosher home, a man who was ambivalent about both Hearst and Welles.
121
(my italics)

Pauline Kael’s essay “Raising Kane” is detailed and convincing in highlighting the fact that
Citizen Kane, “that mass of living contradictions was conceived by Mankiewicz,” and that
“Mankiewicz brought to the film the force of journalism.” Kael’s essay impact, starting in
the 1970s, was inordinate and unforeseen: it created the absolute necessity of mentioning
the screenwriter in the case of Citizen Kane. Therefore, what Kael’s essay made possible,
all of a sudden, in so many novel ways, was that anyone who was to write about Citizen
Kane as a movie, couldn’t only write about the director anymore, as the whole creator, and
just ignore the screenwriter: they had to address the screenwriter as well. By extension, this
essay provided a huge paradigm shift in terms of argument: the issue that there was a writer
who was not only Welles, but a professional screenwriter – making more complex the
already complex issue of authorship in cinema.

Kael’s 1971 essay for the New Yorker was finally reprinted as a book in 1974 (The Citizen
Kane Book
122
) and, although it was clearly a passionate, long, accurate and well-researched
essay (which included the screenplay printed inside the book), it raised a frenzy in the
movie industry and academia. Many texts started popping up in response to Kael – mostly
refuting her defense of screenwriter Mankiewicz and attempting to avenge director Welles.
Among the several rebuttal texts worth noting is first one by renowned director Peter
Bogdanovich
123
(1972) and the BFI film analysis by eminent feminist film critic Laura
Mulvey
124
(1992). Mankiewicz authorial dispute was not Welles first spat, though. Welles
49
had already been involved in more than one writing credit dispute: first one with Howard
Koch (War of The Worlds, 1938 – Koch was one of the writers in the 1942 Casablanca),
and second one, as mentioned, with Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane, 1941).

Judging from the most heated responses to Kael’s essay, her analysis of Citizen Kane’s
production history still fails to change the minds of people who believe highly visible
directors are natural born, superhuman authors. Moreover, we should also note that Kael
did not write essays about screenwriters as authors every day; she didn’t. Kael was a film
critic. She wrote this one essay because the evidence in favor of Mankiewicz was so strong,
and far too great of a comparative opportunity to miss. Like most film critics, Kael mainly
wrote about directors. Nonetheless, this essay’s perspective on screenwriting (also refuted
by Sarris in “Citizen Kael vs. Citizen Kane”
125
) was a huge event, generating a lot of
controversy. Consequently, this historical and bibliographical dialogue between Kael and
others is very productive and telling of how we perceive cinema authorship in our time.

Directors get mythically credited by default with all sorts of things: such as being
responsible for “making their movies up” on the set as they “go along,” or for making lines
up in collaboration with actors. As blown out of proportion assumptions as these may
sound, they are still much believed assumptions in cinema. Thus, in Hollywood mostly
everyone believes the screenwriter’s work is easy, or at least easily replaceable. This long
held illusion that anyone can write a movie on the spur of the moment, as if by magic, turns
screenwriters into virtual ghosts next to the star power of celebrities, such as actors and
directors, as we have seen in Sunset Boulevard and in the history of Citizen Kane.
50

In 1963 Andrew Sarris noted: “the director almost invariably receives sole credit for
direction, regardless of the studio influences behind the scenes.”
126
The behind the scenes
influences from “the studio system victimizes the screenwriter more than the director,”
127

since Hollywood is “more likely to tamper with a story line than with a visual style.”
128

This is one reason many screenwriters dream of becoming a director one day, roughly what
Billy Wilder as a writer-turned-director was able to achieve. A great number of
screenwriters aspire to directing to protect their writing, so that they can get rid of such
extraneous influences, and gain a broader creative control of the final outcome.

Being a writer-director, then, is the only way one can be considered a “complete” auteur, in
the strict sense of the term in cinema, as I have been trying to demonstrate. As I will be
demonstrating later, cinema supports the evidence that the writer is the creator of the film,
while the director comes second in line by adapting a screenplay already written by
somebody else. When someone is both the writer and director, then this sort of adaptation
so to speak doesn’t happen, since they are the writer and the director, all rolled into one.
Even though Sarris zoomed in on the model of Hollywood “directors-only” as auteurs, we
should keep in mind that initially French auteurs were first and foremost both “writers and
directors” at the same time; and there were similar cases in the United States, which was
the course Billy Wilder chose for his famous satiric comedies from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Wilder was able to switch to directing as his main career path, while continuing to
collaborate with screenwriters Charles Brackett and later I.A.L. Diamond. By becoming a
51
writer-director, Wilder secured creative control of his stories. At his gravestone, upon his
death in 2002 at age 95, one of his gag lines still teases us today: “Billy Wilder: I’m a
writer, but then nobody’s perfect.”
129
An intelligent, funny and biting reporter, journalist,
and later a screenwriter, Wilder understood better than anyone else that a screenplay mostly
functions as a platform for the director, in a perverse twist of fate, sapping any creative
rewards a virtually invisible writer might wish to achieve in the larger directing model of
Hollywood cinema. This was certainly not a bad tactic for a writer, since by becoming a
director, Wilder was entitled to final-cut for the works he first envisioned on the page.

Before Wilder, and according to Sarris, comedy-writer Preston Sturges
130
initiated the trend
of writers-turned-directors in Hollywood. Sarris
131
was challenged by Richard Corliss
132
to
write for the special edition “The Hollywood Screenwriters” for Film Comment (1970), a
two-part issue (1970 and 1978) clearly dedicated to the screenwriting counter-argument to
the auteur theory. Sarris agreed
133
and provided an essay about the widely praised Preston
Sturges. Sarris had already covered the work of Sturges before in his book The American
Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968,
134
where he recognized the work of a few
writer-directors as an exception to his main argument of the auteur theory. Sarris explained
in his book that “not all directors are auteurs,” and “nor are all auteurs necessarily
directors,” which is to say “some films are written but not really directed.”
135

Sarris conceded that notably in comedy (a writer’s genre), in the work of some “comic
players” they are particularly “their own auteurs.”
136
However, remaining true to his
position, Sarris insisted that “the director is both the least necessary and the most important
52
component of filmmaking.”
137
Thus, Sarris was willing to accept Sturges as an auteur, but
only as long as Sturges was the director as well, not only the writer. That said, Preston
Sturges was one of Sarris’ favorites (who doesn’t like comedy?), and he noted in both
essays, again, that it was Sturges who led the way of “the writer-director movement in
Hollywood.”
138
In that Film Comment issue, Sarris remarked about Sturges:
To the end of his days Preston Sturges described himself as a writer rather than a director,
and he would have been the first to admit that the films he directed through the 1940s and
1950s relied more on verbal wit than visual style. Still, all his screenwriting efforts in the
1930s would now be of only the most esoteric concern if he had not made the decisive leap
from the writer’s cubicle to the director’s chair with The Great McGinty in 1940, followed
by Christmas in July that same year, The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm
Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero, and The
Great Moment (1944), Mad Wednesday (1947), and somewhat anticlimactically,
Unfaithfully Yours (1948), The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949), and The
French They Are a Funny Race (1957). Although it is relatively common for writers to
become directors nowadays, the switch was somewhat unusual in the craft conditioned
1930s when it was not unknown for producers to fire directors who had the temerity to take
up typing. As it was, the successful accession of Sturges sparked a writer-director
movement involving John Huston, Billy Wilder, Joseph Mankiewicz, Dudley Nichols,
Clifford Odets, Nunnally Johnson, Robert Rossen, Samuel Fuller, Frank Tashlin, Richard
Brooks, and Blake Edwards, among others. But no Hollywood screenwriter-turned-director
ever matched Sturges as the complete writer-director with nine out of his twelve films based
on original screenplays, and even two of his three adaptations (The Great Moment, and The
French They Are a Funny Race) bearing the personal Sturges stamp of the free-wheeling
flashback. . . . Sturges threw in his script for The Great McGinty (originally titled Down
Went McGinty) for the privilege of directing it. Thus, unlike his colleagues, he took a cut in
pay for a rise in status. He proved his point and went on to become the brightest comedy
director of the 1940s.
139
(my italics)

It is clear here that Sarris’ auteur theory of the director created some controversy,
especially among screenwriters. Sarris had to keep justifying Preston Sturges as an auteur
director, even though Sturges considered himself more of a writer than a director, and
everybody knew that Sturges had a funny-hand in writing his comedies. Thus, Sarris had to
be constantly on guard, adjusting his theory from attack here and there.

53
Inevitably, as we can see, Sarris ends up writing about a few more Hollywood writer-
directors as auteurs, such as Sturges, something he had previously resisted. In his defense,
Sarris suggested more than once that the auteur theory is more of an “attitude”
140
than a
fully fleshed out theory. Sarris went as far as to safely say that the first time he applied the
term auteur theory in 1962, “it was certainly not intended as the last word on the
subject.”
141
Sarris’ auteur theory also allowed for “exceptions,”
142
an exception which is
certainly the case of writer-directors such as Sturges, as we can see later taking shape in
Sarris’ argument.

However, Sarris criticized others when they challenged his view of the auteur theory of the
director; because, ultimately, the essence of Sarris’s argument lies in that a director doesn’t
necessarily need to write, he only needs to exist as a director, or be the director, in order to
be praised as the primary author of a movie. Let’s explore another example, as it pertains to
writing, as discussed by Sarris:
Auteurism seems to have become a scapegoat for just about every cultural affliction
associated with cinema. For example, Gore Vidal (in the April American Film) associated
auteurism with the deification of directors over writers in the moviemaking process.
Speaking of Renoir’s “great heist” of The Southerner, Vidal explains: “Renoir was a man
who had great trouble speaking English, much less writing it, and the script was written by
William Faulkner. According to Zachary Scott, who acted in it, Faulkner really liked the
script and would have been pleased to have the credit. But Renoir so muddled the business
that the credit finally read: ‘Screenplay by Jean Renoir’.” Unfortunately, Vidal neglects to
mention that The Southerner was adapted from a novel entitled Hold Autumn in Your Hand
by George Sessions Perry, the forgotten man in the anti-Renoir, pro-Faulkner anecdote.
Who was George Sessions Perry? I have no idea, and neither, apparently does Vidal. He is
(or was) a veteran of the vast army of virtually anonymous authors who have supplied so
many of the stories on the screen. Vidal’s anecdote implies that Faulkner thought up the
story of The Southerner all by himself, and Renoir then stole the script and “muddled” it,
whatever that means. The anecdote loses something if Faulkner is revealed as the
middleman in the screenwriting process. Until Vidal is prepared to research how much
Faulkner’s script owes to Perry’s novel, the indictment of Renoir as a plagiarist must be
thrown out for lack of evidence. Besides, Renoir’s reputation does not rest excessively on
54
The Southerner any more than Faulkner’s reputation rests on his screenplays, credited or
uncredited. Both Renoir and Faulkner must be evaluated in terms of the total context of
their careers. This is one of the basic assumptions of auteurism, one that we have always
taken for granted in literature, music, and the fine arts, but one that came very late to
cinema because of the lack of archival facilities.
143

Sarris’ argument here is insightful in parts,

but misguided in others. Gore Vidal (1925-
2012) – notable author, critic, and a screenwriter himself in Suddenly Last Summer (1959),
Ben Hur (1959, uncredited) and Caligula (1979) – raises an important issue about the
nature of writing credits, rebuffed by Sarris in 1977. Gore Vidal says that Jean Renoir
(1894-1979), as a French director (who arrived in the United States in 1941 fleeing the
Nazi invasion of France, later becoming a U.S. citizen), could not possibly be the writer of
The Southerner
144
(1945); which was something obvious, since Renoir (nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Director with this film) had not achieved proper fluency in
English at that time. It is true that Renoir was a co-writer of most of his well-known films
in France, and that he might indeed have collaborated in The Southerner’s script;

but
Renoir could not have written the bulk of the film, especially dialogue and vernacular
speech in English.

Also, this is not an original work, as Sarris points out. It is the adaptation of an unknown
novel for the screen, which lessens the hold of Renoir’s auteurist claim even more. But for
Sarris, because Gore Vidal did not prove how much “Faulkner’s script owes to Perry’s
novel, the indictment of Renoir as a plagiarist must be thrown out for lack of evidence.”
145

I think this is a false assumption on Sarris’ part. Whether William Faulkner’s script is
faithful to the novel, or only loosely based on it, it is still Faulkner’s script – Renoir cannot
55
just scoop the writing credit for himself, because of his status as an eminent director,
discrediting and annulling Faulkner’s credit altogether. Faulkner was not Renoir’s subaltern
help; as a writer, Faulkner was a prestigious “brand name” and highly respected. The novel
was adapted for the screen by Hugo Butler. And today we know that not only was William
Faulkner (1897-1962),
146
a southerner himself, uncredited at the time of the theatrical
release of The Southerner by United Artists, but Nunnally Johnson (1897-1977),
147
another
southerner, was also an uncredited screenwriter on the film.

Now, why did two highly praised writer/screenwriters, such as William Faulkner and
Nunnally Johnson, both go uncredited in The Southerner? And why did Jean Renoir, as a
director filming an adaptation and not an original work, receive the writing credit to his
name? While we do not know the full answer to these questions, being an uncredited
screenwriter (before the Hollywood heavy blacklisting of screenwriters
148
and
McCarthyism
149
) – and then later being acknowledged for their work while a director
previously held such writing credit – says a lot about the nature of cinema and the credit
disagreements that existed between famous directors and equally famous, albeit less
powerful, writers at the time.

This type of behavior was analyzed earlier in the Citizen Kane case example, and it still
happens today, to some extent, with the possessive credit “a film by”
150
that directors so
unceremoniously appropriate, despite the disapproval of writers and other collaborators in
the sphere of cinema. Being less visible than a famous director, such as Renoir, the
unassuming writer gets mistaken for a mere director’s helper or employee. Maybe Faulkner
56
and Johnson didn’t care enough about screen credit in the larger scheme of things. As
Sarris implied, the film The Southerner was minor work, but that doesn’t make Sarris’
account of the making of the film more truthful. As mentioned earlier, this was the same
type of problem that happened to both an indignant Howard Koch (1938, War of the
Worlds radio show script that scared the East Coast on Halloween
151
) and Herman
Mankiewicz (1941, Citizen Kane script) with regard to director Orson Welles.

Arch Oboler (1909-1987) – playwright and screenwriter, writer of a few Mae West
sketches, and a contemporary who occasionally worked with Welles on radio plays –
commented, “I didn’t particularly like Orson. He is a great actor and a fine director, but he
didn’t know how to give credit to the people around him who did the work . . . He knew
that I knew that he’s not a writer. Yet he sat at that table and . . . played the part so well . . .
But I knew darn well the minute I left that he’d call up Koch and say, ‘Hey, can you write
this for me?’”
152
This is how Orson Welles, not so gracefully, referred to Howard Koch in
regards to the authorship dispute over the War of the Worlds script: “Now it’s perfectly true
that Mr. Koch worked on The War of the Worlds since he was at the time a regular member
of my writing staff. [But] to credit the broadcast version to him, with the implication that
its conception as well as its execution was his, is a gross mistake.”
153
John Houseman,
Welles’ partner in the Mercury Theatre (on Broadway, radio, and on Citizen Kane) – who
also performed sometimes as a writer
154
for Welles – has eloquently described Welles’
tumultuous creative relationship with Howard Koch and Herman Mankiewicz:
Mankiewicz stayed at RKO throughout the making of Citizen Kane, torn between his
enthusiasm over the way Welles was shooting it and his indignation (which grew as he
realized what a great picture it was going to be) at Orson’s tacit at first, and then quite open
57
assumption of writing credit on the film. It was a brawl I had seen coming and of which I
was determined to have no part. Citizen Kane is Welles’s film. The dramatic genius that
animates it and the creative personality with which it is imbued are undeniably Orson’s –
just as, in another medium, The War of the Worlds owed its final impact to his miraculous
touch. But he did not write either of them. Long before “auteurism” became part of the
critical film jargon, it had been generally accepted that a script (no matter how complete,
detailed, or brilliant) is only the first stage in the creative process of filmmaking. In Kane,
Welles direction of his own and the other actors’ performances, his pacing, his strong,
personal visual concept (including his brilliant use of Toland’s deep-focus photography),
his audacious cutting and, above all, the theatrical vitality with which he filled every frame
of the film – all these add up to make it one of the world’s recognized masterpieces. But it
could not have been made without Mankiewicz’s screenplay. It is no denigration of Welles
talent to observe that, throughout his career, he has functioned most effectively and created
most freely when he was supported by a strong text. Mankiewicz supplied him with such a
structure. Since no one has ever disputed Welles cinematic authorship of Citizen Kane and
since its success and fame, like that of The War of the Worlds, was overwhelmingly his,
how does one explain the furious malignance with which he has attempted to deny both
Koch and Mankiewicz the writing credit to which they were entitled? It is always difficult
to fathom an ego like Orson’s, to understand the alchemy through which any project in
which he was even remotely involved became automatically and wholly his own. For this
reason, he was genuinely surprised and disturbed when, in place of gratitude, his
collaborators expressed unreasonable desire for personal credit. When, like Koch or
Mankiewicz (both of whom profited greatly from their collaboration with Welles), they
persisted in their demands, he regarded their attitude as disloyal and treacherous.
155

Houseman has also described his perception of Welles in relationship to his writing:
Writing was a particularly sensitive region of Orson’s ego. It was a form of creativity in
which he had never excelled but in which he refused to concede defeat. . . . His story sense
was erratic and disorganized; whenever he strayed outside the solid structure of someone
else’s work, he ended in formless confusion. This is something his ego would not
acknowledge. It was also something which, for more mundane reasons, he could not afford
to admit. “Written, produced, directed and performed by Orson Welles” was the wording of
his contracts with the mass media: it justified the amount of money and the degree of
artistic freedom which he was able to demand and obtain from his employers. For anyone
else to receive credit – particularly a writing credit – on one of his productions not only
diminished him personally, but threatened the entire fiction of his superhuman capacity.
After the notoriety he had achieved with The War of the Worlds, how could he let it be
known that a $60 a week scribbler had, in fact, been responsible for the script? Following a
year of false starts, how could he acknowledge that his first film was based on the work of a
well-known Hollywood hack?
156
(my italics)

As Houseman pointedly observed, Orson Welles felt personally diminished if he was
grouped or had to share credit with other writers. However, Howard Koch was obviously
58
the writer on the radio play for The War of the Worlds; not only because Welles was
exceedingly busy producing the show, but also because Koch didn’t have much time at his
disposal, having to rewrite the whole H. G. Wells story from scratch to meet the radio show
deadline. Koch describes how his writing process went on The War of the Worlds:
At the time I was a young playwright doing my first professional job, which was writing the
radio plays for the Mercury Theatre’s Sunday evening programs sponsored by CBS and
which were built around the name and talents of Orson Welles. It was an experience lasting
six months I wouldn't have missed nor would I want to go through again. . . . A day came
when a novella was handed me – H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds – with instructions
from Houseman to dramatize it in the form of news bulletins. Reading the story, which was
laid in England and written in narrative style, I realized I could use practically nothing but
the author’s idea of a Martian invasion and his description of their appearance and their
machines. In short, I was being asked to do an almost entirely original hour-length play in
six days. I called Houseman pleading to have the assignment changed to another subject.
He talked to Orson and called back. The answer was a firm no, this was Orson’s favorite
project. On Monday, my one day off, I made a quick trip up to the Hudson to see my family.
On the way back it occurred to me I needed a map to establish the location of the first
Martian arrivals. I drove into a gas station and, since I was on route 9 W where it goes
through a part of New Jersey, the attendant gave me a map of the state. Back in New York
starting to work, I spread out the map, closed my eyes and out down the pencil point. It
happened to fall on Grovers Mill. I liked the sound, it had an authentic ring. Also, it was
near Princeton where I could logically bring in the observatory and the astronomer,
Professor Pierson, who became a leading character in the drama. . . . The six days before
the broadcast were one nightmare of scenes written and rewritten between frantic phone
calls and pages speeding back and forth to the studio and, all the while, that Sunday
deadline staring me in the face. Once the Martians had landed, I deployed the opposing
forces over an eye-widening area, made moves and countermoves between the invaders and
defenders; eventually I found myself enjoying the destruction I was wrecking like a
drunken general. Finally, after demolishing the Columbia Broadcasting Building, perhaps a
subconscious wish fulfillment, I ended the holocaust with one lonely radio voice on the air,
“Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone?” By that time it seems that only the
hardiest souls, or those who knew it was a play, were still listening. People were fleeing
blindly, in every direction on foot and in all kinds of vehicles.
157
(my italics)

The six-day-a-week
158
tight schedule that Koch slaved away on each 60-page script
159
for
the 45-minute Sunday
160
radio broadcasts, weekly for 6 months,
161
apparently did not mean
much to Welles, when compared to his ego and the nurturing of his “reputation,”
162
a
sensitive topic for Welles. The point of the matter is that Welles was very busy. He was so
59
busy that, at the time, he signed up to be the producer, director and actor – not only for the
single episode of The War of The Worlds, but for all the Sunday evening radio broadcasts,
altogether no small feat. Nonetheless, the contract Welles signed with CBS (much similar
to the contract he later had with RKO while doing Citizen Kane) also required him to be the
writer of the radio plays.
163
In the case of War of the Worlds, this is how Pauline Kael
described the Orson Welles phenomenon in her essay “Raising Kane,” to larger audiences
and to less cognizant film critics, and how it was built upon Welles’s possessiveness
164

towards creative authorship, especially the writing credit, as it pertained to Howard Koch:
Very early in his life as a prodigy, Welles seems to have fallen into the trap that has caught
so many lesser men – believing his own publicity, believing that he really was the whole
creative works, producer-director-writer-actor. Because he could do all these things, he
imagined that he did do them. (A Profile of him that appeared in The New Yorker two years
before Citizen Kane was made said that “outside the theatre … Welles is exactly twenty-
three years old.”) In the days before the Mercury Theatre’s weekly radio shows got a
sponsor, it was considered a good publicity technique to build up public identification with
Welles’s name, so he was credited with just about everything, and was named on the air as
the writer of the Mercury shows. Probably no one but Welles believed it. He had written
some of the shows when the program first started, and had also worked on some with
Houseman, but soon he had become much too busy even to collaborate; for a while
Houseman wrote them, and then they were farmed out. By the time of the War of the
Worlds broadcast, on Halloween, 1938, Welles wasn’t doing any of the writing. He was so
busy with his various other activities that he didn’t always direct the rehearsals himself,
either – William Alland or Richard Wilson or one of the other Mercury assistants did it.
Welles might not come in until the last day, but somehow, all agree, he would pull the show
together “with a magic touch.” Yet when the Martian broadcast became accidentally
famous, Welles seemed to forget that Howard Koch had written it. (In all the furor over the
broadcast, with front-page stories everywhere, the name of the author of the radio play
wasn’t mentioned.) Koch had been writing the shows for some time. He lasted for six
months, writing about twenty-five shows altogether – working six and a half days a week,
and frantically, on each one, he says, with no more than half a day off to see his family. The
weekly broadcasts were a “studio presentation” until after the War of the Worlds
(Campbell’s Soup picked them up then). And Koch, a young writer, who was to make his
name with the film The Letter in 1940 and win an Academy Award for his share in the
script of the 1942 Casablanca, was writing them for $75 apiece. Koch’s understanding of
the agreement was that Welles would get the writing credit on the air for publicity purposes
but that Koch would have any later benefit, and the copyright was in Koch’s name. (He
says that it was, however, Welles’s idea that he do the Martian show in the form of radio
bulletins.) Some years later, when C.B.S. did a program about the broadcast and the panic it
had caused, the network re-created parts of the original broadcast and paid Koch $300 for
60
the use of his material. Welles sued C.B.S. for $375,000, claiming that he was the author
and that the material had been used without his permission. He lost, of course, but he may
still think he wrote it. (He frequently indicates as much in interviews and on television.)
“Foible” is the word that Welles’s former associates tend to apply to his assertions of
authorship. Welles could do so many different things in those days that it must have
seemed almost accidental when he didn’t do all the things he claimed to.
165
(my italics)

Note that Pauline Kael compares Orson Welles behavior to what is usually done in
Hollywood by directors anyway in regards to possessive
166
authorship:
Directors, in the theatre and in movies, are by function (and often by character, or, at least,
disposition) cavalier toward other people’s work, and Welles was so much more talented
and magnetic than most directors – and so much younger, too – that people he robbed of
credit went on working with him for years, as Koch went on writing more of the radio
programs after Welles failed to mention him during the national publicity about the panic. . .
If there was ever a young man who didn’t need unearned credits, it was Orson Welles, yet
though he was already too big, he must have felt he needed to dazzle the world.
167

Publicity or no publicity, as Pauline Kael describes above, Orson Welles was unmistakably
named on the air as the writer of the radio shows. He went as far as to sue CBS, saying he
was the author, not Howard Koch. Upon the publication of a book on the subject of The
War of The Worlds panic broadcast, by scholar Hadley Cantril,
168
Welles vehemently
disagreed with Cantril when Cantril gave credit to Koch for the script. In an inflamed
telegram to Cantril about the subject, Welles wrote:
Think how much more unfavorable an impression your book will make as it now stands
and try to conceive the effect on my professional prestige and standing in the theatre world.
Can see no conceivable reason for your steadfast refusal to believe The War of the Worlds
was not my conception but also, properly and exactly speaking, my creation. Once again,
finally, and I promise for the last time, Howard Koch did not write The War of the Worlds.
Any statement to this effect is untrue and immeasurably detrimental to me. I fail to see how
I can put this more strongly.
169
(my italics)

Unfortunately, most writers are quick to justify Welles’ behavior by arguing that Welles
probably believed his own fabrication, which implies that even if they knew better, Welles
61
only deluded himself and meant no harm to anyone. As Kael well noted, Welles was after
all only acting like most directors in Hollywood.
170
His appropriation of writing authorship
was felt to be at least understandable. It is well documented, however, that Welles went out
of his way to sue and supply public statements that he was the writer of both War of the
Worlds and Citizen Kane, taking possessive credit
171
to a heightened level of personal
entitlement. Nonetheless, reality was ready to expose Welles, since writing one complete
play a week, like Howard Koch did, for a radio network, was a full time job in itself, which
barely allowed one day off each week, and Welles was booked to the brim. He obviously
had no spare time left for anything else. Therefore, except for some editing work, Welles
simply outsourced the writing. War of the Worlds no doubt made Orson Welles’ name
famous overnight, and because of it, Welles’ career grew sharply on the East Coast, and he
was eventually able to migrate to Hollywood to direct Citizen Kane.

Therefore, it is safe to say that the two works for which Orson Welles is most well-known,
from the sum of all of his career, are the legendary panic radio broadcast War of the Worlds
(1938), and Citizen Kane (1941), an Academy Award winning film for best original
screenplay.
172
One is science fiction. The other one is a newspaper political satire. Neither,
however, is the best representation of Welles’ individual style (which is more theatrical,
because of Welles extreme admiration for the plays of Shakespeare). Other works written
by Welles never achieved the same status or impact as War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane.
As John Houseman once observed, “I think Welles has always sincerely felt that he, single-
handed, wrote Kane and everything else that he has directed – except possibly the plays of
Shakespeare. But the script of Kane was specially Mankiewicz’s.”
173
Welles directed both
62
War of The Worlds and Citizen Kane. He also acted in them, and even wrote parts and
scenes, but neither of these works were created on the page by Welles. They were the
product of someone else’s imagination and temperament, and obeyed the essential style of
their writers. Welles greatly exaggerated his authorial status, and as one book reviewer
elaborated about Welles, “Welles said he did not want an accurate description of himself,
but a flattering one, and he was not above embroidering the truth.”
174

If Welles made comments to Koch and Mankiewicz about how War of the Worlds or
Citizen Kane should be written, that by itself would not automatically make Welles its
writer-author. Just having an “idea” does not make one a writer. An idea does not write
itself out. If it were that simple, a screenplay would be only a few pages of scrawls, instead
of the 120-page standard, which takes so long to write. Thus, an “idea” needs to be
recorded on the page first (as Welles did with re-writing parts of Citizen Kane) to start
“walking and talking” and existing outside of someone’s imagination.

To illustrate this point, Richard Walter
175
– screenwriter, renowned screenwriting professor
at UCLA, as well as well-known published author – explains very succinctly why “ideas
are cheap,” because “ideas basically are just ideas,” not the pages of a written screenplay:
Why do so many people seem to think their idea was stolen? Probably because they
misunderstand the value of an idea. They do not realize that ideas, basically, are just ideas –
brief, unformed flashes of incidents or insights, broad bits and pieces of notions. Trembling
with excitement, a friend of mine who happens to be a surgeon recently told me that he
“had a great idea for a movie.” All that remained, he assured me, was “for it to be written.”
Because he is my close and affectionate friend, I resisted the urge to say to him: “I have a
great idea for a kidney transplant, all that remains is the surgery.”
176

63
In other lines of work, no one takes credit for something just because they had an “idea” for
it without doing the work first. One can daydream all day long, if they wish, and still get
nothing done. As cited above, Walter humorously points out in Screenwriting: The Art,
Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing
177
(1988, book partly re-published in
2010) that having an idea for a kidney transplant is not the same thing as the transplant
itself. In other words: it is not the idea that saves the patient, it is the surgery. Richard
Walter continues clarifying why writing should be credited back to the writing itself and
not only to ephemeral “ideas” (as Welles has claimed, to varying degrees, about Citizen
Kane and War of the Worlds as being his “idea,” thus the product of his imagination).

An idea is simply something too difficult
178
to prove authorship on. A screenplay or written
material is another story. Ideas per se are not copyrightable, and also, obviously, an idea
cannot be copyrightable without a tangible format (such as paper, film, clay, etc).
179
Even
though this might sound like a small detail in the larger scheme of things, this is actually a
very important detail, even a crucial matter, because several times before the
unionization
180
of screenwriters, several people had been credited in movies as “writer”
(producer’s idea, director’s idea, their relative’s idea,
181
even their pet’s idea). Most of
these illegitimate writing credits had no backing or written proof whatsoever, other than the
power of those asserting the credits. Yet they were justified in the name of “ideas.” Richard
Walter’s book is about screenwriting and the writing habit – as well as about the essentials
of writing, such as character, dialogue, story, theme, action, images, timing, etc – but his
point is that writers write. Writing is a time consuming process that involves getting it on
the page, a mechanism that brings shape to formless, fleeting thought. Walter says:
64
As asserted in the chapter on work habits, ideas are cheap. What has value is an idea
worked out in detail, not merely thought up but written down. It needs to be expressed on
paper in such a way to sustain and maintain interest and attention through a well-
constructed plot integrating warm-blooded characters speaking crisp, trenchant dialogue in
fresh, original scenes and settings.
182

The screenplay is what makes characters and scenes come alive: not merely the “idea” for a
film, or the things that it contains. Without the written part of it, writers could be slaving
away forever, being seen as mere executors of someone else’s ideas – while any “big shot”
(and their affiliates) could just claim that they thought of that idea first. In many ways, this
is what directors convey when they comfortably rely on the auteur theory to validate their
preeminent authorship status. They behave as if a film is ultimately “their idea” because
they directed it at last; while the writer who wrote those pages “for them” was working “for
them.” The director takes a kind of fabricated illusionary possession of the writer’s work.
Now, an idea for a movie, or for a specific scene, doesn’t just pop up in the mind like a
cartoon-bubble just because the director shows up on the set. It takes preparation.

Even if a film is not exactly written in a regular screenplay format – like the case of most of
Paul Morrissey
183
(1938-) and Mike Leigh
184
(1943-) films – these two writer-directors still
use valuable writing tools, similar to improvisational comedy theatre, which are able to
extract from actors improvised dialogue and scenes based on well-defined conceptual-
emotional maps. Their stories have impact. They are not sudden, random ideas, though they
might lack a formal screenplay. Morrissey and Leigh “scripts” (with beginning, middle and
end) exist inside their heads, even on the page; they are just not shared with the actors a
priori as are traditional screenplays. But that is intentional. According to Morrissey’s own
65
words, he finds that actors “put in lots of nuances that a writer wouldn’t come up with.”
185

Yet, as Maurice Yacowar notes, Morrissey plans ahead the story “without selling out,” by
drawing “closer to the conventional narrative (not necessarily commercial).”
186
Mike Leigh
has described his technique as similar to improv: “There is never a script in the
conventional sense. I mean, there is a published script, but that’s something I’ve sat down
and written up after the event. But what we shoot is completely precise. The literary
qualities, the literary considerations, the writing qualities are very important, and I deal
with those in as writerly a way as I can.”
187

So unless cinema can do without the “writing” altogether, a planned-in-advance narrative
of some sort (complete with characters and stories) will always come first, or at least before
the directing. Any argument about securing credit for fleeting “ideas” (wherever they are
coming from) is just pointless. Having an idea for a movie does not write itself on the page
or on the screen, as, again, having the idea for a kidney transplant does not save the patient.
Writing requires time-intensive, focused labor like any other profession. It is real. Philip
Kiszely notes that, “summing up his ideas about the craft of screenwriting and its pivotal
role in the filmmaking process,” Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), screenwriter of Double
Indemnity for director Billy Wilder, commented: “The hell of good film writing is that most
important is what is left out. It’s left out because the camera and the actor can do it better
and quicker, above all quicker. But it had to be there in the beginning.”
188

Because of the frequency with which the screenwriter’s work gets taken for granted – while
directors try to epitomize writer’s credit if they can, such as the example pointed out by
66
Gore Vidal and the ones between Welles, Koch and Mankiewicz – Hollywood writers had
a strong urgency to unionize during the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, as noted earlier
in this chapter. Later they were able to enforce a contract with the studios that held
producers and directors accountable for not trespassing on writers’ territory. As I have
explained, the problem was that historically, writers’ credit appropriation, especially by
directors, was somewhat of a common occurrence in Hollywood. It was not only condoned
behavior, it was expected: a part of the lion’s share for a director who gained the most from
this “gentlemen’s agreement.” Needless to say, especially at that time, most directors and
producers were the mentioned “gentlemen” anyway, since there were fewer women
screenwriters and directors. With time, their attempt to solve this authorship problem
(between writers and directors, and between writers and producers) was finally negotiated
by writers through a contract agreement proposed by the Screen Writers Guild in the early
1940s. The Screen Writers Guild (SWG, founded in 1933) was the precursor of the Writers
Guild of America (WGA, founded in 1954). “‘October 10, 1940’ is the date printed on the
first Producer Screen Writers Guild Agreement in which producers officially recognize the
guild as the collective bargaining agent for all writers in the motion picture industry. The
contract was actually negotiated in 1942 and backdated.”
189

Thus, February 1942, when Citizen Kane (1941) won an Academy Award for best
screenplay, was about the period when the Screen Writers Guild had established the time-
consuming negotiation process with Hollywood (the aforementioned “Producer Screen
Writers Guild Agreement”). It resulted in a contract that made studios, producers, and
directors recognize and acknowledge that writers had copyrights enforced by their Guild.
67
When Welles and Mankiewicz submitted Citizen Kane’s credits for consideration for the
Oscars (Academy Awards of 26 February 1942), this contract was probably not officially
in effect yet, so the screenwriter credit was not properly protected yet. However, there were
talks in the industry that the situation for Welles (such as his all-encompassing contract
190

with RKO that required that he be given full writing credit on his films) might have to
change or even become illegal. According to Philip Kiszely, in his work about adaptations
for the screen in Hollywood,
191
studio executives generally considered writers a
“troublesome breed”
192
with regard to wanting their credit. Also, directors were a huge
threat at that time (and still are today) to the authorship of writers, so writers had no option
but to unionize. The solution, trying to resolve this problem once and for all, was to forbid
directors from spontaneously nominating themselves as writers, which now triggers an
automatic arbitration by the Guild – meaning, when there is more than one writer listed as
the author and the director nominated himself as a writer at the same time, the Guild will
investigate and arbitrate as to who shall be credited.

So unless the director bears the burden of proof, with his own written pages, and announces
it to the guild and to the other writer (or writers), and unless he writes more than 50% of
the screenplay, the director is not entitled to writing credit just because he said so, or
claimed to have had an “idea,” or because he deems the movie to be “his” creation.
Screenwriters built upon their history of unionization in order to achieve this preventive
measure, and thus they became able to safeguard the possession of their creation on the
page. Because a film is the derivative
193
work of a screenplay – “a derivative work is based
upon one or more pre-existing works”
194
– writers engage in a very poignant disagreement
68
with the auteur theory, which views the director as the main creator in cinema. This is
because the auteur theory is an idea that insists on a directorial “possessive credit”
195
that
not only subtracts from the work of everybody else, but most ominously from the writer’s,
since having a credit that intrinsically incarnates the writing realm by and large
presupposes “creation” by definition. For instance, the following section of the Writers
Guild of America “Screen Credits Manual” (for credits submitted after 2010) reads:
Production Executives:

The term “production executives” includes individuals who receive credit as the director or
in any producer capacity. The following rules govern writing credits of production
executives who also perform writing services when there are other writers involved on the
same project.

1. Automatic Arbitration Provisions

Schedule A of the Minimum Basic Agreement provides: “Unless the story and/or
screenplay writing is done entirely without any other writer, no designation of tentative
story or screenplay credit to a production executive shall become final or effective unless
approved by a credit arbitration as herein provided, in accordance with the Guild rules for
determination of such credit.”

2. Notice Requirements

If a production executive intends to claim credit as a team on any literary material with a
writer(s) who is not a production executive, he/she must, at the time when such team
writing begins, have signified such claim in writing to the Guild and to the writer(s) with
whom he/she claims to have worked as a team. Failure to comply with the above will
preclude such production executive from claiming co-authorship of the literary material in
question, and such literary material shall be attributed to the other writer.

3. Percentage Requirements to Receive Screenplay Credit

At the time of the credit arbitration, the production executive or production executive team
must assume the burden of proving that he/she/they had, in fact, worked on the script as a
writer and had assumed full share of the writing. In the case of original screenplays, if the
production executive or production executive team is the second writer he/she/ they must
have contributed more than 50% of the final script to receive screenplay credit.
His/her/their contribution must consist of dramatic construction; original and different
scenes; characterization or character relationships; and dialogue. As in all cases, decisions
of Arbitration Committees are based upon literary material. Therefore, production
executives, as well as other writers, should keep dated copies of all literary material written
by them and submitted to the Company.
196
(my italics)
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This Writers Guild of America “50% rule” prevents directors (also referred to above as
“production executives”) from escalating their desire for greater and greater “possessive
credit” within the movie industry. The WGA “Creative Rights for Writers” mentions that
“during the negotiation of the 2001 Minimum Basic Agreement a great deal of time was
spent trying to reach agreement regarding limitation of ‘a film by’ and other possessive
credits;” and “until resolution of this issue, writers and their representatives can assist in
this effort by making known their belief that the granting of a possessive credit to the
director denigrates the work, not only of writers, but of all those who contribute creatively
to the making of a film.”
197
The WGA 2008 Agreement presents the following as their
reasons for objecting to the auteur practice of relying on director’s possessive credits:
Since its founding, the Writers Guild has opposed the use of the so-called “possessive
credit” on screen and in advertising and promotion when used to refer to a person who is
not the sole author of the screenplay. The Guild's historic, current and ongoing opposition
is based upon beliefs and principles which include the following:

Credits should, as far as possible, accurately reflect each individual's contribution.

The granting of a possessive credit to a person who has not both written and directed a
given motion picture inaccurately imputes sole or preeminent authorship.

The proliferation of the number of unnecessary credits on screen and in advertising
devalues credits in general.

The widespread use of the credit denigrates the creative contributions of others.
198

(my italics)

Screenwriter Eleanor Perry
199
(1914-1981), in Richard Corliss’ book, when asked if she
would like to direct films, which gives the screenwriter more creative control, replied:
I want to direct films very much. It is, after all, the only way a writer can have control over
his own work. If one has written a script which presents a very personal statement or vision
of life, then especially, it is only by directing it that one can keep it one’s own. Although I
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don’t believe that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ or that film is totally a ‘director’s
medium’ – let’s face it, the people in the industry do. I have been far more discriminated
against as a writer than as a woman. The status and prestige of the function of ‘director’ far
exceeds that of the ‘writer.’ If a film is a success, the director always gets the credit; if it is
a flop, he only shares the blame. I understand and support the unrest in the Writers Guild
about the increasing use of the director’s name plus an apostrophe ‘s’ above the title of a
film.
200
(my italics)

Perry summed up very persuasively why she felt more discriminated against as a writer
than as a woman. For that reason, she understood the necessity of the Writers Guild of
America’s stance on the subject of possessive creative authorship. She implicitly agreed
with Foucault’s idea of “author function”
201
in her statement that “the status and prestige of
the function of director far exceeds that of the writer.” In other words, as I have been trying
to demonstrate – even though Perry felt more discriminated against as a writer than as a
woman – Perry still embodied the double function of anonymity for female screenwriters in
Hollywood. If the auteur theory supports that the (often male) director is the most
important factor in cinema, screenwriters certainly have their own version of who creates a
movie and is the real auteur. It is not difficult to recognize, then, that only by writing and
directing one’s own material, can one have more creative control over the whole process of
filmmaking. That is why, again, many screenwriters aspire to be writer-directors, so that
their vision, and what they “are trying to say,” remains true on the screen – such as with
Allison Anders, whose screenplay Grace of My Heart is analyzed in chapter 3.

Being a director without having written the screenplay might give someone the possessive
credit “a film by” on the screen, but it cannot assert authorial intention. Screenwriters
rarely seek celebrity status (such as directors and actors), but they at least seek recognition
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for their creative input. There are a few screenwriting anecdotes about cinema that make
this argument more clearly understood. One anecdote goes, according to David Howard
and Edward Mabley, that the director Frank Capra was recognized by his famous “Capra
touch.” However, in response, a screenwriter once handed him “120 blank pages neatly
bound as a script and said ‘Go ahead, give it that old Capra touch’.”
202
Another anecdote,
described by both Carl Foreman and Marc Norman, illustrates that a director without a
screenplay is like a Don Juan without a penis (without the phallus), without a screenplay he
has nothing to auteur.
203
The logic behind both arguments, shared by many screenwriters,
is that a feature film does not exist or even get off the ground without a screenplay of some
kind. Without a screenplay or a story, the director’s palette is reduced to a blank canvas in
endless waiting mode. A director without a screenplay is, at the end of the day, a “man”
without a job. We say a “man,” because to this day most directors are overwhelmingly
male if we look at the statistics.

However, screenplays still need to be written into existence. And once a screenplay is
written, it is produced by the director (if the director is different from the writer). But then,
when the time comes to investigate the film’s roots or origins, the writing credit is even
more important. Even if the screenwriting counter-theory to the widespread auteur theory
of the director never becomes popular among critics, theorists, or with the larger public,
because a film is a derivative
204
work of a screenplay, screenwriters, in their parallel world,
still believe and carry on as they are the ones who create the film first.

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FOR A WRITING THEORY OF CINEMA

The case of cinema is rather special, because it is a classic case of multiple authorship,
205

not a case of single directorial vision, or any single vision for that matter. This is certainly
true, but it does not resolve the problem of where the work comes from. Where does a film
originate? What are its origins? It does not get presented in the “mind”: anybody can have
an idea for a film, as we mentioned before, “ideas” are too difficult to prove; because a
work at the end of the day is the “artistic and literary expression contained within the
work,”
206
not its unregistered “mind” ideas. So the film originates in writing and it comes
from the writer. Most of the time, it comes from a screenwriter as it happens in the case of
cinema. Or the film may even originate with a writer-director, if the director was the one
who wrote it and envisioned it in the first place.

The creative process in cinema is thus linked to its origins (screenwriting: first) rather than
its execution (directing: second), because creation starts at the beginning, not at the end.
The end (the film itself) might be seen as the manifestation of the creation, manifestation
which also involves editing (and only in rare cases is the director also the editor). But the
final film, as we see it on the screen, can’t really be perceived as the conception itself;
because creation is pre-existent, not the final film. Thus the author is always the creator, the
one who has been seen through history to create or invent something firsthand. If in the
case of theater and television, we know the author to be respectively the playwright and the
screenwriter, not the director (execution), why in the case of cinema do we believe the
director to be the author? I argue that this may be a historically developed anomaly within
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the history of the performing arts. Movies and film were such a scientific novelty at the
beginning, and so conspicuously visual, that people mistook the director for the author.

Note that much of theater is also visually innovative and groundbreaking (Bertolt Brecht,
Antonin Artaud, or the stark, therapeutic techniques of radical Brazilian theatre practitioner
Augusto Boal), so visuality is not only the prerogative of cinema. Carl Foreman, a
screenwriter, knows that when a play is produced, critics interview the playwright about it
first,
207
not the director, but the opposite is true with film. Thus, again, cinema shows itself
to be an anomaly in the history of the performing arts. In an article for Richard Corliss’
208

collection of essays about screenwriting, Foreman observes, “Not one film critic out of a
thousand will ever request a copy of a screenplay before reviewing a film – few will even
read one when it is published – but this never prevents critics from making serious
judgments and comments about both the writing and direction of a film.”
209
Imagine
Shakespeare, and people interviewing the director (and actors) for his plays, as if they were
the author! Shakespeare would become just a footnote, and be probably forgotten by now.

In fictional television (i.e. sitcoms and drama), similarly to theater, the writer is the author.
Directors are hired to execute what has been written on the page by the main-writer and his
or her team of writers. Writers who create a television show are also known as “executive
producers,” or “creators,” or “show-runners;” considering that a television show can have
more than one creator, but usually no more than three. Executive producer is a title not only
applied the writer-creator (producers exclusively may also get that title for instance), but
the creator of a television show always gets the title of executive-producer. In this case, a
74
television show creator (the one writer or main writers on the show) writes the initial pilot,
plus a great number of episodes, and oversees a table of writers who work together to write
the show season by season, staying within the main-writer’s vision. It is not unusual, then,
for the show creator to direct a few episodes, but they are mostly interested in writing. In
this context, directors are hired somewhat haphazardly per episode to film written episodes,
and sometimes only a few times, and still, a television show pretty much maintains its
visual consistency. As examined here, if in the case of theater and television, we know the
author to be respectively the playwright and the screenwriter, not their directors (execution),
why in the case of cinema do we believe the director to be the author?

A film is derivative work
210
from a screenplay, as mentioned previously in terms of
copyright law. The director and everybody else in cinema is at work adapting, so to speak,
a previously written screenplay. However, without the first complete work of the writer (or
writers) there is no film. This is the path through which films must pass in order to get
made. Of course, if a film is written and directed by the same person, like in the case of
most avant-garde pieces and in most written-and-directed feature films, there is one author.
But it was still the “writer” who came up with these pieces first. In other words, this is not a
new idea. We usually look at the writer to recognize as the author, one only needs to look
at the cases of theater and television for this evidence, as previously exemplified. But this
authorial premise has been historically ignored in the case of cinema in favor of the director.

As I have examined previously, when Pauline Kael pointed out that Mankiewicz in fact had
primarily imagined and created Citizen Kane in her 1971 article,
211
and not the director, her
75
analysis caused an uproar among critics, academics and directors. In 1972, Richard Corliss
followed her same line of reasoning, by pointing out the anomalous but widely prevalent
auteur theory myth of the director. He observed that “Kael’s critics retorted by virtually
denying the validity of her research; for Kane to be great, Welles had to have written it.
Almost everyone chose to ignore the obvious answer: that Herman Mankiewicz wrote
Citizen Kane, and Orson Welles directed it.”
212
Corliss remarks about the auteur theory:
“Auteur criticism at its most audacious fabricated the Myth of the Director: creator and
craftsman, aesthete and tycoon, the man with the innocent eye and the iron hand. This
romantic ideal is extraordinarily appealing, if not downright seductive – a portrait of the
artist in a Byronic mold. . . . Unless he writes his films as well, the Hollywood director is
essentially an interpretative artist who steers the script, the actors, and the camera in the
right direction. He is less an architect than a foreman, less a painter than an illustrator, less
a composer than a conductor.”
213

Corliss is unequivocal in pointing out that unless the director writes his own films, he (male
most of them at that time) is predominantly “re-interpreting” the work of the writer: the one
who is the real architect for the film. Corliss also points out the absurdity of assuming that
a director, by being a director, is also the script writer by inverting that logic: “It’s possible
– and at this point in film criticism, it may even be necessary – to treat the screenwriter as
an auteur who, through detailed script indications of camera placement, cutting and acting
styles, virtually ‘directs’ his own films;” that is to say this is “no more absurd than to argue
that the director writes his own scripts.”
214
For Corliss, the “the easiest way to resolve any
writer-director disputes is to concentrate on genuine filmmakers – writer-directors – [as]
auteurs.”
215
So real auteurs are the writer-directors, there is no other way, as I have argued
previously. This dichotomy about the screenwriter being cheated and deceived, and being
robbed of his/her own progeny, is so alive among screenwriters, that in Corliss’
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compilation, there is a passage that illustrates perfectly this notion. This passage is no more
vivid than in Carl Foreman’s evoking “Confessions of a Frustrated Screenwriter”:
“So, imagine yourself one of the novelists, playwrights or radio writers imported to
Hollywood in the 1930s, using Hollywood as a mise-en-scène because it set the pattern for
the western world. You meet and are charmed first by a producer who is either
impressively articulate and erudite or a rather appealing rough diamond, and, later, a
director who fits either description and is in addition the very archetype of poet, dreamer,
misunderstood genius, rebel and master of men. There are story conferences with both men
which are both stimulating and frightening, holding forth the dazzling promise of a
tripartite work of art that will make cinematic history. Later there will be conferences with
one or the other not present, at which you will gather that these collaborators are not
precisely in agreement, and that each is demanding your unqualified loyalty and artistic
integrity. If you are a man, you suddenly find yourself in an unaccustomedly feminine
position, simultaneously wooded by two lovers, and you begin to suspect (correctly) that
when you have given birth to your child, one or other of these swains is going to take it
away from you and raise it his way.”
216
(my italics)

Thus the analogy of screenwriting as the first step in the creation of a film, without which a
film doesn’t exist, applies to the case of cinema, even if it is under the radar, as we can
infer from Michel Foucault’s argument. Therefore, by using the analogy of the
screenwriter’s function of anonymity in Hollywood (applying Foucault’s logic), I hope to
problematize the notion that a screenplay exists merely as a blueprint of a film. I want to
challenge the assumption that a screenplay doesn’t exist without a film, by the counter-
assumption that a film doesn’t exist without a screenplay. Or at least without its storytelling
aspect. In other words the “text,” written or not, is always there, even when presented in its
most abstract visual form.

To borrow Cheryl Walker’s
217
feminist argument that the “death of the author”
218
is a
convenient discourse for the tacitly white, heterosexual, male author (director in the case of
cinema), is to say that the “death of the author” is something certainly not convenient at all
77
for screenwriters or female authors, so this is a focal argument in the case of insipient
voices. For instance, the history of screenwriting has been a gendered history. The early
history of cinema (from the silent era to the transition of sound: from the 1910s to the
1930s) has been dominated by female screenwriters,
219
known as “scenarists” then, such as
Anita Loos
220
(1888-1981) and Frances Marion
221
(1888-1973), who were extremely
skilled in writing “wisecrack” comedy as well as melodramas. So earlier on, female writers
were the ones writing the great majority of scripts for movies, known as “scenarios” then,
until male writers noticed there was money in it to be made, and took over. Male
playwrights and journalists enter the field in large numbers with the advent of sound,
consequently women screenwriters get de-emphasized. This is a history that, for instance,
has only more recently been researched by scholars; so Cheryl Walker’s argument is
important in that we should not delete female writing agency in the early history of cinema
in the United States. Gary Carey gives us an illustration of the period through the trajectory
of Anita Loos:
At the time (c.1914) when Miss Loos became a permanent Hollywood fixture as a staff
writer, the industry’s leading scenarists were by large majority women. Perhaps there is a
good sociological reason for this; perhaps because women were more attuned than men to
turning out the kitch melodrama and hothouse romances that dominated the run-of-the-mill
Hollywood product of the period. Whatever the reason, it was a phenomenon that remained
constant until the mid-1920s. This was the heyday of the lady writer, the girls with those
crazy names that evoke an incongruous image of a beplumed toque above an archaic
typewriter: Clara Beranger, Agnes Christine Johnson, Frances Marion (who wrote the Mary
Pickford films and later was a specialist for Marie Dressler), Olga Printzlau, Josephine
Lovett, June Mathis (remembered mainly, and unfairly, as the woman who cut Greed to
shreds), Ouida Bergere, Grace Unsell, Jane Murfin, Beulah Marie Dix, Jeanie MacPherson
(De Mille’s favorite scenarist), Bess Meredyth, Leonore Coffee. It was a woman’s world,
and Anita led the pack, vying with the stars for space in the fan magazines.
222

Another focus to take into consideration is the discussion and questioning of the influence
of a gendered perspective, or its lack thereof, in more recent film history. Is there
78
something culturally or physically specific about screenplays written by female writers and
writer-directors? One stance would be that a gendered position that is too tight (as well as
any minority position: racial, gendered, national, or otherwise) is more of a constraint than
a freeing creative force. It tends to typecast female screenwriters and writer-directors into
the realm of narrow aptitudes and stereotypes, excluding them from more ambitious
projects such as high-concept action films, which happen to be considered a male domain.

This typecasting niche couldn’t be further from the truth. Several films that we have
attached a legendary aura of male auteurism have actually been written (or at least co-
written) by female screenwriters: Lord of the Rings (2001),
223
King Kong (1933),
224
Peter
Jackson’s King Kong (2005),
225
Terminator (1984, 2002),
226
Indiana Jones and the Temple
of Doom (1984),
227
American Graffiti (1973),
228
E.T. (1982),
229
Kundun (1997),
230
El Norte
(1983),
231
Interview with the Vampire (1994),
232
Brokeback Mountain (2005),
233
Nightmare
Before Christmas (1993),
234
Sombrero (1953),
235
Intolerance (1916),
236
to cite just a few.
This authorial split (screenplay/film, female/male) has largely been under-analyzed by film
criticism. But most importantly, this split shows that gendered generalizations in authorship
do not always hold true. In fact they may reflect and perpetuate a socio-economic bias.

On the other hand, another stance to consider in terms of a gendered perspective is, in
effect, the very opposite of what I have just argued. Films authored by women can provide
us with a critical window not only in terms of character identification (stronger and more
well-defined female characters), but in terms of the life of the female artist in a patriarchal
society. This comes across to the audience via an autobiographical filter that is both
79
peripheral and self-reflexive. What types of critique of sexism, masculinity and exclusion –
as well as what types of critique of the government, the state, and other authority figures
can be uncovered by the screenplays and stories written by female writers? For example,
we can find such critique of institutional patriarchal authority through the figure of the
child in screenplays such as Kundun (1997) and E.T. (1982) by Mellissa Mathison, and in
Edward Scissorhands (1990) by Caroline Thompson. Also, autobiographical references,
such as in the work by Allison Anders, become representative not only of a personal voice
and their outsider status, they become representative of an allegorical interpretation of the
society we live in. This way, a gendered perspective may be able to portray not only a
viable panoramic reading that comments on and mirrors our society, but a panoramic
reading that is also autonomous, compelling, and perhaps even gender-neutral.

These films bring to the forefront the work of female screenwriters that have been
neglected in favor of their male directors, or that have been overseen in terms of their
independent stance, as for their creativity and personal reading such as in the case of
Allison Anders. Also, in the case of female screenwriters and male directors – as analyzed
in Chapter 2 for Caroline Thompson and Tim Burton – we get a more specific indication of
who imagined what, because of the obvious gender difference. For instance, Edward
Scissorhands is portrayed in all his domesticity, something that strongly indicates
Thompson’s creation.

Therefore, I would like to insist that the idea of an auteur-as-author is of utmost importance
not only for minority writers, but for the very survival of independent and avant-garde
80
cinemas. If we take into account one of David James’ point in The Most Typical Avant-
Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles,
237
women avant-garde
and/or independent filmmakers at specific historical contexts (in the case described: Los
Angeles in the 1970s) may lack supportive and common institutional ties with which to
connect, and thus their body of work may grow relatively autonomous from each other.
James cites filmmakers such as Allison Anders, Barbara McCullough, Amy Halpern, Nina
Menkes, Sylvia Morales, among others in this passage.
238
Despite difficulties and various
degrees of separation, their work must endure in the end. In this case, and this is not only
the case of minor cinemas in Los Angeles, pockets of creation in other international cities
may apply. The reliance on the very internal idea of auteur-as-author consists of a hopeful
thin layer with which an artist may hold the expectation of permanence of their work in the
future. A stable and community-shared artistic future may not yet be fully realized or may
never be. Yet, in this case, the strength of thinking in individualist terms is not one to be
ignored or dismissed. It helps assign agency, however insipient and precarious, to an initial
moment of production. In the “minor” case of writers, to borrow David James analogy of
“minor cinemas” (which are not minor at all, just not at the center), take these statistics for
instance:
The number of women writers, while rising and dropping in alternate years, has not made it
past 15% in any year through 2004. Some years it may be 13%, some years 11%. But it has
never risen above 15% in any year of this new century. Victoria Riskin, past president of
the Writers Guild of America West, says, “There’s still a prejudice, a bias where women
are concerned that you don’t hire a woman if you want to do an action picture, which is
nonsense. Agents still worry that women are better at writing intimate relationship stories
or maybe comedies. But there are any numbers of women in the Writers Guild who are
highly capable of writing high-action, intense kind of movies. The dearth of women
screenwriters was of such concern to the Writers Guild of America that in the late 1990s it
commissioned a study about women and minorities in the movie business, the Directory of
Women Writers. It began, “A common complaint among some film and television
81
producers, directors, and other entertainment industry executives is that they don’t know
many women writers or how to contact them. The Directory solves the problem.”
239

The issue of spending time studying female screenwriters – and thus female writing and
cinematic female authorship by extension – should be taken as a political position. Simply
put, as the above quote indicates, there are “not too many women” or minority writers
working in the entertainment industry. If the above statistics of women working as writers
(making a living or sporadically) is close of being correct – a mere 15% – the need for
understanding what is behind this state of affairs is not only one of sociological relevance,
it is larger and deeper, it is a philosophical and structural issue. A more recent study
confirms this trend in numbers, “in 2012, women represented only 18 percent of all
directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250
domestic grossing films according to a report from the Center for the Study of Women in
Television and Film at San Diego State University.”
240
Film and Media theorists have
grappled with this issue for decades, and while breakthrough radical work has been
produced to understand this situation, especially in the 1970s (Laura Mulvey
241
in the
appropriation of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Linda Nochlin
242
in contemporary art history,
to cite a few), few significant changes seem to have occurred since.

The point perhaps is that there have been many “great women artists,” to borrow Nochlin’s
ponderings, however, we just may have not been “looking” for them hard enough. The
concept of invisibility and/or anonymity is a condition which women, minorities and
screenwriters share with one another. Because we’ve been swept by universalist modes of
explaining of the world, this condition persists, marginalizes and even further increases the
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distance between female’s expression and contemporary society. Nochlin offers her insight
into this subject matter at the conclusion of her essay:
I have tried to deal with one of the perennial questions used to challenge women’s demand
for true equality, rather than token equality, by examining the whole erroneous intellectual
substructure upon which the question “why have there been no great women artists?” is
based; by questioning the validity of the formulation of so-called problems in general and
the ‘problem’ of women specifically; and then by probing some of the limitations of the
discipline of art history itself. I have suggested that it was indeed institutionally made
impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men,
no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius. The existence of a tiny band
of successful, if not great women artists throughout history does nothing to gainsay this fact,
any more than does the existence of a few superstars or token achievers among the
members of any minority groups. And while great achievement is rare and difficult at best,
it is still rarer and more difficult if, while you work, you must at the same time wrestle with
inner demons of self-doubt and guilt and outer monsters of ridicule or patronizing
encouragement, neither of which have any specific connection with the quality of the art
work as such.
243
(my italics)

As with female authorial participation, writing is the invisible part of cinema, as well as
sound. Directing and acting are the visible parts, what we can focus on because we can see.
However, I suggest that the invisible (the film’s writing grid) is what breathes life into the
visible format we are able to see and experience on the screen. That is why, by being
smitten with the visible, we experience what is invisible to us as well; it is just that we
cannot see that. Even if not visible, it does not mean that which is invisible is not there
holding the whole structure together.

So, despite the problems of multiple writers, or rotation of writers, on a good number of
Hollywood movies, screenwriting is still a formative force. Paying attention to one author
as the author of everything (i.e. the director) is something convenient, since we need
authors to attribute meaning; we resist being left out in the dark with no author, our brain is
not able to accept such an abstraction. However, conversely, paying equal attention to
83
several authors simultaneously can get quite disruptive and complicated, so why not
simplify this whole dilemma with one generative author?

What I propose is to focus at the very beginning of creativity, not on its final result. Who
creates the film first? Creation means “beginning.” Certainly there is multiple authorship,
but there is also a template out there, a base upon which everything starts from – a palette,
a musical score, an architectural plan; in other words, there is the script. The one who plays
“God” first is undeniably the writer (or writer “doctors” as it may be the case as they
rewrite each other). Once a script is finished, and it becomes a shooting script, the director
will inevitably come second in line, improvising upon something which was already
composed and fixed in existence. The script is like the written grid of the film, everything
else takes off after the screenplay.

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
CHAPTER 1 NOTES

1
See Appendix A.

“A film by” is the on-screen custom used by directors, the written label we see on the screen when we watch
a movie, and is one example of “possessive credit” examined and refuted by the Writers Guild of America
(WGA); because, even though this is not a copyright credit per se, it projects creative rights to all directors
(who may or may not have written the film) as the “sole or preeminent” author.

2
See Appendix A.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) in the 2008 Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA), as well as in several
other printed and internet sources, have long been opposing the indiscriminate use of “possessive credits” by
directors who are not also the author of the screenplay. Therefore, by implication, the WGA also fails to
recognize the auteur theory (of the director) as the main source of authorship in cinema.

3
See Appendix A.

4
“WGA, Creative Rights for Writers of Theatrical and Long-Form Television Motion Pictures: The Latest
WGA Provisions and Overscale Suggestions,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East, (2002), p.33.
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/creative_rights/creative-rights.pdf
(last accessed 10 April 2013).

5
“WGA, 2008 Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East,
(2008: Effective February 13, 2008 through May 1, 2011), p.1. (last accessed 21 May 2013):
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/MBA08.pdf

6
See Appendix B.

There are several elements in copyright law, as it regards cinema and writing, that are relevant to my thesis.

7
For more on the politique des auteurs, refer to the essays by Truffaut (1954) and Bazin (1957) subsequently
cited below.

8
François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” essay originally published as “Une Certaine
Tendance du Cinéma Français” by Cahiers du Cinéma (no.31, France: Jan.1954), in: Peter Graham and
Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, (London: BFI, British Film Institute,
2009), pp.39-63.

9
Andre Bazin, “La Politique des Auteurs,” essay originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma (no.70, France:
April 1957), extract in: John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship, (London and New York: Routledge,
1999), pp.44-46.

10
Not only the Cahiers du Cinéma has influenced French auteurism. Another film magazine important at the
time was La Revue du Cinéma. Edward Buscombe says the following about the subject:

“One thing is clear, however. From the beginning Cahiers, and its predecessor La Revue du Cinéma, were
committed to the line that the cinema was an art of personal expression. (In the second issue of La Revue an
article appeared entitled: ‘La Creation Doit Etre Vouvrage d'un Seul’). At that period (late 1940s) it was
inevitable that part of the project of a new film magazine would be to raise the cultural status of the cinema.”

Edward Buscombe, “Ideas of Authorship,” Screen (vol.14, issue 3, autumn 1973), p.75.
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Cahiers du Cinéma
Publication dates: 1951 to today.
Founded by Andre Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca.
Website: www.cahiersducinema.com (last accessed 10 April 2013).

La Revue du Cinéma
Publication dates: 1928 to 1932. Then from 1946 to 1949. Then from 1969 to 1992.
Founded by Jean-Georges Auriol.
Was called Informations U.F.O.C.E.L. (1946 to Sep.1951). Was called Image et Son from Oct.1951 to
Feb.1969. Was called La Revue du Cinéma from March 1969 to 1992. Incorporated Écran in 1980.
Continued as Le Mensuel du Cinéma (1992 to1994).
Source: www.moviemags.com and French Wikipedia. (last accessed 10 April 2013).

11
Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: ‘La Caméra-Stylo’,” essay originally published as
“Du Stylo à la Caméra et de la Caméra au Stylo” by L'Écran Français (no.144, France: 30 Mar. 1948), in:
Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, (London: BFI,
British Film Institute, 2009), pp.31-37.

12
In regards to the comparison of cinema with literature and/or architecture, Edward Buscombe says that
Alexandre Astruc’s article comparing cinema to literature (in his 1948 essay “The Birth of an Avant-Garde:
‘La Caméra Stylo’”) was the article “which was to prove more influential over the critics of Cahiers.”

Edward Buscombe, “Ideas of Authorship,” Screen (vol.14, issue 3, autumn 1973), pp.76-77.

13
Astruc, p.32.

14
Astruc, p.35.

15
Astruc, p.35.

16
See Astruc’s complete essay title above.

17
Astruc, p.35.

18
Astruc, p.35. See also p.32.

19
Astruc, p.31.

20
Again, see title of his essay, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: ‘La Camera-Stylo’,” as well as his
argumentation in his text.

21
In more detail, without actually using the word “autonomy,” Astruc remarks about his perceived growing
autonomy of cinema in regards to the other arts:

“From today onwards, it will be possible for the cinema to produce works which are equivalent, in their
profundity and meaning, to the novels of William Faulkner and Andre Malraux, to the essays of Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus. More- over . . . perhaps for the first time ever, film language is the exact equivalent
of literary language.” (Astruc, p.34) (my italics)

“To come to the point: the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts
have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successively a fairground
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attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is
gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which artists can express their
thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate their obsessions exactly as they do in the contemporary
essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera-stylo (camera-pen).”
(Astruc, pp.31-32) (my italics)

22
Astruc, p.34.

23
Refer to François Truffaut’s essay cited below.

24
François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” essay originally published as “Une Certaine
Tendance du Cinéma Français” by Cahiers du Cinéma (no.31, France: Jan.1954), in: Peter Graham and
Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, (London: BFI, British Film Institute,
2009), pp.39-63.

25
Truffaut, p.56.

26
Truffaut, p.56.

27
Astruc, p.35.

28
For example, these are some of the Hollywood directors Truffaut has written about for the Cahiers:

François Truffaut, “‘John Ford’ de Jean Mitry,” Cahiers du Cinéma, (no.45, France: March 1955).

François Truffaut, “Le Derby des Psaumes (Vera Cruz),” Cahiers du Cinéma, (no. 48, France: June 1955).
Vera Cruz was directed by Robert Aldrich.

Jacques Becker, Jacques Rivette et François Truffaut, “Entretien avec Howard Hawks,” Cahiers du Cinéma,
(no.56, France: Feb.1956).

François Truffaut, “Les Haricots du Mal (East of Eden),” Cahiers du Cinéma, (no.56, France: Feb.1956).
East of Eden was directed by Elia Kazan.

François Truffaut, “Rencontre avec Robert Aldrich,” Cahiers du Cinéma, (no.64, France: Nov.1956).

François Truffaut, “L’Attraction des Sexes (Baby Doll),” Cahiers du Cinéma, (no.67, France: Jan.1957).
Baby Doll was directed by Elia Kazan.

29
In an interview, Jean-Luc Godard said the following about the influence of Scarface (1932) on his first
feature film Breathless (1960):

“Well, it’s only because when I made Breathless I thought I was doing something very precise. I thought I
was doing a thriller movie or a gangster movie, but when I saw the print for the first time I discovered what
I’d done was completely different from what I supposed. I thought I was making The Son of Scarface or The
Return of Scarface, and I discovered I’d made Alice in Wonderland, more or less. So I said to myself, you
must be sick, man. You have to watch what you are doing.”

Gene Youngblood, “Jean-Luc Godard: No Difference Between Life and Cinema,” Interview with Jean-Luc
Godard originally published in 1968, in: David Sterritt (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, Conversations
with Filmmakers, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p.29.

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30
Scarface (1932). Directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson. Based on novel by Armitage Trail.
Screenplay by Ben Hecht. Dialogue credits, Seton Miller, John Lee Mahin, and W.R. Burnett. Uncredited
adaptation, Fred Pasley.

31
Breathless (1960). À Bout de Souffle. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Story by François Truffaut. Screenplay
by Jean-Luc Godard.

32
Jean-Luc Godard, “Tears and Speed: Jean-Luc Godard on ‘A Time to Love and a Time to Die’,” originally
published by Cahiers du Cinéma (April 1959), in: Screen, (vol.12, issue 2, summer 1971), pp.95-98.

33
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958). Directed by Douglas Sirk. Based on the novel by Erich Maria
Remarque. Screenplay by Orin Jannings.

34
Godard, p.97.

35
Godard, p.97.

36
Godard, p.96.

37
Godard, p.97.

38
Edward Buscombe, “Ideas of Authorship,” Screen (vol.14, issue 3, autumn 1973), pp.75-85.

39
Buscombe, p.75.

40
Buscombe, pp.75-76.

41
Buscombe, p.76.

42
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, book originally published in
1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.394.

43
About the auteur “abbreviation,” in 1962, Andrew Sarris wrote:

“Unfortunately, some critics have embraced the auteur theory as a short-cut to film scholarship. . . . Without
the necessary research and analysis, the auteur theory can degenerate into the kind of snobbish racket that is
associated with the merchandizing of paintings. It was largely against the inadequate theoretical formulation
of la politique des auteurs that Bazin was reacting in his friendly critique. (Henceforth, I will abbreviate la
politique des auteurs as the auteur theory to avoid confusion.)”

Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” essay originally published by Film Culture (no.27,
winter 1962-1963), in: P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000),
p.124.

44
Sarris, p.131.

45
Sarris, p.131.

46
Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” essay originally published as “The American Cinema”
by Film Culture (no.28, spring 1963), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions
1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.26.

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47
Sarris complete sentence actually was:

“If one were to examine the pertinent texts of the fifties, the sixties, or the seventies, one would be hard put to
find a single generalization in auteurist criticism sweeping enough to justify the simplistic attacks made
against it.”

Andrew Sarris, “Afterword: The Auteur Theory Revisited,” essay originally published by American Film
(vol.2, issue 9, July-August 1977, The American Film Institute), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions 1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.271.

48
Sarris, p.278.

49
Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” essay originally published as “The American Cinema”
by Film Culture (no.28, spring 1963), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions
1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.26.

50
Sarris had remarked more than once in numerous sources thar the auteur theory was a “pattern theory in
constant flux”:

Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” essay originally published by Film Culture (no.27,
winter 1962-1963), in: P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000),
p.134.

Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” essay originally published as “The American Cinema”
by Film Culture (no.28, spring 1963), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions
1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.34.

Andrew Sarris, “Afterword: The Auteur Theory Revisited,” essay originally published by American Film
(vol.2, issue 9, July-August 1977, The American Film Institute), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions 1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.270.

51
Edward Buscombe, “Ideas of Authorship,” Screen (vol.14, issue 3, autumn 1973), p.75.

52
Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” essay originally published as “The American Cinema”
by Film Culture (no.28, spring 1963), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions
1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.27.

53
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” essay originally published by Film Culture (no.27,
winter 1962-1963), in: P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000),
p.134.

54
“The three premises of the auteur theory may be visualized as three concentric circles: the outer circle as
technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning. The corresponding roles of
the director may be designated as those of a technician, a stylist, and an auteur.”

Sarris, p.133.

55
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” essay originally published by Film Culture (no.27,
winter 1962-1963), in: P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000),
pp.121-135.

56
Sarris, p.130.
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57
Sarris, pp.132-133.

58
Note that all the writer-directors cited here – Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Bresson, Billy
Wilder – have more writing credits to their names than directorial credits; being that the great majority of
both of their credits overlap: not only they directed, but they have written most of their films.

59
Andrew Sarris, “Afterword: The Auteur Theory Revisited,” essay originally published by American Film
(vol.2, issue 9, July-August 1977, The American Film Institute), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions 1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), pp.274-275.

60
Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Directed by Nicholas Ray. Adaptation by Irving Schulman. Screenplay by
Stuart Stern.

61
Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” essay originally published as “The American Cinema”
by Film Culture (no.28, spring 1963), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions
1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.31.

62
Sarris, p.32.

63
Sarris, p.31.

64
Sarris, p.30.

65
Sarris, p.31.

66
David A. Cook, “Auteur Cinema and the ‘Film Generation’ in 1970s Hollywood,” in: Jon Lewis (ed.), The
New American Cinema, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p.13.

67
Cook, p.13.

68
Cook, see whole essay for his 1970s list of Hollywood auteur directors, pp.11-37.

69
Andrew Sarris, “Afterword: The Auteur Theory Revisited,” essay originally published by American Film
(vol.2, issue 9, July-August 1977, The American Film Institute), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions 1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.273.

70
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” essay originally published in 1969 as “Qu’est-ce Qu’un Auteur?,”
in: William Irwin (ed.), The Death and Resurrection of the Author, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002),
pp.9-22.

71
Andrew Sarris, “The Golden Years: Preston Sturges,” in: Richard Corliss, The Hollywood Screenwriters, a
Film Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), pp.93-106.

72
“To the end of his day, Preston Sturges describes himself as a writer rather than a director, and he would
have been the first to admit that the films he directed through the forties and fifties relied more on verbal wit
than visual style.” (Sarris, p.93.)

73
Sarris, p.93.

74
Richard Meryman, Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz, (New York: William Morrow,
1978), p.250.
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75
Meryman, p.286.

76
Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman Jr., Sunset Boulevard, screenplay, (March 21, 1949),
p.68. http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/sunset_bld_3_21_49.html (last accessed 10 April 2013).

77
Citizen Kane (1941), directed by Orson Welles, screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles.
Uncredited, John Houseman, Roger Q. Denny, and Mollie Kent.

78
Sunset Boulevard (1950), directed by Billy Wilder, written by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D.M.
Marshman Jr.

79
Billy Wilder (1906-2002).
Screenwriter and Writer-Director.
Screenplays as writer-director:
-- Double Indemnity (1944, written and directed by Billy Wilder, screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond
Chandler, based on the novel by James M. Cain).
-- The Lost Weekend (1945, written and directed by Billy Wilder, based on the novel by Charles R. Jackson,
screenplay by Charles Bracket and Billy Wilder).
--Sunset Boulevard (1950, written and directed by Billy Wilder, co-written by Charles Brackett and D.M.
Marshman Jr.).
-- Sabrina (1950, written and directed by Billy Wilder, written by Billy Wilder, Ernest Lehman, and Samuel
Taylor, from the play by Samuel Taylor.)
-- The Apartment (1950, written and directed by Billy Wilder, screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L.
Diamond).
-- The Seven Year Itch (1955, directed by Billy Wilder, based on the play by George Axelrod, screenplay by
George Axelrod and Billy Wilder).
-- Love in the Afternoon (1957, written and directed by Billy Wilder, screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L.
Diamond, based on novel “Ariane, Jeune Fille Russe” by Claude Anet).
-- Some Like it Hot (1959, written and directed by Billy Wilder, screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L.
Diamond, suggested by a story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan).
-- Kiss me Stupid (1964, written and directed by Billy Wilder, screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L.
Diamond, based on the play “L’Ora della Fantasia” by Anna Bonacci).
-- The Front Page (1974, directed by Billy Wilder, based on the play “The Front Page” by Ben Hecht and
Charles MacArthur, screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond).
Screenplays as screenwriter:
-- The Wrong Husband (1931, directed by Johannes Guter, in Germany, written by Paul Grank and Billy
Wilder).
-- Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, based on the play “La Huitieme Femme de
Barbe-Bleue” by Alfred Savoir, English translation by Charlton Andrews, screenplay by Charles Brackett and
Billy Wilder).
-- Ninotchka (1939, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, based on the original story by Melchior Lengyel, screenplay
by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett).

80
Grace of My Heart (1996). Written and directed by Allison Anders.

81
Allison Anders (1954-).
Writer-director.
Screenplays as writer-director:
-- Border Radio (1987, written and directed by Allison Anders, Dean Lent, and Kurt Voss).
-- Gas Food Lodging (1992, written and directed by Allison Anders, based on the novel “Don’t Look and It
Won’t Hurt” by Richard Peck).
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-- Mi Vida Loca (1993, written and directed by Allison Anders).
-- Four Rooms (1995, segment “The Missing Ingredient” written and directed by Allison Anders).
-- Grace of My Heart (1996, written and directed by Allison Anders).
-- Sugar Town (1999, written and directed by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss).
-- Things Behind the Sun (2001, written by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, directed by Allison Anders).
-- In the Echo (2002, TV movie, written by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, directed by Allison Anders).
-- Strutter (2012, written and directed by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss).

82
Herman J. Mankiewicz (1897-1953).
Screenwriter.
Screenplays:
-- The Road to Mandalay (1926, directed by Tod Browing, story by Tod Browning and Herman Mankiewicz,
continuity by Elliot Clawson, titles by Joseph Farnham)
-- Fashions for Women (1927, directed by Dorothy Arzner, story “The Girl of the Hour” by Paul Armond and
Leopold Marchand, titles by George Marion Jr., writing by Herman Mankiewicz, Jules Furthman, and Percy
Heath).
-- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928, directed by Malcom St. Clair, based on the novel of the same name by
Anita Loos, screenplay by Anita Loos, John Emerson, and Herman Mankiewicz).
-- Abie’s Irish Rose (1928, directed by Victor Fleming, play/titles by Anne Nichols, titles by Herman
Mankiewicz and Julian Johnson, written by Jeles Furthman).
-- Love and Learn (1928, directed by Frank Tuttle, story by Doris Anderson, adaptation by Florence Ryerson,
written by Louise Long and Herman Mankiewicz).
-- The Dragnet (1928, directed by Joseph Von Sternberg, story “Nightstick” by Oliver H.P. Garrett, titles by
Herman Mankiewicz, written by Charles Furthman, and Jules Furthman).
-- The Last Command (1928, directed by Joseph Von Sternberg, story by Sternberg and Lajos Biro, written by
John Goodrich, titles by Herman Mankiewicz).
-- Thunderbolt (1929, directed by Joseph Von Sternberg, story by Charles Furthman and Jules Furthman,
written by Herman Mankiewicz and Sternberg, titles by Joseph Mankiewicz).
-- The Dummy (1929, directed by Robert Milton, play by Harriet Ford and Harvey J. O’Higgins, written by
Herman Mankiewicz, titles by Joseph Mankiewicz).
-- Love Among the Millionaires (1930, directed by Frank Tuttle, adaptation by William M. Conselman and
Gove Jones, story by Keene Thompson, dialogue by Herman Mankiewicz).
-- Ladies’ Man (1931, directed by Lothar Mendes, story by Rupert Hughes, writing by Herman Mankiewicz).
-- Girl Crazy (1932, directed by William Seiter, book of musical play by Jack McGowan and Guy Bolton, ad-
aptation by Herman Mankiewicz, screenplay by Tim Whelan, dialogue by Eddie Welch and Water DeLeon).
-- Dinner at Eight (1933, directed by George Cukor, from the stage play by George Kaufman and Edna
Ferber, screenplay by Frances Marion and Herman Mankiewicz).
-- John Meade’s Woman (1937, directed by Richard Wallace, written by Herman Mankiewicz, Vincent
Lawrence, John Bright, and Robert Tasker).
-- My Dear Miss Aldrich (1937, directed by George Seitz, original story and screenplay by Herman
Mankiewicz).
-- Mademoiselle Docteur (1937, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, adaptation by George Neveux, adaptation
and dialogue by Jacques Natanson, written by Herman Mankiewicz, Leo Birinsky, and Irma von Cube).
-- The Wizard of Oz (1939, directed by Victor Fleming, uncredited directing by George Cukor, Mervyn
LeRoy, and Norman Taurog, uncredited directing of Kansas scenes by King Vidor, from the book by L.
Frank Baum, adaptation by Noel Langley, screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan
Woolf, uncredited writing by: Herman Mankiewicz, Irvin Brecher, William H. Cannon, Herbert Fields,
Arthur Freed, Jack Haley, E.Y. Harburg, Samuel Hoffenstein, Bert Lahr, John Lee Mahin, Jack Mintz, Ogden
Nash, Robert Pirosh, George Seaton, Sid Silvers).
-- The Wild Man of Borneo (1941, directed by Robert Sinclair, based on play by Herman Mankiewicz and
Marc Connelly, screenplay by Waldo Salt and John McClain).
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-- Comrade X (1940, directed by, King Vidor, screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, story by Walter
Reisch, uncredited Herman Mankiewicz).
-- Citizen Kane (1941, directed by Orson Welles, screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles,
uncredited: John Houseman, Roger Q. Denny, and Mollie Kent.)
-- The Pride of the Yankees (1942, directed by Sam Wood, screenplay by Jo Swerling and Herman
Mankiewicz, original story by Paul Gallico, prologue by Damon Runyon, Uncredited Vincent Lawrence and
Casey Robinson).
-- Christmas Holiday (1944, directed by Robert Siodmak, based on novel by W. Somerset Maugham, written
for the screen by Herman Mankiewicz).
-- The Spanish Main (1945, directed by Frank Borzage, screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and George
Worthing Yates, original story by Aeneas MacKenzie).
-- A Woman’s Secret (1949, directed by Nicholas Ray, based on novel “Mortgage on Life” by Vicki Baum,
screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz).

83
Orson Welles (1915-1985).
Director and Writer-Director.
Screenplays as Writer-Director:
-- War of the Worlds (1938, original radio play and script by Howard Koch, script idea by Orson Welles and
assisted by John Houseman, very loosely based on H.G. Wells novel “The War of the Worlds,” handwritten
pages typed by secretary Anne Froelisch aka Anne Froelick Taylor, directed and performed on the air on CBS
radio by Orson Welles on Sunday October 30
th
, 1938, from 8 to 9 pm, in New York).
-- Citizen Kane (1941, directed by Orson Welles, screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles,
uncredited: John Houseman, Roger Q. Denny, and Mollie Kent).
-- The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, directed by Orson Welles, uncredited additional sequences: Fred Fleck
and Robert Wise, novel by Booth Tarkington, screenplay by Orson Welles, uncredited: Jack Moss and Joseph
Cotten).
-- The Lady from Shanghai (1947, directed by Orson Welles, screenplay by Orson Welles, uncredited:
William Castle, Charles Lederer, and Fletcher Markle).
-- Macbeth (1948, directed by Orson Welles, based on the play “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare,
uncredited writer: Orson Welles).
-- Othello (1952, directed by Orson Welles, based on the play “Othello” by William Shakespeare, uncredited
writers: Orson Welles and Jean Sacha.)
-- Mr. Arkadin (1955, written and directed by Orson Welles).
-- Touch of Evil (1958, directed by Orson Welles, based on the novel “Badge of Evil” by Whit Masterson,
screenplay by Orson Welles, uncredited: Franklin Cohen and Paul Monash).
-- The Trial (1962, directed by Orson Welles, based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, screenplay by Orson
Welles, uncredited French dialogue adaptation by Pierre Cholot).
-- Chimes at Midnight (1965, directed by Orson Welles, based on the “Henry IV” and “Henry V” plays by
William Shakespeare, also based on the book “Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande” by Raphael
Holinshed, written by Orson Welles).
-- Vienna (1968, short, written and directed by Orson Welles).
-- The Immortal Story (1968, TV movie, directed by Orson Welles, based on novel by Karen Blixen, written
by Louise de Vilmorin and Orson Welles).
-- The Merchant from Venice (1969, TV movie, directed by Orson Welles, based on the play “The Merchant
from Venice” by William Shakespeare, screenplay by Orson Welles).
-- The Golden Honeymoon (1970, short, directed by Orson Welles, story by Ring Lardner, written by Orson
Welles).
-- The Deep (1970, directed by Orson Welles, unfinished, based on the novel “Dead Calm” by Charles
Williams, written by Orson Welles).
-- London (1971, short, written and directed by Orson Welles).
-- F for Fake (1973, written and directed by Orson Welles, uncredited writer: Oja Kodar).
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-- Don Quixote (1992, directed by Orson Welles, originally an unfinished epic, based on novel by Miguel de
Cervantes y Saavedra, written by Orson Welles, additional dialogue in new edition: Jesus Franco, dialogue
adaptation in new edition: Javier Mina).
-- Moby Dick (2000, short, directed by Orson Welles, originally unfinished and shot in 1971 and much later
edited by the Filmmuseum Munchen according to the play by Orson Welles, based on novel “Moby Dick” by
Herman Melville, play “Moby Dick Rehearsed” by Orson Welles.)
Screenplays as Screenwriter-only:
-- Treasure Island (1972, directed by John Hough, uncredited direction by Andrea Bianchi and Antonio
Margheriti, based on novel “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson, screenplay by Wolf Mankowitz and
Orson Welles, more writing credits by Bautista de la Calle, Hubert Frank, and Gerard Vergez).
-- The Way to Santiago (1998, short, directed by Jack Swanstrom, written by Orson Welles).
Director-only (not the screenplay, by someone else):
-- Black Magic (1949, directed by Gregory Ratoff, uncredited direction by Orson Welles, based on novel by
Alexandre Dumas Pere, adaptation and screenplay by Charles Bennett, addictional scenes and dialogue by
Richard Schayer).

84
About Citizen Kane being not only Mankiewicz’s original screenplay, but his original idea, there are
several accounts and testimonies by different authors and witnesses that give evidence to this fact:

By Pauline Kael (film critic antagonized by Andrew Sarris), by the secretary who took Mankiewicz’s
dictation in the Citizen Kane script (Rita Alexander), by Richard Meryman (Mankiewicz’s biographer), as
well as some detailed accounts by a few biographers for Orson Welles (such as Simon Callow, for instance).

John Houseman (Welles’ partner in the Mercury Theatre) is another important source about Mankiewicz’s
authorship contribution. And since Houseman knew well both Welles and Mankiewicz, he witnessed both
sides of the dispute. Note that Houseman worked as a writer and editor for several of Welles’ ealier projects.
Also, Houseman was Mankiewicz’s editor in Citizen Kane (some authors even hinted that Houseman might
have contributed as a writer in the Kane script due to the nature of his contribution, though he never claimed a
writing credit). Moreover, Houseman also worked as editor on the radio scripts written by Mankiewicz for
Welles (before Kane) after the Howard Koch’s highly popular, loose script adaptation of H.G.Well’s The War
of the Worlds. Exhausted from working weekly as a writer for radio, Houseman hired newbie Koch to ease
his workload, switching to editor instead of writer. Hence, we cannot underestimate Houseman’s account
about the Citizen Kane authorship dispute, simply because he is a historical witness of his time, and someone
not easily smitten with a director’s power when it comes to issues of writing (himself being a writer).

“American” – what the Citizen Kane script was initially titled – originated from an old idea by Mankiewicz
about using the poweful newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst as the basic subject for a screenplay.
Mankiewicz and his wife Sara knew Hearst and Marion Davis (comedienne and Hearst’s mistress) personally,
as well as frequented as a couple their exclusive mansion-castle, the San Simeon, which served as inspiration
for “Xanadu.” Welles did not have this type of access to Hearst’s life; besides he was too young (early 20s) to
be hanging out with the older crowd. In addition, like Hearst, Mankiewicz’s background in journalism made
Kane another obvious “newspaper” picture like others at his time (written by jornalists turned screenwriters in
Hollywood). Mankiewicz, a newsman, migrated from N.Y. to L.A. to become a screenwriter. Welles came
from theater, so his interests were different: mainly literary and Shakespearean adaptations. Various accounts
indicate that Mankiewicz was clearly fascinated with the Hearst “subject,” as he collected information about
Hearst for a long time before he even met Welles. When the opportunity presented itself, Mankiewicz offered
his script idea to Welles, who, at the time, was in desperate need for a script that would please RKO, since his
projects were obviously failing there (too expensive, too confusing, etc). Consequently, in Houseman’s
account, it makes sense that Mankiewicz’s screenplay saved Welles, and not the other way around (as it has
been often written: that Welles gave alcoholic and self-destructive Mankiewicz his last opportunity to be part
of a great film). That was because, very matter of factly, Welles was running out of time to come up with an
appropriate script to meet his deadline for his contract with RKO which was on the brink of expiration.
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John Houseman writes:

“Things were getting grim at RKO; with Heart of Darkness still on the shelf, and The Smiler with the Knife
stalled, the miraculous contract had three months and a half to run and there was no film in sight. There was
one faint glimmer of hope: Herman Mankiewicz had come up with a project – little more than a notion, but an
exciting one. If it could be developed into some kind of screenplay in the next 10 weeks, the situation might
still be saved. Mankiewicz was notoriously unreliable: I asked Orson why he didn’t take over the idea and
write himself. He said he didn’t want to do that. In the name of our former association he pleaded with me to
fly back to California, talk to Mankiewicz and, if I shared his enthusiasm, stay and work with him as his
collaborator and editor until the script was done. It was an absurd venture and that night Orson and I flew
back to California together.” (my italics)

John Houseman, Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988, (New York: Applause Books, 2000), p.220.
(For more, see also pp.222-224.)

This quotation by Houseman can also be found in a somewhat more detailed format in:
Andrew Sarris, “Citizen Kael vs. Citizen Kane,” in: Primal Screen: Essays on Film and Related Subjects,
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp.114-115.

Simon Callow, Welles’ biographer, notes the relationship between Welles, Mankiewicz, and Hearst. He
illustates Mankiewicz’s draw to the Hearst idea for a script, and how Welles then got involved with it:

“Mankiewicz, a keen student of power and its abuses (which is a slightly different thing that Welles was
interested in), had, for his part, long dreamed about a screenplay about a public figure – a gangster perhaps –
whose story would be told from the many different points of those who have known him. . . . The idea was
very much in the air. Mankiewicz himself had written an unperformed play (The Tree Will Grow, about the
gangster John Dillinger) to this prescription: In Act One, as described by Mankiewicz’s biographer Richard
Meryman, news of Dilinger’s death is brought to his family. The play is a complex and contradictory portrait
gradually accumulated from the recollections of mother, father, friends, and minister. Immediately enthused
by the idea of multiple viewpoints, Welles was less excited by the idea of playing Dillinger (hardly a part for
him). Instead, he and Mankiewicz began to think in terms of someone nearer at hand about whom they had
also chatted a great deal: William Randolph Hearst, at whose parties Mankiewicz had been a welcome guest
till his alcoholism had had him barred; Hearst did everything he could to keep Marion Davis away from
anyone who might encourage her foundness for the bottle. Mankiewicz, nursing his resentment, had
subsequently become obssessed by both Hearst and Davis, collecting stories about them the way small boys
collect stamps. Immediately, they hit on the idea of using Hearst as their central character, Welles’s separate
needs fell into place: a great theme, one which, because of Hearst’s extraordinary career, encompassed a
substantial amount of recent American history; a great role for him; and an original cinemathically exciting
method, barely explored as yet, of telling a story. It is hard to exaggerate the relief and excitement that he felt
once the idea had crystallised. As 1939 drew to an end, he had again – in the nick of time – been saved by the
bell. Still expecting to shoot The Smiler with a Knife, with which Mankiewicz had been unenthusiastically
tinkering, Welles was desperate to get cracking on the new idea.” (my italics)

Simon Callow, “Chapter Nineteen: Mank,” in: Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu: Volume 1 (New York:
Penguin, 1997), pp.484-485.

See also:

Herman Mankiewicz letter to Alexander Woollcott (about Hearst and Louella Parsons), published in:
Richard Meryman, Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz, (New York: William Morrow,
1978). pp.267-269.
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85
Robert Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, revised edition, originally published in 1985, (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p.28.

86
Note Meryman’s accounts about the inexistence of preliminary original or paralell scripts by Welles:

“[Welles] specifically denies that Herman did the basic script for Kane. According to Welles, he himself
wrote the first script, a mammoth, 300-page version, mainly dialogue, which Herman actually took with him
to Victorville. ‘Though everything was reworked throughout, that contained the script as it developed. But
apparently, Mank never showed it to anybody.’ Welles never mentioned before that massive piece of pre-
liminary work. Hitherto he [based] his claim of primary authorship on a very different story: [Him] writing his
own, original screenplay not before Victorville but in parallel with Herman during Victorville. When the two
scripts were finished, Welles combined [them]. It’d have been strange if Welles had not put his Kane ideas on
paper before Herman began writing. Moreover, he had chunks of Herman’s script to work on during
Victorville. At least once, during Herman’s labors, Welles drove out and picked up all the pages to date.
Reading them on the trip back to Los Angeles, he was [critical] and began editing in the car. But as far for an
original script by Welles, there is only his word. Both Richard Wilson, his production assistant, and Richard
Barr, [who] ran his households and his errands, do not remember Welles, either before or during Herman’s
stay in Victorville, working the number of weeks that such a writing job requires.” (my italics and brackets)

“Revised pages were passed back and forth between the two, Welles changing Herman, who changed Welles
– ‘often much better than mine,’ says Welles. They fought over cuts and additions. . . . And indeed Sara
[Mankiewicz’s wife] remembers no serious unhappiness over the surgery he [Mankiewicz] and Welles were
performing, which is also testimony that Welles never wrote a parallel script. ‘This was as good a time as
Herman had in his career,’ she says. ‘He didn’t drink at all and grew very expansive, was able to enjoy the
boys, enjoy Johanna. If Orson had brought in his own script, Herman would have screamed and yelled, ‘Jesus,
you should see what he’s got!’ Never.’” (my italics and brackets)

Richard Meryman, Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz, (New York: William Morrow,
1978). pp.251-252 (first quote), and pp.258-259 (second quote). (See also page 265 for more.)

Note also the account by Simon Callow, Orson Welles’ biographer, about Welles intention in being known as
the sole author, and the very likely inexistence of such an earlier script by Welles to Mankiewicz:

“Mankiewicz grouse against Hearst was not political; it was personal. He loathed tycoons of any persuasion;
his screenplay of two years before, John Meade’s Woman, had been a savage assault on one. Entirely lacking
power himself, he detested those who had it. American, as he and Welles decided to call their screenplay (the
very title an allusion to Hearst newspapers), was to be his revenge on the pack of them. . . . A contract was
drawn up with Mercury Productions by which Mankiewicz was to be paid $1,000 a week. As often, he was to
have no credit for his work, a small matter to him, screenplay doctor extraordinaire, but a large one to Welles,
‘actor-director-producer-writer.’ The publicity surrounding the prodigality of Welles’s talents, and the
subsequent and ever-increasing sniping about it, meant, he felt, that for him to acknowledge co-authorship
would be a public humiliation; his contract with RKO precisely stipulated that the screenplay was written by
him. So Arnold Weissberger took particular care to insert a clause in Mankiewicz’s contract . . . A similar
clause was to be found in the contracts of writers on Campbell’s Playhouse; it was an understanding that
Welles was known as the author, just as politicians’ speeches, though rarely written by them, are deemed to
be theirs. Welles had, in fact, he said, created a rudimentary script, 300 pages of dialogue with occasional
stage directions under the title of John Citizen USA . . . This he had handed to Mankiewicz before he started
work. Mankiewicz may or may not have read it; certainly no one else has ever seen it.” (my italics)

Simon Callow, “Chapter Nineteen: Mank,” in: Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu: Volume 1, (New York:
Penguin, 1997), pp.486-487.
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87
Richard Meryman notes the following three versions (by Mankiewicz, Welles, and the Screen Writers
Guild) about the writing credit controversy in Citizen Kane:

[First Version]

“Once the filming of Kane was under way, the question of writer’s credit began to loom. There are two
diametrically opposite versions of what happened. One of them has Welles battling to be listed as the sole
writer, removing Herman. This version begins in Victorville when Herman mentioned almost casually that it
was turning out to be a good script; too bad he wasn’t going to get credit. Rita Alexander felt a rush of
indignation: ‘How could you agree to such a thing?’ Herman explained that he needed the money and that this
was part of his deal with Welles. Eventually Herman was assured that he would get co-credit. [But] Sara
[Mankiewicz’s wife] thought he deserved sole credit. Herman kept blandly telling her not to worry, he would
get credit. She must understand that Welles had to get co-credit as part of ‘written, produced, directed, and
performed by Orson Welles.’ Anything less would break his contract. ‘Herman was acquiescent about it, far
too acquiescent,’ says Sara. ‘At the time I was not myself. I was Pollyanna. I kept thinking right would win
out – which it never does – and that Orson would finally say, Oh, Christ, I’m not going to take any credit;
you’ve done it all.’ When Kane was roughly a month into production, Houseman talked to Herman by phone
and, says Houseman, ‘I had to listen his ambivalent ravings about Monstro, his latest name for Welles, whom
he alternately described as (one) a genius shooting one of the greatest films ever made, and (two) a scoundrel
and a thief, who was now claiming sole credit for the writing of Citizen Kane.’ Herman lodged a protest with
the Screen Writers Guild. According to Welles’ assistant, Richard Barr, this was a battle Welles set out to win.
‘I believe,’ says Barr, ‘that Orson didn’t want anybody’s name on that script but his own.’ Herman made
angry phone calls to influential friends. He asked Sara, ‘If Welles offers me money to take my name off the
credits, should I accept it?’ Sara said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ An offer of $10,000 was actually made,
believed Nunnally Johnson, and Hecht advised Herman to ‘take the money and screw the bastard.’ But then
Herman withdrew his guild arbitration request, according to a Welles biographer named Roy Fowler, who did
his research in the early 1940s, when memories were fresh and all the participants alive. Herman was afraid
of retribution from Hearst, says Fowler, and decided not to be a writer of record on Kane. Then Herman
vacillated. Should he or should he not protest to the guild? In January 1941 Herman was awarded his credit
[by RKO], says Fowler. The routine guild credit form listed Welles first, Herman second. Somebody –
Richard Wilson, his production manager, says Welles did it – circled Mankiewicz with a pencil and drew an
arrow putting him in first place. So the official credits read ‘Screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson
Welles.’” (my italics and brackets)

[Second Version]

“The second version is Welles story. He regards himself as permanently vilified. ‘I have to think,’ Welles has
said, ‘what my grandchildren, if I ever have any, are going to think of their ancestor. . .’ These are Welles’s
facts: ‘When Mank turned into the real writer, it was immediately understood between us that he would get
first billing since he was a distinguished screenwriter. And I’ve always said that his credit was immensely
deserved. But then Mankiewicz persuaded himself that he was the sole and only writer. He wanted his name
to be the only name. He wanted mine off. I didn’t want mine off. And I tried to persuade Houseman to put his
name on, since he’d been working all this time. But Houseman was more interested in mischief than glory.
And there wasn’t any way of discussing it with Mank. . . .’ Welles [adds:] ‘Certainly somebody who was
around then can . . . maybe Wilson can verify that.’ But Richard Wilson does not remember any credit battle
at all. The director Peter Bogdanovich, Welles’s friend and defender, wrote for Esquire an elaborate rebuttal
to Pauline Kael’s pro-Mankiewicz article in The New Yorker. But he had no evidence supporting Welles’s
version of the credit dispute. Welles said that preparing for a possible guild arbitration, he had his secretary
assemble all the pages he alone wrote, and copies were sent to Herman. But even Welles himself was unable
to extract this memory from the secretary, though she remembers typing many script pages for Welles. ‘There
went my best case,’ he bewails.” (my italics and brackets)
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[Third Version]

“Screenwriter and director Frank Pierson (Cool Hand Luke, Dog Day Afternoon, A Star is Born) sits on the
guild arbitration committee. It is Pierson’s personal opinion that if Welles wrote original material during the
cutting of American [initial title of Citizen Kane] the changes made at that time were more than enough to
earn him a second line credit – signifying that Welles was not co-author but did make significant contribution.
Considering the two men involved and the probabilities, the existing credit seems fair.” (my brackets)

Richard Meryman, Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz, (New York: William Morrow,
1978), pp.263-266.

88
Note the following examinations (by Pauline Kael, TCM files, John Gosling, and Laura Mulvey) about
Welles’s all-emcompassing RKO contract (marked italics) that granted him complete creative freedom plus
required that he be the writer in Citizen Kane. Also note that, initially, Mankiewicz’s contract did not offer
him on-screen credit (marked italics), even if he originally wrote the script for Welles. Mankiewicz was under
personal contract with Welles, so a dispute was launched with the Screen Writers Guild (marked italics):

Pauline Kael:

“XIII: Herman Mankiewicz didn’t – to be exact – write Citizen Kane; he dictated it. The screenwriters may
have felt like whores and they may have been justified in that feeling, but they were certainly well paid
whores. . . . Mankiewicz dictated the script while the nurse watched over him and Houseman stood by in
attendance. This was a cut-rate job, Mankiewicz was getting $500 a week for his ghostly labors, but it was
still in the royal tradition of screenwriting. Outside the movie business, there has probably never been a writer
in the history of the world who got this kind of treatment. . . Welles had come to Hollywood the previous July
in a burst of publicity, but his first two film projects hadn’t got under way. Within a few months of his arrival,
he was being jeered at because nothing had happened. Although his contract with R.K.O. gave him freedom
from interference, Schaefer and his legal staff had to approve the project and clear the shooting script and the
budget. . . [What] a sensational idea a movie about Hearst was. . . Hearst was even right for Welles physically.
Welles and Mankiewicz must have enjoyed thinking what a scandal a movie about him would make.
Mankiewicz didn’t need to have misgivings about repercussions, because the risks would all be Welles’s.
Schaefer had signed Welles up to a widely publicized four-way contract as producer, director, writer, and
actor. It was understood that he would take credit for the script, just as he did for the scripts of the radio
plays. His R.K.O. contract stated that ‘the screenplay for each picture shall be written by Mr. Orson Welles,’
and Welles probably took this stipulation as no more than his due. . . He probably accepted the work that
others did for him the way modern Presidents accept the work of speech-writers.” (my italics and brackets)

“XVII: Like D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles . . . discovered that movies were the medium in which he could do
what he had barely dreamed of doing in the theatre. . . . Welles was desperate for money to make movies. It
took guile to get Kane approved. Robert Wise, whom the head of the RKO. editing department had assigned
to the picture because he was close to Welles’s age, says, ‘Orson sneaked the project onto RKO. He told the
studio that he was merely shooting tests.’ Sets were built and shooting began on June 29, 1940. [Mercury]
actors and associates were there anyway, most of them under personal contract to Welles, as Mankiewicz
was. But Dorothy Comingore, not a member of the Mercury Theatre but a Hollywood bit player . . . says that
she lived on unemployment checks of $18 a week while she ‘tested for one month’ for the role of Susan
Alexander. She adds, ‘All these tests were incorporated into the film; they were never retaken.’ After a month,
with the studio buzzing about how brilliant the footage was, the movie was practically a fait accompli and
Welles was able to bulldoze Schaefer into approving the project. All the people who were already at work on
Citizen Kane […] met at Herman Mankiewicz’s house for breakfast, and Welles announced that the picture
had been approved and could formally begin. They officially started on July 30, 1940, and they finished
‘principal photography’ 82 shooting days later, on October 23, 1940.” (my italics and brackets)
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Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” essay originally published by the New Yorker (20 Feb. 1971, and 27 Feb.
1971), in: Pauline Kael, Herman Mankiewicz, and Orson Welles, The Citizen Kane Book, (New York:
Bantam Books, 1974), pp. 47 & 50 (chapter XIII) and p.66 (chapter XVII).

TCM Notes:

“The initial rough draft script of Citizen Kane is dated April 16, 1940 and entitled ‘American.’ This draft, in
which ‘Xanadu’ was called the ‘Alhambra,’ includes many scenes similar to incidents in the life of William
Randolph Hearst, which were subsequently dropped. Modern sources dispute whether Welles or his co-writer,
[Mankiewicz], should be given credit for the various drafts. Some sources claim that Welles tried to keep
Mankiewicz's name off the screen credits, while others argue that while Mankiewicz's contract stipulated that
he would not necessarily get an onscreen credit; Welles, in correspondence with his attorney, stated that he
wanted Mankiewicz to get credit. In a deposition taken for a 1949 lawsuit, Welles stated that Mankiewicz
wrote the dialogue for the first two drafts, and that he (Welles) worked on the third draft and ‘participated all
along in conversations concerning the structure of the scenes.’ RKO story files at UCLA Arts Special
Collections Library contain extensive notes dated April 30, 1940 by Welles concerning desired changes to the
April 16, 1940 draft. Subsequently, a number of drafts and continuities were written, concluding with the
third revised final script, dated July 16, 1940. According to modern sources, Mankiewicz claimed to the
Screen Writers Guild that he should be given sole writing credit. According to the RKO Billing Memorandum
file for the film at UCLA, on January 11, 1941, Mankiewicz signed a statement giving his consent for
advertising to omit a screenplay credit. On January 18, 1941, Dore Schary of the Screen Writers’ Guild wrote
to Mercury Productions stating that the proposed credit ‘screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson
Welles’ seemed to be in violation of a clause in the Producer-Screen Writers' Guild Agreement which stated
that ‘No production executives will be entitled to share in the screen play authorship screen credit unless he
does the screenplay writing entirely without the collaboration of any other writer.’ Subsequently, on January
22, 1941, Welles and Mankiewicz signed a joint statement that ‘having carefully considered their intentions
relative to the contract dated June 19, 1940, and having carefully considered the contribution of each of them
in the writing of the original screen story for Citizen Kane,’ they agreed to the screen credits as they appear
on the film. On January 27, 1941, the Screen Writers' Guild met and decided that the Guild had no jurisdiction
in the matter because of the particular contract Mankiewicz had signed. A memo in the RKO files, dated June
5, 1941, states that both Mankiewicz and Welles worked 111 days on the screenplay: 7 December-December
23, 1939; 19 February-May 11, 1940; and 18 June-July 27, 1940. The memo also indicates that Houseman
worked 87 days: 21 February-April 27, 1940; and 29 April-1 June 1940.” (my italics and brackets)

“Citizen Kane (1941)” in: TCM: Turner Classic Movies, TCMDb Archive Materials, (no date provided).
http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/89/Citizen-Kane/notes.html (last accessed 10 April 2013).

John Gosling:

“Welles sold himself as a man who needed no help. He was writer, actor, and director all rolled into one, and
to have his authorship questioned could be a potentially mortal blow to his reputation, a fear Welles made
plain in his correspondence with [Hadley] Cantril. ‘I am sure you can appreciate the untold damage done to
my professional reputation the publication of this book in its present form will create. I know you will under-
stand that I cannot permit this to occur.’ Welles seems to be implying he would take legal steps to prevent
further printings of the book [by Cantril about War of the Worlds, crediting the script to Howard Koch],
having already failed to stop the book’s first printing. But perhaps Welles . . . hoped that he could intimidate
Cantril by the sheer force of his personality. After all, how could a lowly university professor hope to prevail
against a man of Welles’ stature and importance?” (my italics and brackets)

John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic,
Including the Original Script, Radio Script by Howard Koch, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), p.93
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Laura Mulvey:

“Citizen Kane has been surrounded by extra-textual myths and legends from the moment of its birth. . . . Both
were constantly to be beset by controversy, starting from Welles arrival in Hollywood in July 1939 to sign the
contract between the Mercury Theatre and RKO that immediately achieved legendary status. Welles
adaptation of Shakespeare’s history play, Five Kings, has just flopped, leaving him badly damaged financially,
critically, and personally. All the same, he claims that he had no particular interest in moving to Hollywood
and, had it not been for the favorable conditions and creative freedom guaranteed in the contract, he would
have turned down the offer from George Schaefer, recently hired to bring outside, East coast talent to RKO.
Schaefer was bitterly attacked in Hollywood for putting the car of genius among the pigeons of the entertain-
ment industry. As it was, he contracted Welles to write, produce, direct and act in two films without studio
interference and with rights over the final-cut, keeping control only over the choice of story and the budget if
it ran over $500,000. The first project, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, had to be shelved when it came out way
over any possible budget at the end of the pre-production period. It was then, in early January 1940, that the
industry gossip began to triumph at the discomfiture of the genius and the just deserts of management
irresponsibility. In this atmosphere, heightened as another stillborn project, The Smiler with a Knife, failed
publicly, the Citizen Kane idea brought a last minute rescue. When Welles finally launched what was to be
the only project he managed to make with the freedom guaranteed by the terms of his fantastic contract with
RKO, two industry professionals joined the team from outside the studio. In addition to Greg Toland, on loan
from Goldwyn Studios, Welles brought in Herman Mankiewicz as his screenwriter.” (my italics)

Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane: BFI Film Classics, (London: BFI, British Film Institute, 2008), p.10.

89
Howard Koch (1901-1995).
Screenwriter.
Screenplays and Radio-Play:
-- War of the Worlds (1938, original radio play and script by Howard Koch, script idea by Orson Welles and
assisted by John Houseman, very loosely based on H.G. Wells novel “The War of the Worlds,” handwritten
pages typed by secretary Anne Froelisch aka Anne Froelick Taylor, directed and performed on the air on CBS
radio by Orson Welles on Sunday October 30
th
, 1938, from 8 to 9 pm, in New York).
-- The Letter (1940, directed by William Wyler, written by W. Somerset Maugham, screenplay by Howard
Koch).
-- The Sea Hawk (1940, directed by Michael Curtis, screenplay by Howard Koch and Seton I. Miller).
-- Sergeant York (1941, directed by Howard Hawks, based on the diary by Alvin C. York as Sergeant York,
diary editor Tom Skeyhill, original screenplay by Howard Koch, Abem Finkel, Harry Chandlee, and John
Huston, uncredited Sam Cowan).
-- Casablanca (1942, directed by Michael Curtis, play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, screenplay by
Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein, and Howard Koch, uncredited Casey Robinson).
-- Mission to Moscow (1943, directed by Michael Curtis, based on book by Joseph E. Davies, screenplay by
Howard Koch, Story by Stefan Zweig, uncredited Max Ophuls).
-- Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948, directed by Max Ophuls, screenplay by Howard Koch).

90
About Orson Welles view of writers as part of his personal “staff,” see John Goslig comparison of the
writing credit dispute between Orson Welles and Howard Koch in the radio broadcast of War of The Worlds
(1938), and similarly, later between Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz in Citizen Kane (1941):

John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic,
Including the Original Script, Radio Script by Howard Koch, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), pp.92-94.

91
Robert L. Carringer, “Scripting,” in: The Making of Citizen Kane, revised edition, originally published in
1985, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p.32.
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92
A few explorations of the idea of “first writer” according to the Writers Guild of America:

-- The idea that that a “first writer” is one that chronologically started writing the screenplay first:

“The order of writers’ names in a shared credit may be arbitrated. Generally, the most substantial contributor
is entitled to first position credit. Where there is no agreement among the arbiters as to order of names, or
where the Arbitration Committee determines that the credited writers’ contribution is equal, then the
Arbitration Committee shall order the writers’ names chronologically.” (p.25) (my italics)

-- The idea that “first writers” cannot be deprived of credit:

“In the case of an original screenplay, the first writer shall be entitled to no less than a shared story credit.”
(p.22) (my italics)

-- The idea that original screenplays are written by “first writers”:

“Original screenplays (i.e., those screenplays which are not based on source material and on which the first
writer writes a screenplay without there being any other intervening literary material by another writer per-
taining to the project). If a writer is furnished or uses research material, the screenplay is still considered an
original screenplay.” (p.20) (my italics)

-- The idea that a director (as writer) comes second to a (first) writer (unless they are the same person):

“In the case of original screenplays, if the production executive or production executive team is the second
writer he/she/ they must have contributed more than 50% of the final script to receive screenplay credit.”
(note: “production executive” according to the WGA often times means “director”)
(p.23) (my italics)

“WGA, Screen Credits Manual,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East, Effective for Notices of
Tentative Writing Credits Submitted on or after June 18, (2010), p.20, p.22, p.23 and p.25.
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/credits/screenscredits_manual10.pdf
(last accessed 10 April 2013).

93
A few accounts of the exploitation of writers in Hollywood in terms of authorship credit misapropriation
and low salary compensation:

“The majority of ordinary screenwriters – those who could not use a pre-established literary reputation as a
bargaining tool – did suffer under the system. Before the Producer-Screenwriters Guild Minimum Basic
Agreement Act of 1942, screenwriters – unlike directors and actors or even stagehands and electricians –
lacked basic standards of equity or collective bargaining rights. For two decades film writers in the lower
salary brackets were given no protection of minimum wages, nor were they guaranteed minimum periods of
employment. The working conditions of the average Hollywood screenwriter were not only the worst in the
film industry, they were among the worst anywhere in the country. ‘Their right to screen credit was
mistreated by certain producers, who allotted credit to their friends or relatives or – under pseudonyms – to
themselves,’ wrote industry commentator Leo Rosten in 1941.” (my italics)

Philip Kiszely, Hollywood Through Private Eyes: The Screen Adaptation of the Hard-Boiled Private
Detective Novel in the Studio Era, Stage and Screen Studies, (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG,
International Academic Publishers, 2006), p.143.

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“So it was in the 1930s, and those who stayed on to become career screenwriters soon found it necessary to
form trade unions and, simultaneously, to master their craft. Both efforts met with the most stubborn
opposition. Nevertheless, today the unions are firmly established, especially in the instances of the Writers
Guild of Great Britain and the Writers Guild of America, which are affiliated as well, and the writer of a film
no longer earns from it less than the wardrobe mistress or a carpenter.”

Carl Foreman, “Foreword: Confessions of a Frustrated Screenwriter,” in: Richard Corliss, The Hollywood
Screenwriters, a Film Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p.31.

“With the knowledge that everybody wanted to be a screenwriter, the studios had made it practice to hire
unknowns for anywhere from $30 to $50 a week. There was even a classic case of the producer who
promoted his secretary to writer; the next day, she came to the studio and found her name on the door of her
new office; and on payday, instead of the $60 she had been receiving as secretary, she got $40 as a scenarist.”
[“scenarist” being the nomenclature for “screenwriter” at that time.]

Nancy Lynn Schwartz. The Hollywood Writers’ Wars, book completed post-humorously by Sheila Schwartz,
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), p.173.

94
These stories (from footnote 93) helped push writers towards toward unionization, not only because of
under-payment, but because of writing credit misappropriation as well.

Nancy Lynn Schwartz excellent pos-humorously published book describes the conditions for writers in
Hollywood leading to such unionization, and the story of the formation of the Screen Writers Guild [SWG] in
1933 (which is the precursor of the Writers Guild of America [WGA] in 1954). This unionization had in mind
the prevention “cheating” of writers by producers, directors or studio-heads; the determination of writing
credits by writers instead of producers (or directors); to act as a counterpoint to the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences (created in 1927) which represented the interests of producers and studio-heads in
Hollywood (delaying writers’ unionization); and to establish an autonomous guild control and oversight of
screenplay credit by writers (instead of by studios, producers or directors):

“In 1933 Los Angeles was an open-shop town. The only unions in the movie industry were the International
Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which covered electricians, engineers, and grips, and the
Musician’s Union. This arrangement suited the producers, who were anxious to avoid the loss of absolute
power intrinsic to unionization. In response to the producer’s desire to control all unions, on May 11, 1927,
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was established, covering producers, directors, actors,
writers, and technicians. . . . So the Academy was born and anyone who “had contributed in a distinguished
way to the arts and sciences of Motion Picture production” was eligible for membership. The wording was
vague enough to assure Mayer he could keep out whomever he wanted. Functioning actually as a company
union, the Academy managed to delay any serious labor organizing in Hollywood for over 5 years.” (p.8)

“Both Lawson and Raphaelson, though playwrights of different styles and philosophies, were familiar with
the struggle of the Dramatists Guild in New York. At the meeting they pointed out that the task to be
accomplished by writers in Hollywood was far less difficult than that successfully carried through by the
Dramatists Guild, which had taken command of the theater at the height of its prosperity and at a time when
there was a strong association of managers and producers. The ten men agreed that the only possible hope for
obtaining what they wanted from the producers lay in building a powerful organization among the writers,
one of sufficient strength to be able to back up its demands by shutting off the source of supply of
screenplays. . . . After several suggestions have been made and discarded, the writers decided that trough
negotiation with the Dramatists Guild (to be carried out in New York), the moribund screen writer’s
subsidiary of the Dramatists Guild, which now existed only as the Writers Club, could be revived and turned
over to the authority of the new group. It was believed by these ten that the Dramatists Guild would lend its
utmost support to the new organization, even to the extent of prohibiting its members from selling any plays
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to recalcitrant movie producers. The idea of royalties for screenwriters was also enthusiastically endorsed,
and it included not only a percentage of the gross, but the right to audit studio books to circumvent cheating.
The meeting ended with a few other exciting, enthusiastic proposals, including the determination of writer
credits by writers instead of producers. Today, these sound like small, reasonable demands, but they were
revolutionary at the time. In fact, the movement of writers to unionize was met with opposition so violent that
it contained the seeds of a struggle lasting more than fifteen years, one that became part of a larger battle
ending in destroyed careers and ruined lives.” (p.18)

“There was always an element of triumph about the largely uneducated studio heads who could own and
manipulate the literati. Sometimes it took unpleasant forms. Milton Sperling said that many producers kept in
their offices a goosing stick, which looked and functioned something like a cattle prod, and they found it
amusing to use it on writers. ‘The cruelty,’ he remembered, ‘was intensified by the way people played along.’
The stakes were so big that many people submitted to this humiliation.” (p.20)

“With the wage cut in effect, scores of writers joined the original ten
94
to demonstrate their concern. During a
meeting held at the Writers Club, they rushed emotionally to the platform . . . ‘This was an impressive
demonstration and doubtless, in some Hollywood front offices, had a decided sans-culottes flavor.’ The
Screen Writers Guild (SWG) of the Authors League of America was then re-organized from the Writers Club,
with a new constitution and by-laws. One hundred and seventy-three charter members each contributed a
hundred-dollar membership fee, with some giving more for their less solvent brethren. A contract was drawn
up by Guild attorneys and signed by 102 of the Guild’s members. A committee formed to draft a code of
working rules included Samuel Ornitz, Jane Murfin, Rupert Hughes, Oliver H. P. Garrett, Robert Riskin, S. N.
Behrman, and John Bright. At a meeting on April 6, 1933, John Howard Lawson was elected the first
president of the new Screen Writers Guild. Frances Marion was elected vice-president, Joseph Mankiewicz (a
rising young screenwriter and brother of Herman Mankiewicz) secretary, and Ralph Block treasurer.” (p.21)

“‘The founding of the SWG, [Screen Writers] Guild, in 1933,’ said Lawson, ‘made it inevitable that there be
a struggle with big business . . . As far back as 1933, I knew that this would be a fundamental struggle, so we
opened up that first big meeting with a speech I made in which I said that the writers were the owners of their
material.’ ‘Most of the writers were young people,’ Milton Sperling remembered, ‘under twenty-five, under
thirty.’ The Guild was an attempt to bring reality to Hollywood. It was an assault on the kingdom, a quixotic
struggle. And the producers knew that . . . It was an assault on the paternalistic kingdom, and they were going
to fight back. The immediate concern of wages was inseparable from a challenge to the sovereignty of the
studios over the issue of film content. The wage scale for writers was based on credits, and credits implied a
creative voice, if not a responsibility, for what was seen. The SWG movement was emphasizing that
individuals were involved in this process that was dominated by one super-creator – the producer, as
representative of the studio. But the producers felt they had the right to assign credits to anyone, even if this
took the form of literary nepotism. As Ogden Nash once quipped, ‘Uncle Carl Laemmle / has a very large
faemmle.” (p.24)

“One valuable effect of the imminence of war was the final working out of a contract between producers and
the Screen Writers Guild. The negotiations had been dragging on, and by May 1941, the SWG was fed up, so
they used the only weapon they had – the threat of a strike. . . . And everyone couldn’t help remembering the
1933 wage cut.” (p.172)

“‘So we had our first SWG contract.’ The contract was accepted, in principle, by the SWG membership by a
unanimous vote of five hundred. The contract was to be written permanently as soon as the war contingency
was resolved. On June 18, 1941, nine years after the guild had organized, they had their first contract. The
agreement, to be effective for 7 years and subject to re-opening after 3 years, included provisions for an 85%
guild shop for 3 years and then a 90% guild shop, and minimum pay of $125 per week for all writers,
including shorts writers, which would be effective one year after the contract was signed. Also, minimum
periods of employment were assured, layoffs were controlled, and arbitration was provided for, with the guild
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in control of screen credits. Speculative writing was outlawed, and it was proclaimed that all writers had the
right to attend sneak previous of their own pictures.” (p.173)

“Although it would not be a reality until the contract was signed, the final settlement of $125 for minimum
wage was regarded as one of the most important points won because of the treatment of the low-bracket
screenwriters at the studio. With the knowledge that everybody wanted to be a screenwriter, the studios had
made it practice to hire unknowns for anywhere from $30 to $50 a week. There was even a classic case of the
producer who promoted his secretary to writer; the next day, she came to the studio and found her name on
the door of her new office; and on payday, instead of the $60 she had been receiving as secretary, she got $40
as a scenarist.” (p.173)

Nancy Lynn Schwartz. The Hollywood Writers’ Wars, book completed post-humorously by Sheila Schwartz,
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), pp. 8, 18, 20, 21, 24, and 172-173.

95
“Securing creative rights for writers was a fundamental goal of the Screen Writers Guild at its founding in
1933 and continues as a prime element of the Writers Guild agenda.”

“Pursuant to the provisions of the Minimum Basic Agreement the Guild has the right to protest credits
proposed by the Company. The Guild may act irrespective of the wishes of any of the participating writers in
order to ensure that the credit rules are properly applied.”

“WGA, Creative Rights for Writers of Theatrical and Long-Form Television Motion Pictures: The Latest
WGA Provisions and Overscale Suggestions,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East, (2002), p.1.
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/creative_rights/creative-rights.pdf
(last accessed 10 April 2013).

“WGA, Screen Credits Manual,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East, Effective for Notices of
Tentative Writing Credits Submitted on or after June 18, (2010), p.25. (last accessed 10 April 2013):
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/credits/screenscredits_manual10.pdf

96
Robert L. Carringer, “Scripting,” in: The Making of Citizen Kane, revised edition, originally published in
1985, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p.31. (my brackets)

97
Carringer, pp.31-32.

98
Carringer, p.32.

99
Carringer, pp.32-33.

100
For a history summary of the Screen Writers Guild, see footnote 94.

101
Carringer, pp.33-34.

102
Carringer has ended his earliest article with the two following statements:

“Not even the staunchest defenders of Mankiewicz would deny that Welles was principally responsible for
the realization of the film. But in light of the evidence, it may be that they also have to grant him principal
responsibility for the realization of the script.”

Robert L. Carringer, “The Scripts of Citizen Kane,” originally published by Critical Inquiry (vol.5, no.2,
winter 1978), in: James Naremore (ed.), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook, (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.117-118.
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103
Robert L. Carringer, “Scripting,” in: The Making of Citizen Kane, revised edition, originally published in
1985, (Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p.32.

104
Carringer, p.32.

105
Robert L. Carringer, “The Scripts of Citizen Kane,” originally published by Critical Inquiry (vol.5, no.2,
winter 1978), in: James Naremore (ed.), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook, (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.79-121.

106
Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” New Yorker, (20 Feb. 1971, and 27 Feb. 1971).

107
Meryman, p.251.

108
About Orson Welles all encompassing contract as “writer-director-producer-actor”: see footnote 88.

Plus refer to the following books in chronological order:

Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” essay originally published by the New Yorker (20 Feb. 1971, and 27 Feb.
1971), in: Pauline Kael, Herman Mankiewicz, and Orson Welles, The Citizen Kane Book, (New York:
Bantam Books, 1974).

John Houseman, Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988, originally published in 1972, (New York:
Applause Books, 2000).

Richard Meryman, Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz, (New York: William Morrow,
1978), pp.263-264.

Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane, BFI Film Classics, originally published in 1992, (London: BFI, British Film
Institute, 2008), 87 pages.

John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic,
Including the Original Script, Radio Script by Howard Koch, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009).

109
Meryman, pp.254 and 257; Houseman, p.87; Koch, p.24; and Gosling, p.31.

110
Meryman, p.274; and Houseman, p.228.

111
Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” New Yorker, (20 Feb. 1971, and 27 Feb. 1971).

112
Refer to footnote 83 for Orson Welles credits.

113
In Meryman’s biography of Mankiewicz, he publishes an original letter by Mankiewicz where he tells the
connection between Citizen Kane and, plus all the details, and why and when Hearst chooses to retaliate or
not. The Hearst references in the script by Mankiewicz are bold, daring, and obviously intended.

Richard Meryman, Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz, (New York: William Morrow,
1978), p.267-268.

See also footnote 84 for Citizen Kane being not only Mankiewicz’s screenplay, but his original idea.

114
For the take on yellow journalism, see Chapter “XXI” of Pauline Kael’s article:
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Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” essay originally published by the New Yorker (20 Feb. 1971, and 27 Feb.
1971), in: Pauline Kael, Herman Mankiewicz, and Orson Welles, The Citizen Kane Book, (New York:
Bantam Books, 1974), pp.86-89.

115
About the issue of Mankiewicz being an avid reader of politics, as well as former newspaperman himself,
and to have great reading knowledge about Hearst, we should note that there was a lawsuit filed against
Citizen Kane in 1947 on the grounds of plagiarism from a book by Ferdinand Lundbert, Imperial Hearst.
However, Mankiewicz was not even worried about such charge of plagiarism, he thought it ridiculous. He
considered himself a man of intellect, a journalist by formation afterall, and this is what journalists do (they
read), while screenwriters fictionalize the truth in the public domain for added excitement and risk. To Welles
and Mankiewicz, the scandalous aspects of the fictionalized Citizen Kane was part of their thrill. This is how
Pauline Kael described the incident:

“In 1947, Ferdinand Lundberg sued Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., for
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for copyright infringement, charging that Citizen Kane had plagiarized
his book Imperial Hearst. On the face of it, the suit looked ridiculous. No doubt (as Houseman admits)
Mankiewicz had drawn upon everything available about Hearst, in addition to his own knowledge, and no
doubt the Lundberg book, which brought a great deal of Hearst material together and printed some things that
had not been printed before, was especially useful, but John Dos Passos might have sued on similar grounds,
since material that was in U.S.A. was also in the movie, and so might dozens of magazine writers. Hearst
himself might have sued, on the basis that he hadn’t been credited with the dialogue. The defense would
obviously be that the material was in the public domain, and the suit looked like the usual nuisance-value suit
that Hollywood is plagued by – especially since Lundberg offered to settle for a flat payment of $18,000. But
RKO had become one of Howard Hughes’s toys in the late forties, and a crew of expensive lawyers was hired.
When the suit came to trial, in 1950, Welles was out of the country; he had given his testimony earlier, in the
form of a deposition taken before the American vice-consul at Casablanca, Morocco. This deposition is a
curious document, full of pontification and evasion and some bluffing so outrageous that one wonders
whether the legal stenographer was able to keep a straight face. Citizen Kane had already begun to take over
and change the public image of Hearst; Hearst and Kane had become inseparable, as Welles and Kane were,
but Welles possibly didn’t really know in detail – or, more likely, simply didn’t remember – how close the
movie was to Hearst’s life. He seemed more concerned with continuing the old pretense that the movie was
not about Hearst than with refuting Lundberg’s charge of plagiarism, and his attempts to explain specific
incidents in the movie as if their relationship to Hearst were a mere coincidence are fairly funny. He stated
that ‘I have done no research into the life of William Randolph Hearst at any time,’ and that ‘in writing the
screenplay of Citizen Kane I drew entirely upon my own observations of life,’ and then was helpless to
explain how there were so many episodes from Hearst’s life in the movie. When he was cornered with
specific details . . . he gave up and said, ‘The dialogue for the scene in question was written in its first and
second draftings exclusively by my colleague Mr. Mankiewicz. I worked on the third draft.’ . . . Mankiewicz,
in a preparatory statement, freely admitted that many of the incidents and details came from Hearst’s life but
said that he knew them from personal acquaintance and from a lifetime of reading. He was called to testify at
the trial, and John Houseman was called as a witness to Mankiewicz’s labor on the script. Mankiewicz was
indignant that anyone could suggest that a man of his knowledge would need to crib, and he paraded his
credentials. It was pointed out that John Gunther had said Mankiewicz made better sense than all the
politicians and diplomats put together, and that he was widely known to have a passionate interest in
contemporary history, particularly as it related to power, and to have an enormous library. And, of course, he
had known Hearst in the years of his full imperial glory, and his friends knew of his absorption in everything
to do with Hearst. According to Houseman, he and Mankiewicz thought they were both brilliant in court; they
treated the whole suit as an insult, and enjoyed themselves so much while testifying that they spent the time
between appearances on the stand congratulating each other. Mankiewicz, in a final gesture of contempt for
the charge, brought an inventory of his library and tossed it to the RKO lawyers to demonstrate the width and
depth of his culture. It was an inventory that Sara had prepared some years before, when (during a stretch of
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hard times) they had rented out their house on Tower Road; no one had bothered to look at the inventory –
not even the RKO attorneys before they put it into evidence. But Lundberg’s lawyers did; they turned to ‘L,’
and there, neatly listed under ‘Lundberg,’ were 3 copies of Imperial Hearst. During Mankiewicz’s long
recuperation, his friends had sent him many books, and since his friends knew of his admiration for many
sides of the man he called ‘the outstanding whirling pagoda of our times,’ he had been showered with copies
of this particular book. The inventory apparently made quite an impression in court, and the tide turned. The
jury had been cordial to Mankiewicz’s explanation of how it was that he knew details that were in the
Lundberg book and were unpublished elsewhere, but now the width and depth of his culture became suspect.
After thirty days, the trial resulted in a hung jury, and rather than go through another trial, R.K.O. settled for
$15,000 – and also paid an estimated couple of hundred thousand dollars in lawyers’ fees and court costs.
Mankiewicz went on writing scripts, but his work in the middle and late forties is not in the same spirit as
Kane. . . The booze and the accidents finally added up . . . [but] Many of [Mankiewicz’s] thirties movies he
wrote are popular on television and at college showings, but when they have been discussed in film books his
name has never, to my knowledge, appeared. . . . He is now all but ignored even in many accounts of Citizen
Kane.” (my italics and brackets)

Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” essay originally published by the New Yorker (20 Feb. 1971, and 27 Feb.
1971), in: Pauline Kael, Herman Mankiewicz, and Orson Welles, The Citizen Kane Book, (New York:
Bantam Books, 1974), pp.118-122.

116
Richard Meryman, Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz, (New York: William Morrow,
1978), p.209-210.

117
Kael, p.117.

118
See footnote 84 about John Houseman’s account of the expiring contract that Welles had with RKO, and
how Mankiewicz saved the day with a script idea about Hearst.

119
Kael, p.43.

120
Meryman, p.272.

121
Kael, p.44.

122
Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” in: Pauline Kael, Herman Mankiewicz, and Orson Welles, The Citizen
Kane Book, (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), pp.1-124.

123
Peter Bogdanovich, “The Kane Mutiny,” Esquire, (October 1972).

“The Kane Mutiny” was written by Peter Bogdanovich, but it was revised (thus co-written) by Orson Welles,
since they were close friends.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in Discovering Orson Welles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2007), on page 295, writes on footnote 6:

“‘The Kane Mutiny,’ by Peter Bogdanovich, Esquire, October 1972, [Oja] Kodar alerted me to Welles’s
authorship of this essay in 1986. In ‘My Orson,’ Bogdanovich’s introduction to the second edition of This is
Orson Welles, by Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), which I edited, he
writes, ‘I did all the legwork, research, and interviews, and the byline carried only my name, but Orson had
taken a strong hand in revising and rewriting. Why shouldn’t he? He was fighting for his life.’ For a definite
refutation of Kael’s thesis, see especially ‘The Scripts of Citizen Kane’ by Robert Carringer, Critical Inquiry
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5 (1978), reprinted in Perpectives on Citizen Kane, edited by Ronaldf Gottesman (New York: G. K. Hall &
Co., 1996).”

124
Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane, BFI Film Classics, originally published in 1992, (London: BFI, British Film
Institute, 2008).

125
Andrew Sarris, “Citizen Kael vs. Citizen Kane,” originally published in 4 issues by The Village Voice
(April 15, April 29, May 27, and June 3, 1971), in: Primal Screen: Essays on Film and Related Subjects,
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp.111-136.

126
Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” essay originally published as “The American Cinema”
by Film Culture (no.28, spring 1963), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions
1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.30.

127
Sarris, p.30.

128
Sarris, p.31.

129
At Wikipedia, there is the photograph of Billy Wilder’s gravestone at the Westwood Village Memorial
Park Cemetery, in Los Angeles, which reads: “Billy Wilder: I’m a Writer, But Then Nobody’s Perfect.” This
entry mentions that the next day after Wilder’s death, the “French newspaper Le Monde titled its first page
obituary, ‘Billy Wilder, Nobody’s Perfect,’ quoting the final gag line in Some Like It Hot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Billy_Wilders_grave_(978339409).jpg (last accessed 10 April 2013).

130
Preston Sturges (1898-1959).
Sceenwriter and Writer-Director.
Screenplays as Writer-Director:
-- The Great McGinty (1940, written and directed by Preston Sturges).
-- Christmas in July (1940, written and directed by Preston Sturges, based on Sturges play “A Cup of
Coffee”).
-- The Lady Eve (1941, written and directed by Preston Sturges, based on a story by Monckton Hoffe.)
-- Sullivan’s Travels (1941, written and directed by Preston Sturges).
-- The Palm Beach Story (1942, written and directed by Preston Sturges, uncredited contributing writer Ernst
Laemmle.)
-- The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944, written and directed by Preston Sturges).
-- Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, written and directed by Preston Sturges).
-- The Great Moment (1944, written and directed by Preston Sturges).
-- Unfaithfully Yours (1948, written and directed by Preston Sturges).
-- The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949, written and directed by Preston Sturges, story and
screenplay by Earl Felton).
-- The French They Are a Funny Race (1957, written and directed by Preston Sturges, book by Pierre
Daninos).
Screenplays as Screenwriter only:
-- Fast and Loose (1930, directed by Fred C. Newmeyer, based on play “The Best People” by David Gray
and Avery Hopwood, story by Doris Anderson and Jack Kirkland, dialogue by Preston Sturges)
-- Easy Living (1937, directed by Mitchell Leisen, screenplay by Preston Sturges, story by Vera Caspary).
-- The Good Fairy (1945, directed by William Wyler, play by Ferenc Molnar, English translation of play by
Jane Hinton, screenplay by Preston Sturges).
-- Child of Manhattan (1937, directed by Edward Buzzell, play by Preston Sturges, screenplay by Gertrude
Purcell).
-- Hotel Haywire (1937, directed by Arthur Archainbaud, written by Lillie Hayward and Preston Sturges).

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131
Andrew Sarris, “The Golden Years: Preston Sturges,” in: Richard Corliss, The Hollywood Screenwriters, a
Film Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), pp.93-106.

132
Richard Corliss (ed.), The Hollywood Screenwriters, a Film Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books,
1972), Originally published as a Special Issue of Film Comment, (New York: vol.6, no.4, winter 1970-1971).

Richard Corliss, “The Hollywood Screenwriter: Take 2,” Midsection, Film Comment, (New York: vol.14,
no.4, July/Aug. 1978), pp.33-47.

See also the Museum of Modern Art lecture series on “Screenwriters” as part of the Museum’s “Looking at
Film” program:

Richard Corliss (lecturer), “Talking Pictures: The Art of the Screenwriter,” in: MOMA, The Museum of
Modern Art Archives, Sound Recordings of museum-related events, “Looking at Film Series” sponsored by
the National Endowment for the Humanities, (New York: 16 Nov., 19 Nov., 30 Nov., 3 Dec., 7 Dec., and 10
Dec. of 1977). Invited screenwriters and participants interviewed by Corliss were: Howard Koch (16 Nov.
1977), Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin (19 Nov. 1977), Richard Levinson and William Link (30 Nov. 1977),
Paul Schrader (3 Dec. 1977), Robert Benton and David Newman (7 Dec. 1977), George Axelrod (10 Dec.
1977).

133
Richard Corliss comments about Sarris acceptance to contribute to the screenwriter’s issue of Film
Comment:

“The purpose of the enterprise was certainly polemical, in those dear contentious days (we were suggesting
that the director wasn't the only creator of a Hollywood film), but the tone was modest (we were not
suggesting that the screenwriter should take the director's place in the hagiography of auteurism). Most of the
critics - and a surprising number of the screenwriters themselves - hedged bets, qualified their assertions, left
the definitive decision on screen credits to God and William K. Everson. Only Andrew Sarris, who
generously contributed to the issue even though it could be seen as either a challenge or an affront to the
historical method he had developed, made a forthright assertion of the screenwriter as auteur: Preston Sturges
in the Thirties. It would be nice to report that our special issue had something of the effect of Andy's "The
American Cinema" when it appeared in a 1963 Film Culture. Alas, the stars remained in their courses, and the
stars were still the directors.”

Richard Corliss, “The Hollywood Screenwriter: Take 2,” Midsection, Film Comment, (New York: vol.14,
no.4, July/Aug. 1978), p.34.

134
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, book originally published in
1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), 394 pages.

135
Sarris, p.37.

136
Sarris, p.37.

137
Sarris, p.37.

138
Andrew Sarris, “Preston Sturges (1898-1959),” in: The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-
1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.114.

139
Andrew Sarris, “The Golden Years: Preston Sturges,” in: Richard Corliss, The Hollywood Screenwriters, a
Film Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), pp.93-94.

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140
Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” essay originally published as “The American
Cinema” by Film Culture (no.28, spring 1963), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and
Directions 1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.30.

141
Sarris, pp.25-26.

142
For Sarris’ auteur theory allowing for exceptions, refer to:

Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” essay originally published by Film Culture (no.27,
winter 1962-1963), in: P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000),
pp.130 and 131.

Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” essay originally published as “The American Cinema”
by Film Culture (no.28, spring 1963), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions
1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.33. (as well as pp.31 and 37).

143
Andrew Sarris, “Afterword: The Auteur Theory Revisited,” essay originally published by American Film
(vol.2, issue 9, July-August 1977, The American Film Institute), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions 1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), pp.269-270.

144
The Southerner (1945). Directed by Jean Renoir. Based on novel “Hold Autumn in Your Hand” by George
Sessions Perry. Adaptation by Hugo Butler. Written by Jean Renoir. Uncredited screenplay by William
Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson.

145
Andrew Sarris, “Afterword: The Auteur Theory Revisited,” essay originally published by American Film
(vol.2, issue 9, July-August 1977, The American Film Institute), in: Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions 1929-1968, (Chicago: Da Capo Press, 1996), p.270.

146
William Faulkner (1897-1962).
Noble Prize of Literature in 1949. Writer, Novelist and Screenwriter.
Significant writing credits for cinema:
-- The Road to Glory (1936, directed by Howard Hawks, screenplay by William Faulkner and Joel Sayre,
uncredited Stephen Morehouse Avery, Walter Ferris, and Violet Kemble Cooper).
-- The Southerner (1945, directed by Jean Renoir, based on novel “Hold Autumn in Your Hand” by George
Sessions Perry, adaptation by Hugo Butler, written by Jean Renoir, uncredited screenplay by William
Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson).
-- The Big Sleep (1946, directed by Howard Hawks, based on novel “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler,
screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman).
-- The Tarnished Angels (1957, directed by Douglas Sirk, based on novel by William Faulkner, screenplay by
George Zuckerman).
-- The Long Hot Summer (1958, directed by Martin Ritt, based on stories by William Faulkner “Barn
Burning” and “The Spotted Horses” and novel “The Hamlet”, screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank
Jr.).

147
Nunnally Johnson (1897-1977).
Screenwriter and Writer-Director.
Screenplays:
-- The Grapes of Wrath (1940, directed by John Ford, based on the novel by John Steinbeck, screenplay by
Nunnally Johnson).
-- The Southerner (1945, directed by Jean Renoir, based on novel “Hold Autumn in Your Hand” by George
Sessions Perry, adaptation by Hugo Butler, written by Jean Renoir, uncredited screenplay by William
Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson).
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-- How to Marry a Millionaire (1953, directed by Jean Negulesco, based on the plays by Zoe Akins, Dale
Eunson, and Katherine Albert, screenplay by Nunnally Johnson).
-- The Three Faces of Eve (1957, directed by Nunnally Johnson, based on book by Corbett Thigpen and
Hervey M. Cleckley, screenplay by Nunnally Johnson).
-- The Dirty Dozen (1967, directed by Robert Aldrich, novel by E.M. Nathanson, screenplay by Nunnally
Johnson and Lukas Heller).

148
The Hollywood Blacklist of screenwriters, directors, and producers (and other professionals such as
musicians and actors, etc) was an ongoing event that lasted roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s.
During this time, more than one hundred professionals were blacklisted. The blacklisted were fired and
denied work in Hollywood on the basis of their political beliefs (associated with Communism and the Cold
War). Many had to go into exile (mainly in Mexico and Europe), working under pseudonyms or pennames, as
in the case of several screenwriters who could work from abroad, and who did not need to be physically
present in Hollywood in order to provide a screenplay. Others were not as resourceful as to circumvent the
Blacklist, and had their careers completely shattered because of it.

Note that the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten” were almost all of them screenwriters, with only one exception, a
director. Because the blacklisting was an ideological “war,” and writers provide content, they were the most
affected. On November 25, 1947, the “Hollywood Ten” list was made known to the industry and the studios –
a group of writers, directors, and producers (but mainly screenwriters) who were subpoenaed by HUAC
(House of Un-American Activities Committee) and cited for contempt of Congress. They were blacklisted
after refusing to answer HUAC questions about their alleged involvement with the Communist Party and the
active SWG (Screen Writers Guild, founded in 1933). For more information on this subject, and the
involvement of screenwriters with the unionization of writers in Hollywood, plus the creation of the SWG
(predecessor of the current WGA, Writers Guild of America, founded in 1954), as well as the heavy
blacklisting of writers in Hollywood, please consult the excellent book by Nancy Lynn Schwartz:

Nancy Lynn Schwartz. The Hollywood Writers’ Wars, book completed post-humorously by Sheila Schwartz,
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983).

The blacklisted “Hollywood Ten” were:

-- Ring Lardner Jr. (screenwriter),
-- Dalton Trumbo (screenwriter),
-- John Howard Lawson (screenwriter),
-- Alvah Bessie (screenwriter),
-- Samuel Ornitz (screenwriter),
-- Albert Maltz (screenwriter),
-- Lester Cole (screenwriter),
-- Adrian Scott (producer and screenwriter),
-- Herbert Bieberman (screenwriter and director),
-- Edward Dmytryk (director).

149
McCarthyism lasted roughly from 1950 to 1956.

150
For the definition of “possessive credit” such as “a film by,” please refer to Appendix A.

151
The broadcast was on Sunday October 30
th
, 1938, just one day before Halloween, and one year before
World War II finally broke out. For more, see:

Howard Koch, The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event, with introductory interview with Arthur C. Clarke,
book originally published in 1970, (New York: Avon Books, 1971).
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The copyright page reads: “The play ‘Invasion from Mars’ included in this book was copyrighted in 1940 by
Hadley Cantril, and renewed in 1967 by Howard Koch.”

152
John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic,
Including the Original Script, Radio Script by Howard Koch, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), p.93.

Gosling quotes this Arch Oboler passage from:

Martin Grams, Jr., “‘The War of the Worlds’ Revisited: Another Perspective,” Old Time Radio Logs and
Reviews. http://www.old-time.com/otrlogs2/wow_mg.html (last accessed 10 April 2013).

153
Gosling, p.92. (my brackets)

Gosling quotes this passage by Orson Welles from Frank Brady, one of Welles biographers:

Frank Brady, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles, (London: Coronet, 1991), p.177.

154
Chronologically, John Houseman, partner with Orson Welles in the Mercury Theatre, first acted as a
writer for the Mercury production of literary work adapatations for CBS radio, and later acted as a writer for
Citizen Kane, doing editing on Herman Mankiewicz’s screenplay. Read passages below for reference.

John Gosling describes how Houseman was the writer for the CBS first play radio shows (instead of Welles),
before an exhausted Houseman hired Howard Koch to write for them:

“Producing a broadcast of the Mercury Theatre was a study in the art of organized chaos . . . At the very
center was Orson Welles, not exactly the calm in the eye of the storm but rather a conductor of lightning. . . .
The proposed format was simple. Each hour-long show would present an adaptation of a classic literary
property. Welles would naturally take the lead, plus read any expositional passages, a technique he had
developed in the previous year when he had brilliantly adapted Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. . . . These low
cost shows were usually aired opposite unassailable sponsored competitors and were produced on very tight
budgets. . . . [If] the monetary rewards were thin, then conversely the opportunity to push the creative
envelope was incredibly enticing, since without the interfering presence of a sponsor they were blissfully free
to innovate and experiment. It was the beginning of the golden age of radio, and for the fiercely independent
Welles . . . [he] would further cement his reputation as an artistic prodigy. His agent had declared
emphatically, “You got to do it all, Orson,” and Welles willingly obliged by billing himself as writer, director,
producer and star, hence the original working title for the series, First Person Singular. Meanwhile, CBS was
equally pleased to make capital of the unique fact that they had a highly regarded theatrical company in their
employ . . . but it was John Houseman who effectively found himself saddled with the job of breathing life
into this singular vision, for Welles was if anything an accomplished delegator of tasks, and besides rather
busy at the time in pursuit of a ballerina with whom he had become enamored. After discussing the first
choice of Alice in Wonderland . . . CBS and Welles settled on Treasure Island as an appropriate inaugural
broadcast. Though Houseman complained that he knew nothing at all of the styles and conventions of radio,
Welles set him to work with the rather careless rejoinder that he had better start learning. After Houseman
spent days cooped up in his one-room apartment laboring to fashion a script, Welles then threw a typical
curveball and announced that they would instead premiere with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to which he had just
secured the rights. Three weeks had been wasted. It was now less than one week to the first broadcast. Buying
up half a dozen copies of the book and arming themselves with paper, paste, and scissors, the pair retired to
an all-night diner on 59
th
Street called Reubens and over steak and cognac fell upon the story, . . . creating the
storyboard to a serviceable script in a single marathon 12-hour session. It was now just two days of airtime,
and though it would prove to be the first of many successful broadcasts, this precarious brush with a deadline
set something of a pattern. . . . After the initial nine broadcasts for which Welles was contracted, the show
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was renewed and to considerable acclaim continued to deliver its broad spectrum of classic adaptations,
though listening figures remained disappointing. Planned for the seventeenth show was Lorna Doone, by R.
D. Blackmore, a turbulent novel of love and larceny in the 17
th
-century England. A draft script had been
prepared by Houseman, but as the broadcast date of October 30 approached, second thoughts began to plague
Welles. Was this really such a suitable story? . . . [For] the broadcast (yet again just over one week away),
Welles decided to shelf Lorna Doone and replace it with The War of the Worlds, the only other property to
which he had secured rights at the time. . . As the season progressed, Houseman was finding the pressure of
managing the Mercury both on and off the air plus writing a weekly 60-minute script an increasingly
wearisome burden. “There was a time when I never got out of bed, because I never had time to get out of bed.
So I would lie in bed and write the radio shows, lie in bed and administer the Mercury Theatre, simply
because I had no time to get up.” So it was that that the exhausted Houseman came to add to the Mercury
roster a largely untried but talented young playwright named Howard Koch. Koch was almost a totally
unknown when the desperate Houseman hired him. Having had a play recently performed by the Federal
Theatre Project in Chicago, he had arrived in New York with his family with the ambition of becoming a
writer. His starting salary with the Mercury was $75 a week, and for this he was expected to turn out some 60
pages of script every seven days. For his third project he was assigned The War of the Worlds.” (my italics
and brackets)

Passage from:
John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic,
Including the Original Script, Radio Script by Howard Koch, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), pp.31-33.

John Houseman, in his memoirs, notes that upon deciding to have Mankiewicz be the writer for the first draft
of Citizen Kane (then named American, cited in the passage below is Sara, Mankiewicz’s wife), Houseman
re-signed his contract with Welles and the Mercury Theatre as a writer, and later, he was to edit Mankiewicz’
pages:

“After Mank and I have talked for several hours and Sarah had sent out dinner to his room, I phoned Orson
from his bedside and told him I was ready to try. He arrived with a magnum of champagne and we talked on
until Sarah threw us out. The next day, no longer as its president but as a writer – I signed a contract with
Mercury Productions. At Mank’s insistence and remembering how badly I myself had worked with Orson
peering over my shoulder, it was stated in the agreement that we would do our work without interference and
beyond his reach. Welles would be shown what there was of the script after 6 weeks and the rest of it, if he
decided he wanted to continue, after we were finished. It was felt by everyone, especially Sarah, that our only
hope of getting such a difficult script done in such a limited time was to move Mankiewicz out of his natural
habitat – away from distractions and temptations. The retreat chosen for us was a guest ranch in the mesa
county near Victorville at the top of the Cajon Pass.” (my italics)

“Our days and nights at the Campbell ranch followed a reassuring routine. Mankiewicz wrote and read half
the night and slept in the morning. I got up early, went ridding for an hour – my first contact with a horse
since Estancia Santa Maria. After that, while I waited for him to come to life, I would edit the pages Mank
had dictated the night before, which the secretary had typed at dawn. At 9:30, Mank received his breakfast in
bed. An hour later, having made an enormous production of shaving, washing and dressing himself on one
leg, he was ready for work. This consisted of going over yesterday’s material, arguing over changes, and
seeing how the new scenes fit into the structure of the whole and affected the scenes to come.”

These two passages are respectively from:
John Houseman, Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988, (New York: Applause Books, 2000), p.223 and
p.225.

155
John Houseman, Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988, (New York: Applause Books, 2000), pp.227-
228.
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156
Houseman, pp.228-229.

157
Howard Koch, The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event, with introductory interview with Arthur C.
Clarke, book originally published in 1970, (New York: Avon Books, 1971), pp.12-15.

The copyright page reads: “The play ‘Invasion from Mars’ included in this book was copyrighted in 1940 by
Hadley Cantril, and renewed in 1967 by Howard Koch.”

158
John Gosling cites that Howard Koch worked on one radio script per week. That was a 60-page format
script (45 minutes air time) adapting literary classicas that were assigned to him. He worked for 6 days, the
Broadcast was on Sunday, and he had Mondays off.

John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic,
Including the Original Script, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), p.31 and pp.33-34.

Howard Koch, The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event, with introductory interview with Arthur C. Clarke,
book originally published in 1970, (New York: Avon Books, 1971), pp.11-13.

159
Gosling, p.33.
Koch, p.12.

160
Koch, p.11-12.

161
Koch, p.12.

162
About Orson Welles being concerned about his “reputation” over the Howard Koch writing authorship
dispute of the radio-script, John Gosling writes:

“These low cost shows were usually aired opposite unassailable sponsored competitors and were produced on
very tight budgets. . . and for the fiercely independent Welles the situation was heaven sent. He was to be at
the helm of a new and exciting venture with which he intended to challenge the moribund conventions of
radio, and at the same time he would further cement his reputation as an artistic prodigy. His agent had
declared emphatically, ‘You got to do it al, Orson,’ and Welles willingly obliged by billing himself as writer,
director, producer and star, hence the original working title for the series, First Person Singular.”

“Welles sold himself as a man who needed no help. He was writer, actor, and director all rolled into one, and
to have his authorship questioned could be a potentially mortal blow to his reputation, a fear that Welles made
plain in his correspondence with [Hadley] Cantril. ‘I am sure you can appreciate the untold damage done to
my professional reputation [that] the publication of this book in its present form will create. I know you will
understand that I cannot permit this to occur.’ Welles seems to be implying that he would take legal steps to
prevent further printings of the book, having already failed to stop the book’s first printing. But perhaps
Welles knew that in truth he was powerless and so simply hoped that he could intimidate Cantril by the sheer
force of his personality.”

John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic,
Including the Original Script, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), pp.31-32 and p.93.

163
About Orson Welles all encompassing contract as “writer-director-producer-actor” with CBS radio see:

John Houseman, Unfinished Business: Memoirs: 1902-1988, (New York: Applause Books, 2000), p.228.

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John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic,
Including the Original Script, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), p.32 and pp.92-93.

Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” essay originally published by the New Yorker (20 Feb. 1971, and 27 Feb.
1971), in: Pauline Kael, Herman Mankiewicz, and Orson Welles, The Citizen Kane Book, (New York:
Bantam Books, 1974), p.50 and pp.55-56.

See also footnote 88.

164
For possessiveness toward creative authorship, see Appendix A.

165
Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” essay originally published by the New Yorker (20 Feb. 1971, and 27 Feb.
1971), in: Pauline Kael, Herman Mankiewicz, and Orson Welles, The Citizen Kane Book, (New York:
Bantam Books, 1974), pp.55-57.

166
For possessive authorship, see Appendix A.

167
Kael, p.57.

168
About Orson Welles’ disgreement with scholar Hadley Cantril, see John Gosling’s chapter:

John Gosling, “Animosities and Rapprochements, The Aftermath of the War,” in: Waging The War of the
Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic, Including the Original Script, radio
script by Howard Koch, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), pp.86-98.

See also:

Howard Koch, The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event, with introductory interview with Arthur C. Clarke,
book originally published in 1970, (New York: Avon Books, 1971).

The copyright page reads: “The play ‘Invasion from Mars’ included in this book was copyrighted in 1940 by
Hadley Cantril, and renewed in 1967 by Howard Koch.”

169
Orson Welles telegram to Hadley Cantril, cited in:

John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic,
Including the Original Script, radio script by Howard Koch, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), p.92.

170
Kael, p.57.

171
For possessive credit, see Appendix A.

172
Citizen Kane (1941) was nominated for Academy Awards in 9 categories: “Best Writing/Original
Screenplay,” “Best Director,” “Best Picture,” “Best Actor,” “Best Cinematography,” “Best Music,” “Best
Sound Recording,” “Best Art Direction,” “Best Film Editing.” It won only in one category, “Best
Writing/Original Screnplay,” on February 26, 1942. This award went obviously to Herman Mankiewicz (first
writer) and Orson Welles (co-writer). Several authors cite that this was a disappointment for Welles, who
wanted to be recognized for his “whole one-manship” as writer, producer, director, and actor, but especially
as a director. After the authorship dispute over the screenplay, between Mankiewicz and Welles, Hollywood
was weary, and it all seems to indicate that The Academy wanted to send a clear message to Welles, that even
though his direction was impressive, they were not endorsing him as “best director,” or giving him “best
fim,” because of the circuntances of the writing credit dispute.
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173
John Houseman quoted by Andrew Sarris in:

Andrew Sarris, “Citizen Kael vs. Citizen Kane,” essay originally published in four issues of The Village
Voice (April 15, April 29, May 27, and June 3, 1971), in: Andrew Sarris, Primal Screen: Essays on Film and
Related Subjects, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p.114-115.

174
Library Journal Book Review of:

Frank Brady, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles (1989). (Los Angeles: Media Source, 2010).

175
For Richard Walter, see his personal website and faculty description from UCLA:
http://richardwalter.com/
http://www.tft.ucla.edu/2011/09/faculty-richard-walter

176
Richard Walter, Screenwriting: The Art, Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing, (New York:
Plume, Penguin Group, 1988), pp.188-189.

177
Refer to book bibliographical description above.

178
See Appendix B.

An idea pure and simple is something too difficult to prove authorship on. Ideas per se are not copyrightable:

“The Copyright Act creates rights in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression
[such as paper, film, clay, etc]. . . . What does it take to make an ‘original work of authorship’? A Piece of
Work. For there to be a copyright, there has to be a ‘work’ expressed in tangible form, because what copy-
right protects is the artistic or literary expression contained in the work, not the ideas the work expresses.”
(my brackets and italics)

Bill Seiter and Ellen Seiter, “Copyright,” chapter 1, in: The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright,
Trademark, and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012),
pp.2-3.

179
See footnote 178 above, and Appendix B, for Copyright Law.

180
For unionization, see footnote 94.

181
For the industry custom of erroneous or unrelated people been credited in movies as the “writer”
(producer’s idea, director’s idea, their relative’s idea, etc), see footnotes 93 and 192.

182
Richard Walter, Screenwriting: The Art, Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing, (New York:
Plume, Penguin Group, 1988), p.189.

183
For more on Paul Morrissey’s creative (writing) techniques and story and character construction, refer to:

Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

184
For more on Mike Leigh’s creative techniques and story and character writerly construction, read:

Susan Bullington Katz (ed.), “A Conversation with Mike Leigh,” in: Conversations with Screenwriters,
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), pp.33-42.
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185
Yacowar, p.10.

186
Yacowar, p.46.

187
Mike Leigh cited in Susan Bullington Katz interview, p.35.

188
Philip Kiszely, Hollywood Through Private Eyes: The Screen Adaptation of the Hard-Boiled Private
Detective Novel in the Studio Era, Stage and Screen Studies, (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG,
International Academic Publishers, 2006), p.142.

189
This citation is referring to year “1940” on the Writers Guild of America Timeline:
Note that this is because the contact was negotiated in 1942, and backdated to 1940. (my italics)

“WGA, History Timeline,” 1933-1999, WGA / Writers Guild of America, West, website, (2012).
http://www.wga.org/history/timeline.html (last accessed 10 April 2013).

190
For Orson Welles all-encompassing contract, see footnote 88.

191
Philip Kiszely, Hollywood Through Private Eyes: The Screen Adaptation of the Hard-Boiled Private
Detective Novel in the Studio Era, Stage and Screen Studies, (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang AG,
International Academic Publishers, 2006).

192
About the threat to the authorship of writers before the “Producer-Screenwriter Guild Minimum Basic
Agreement Act of 1942,” (as mentioned on footnotes 181 and 93), Kiszely writes:

“The majority of ordinary screenwriters – those who could not use a pre-established literary reputation as a
bargaining tool – did suffer under the system. Before the Producer-Screenwriters Guild Minimum Basic
Agreement Act of 1942, screenwriters – unlike directors and actors or even stagehands and electricians –
lacked basic standards of equity or collective bargaining rights. For two decades film writers in the lower
salary brackets were given no protection of minimum wages, nor were they guaranteed minimum periods of
employment. The working conditions of the average Hollywood screenwriter were not only worst in the film
industry, they were among the worst anywhere in the country. ‘Their right to screen credit was mistreated by
certain producers, who allotted credit to their friends or relatives or – under pseudonyms – to themselves,’
wrote industry commentator Leo Rosten in 1941. ‘[Screenwriters] were frequently offered the bait of
speculative writing without either guarantees or protection in the outcome.’ Screenwriter Howard Koch
thought studio executives generally regarded writers as a separate, troublesome but necessary ‘special breed.’”
(my italics)

Kiszely, p.143.

About the idea that “writers make trouble,” see also:

Robert L. Carringer, “Scripting,” in: The Making of Citizen Kane, revised edition, originally published in
1985, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p.32.

193
See also Appendix B.

Definition of derivative works:

“The film is a derivative work of the screenplay, and it is also a derivative work of the recorded music. The
screenplay and the recorded music are each separately copyrightable. The film is also copyrightable as a
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derivative work. In turn, if the screenplay is based on a novel, it is a derivative work of the novel, and if the
recorded music is a recording of a song, the recording is a derivative work of the song. . . Since a derivative
work is based upon one or more preexisting works, the copyright in a derivative work extends only to the
material contributed by the author of the derivative work. In creating a motion picture, the filmmaker gets a
copyright in the film, as a derivative work, but the filmmaker does not thereby get to hijack the separate
copyrights in the screenplay and the recorded music, or in the novel or song underlying them.” (my italics)

Bill Seiter and Ellen Seiter, “Copyright,” chapter 1, in: The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright,
Trademark, and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012),
p.7.

194
See footnote above.

195
For possessive credit, see Appendix A.

196
“WGA, Screen Credits Manual,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East, Effective for Notices of
Tentative Writing Credits Submitted on or after June 18, (2010), pp.23-24. (last accessed 10 April 2013):
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/credits/screenscredits_manual10.pdf

197
See also Appendix A.

“WGA, Creative Rights for Writers of Theatrical and Long-Form Television Motion Pictures: The Latest
WGA Provisions and Overscale Suggestions,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East, (2002), p.33.
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/creative_rights/creative-rights.pdf
(last accessed 10 April 2013). (my italics)

198
See also Appendix A.

“WGA, 2008 Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East,
(2008), p.1. http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/MBA08.pdf
(last accessed 10 April 2013).

199
Eleanor Perry (1914-1981).
Screenplays:
-- David and Lisa (1962, directed by Frank Perry, book by Theodore Isaac Rubin, screenplay by Eleanor
Perry).
--The Swimmer (1968, directed by Frank Perry and Sidney Pollack, uncredited, story by John Cheever,
screenplay by Eleanor Perry).
-- Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970, directed by Frank Perry, novel by Sue Kaufman, screenplay by Eleanor
Perry).

200
Eleanor Perry, “Rebirth?: Eleanor Perry, An Interview by Kay Loveland and Estelle Changas,” in: Richard
Corliss, The Hollywood Screenwriters, a Film Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p.215.

201
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” essay originally published in 1969 as “Qu’est-ce Qu’un Auteur?,”
in: William Irwin (ed.), The Death and Resurrection of the Author, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002),
pp.9-22.

202
David Howard and Edward Mabley, The Tools of Screenwriting: A Writer’s Guide to the Craft and
Elements of a Screenplay, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993), pp.88-89.
118
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !
203
Marc Norman, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting, (New York: Harmony Books,
2007), p.361.

Also cited in:

Carl Foreman, “Foreword: Confessions of a Frustrated Screenwriter,” in: Richard Corliss, The Hollywood
Screenwriters, a Film Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p.33.

204
See also Appendix B.

Definition of derivative works:

“The film is a derivative work of the screenplay, and it is also a derivative work of the recorded music. The
screenplay and the recorded music are each separately copyrightable. The film is also copyrightable as a
derivative work. In turn, if the screenplay is based on a novel, it is a derivative work of the novel, and if the
recorded music is a recording of a song, the recording is a derivative work of the song. . . Since a derivative
work is based upon one or more preexisting works, the copyright in a derivative work extends only to the
material contributed by the author of the derivative work. In creating a motion picture, the filmmaker gets a
copyright in the film, as a derivative work, but the filmmaker does not thereby get to hijack the separate
copyrights in the screenplay and the recorded music, or in the novel or song underlying them.” (my italics)

Bill Seiter and Ellen Seiter, “Copyright,” chapter 1, in: The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright,
Trademark, and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012),
p.7.

205
Jack Stillinger, “Plays and Films: Authors, Auteurs, Autres,” in: Multiple Authorship and the Myth of
Solitary Genius, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp.163-181.

206
See footnote 204 for definition of derivative works.

207
Carl Foreman, “Foreword: Confessions of a Frustrated Screenwriter,” in: Richard Corliss, The Hollywood
Screenwriters, a Film Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p.33.

208
Richard Corliss, The Hollywood Screenwriters, a Film Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972).

209
Foreman, p.33.

210
For definition of “derivative” works: see footnote 204.

Bill Seiter and Ellen Seiter, “Copyright,” chapter 1, in: The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright,
Trademark, and Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012),
p.7.

211
Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” New Yorker, (20 Feb. 1971, and 27 Feb. 1971).

212
Richard Corliss, “Introduction: The Hollywood Screenwriters,” in: The Hollywood Screenwriters, a Film
Comment Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p.26.

213
Corliss, p.10.

214
Corliss, p.19.

119
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !
215
Corliss, p.26. (my brackets)

216
Carl Foreman, pp.30-31.

217
Cheryl Walker, “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author,” essay originally published in 1990 at
Critical Inquiry, in: William Irwin (ed.), The Death and Resurrection of the Author, (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2002), pp.9-22.

218
William Irwin (ed.), The Death and Resurrection of the Author, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).

219
For the early history of cinema account of female screenwriters, see:

Antonia Lant and Ingrid Periz, Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema,
(London and New York: Verso, 2006).

Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Cari Beauchamp and Mary Anita Loos (eds.), Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by
Anita Loos, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Anita Loos, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, (New York: Penguin Books, 1974).

Gary Carey, “Prehistory: Anita Loos,” in: Richard Corliss, The Hollywood Screenwriters, a Film Comment
Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), pp.37-50.

220
Anita Loos (1888-1981).
Writer and screenwriter.
Screenplays:
-- The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912, directed by D. W. Griffith, written by D.W. Griffith and Anita Loos).
-- The New York Hat (1912, directed by D. W. Griffith, written by Anita Loos and Frances Marion).
-- Intolerance (1916, directed by D. W. Griffith, based on the poem by Walt Whitman “Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking,” scenario by D.W. Griffith, titles by Anita Loos, uncredited titles by D.W. Griffith, Hettie
Grey Baker, Mary H. O’Connor and Frank Woods, uncredited Tod Browning).
-- His Picture in the Papers (1916, directed by John Emerson, written by Anita Loos and John Emerson).
-- A Virtuous Vamp (1919, directed by David Kirkland, based on the play “The Bachelor” by Clyde Fitch,
“scenario” by John Emerson and Anita Loos).
-- The Love Expert (1920, directed by David Kirkland, written by John Emerson and Anita Loos).
-- The Barbarian (1933, directed by Sam Wood, based on play “The Arab” by Edgar Selwyn, written by
Anita Loos and Elmer Harris).
-- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928, directed by Malcom St. Clair, based on the novel of the same name by
Anita Loos, screenplay by Anita Loos, John Emerson, and Herman Mankiewicz).
-- Blondie of the Follies (1932, directed by Edmund Goulding, story by Frances Marion, dialogue by Anita
Loos, uncredited Frances Marion and Ralph Spence).
-- The Cat and the Fiddle (1934, directed by William Howard and Sam Wood, book by Otto Harbach, script
by Bella Spewack and Sam Spewack, uncredited Anita Loos, James McGuinness, Zelda Sears, Eve Greene).
-- The Women (1939, directed by George Cukor, play by Clare Boothe Luce, screenplay by Anita Loos and
Jane Murfin, uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Donald Ogden Stewart)
-- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, directed by Howard Hawks, based on the novel by Anita Loos, based on
the musical comedy by Anita Loos and Joseph Fields, screenplay by Charles Lederer).
-- Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955, directed by Richard Sale, based on the novel “But Gentlemen Marry
Brunettes” by Anita Loos, written for the screen by Mary Loos and Richard Sale).
120
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221
Frances Marion (1888-1973).
Screenwriter.
Screenplays:
-- The New York Hat (1912, directed by D. W. Griffith, written by Anita Loos and Frances Marion).
-- A Girl’s Folly (1917, directed by Maurice Tourneur, story and “scenario” by Maurice Tourneur and
Frances Marion).
-- The Flapper (1920, directed by Alan Crossland, story and screenplay by Frances Marion).
-- Stella Dallas (1925, directed by Henry King, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, adaptation for
the screen by Frances Marion).
-- The Scarlet Letter (1926, directed by Victor Sjöström, based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
adaptation and screenplay by Frances Marion).
-- The Son of the Sheik (1926, directed by George Fitzmaurice, based on the novel by Edith Maude Hull,
screen adaptation by Frances Marion and Fred De Gresac, “titles” by George Marion Jr., uncredited Paul
Girard Smith).
-- The Red Mill (1927, directed by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, musical comedy by Henry Blossom, adaptation
and “scenario” by Frances Marion).
-- Bringing Up Father (1928, directed by Jack Conway, based on the newspaper cartoon feature by George
McManus, story and continuity by Frances Marion, “titles” by Ralph Spence).
-- Anna Christie (1930, directed by Clarence Brown, based on the play “Anna Christie” by Eugene O’Neill,
adaptation by Frances Marion).
-- Blondie of the Follies (1932, directed by Edmund Goulding, story by Frances Marion, dialogue by Anita
Loos, uncredited Frances Marion and Ralph Spence).
-- Dinner at Eight (1933, directed by George Cukor, from the stage play by George Kaufman and Edna
Ferber, screenplay by Frances Marion and Herman Mankiewicz).
-- Camille (1936, directed by George Cukor, screenplay by Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, and James Hilton).
-- The Champ (1979, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, story by Frances Marion, written by Walter Newman).

222
Gary Carey, “Prehistory: Anita Loos,” in: Richard Corliss, The Hollywood Screenwriters, a Film Comment
Book, (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p.39.

223
Lord of the Rings (2001). Directed by Peter Jackson. Based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Screenplay by
Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson.

224
King Kong (1933). Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. Story and idea by Merian C.
Cooper and Edgar Wallace. Screenplay by Ruth Rose and James Ashmore Creelman.

225
King Kong (2005). Directed by Peter Jackson. Screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter
Jackson. (still based on the 1933 King Kong).

226
The Terminator (1984). Directed by James Cameron. Additional Dialogue by William Wisher Jr. Written
by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. Gale Anne Hurd participated of several other Terminator films as a
writer, as well produced several action films such as Aliens (1986) and Armageddon (1998).

227
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Directed by Steven Spielberg. Story by George Lucas.
Screenplay by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.

228
American Graffiti (1973). Directed by George Lucas. Written by George Lucas, Willard Huyck and Gloria
Katz.

229
E.T. (1982). Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Melissa Mathison.

121
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230
Kundun (1997). Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Melissa Mathison.

231
El Norte (1983). Directed by Gregory Nava. Story by Gregory Nava. Screenplay by Anna Thomas.

232
Interview with the Vampire (1994). Directed by Neil Jordan. Based on the novel by Anne Rice. Screenplay
by Anne Rice.

233
Brokeback Mountain (2005). Directed by Ang Lee. Short story by Annie Proulx. Screenplay by Larry
McMurtry and Diana Ossana.

234
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Directed by Henry Selick. Story and characters by Tim Burton.
Adaptation: Michael McDowell. Screenplay by Caroline Thompson.

235
Sombrero (1953). Directed by Norman Foster. Screenplay by Norman Foster and Josefina Niggli.

236
Intolerance (1916). Directed by D.W. Griffith. Written by D.W. Griffith, Anita Loos, Tod Browning
(uncredited), Mary H. O’Connor, Frank E. Woods (uncredited).

237
David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los
Angeles, (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).

238
David E. James, p.355.

239
Marsha McCreadie, Women Screenwriters Today: Their Lives and Words, (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2006),
p.xxii.

240
Alexander C. Kaufman and Brent Lang, “Sexist Hollywood? Women Still Struggle to Find Film Jobs,
Study Finds,” in: The Wrap, (22 Jan. 2013). (last accessed 10 April 2013):
http://mobile.thewrap.com/thewrap/db_/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=00bA6xFu&full=true#display

241
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” essay originally published in 1975, in: Gerald
Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism, 4
th
edition, (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.746-757.

242
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” essay originally published in 1971 by
Art News, in: Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader, (London and New York:
Routledge, 2005), pp.229-233.

243
Nochlin, p.233.

122

Chapter 2
“EDWARD SCISSORHANDS:”
AN OUTSIDER FAIRYTALE OF SOCIAL-CASTRATION

SYNOPSIS

The story starts at bedtime, with a little girl asking her grandmother where does snow come
from. The grandmother explains that snow has to do with scissors, from a young man
named Edward. Confused, the little girl listens intently, so the story of Edward
Scissorhands begins. Edward was created by an inventor, who raised him as a son, but died
before he could give him human hands to replace the scissors. Because Edward had no
family, he was left behind all alone, living in a decrepit Gothic mansion on top of a
mountain. Years go by, and Edward learns how to grow up “unfinished,” at least as best as
he can. He is able to adapt to his circumstances as a lonely artist, and channels his creative
side by sculpting away on the plants in the mansion. His well-tended garden is beautiful, a
picture of vitality and enchantment achieved through his sharp and agile scissors. On the
other hand, he involuntarily scars his face with the tip of his shears, or shreds everything he
comes in contact with. Also, his isolated mansion looks unkempt and run down. This is
Edward’s world, and he grows up secluded as a teenager minding his own business.

Until the day he is discovered by the Avon saleswoman down the street, who insists in
“fixing” him and bringing him home with her. Edward is thrilled. He’s never been outside
of his old mansion, and becomes delighted just to look at things; such as the matching
pastel-color suburban houses, the children and the dogs, the manicured green lawns and the
123
sunny car ride. Everything is new to him: a world he has never seen before. But Edward is
too different from everybody else; he is not a hundred percent human.
1
Even though the
Bogg’s family and the town embrace Edward at first (all housewives get their hair, hedges
and pets trimmed by Edward), misunderstandings abound and the town eventually turns
against him as a menacing oddity. In due course, Edward captures Kim’s heart by sculpting
an angel from a block of ice, thus creating snowfall at Christmas. But he also cuts her hand
accidentally, something hard to prevent with his huge scissor hands. As a result, his
frustration for not being able to adapt only grows stronger. To make matters worse, soon
after he is attacked by Kim’s jealous boyfriend; who tricked Edward into breaking into his
house previously in the story, which made Edward fall target to the local police and the
townspeople. Edward is cornered.

The Avon saleswoman and her daughter Kim – now in love with Edward – understand that
the best course of action at this point would be for Edward to go back to where he came
from, and run for his life. Maybe it was a mistake displacing him. Eventually, Edward and
Kim recognize their love for each other, but understand that their love is doomed. Kim
urges Edward to escape the town’s chase, so that he can live. After a deadly confrontation
between Edward and Kim’s ex-boyfriend, Edward escapes and survives atop his mansion.
This is how the fairytale begins and ends: with Edward living alone again, making ice
sculptures of Kim and snowfall at Christmas. That explains the elderly woman’s magic tale
to the little girl in the beginning of the story. That woman who grew older is Kim; she
knows where snow comes from: it comes from Edward who remained forever
2
young.

124
ISSUES OF AUTHORSHIP, THEMATICS, AND PRODUCTION ANALYSIS

Edward Scissorhands
3
(1990) is a screenplay
4
by Caroline Thompson
5
(born 1956). The
character of Edward Scissorhands – who was born with scissors instead of hands thus
destroying everything he comes in contact with – was based on Thompson’s dog. She
describes how she created the Scissorhands character in the following manner:
In college and after, I had this magnificent dog who was the most alive creature I’ve ever
met. She seemed more aware of what was going on around her than anyone else in the
room; and more sensitive and more understanding, more sympathetic, but more hurt by it. It
was really from my feelings for her that I drew the character of Edward Scissorhands – this
kind of sweetness that wasn’t prepared for the horrors of what was going to hit him.
6

Caroline Thompson, besides building Edward Scissorhands’ character from images of her
pet, construes the protagonist in a manner that stands to signify Thompson herself in the
role of a woman screenwriter who creates the story. But as a screenwriter, she remains at
the shadow of the director, both linked and detached in her dichotomy as an outsider in
terms of her authorial power in cinema. There is a resonance between the two, between the
female screenwriter and the protagonist Edward, which is a binary correlation, since
Edward is the clear prototype of the outsider at the shadow of societal power to which he
attempts to adapt to. Like the dog, he understands everything but is somewhat limited in his
ability to react, since he doesn’t completely belong, thus the “horror” undertone of the story.

Similarly, Thompson has written First Born
7
(published in 1983), a novel about an aborted
fetus (at twelve weeks)
8
who hadn’t quite died in the university hospital experiment he has
been clandestinely put through. Alongside other medical abortions, the reader learns that
125
the fetus grew in an artificially built environment imitating the womb without knowledge
of his mother, who terminated the pregnancy. All the other fetuses died but this one, the
experiment was too much for them. This one fetus, though, was able to escape the lab, and
deformed he came back to haunt, but most significantly to find his mother and be together
with her.
9
That was an uncanny story, to say the least.

As Thompson describes in her above quotation, like in Edward Scissorhands, the character
of the runaway fetus was not prepared for the horrors and trials that were coming his way.
Thompson describes the narrative of First Born in “Hollywood terms” as a cross between
Eraserhead (1977) and E.T. (1982);
10
and it is worth mentioning that another female
screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, similarly to Thompson, is the only writer who authored the
screenplay E.T.
11
Likewise, Edward Scissorhands has also been compared to E.T. and
Eraserhead by film critics.
12
Furthermore, the dust-jacket of First Born aptly compares it to
Frankenstein
13
(1818), another novel by a female writer, Mary Shelley, which only adds to
the mythical, horror x make-believe metaphorical quality of the fiction. Likewise again,
Edward Scissorhands has also been compared to Frankenstein
14
sources.

First Born was a strong novel for a young writer. Thompson was 26 years old at the time,
and this novel was able to get her an agent in Hollywood. The unproduced screenplay that
came out of the First Born novel (adapted from Thompson’s book, screenplay by
Thompson and Penelope Spheeris) was read several times in the movie industry; and as she
recounts, “everybody wanted to meet me, they couldn’t believe that a human being would
126
come up with this story, because it was so shocking.”
15
Thompson describes this novel as a
“perverse autobiography,”
16
which according to her was funny yet it ended in tragedy.
17

Therefore, in comparing the thematic motifs present in Edward Scissorhands (screenplay)
and First Born (novel), a common specific thread between the two is the recurrence of a
“half-creature/half-human” type of character (that reminds us of animals or sci-fi beings,
fantastic living organisms). These are characters who possess a natural “sweetness”
18

(common in fairytale protagonists) which makes them challenged or unprepared to cope
with the hardships of life of the outside adult world we live in (the fairytale predicament).
Both Joey (the aborted fetus in First Born) and Edward Scissorhands are very sweet, far
from being the monster we first imagine them to be. In fact, Thompson had the opportunity
to wittily refute the idea that “Tim is Edward”
19
posed by Vincent Price once, an idea
repeated quite often in the press, which happens to reason that Edward is the portrait of
Tim Burton as a young artist. Thompson cautioned against such literal interpretation,
somewhat quizzically, by insisting that Edward Scissorhands is based on her deceased pet
instead, and “it’s more [like] the portrait of the artist as a young dog.”
20

Clever remark aside, we clearly observe not only horror and sci-fi narrative elements at
play in the construction of the stories above mentioned, we observe a quintessential
fairytale element: these are creatures and characters with some sort of handicap; they are
orphans; they raise in us the nurturing or maternal desire to protect and rescue them. And
this is exactly what the Avon saleswoman did when she first met Edward. Even though
Edward appeared to be tough and dangerous at first – with those massive, frightening sharp
127
scissors attached to his wrists – she realized that Edward was also sweet, which made her
feel sorry for him, and prompted her to take him home with her. The Avon lady viewed
Edward like a sweet, exotic being; and felt determined to rescue him. Similarly, and not so
strangely, Doctor Frankenstein’s son/creation is also sweet in many respects. The reader
can’t help but feel sympathy for an ugly, abnormal creature who is abandoned by his own
creator to die. This is a character who was left to fend for himself, trying to teach himself
how to speak in the woods far away from civilization and completely alone. We feel his
pain, since his fate of being such a monstrous creature is essentially the scientist’s fault:
someone who when things went wrong did not want the responsibility, or did not have the
strength, and swiftly rejected his son, his own creation.

The moral of the story – like in Hansel and Gretel
21
– is that circumstances like these are
usually the parents’ fault. The son of Dr. Frankenstein, Joey, and Edward are all left
deformed, abandoned, unfinished, and incomplete; having to survive on their own. Except
for the Grimm Brothers’ Hanzel and Gretel, these fairytale-like stories, I would like to
suggest, have all been written by women, they tell us significantly about the nurturing
instinct (or lack thereof) and about maternal/parental guilt. They serve as an example, and
disclose a Freudian lesson about a child’s wounded past. They also counterpoint with the
will of survival of their progeny, and teach us about the harsh realities of being an outsider,
a misfit, or an outcast in an adult world socially constructed as cruel and unforgiving – a far
cry from the sheltered, cocooned life of stereotypical infancy from the model family unit.

128
In Melissa Mathinson’s E.T., the child-like extraterrestrial is almost like an orphan (from
another planet), and he easily befriends all the kids in the movie. The kids feel a quick
instinctual urge to rescue and protect him, almost as if he was a pet or younger sibling of
the family. E.T. is not our ordinary, scary sci-fi alien; he belongs to the world of fairytales
and affection. Who could be afraid of E.T. in the end of the day? No one. It is more likely
that E.T. is afraid of us from the adult world: he is in a fairytale social predicament that
begs to be resolved in the mind of the viewer.

Edward Scissorhands, First Born, Frankenstein, and E.T. all have an underlining thematic
connection, and have been astonishingly powerful in capturing the audience’s imagination.
It is no wonder that there is a crossover between the formats of prose-writing, screenwriting,
and filmmaking for these fictionalized narratives. Because cinema is such a popular
medium, it is one of the most convincing thermometers to measure what type of story will
resonate with an audience in order to survive the test of time. In this manner, fairytale
stories like these are hard to beat in terms of intensity, empathy and popularity, since they
survive as metaphors throughout the years, a primary reason why they achieve such
fairytale status. Several reviewers and academics agree with the fact that Edward
Scissorhands is ultimately a fairytale. Edward Scissorhands has been constantly analyzed
and reviewed as such in print.
22
In talking about fairytales, in the case of her TV movie
Snow White,
23
Caroline Thompson emphasizes what draws her to fairytales as a writer:
“I love fairytales. To me fairy tales have a kind of mythic dimensionality that is – they tell
us about ourselves without being overly moralistic. They’re little glimpses into human
nature. It’s telling you about yourself without you knowing.” At age 44, Thompson
immediately understood the drive of the tale: fear . . . “I think little kids are born knowing
everything, and aging is a process of forgetting. I as a kid just adored the macabre elements.”
129
She still does, as evidenced by her screenplays for Edward Scissorhands, The Addams
Family, and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
24

In a film review at Time Out magazine, Colette Maude takes the stance that Edward
Scissorhands should be perceived as a fairytale. Here is her explanation of some of the
common elements from fairytales and its connection with Edward Scissorhands:
Fairy tales, the beautiful, perverse and sometimes cruel fantasies which span all cultures
and inspire all children, are fruitful territory for Freudian analysts, writers, and artists. Tim
Burton is the latest to fall under the spell, with his new film Edward Scissorhands. . . . In
his book The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim
25
gives Cinderella a Freudian twist,
saying it “guides the child from his greatest disappointments – Oedipal disillusionment,
castration anxiety, low opinion of himself because of the imagined opinion of others –
towards developing his autonomy.” . . . With his wounded face, lethal limbs and penchant
for silly hairdos, Edward Scissorhands embodies the sort of contradictions contained within
fairy tales. As [Nicholas] Tucker says: “Our dreams are a mixture of wish-fulfillment and
nightmares. Fairy tales provide children with a map of their own dream world. They give
you a spiritual geography. You learn about the demons inside yourself.”
26
(my brackets)

With the poignancy of contradictory yet complementary fairytale elements – fear and
enchantment, beauty and perversion, wish-fulfillment and nightmare, reality and dream – it
is not uncommon for several fairytale-like stories to go on to become box-office hits or
even classics, crossing-over different media paths, as Edward Scissorhands, E.T. and
Frankenstein have done. Edward Scissorhands, for instance, has been remade for the
stage,
27
and was voted by critics one of the top 100 classic films ever released.
28
In the case
of First Born (Thompson’s first novel), there were attempts by Thompson herself and
others to adapt the book to the screen.
29
If that did not succeed yet, it at least generated a
screenplay version of First Born, as well as enough interest to eventually give Thompson
an opportunity to write Edward Scissorhands (her first screenplay to become a movie).
30

130
It would not be far-fetched to say that the bigger picture of these stories encapsulate the
allegorical “feeling of being an outsider”
31
as written in some fairytales; or the feeling of
being “in disproportion to the world,”
32
which informs most of Thompson’s characters in
her own words. As Thompson remarks, in comparing Edward Scissorhands to First Born
in her interview to Joel Engel, “I’ve always been drawn to stories of outsiders and isolation.
Black Beauty also fits that, but the one in First Born is the strongest.”
33
Even though
Thompson says that she “wasn’t particularly an outsider as a kid [and that she] didn’t have
any real problems,”
34
one can’t help but wonder where does she draw her creative energy
from, and why these archetypes and allegories keep recurring in her work.

In a more explicit way, I would like to argue Edward Scissorhands is a fairytale of social
castration, acting to fulfill a social function of marginalization sentience and self-aware-
ness. An unintended correlation to Thompson’s gender can be elicited in that she might
experience herself as an outsider artist, to a certain extent, thus castrated and limited on her
own bargaining social power – for being a woman and a writer – which transpires to the
psychology makeup of her characters. She says, “having grown up in suburbia,
35
I
immediately realized that [Burton’s high school drawing of Edward Scissorhands] was an
obvious metaphor for being an outsider. Edward can’t even touch anything; he destroys
everything he touches. It brought up [that] feeling of childhood of not belonging.”
36

Children often feel cut-off from experiences they are not allowed to participate in the adult
world, yet they have to prepare for those experiences exactly during childhood.

131
When their agent decided Burton and Thompson “were weird,” and “didn’t know what to
do with either” of them, they were introduced, “got along immediately [and] wanted to
work together.”
37
Tim Burton kept a drawing from high school of a character that inspired
Edward Scissorhands, which he has always wanted to make a movie about, but had no idea
how.
38
His initial impulse was to make it as a musical, so that the “unreality”
39
of Edward’s
character would seem less questionable to the studios, but Burton had no story in mind.
40

Thompson started the screenplay as a musical, per Burton’s request, but her text ended up
with so much dialogue that Burton eventually liked the script just the way it was.
41

In other words, Thompson came up with the characterization and plot for Edward
Scissorhands,
42
went against Burton’s wishes by transforming the screenplay from a
musical to a standard theatrical narrative, and eventually wrote the whole screenplay in
approximately four weeks.
43
In “Scripting Fantasies,”
44
Mike Lyons investigates the
writing process of screenwriters, several of which have written films for directors, but
never elicit the same type of appreciation from the audience or critics as authors or creators.
Lyons succinctly describes how Thompson based her screenplay on Tim Burton’s drawing:
Caroline Thompson has also been fortunate to share a kindred relationship with another
great genre director, Tim Burton. After adapting her novel First Born, Thompson
fortuitously found herself at the same agency that represented Burton. “Quite honestly, they
didn't know what to do with either of us,” she laughed. “He had just made Pee-Wee’s Big
Adventure, and I had just done this strange screenplay.” Once they were introduced, Burton
and Thompson became fast friends. They then began bouncing ideas off of one another and
Burton told Thompson about this drawing he had done in high school, that he had expanded
into an idea for a film. “I never even saw the drawing,” recalled Thompson, “but Tim just
said, ‘Well, its a picture of a guy who's got scissors instead of hands,’ I said, ‘Stop. That's
it.’ It was one of those miraculous things where the story came to me in a flash.”
45

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We should keep in mind that Edward Scissorhands as a film is, in countless ways, notably
Thompson’s creation, because it was a product of her mind. She created a whole screenplay
out of a drawing that in reality she has not even seen, as the above quote points out. Some
places mention she has seen the drawing, and others that she hasn’t. Regardless of whether
Thompson has actually seen the drawing or not, ahead of time, at the end of the day the
truth is that Tim Burton fancied his drawing for years, without developing a narrative for it,
so a story never existed as far as Burton was concerned. The script comes first. A story not
registered on the page might exist in the mind, but that is something difficult to prove, and
much more relative than a specific, detailed story flashed out in writing. A similar process
happened with Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Thompson recounts that for Nightmare
Before Christmas,
46
Burton had invested a good deal of money, time and resources (an
entire animation facility was built in San Francisco),
47
had one screenwriter write lyrics for
the musical, but after years Burton still had no screenplay, so the project was stalled.
Finally, Burton invited Thompson and she wrote the script in less than a month. She
thoroughly changed the character of the girl (Sally), gave her something to do, and while
Jack’s story was told in songs, Sally’s story was told as theatrical narrative, which made
her character stronger and more memorable than Jack’s.
48

Sally’s character as a rag-doll, as well as Edward Scissorhands as a teen with a mechanical
splicing disability, are virtually interchangeable character archetypes, whose strengths lie in
picking up their pieces and putting themselves back together in order to survive. This
metaphor of the outsider managing to cope within the challenging boundaries of their world,
connects with the idea of a fairytale of social castration, where a character learns as much
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about themselves as about their surroundings. Their inner castration complex gets
manifested and visible through a social metaphor of outward marginalization, which leads
to the need to preserve and safeguard themselves. Therefore, without Thompson, the
characters in Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands might have never
come to exist on film. Both attempts could have remained unfinished projects.

For the sake of the argument about writing and authorship, we should question then how
much Tim Burton as a director really contributed to the overall structure and conception of
Edward Scissorhands (as well as his other films), other than its high-end personal and
visual aesthetics. Who should be entitled as the intellectual and imaginative creator of a
movie after all? In other words, the writer/architect (i.e. the screenwriter) or the visual
decorator/executor (i.e. the director)? Although this might sound as a loaded question at
first, it is one that deserves more examining. No doubt Burton is one of the most visually
unique directors working in cinema today, someone any screenwriter would be thrilled to
work with. Tim Burton created a recognizable look and aesthetics that not only brings forth
his personality, it can make any of his films recognizable within barely a few frames. We
can even talk in terms of a Burtonesque style, like a painting. But someone got displaced in
this process, castrated out of the picture so to speak, without an invitation to the authorship
glory – as if Burton’s images have written themselves onto the screen with a magic hand.

This invisible creator left out of the bigger picture is the screenwriter Thompson. Tim
Burton “painted” and gave his own “twist” to a printed narrative of images painstakingly
created inside someone else’s head, the screenwriter’s. The screenwriter was the one to set
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the tone, the images, and the world of the story. This is not a matter of talent or merit – Tim
Burton is obviously a remarkable director who also happens to be an inventive and skillful
animator and artist – this is a matter of who is the actual intellectual and imaginative
creator who imagined and recorded a whole set of characters and a course of action in its
most interconnected detail first. Visually, Burton is comparable to a director like David
Lynch, for instance; and Edward Scissorhands has been compared to David Lynch’s
feature debut Eraserhead,
49
as previously mentioned in this chapter.

But we shouldn’t forget that Lynch writes his own movies, therefore he is a true auteur. A
David Lynch film is a David Lynch film, period and end of story. However, for the
majority of directors working within the studio system in the United States, or even
internationally, we witness a completely different scenario. Most of the time, there is
someone scripting their fantasies for the screen. The director comes in midpoint to finish
the job written by somebody else. Tim Burton didn’t direct his own screenplay, he directed
Thompson’s – and because of that he will never be the film’s indisputable author, no matter
what belief system we hold about who the author of a film is. In an interview to Robert
Olague, Thompson explains in more detail how the story of Edward Scissorhands came to
fruition, presenting more clarification about the authorship process of her screenplay:
Robert: On the front page of Edward Scissorhands, there is indication of collaboration
where it says story by Caroline Thompson and Tim Burton. Was there a split credit once it
went into production?
Caroline: Yes. There was a separate credit. It said story by the two of us and then
screenplay by me. The image was his, so I felt that I certainly owned him a shared story
credit.
Robert: Did Tim Burton write any of the script? If so, what percentage did you write?
Caroline: I wrote the whole thing.
Robert: What percentage of the original screenplay of Edwards Scissorhands was changed
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by the time it got into final production?
Caroline: None, as I was with the project from day one.
Robert: Did Edwards Scissorhands go through any studio readers for professional coverage
or collaboration?
Caroline: Edwards Scissorhands was a unique situation to the extent that when Tim Burton
went to make the deal for it at 20th Century Fox, we both took very little money up front
relative to what we could've made at the time in order to have a very short turnaround and
to have a maximum of creative control. We never developed it within the studio system.
We developed it completely between ourselves. I never had a story meeting on it with any
studio executive, or any coverage. But this was a completely unique situation based on the
president of production at that time knowing that Tim Burton was going to deliver, because
of the success of Pee Wee's Big Adventure. To some extent, the president of production was
taking a gamble, but he was very smart and intelligent about what he had in front of him. I
don't think Edwards Scissorhands could have survived a studio development or coverage
because they would have never believed that an audience would have gone with it. We
were very smart to set it up the way we did, and when I turned in the script, the studio had
only a month to decide to give it a “go ahead,” not just to proceed with the script, but to
actually make the film.
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Caroline Thompson wrote the entire screenplay of Edward Scissorhands. Tim Burton had
his drawing as a teen, but he did not write any of it. The screenplay suffered no studio
reader coverage, no collaboration by other screenwriters, and no studio notes or changes.
Not even director changes, as explained earlier in this chapter. In fact, Burton liked the
screenplay so much that he virtually shot a first draft.
51
Thompson’s screenplay went from
the page to the screen practically unchanged.

That is unusual, and it was made possible because of a studio-deal Burton had negotiated
ahead of time, as the above quote illustrates, which afforded the screenplay ample freedom
to be itself and exist on its own. As Thompson humorously said, “Scott Rudin, then head of
production at Fox, was after Tim to do something. He would have made a deal to do the
phone book with Tim.”
52
Because Burton wanted creative control, the deal was that as soon
as the script was delivered to the studio, the studio would pay considerably less for the
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whole project, but they would have to take it or leave it as it came already developed and
pre-packaged.

This also made sure that Thompson’s screenplay (development) was a unique creation not
touched by anybody else. In this regard, Burton’s need for creative control meant that his
own creative control was extended to Thompson. As a pair, they only needed a script to
initiate the whole process. Note, however, that without a screenplay there would be no deal,
no matter how famous Tim Burton was at the time. Even after Batman,
53
Tim Burton by
himself and himself alone would not cut, since he is not a writer. The studio needed to see a
complete screenplay in order to consider financially backing the film.

In researching the relationship between Burton and Thompson, several times there have
been allusions to Burton’s cryptic and non-verbal way of communicating (the artist), and to
Thompson’s easy proficiency and dialogue skills (the writer), which made for a good
match between director and screenwriter: as if they were balancing each other out. In a way,
it almost seems as if Burton felt relieved that Thompson was be able to tune in to his mind,
as she was capable to translate his partial inarticulateness and feelings into a complete
packaged script with a life of its own, “breathing,” and ready to be shot. This is an analogy,
of course, but here is what Burton, Thompson, and others have mentioned about this issue:

Tim Burton on Caroline Thompson:
I had read her book, First Born, which was about an abortion that came back to life. It was
good. It had sociological things that were thematic, but also had fantastical elements to it,
which was nice, and the combination of those things I liked. It was close to the feeling I
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wanted for Edward Scissorhands. I’m not the most communicative of people, especially
when an idea comes from a feeling, so I was lucky to meet Caroline. She was very in tune
with my ideas, which was good because the idea had been inside me for a long time, it was
symbolic and not something I wanted to sit there and pick apart and analyze. I needed
somebody who understood what the basic thing was about, so there wouldn’t have to be a
lot of grade school psychology going on in terms of discussing the project. I could be very
cryptic and still come across to her. I paid Caroline a few thousand dollars to write it, so
there was no studio involved. That was good. Sometimes you just like to get it out. We
submitted it to the studios as a package. It was like, “Okay, this is the script. This is the
movie. Do you guys wanna do it?”
54

A journalist on Tim Burton and Caroline Thompson:
Burton often slips into these half sentences and allows his words to stray off like that. His
thoughts seem to come racing to his tongue, tripping over each other before they can get
out. Yet, for some strange reason, it’s always clear what he’s trying to say. As writer
Thompson put it: “He’s the most articulate non-verbal person I know.”
55

Caroline Thompson on Tim Burton:
Interviewer: Here’s one of the questions the magazine editors asked me to ask you: “What
is it like working with Tim Burton?”
Thompson: Working with Tim Burton is like a psychic experience – Tim waves his hands
and says, “I don’t know” and you go home and do it. He’s the most articulate nonverbal
person in the world. He doesn’t say a word and you know exactly what it means. . . .
Interviewer: I remember when you called from Florida when they were shooting Edward
and you said –
Thompson: – I said that I loved it! I mean, I loved being there and I loved being welcome
there. Tim left me alone to write the script I wanted to write, and I left him alone to direct
the movie he wanted to direct. That’s the way it is with Tim and me and I completely
respect him and he made a beautiful movie and I loved it. . . .
Interviewer: So obviously you and Tim get along really well, it sounds like you’ll be
working together for the next 50 years.
Thompson: Tim and I know each other so well, we can communicate with no language, so
working together really works for us. I mean, people read things how they read them, and
they don’t always get it. My best experiences have been with people who get it, like Tim,
and also with Penelope Spheeris.
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(my italics)

I have shown plenty of evidence in this chapter that in the case of Edward Scissorhands,
because there are no other writers involved, that Caroline Thompson is the sole author, at
least in terms of the screenplay. We have also questioned how much a director is truly
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responsible, or not responsible, for the authorship of a film when they did not also write
that film. Like in theatre, the author has always been the writer (the playwright), not the
director, so our belief system about authorship in cinema might be a historical anomaly in
this regard. While directors change overtime in the theatre (through generations and
historical cycles), the written plays remain essentially the same (or as close to the original
as possible) with only one main author to be remembered: the playwright.

In the case of Tim Burton – while he is responsible for the aesthetic part of Edward
Scissorhands, and his images will forever be imprinted in our minds upon watching the
film, in other words, we tend to literally associate images with the director in cinema – Tim
Burton is not responsible for “creating” or “imagining” those images. This is a crucial point.
Those images were formed as a coherent intellectual narrative inside the mind of the
screenwriter first, in this case, a Caroline Thompson’s imprint.

Screenwriters as storytellers also speak in images, the only difference is that they are
written. While screenwriters express themselves and make sense of the world of a story by
typing, writing and imagining from inside their heads (they create images); directors are
second in line. They “read” images already created and written, in order to capture them as
their own on film.

In many ways, film directors are channeling somebody else’s mind with their vision. But
that is still channeling. Sometimes the writer and the director are the same, so these are true
auteurs in the true sense of the word. Most of time, however, there is a division of labor in
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the making of cinema, so that the writer and the director are not the same person. In that
case, I strongly argue that the director cannot possibly be the author, much less an auteur,
since being the author means being the creator, and one cannot create something that was
already created and written by somebody else. The director can be a virtuoso and an artist,
yes, but not the intellectual and imaginative creator – unless they are the same person. A
story has a life of its own – some kind of life with a beginning, middle and end – and that is
not the invention or the register of a director, that is the register of the writer – or even of a
group of writers as the case may be often times.

Much like a fairytale that survives the test of time – say Hansel and Gretel
57
– in which the
characters and plot remain an essential solid unit alongside some historical reinterpretation,
what really changes overtime are the recorded visual aspects of the fairytale (the artistic
side and the artists so to speak). But the story remains the same in its essence. In the case of
Edward Scissorhands, Caroline Thompson managed to create a fairytale about an outsider
with a bittersweet ending. An ending that is sweet (Edward survives making snow in the
end of the movie), but an ending that also remained forever frozen in time and does not
really resolve Edward’s predicament.

Edward is not assimilated by the small suburban town depicted in the movie, and he does
not get the girl. He survives, but he survives socially castrated from everybody else, in a
state of sublimation, still in love with a woman and a world he cannot belong to. Thus the
bittersweet ending.

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In terms of authorship, we should also pay attention to the issue of analyzing screenplays
written by women that have been directed by men. This is the most opportune example,
since it offers us with a fertile ground of stylistic and thematic tracing in terms of origins
and voice. In other words, many times we think of a movie as being “by” a certain male
director, while it has been written by a female screenwriter instead. If that movie has had
only one female screenwriter behind it (an ideal case scenario), we then are able to see and
trace how her mind and inner self was the one really behind that movie, not the mind of the
director. She is creating the story, in many respects. This opens up a window of creative
analysis, a tool rarely used when establishing the relationship between film and director
and screenwriter. In the case of Edward Scissorhands, its world is blithely told in such a
domestic way that is it is hard to believe that Tim Burton, as a male director, would have
come up with such a story the way it was told. Sure, in a parallel universe in which Tim
Burton was also a writer, it could be possible, yet unlikely.

This is stylistically Caroline Thompson’s creation, and it is all in the fine print. First Born,
the novel and screenplay written by Thompson, right before Edward Scissorhands, was
also a “domestic” story told in “diary” format from a “home-based” point-of-view. At
center stage, the protagonists and characters in these two stories are always at home, going
away from home, doing something from home, or returning back home. The pleasures of
home life and the yearning for domestic bliss are part of their personality as much as what
they need in order to thrive.

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Edward Scissorhands even works from home: he works in the garden, or doing his
neighbors’ hair and trimming pets. He is unable to get work outside of the home, since he
doesn’t have social security or credit established.
58
He is marginalized to the home sphere
because of his isolated upbringing, thus he is in serious need to be schooled before he is
ready to go out in the real world. Socially castrated as a grown up, he is the only one in the
movie who doesn’t have access to the world outside of the home.

There is a funny scene in which the Bogg’s family father, Bill, says Edward should not
accept getting paid in cookies anymore. They are all having dinner together, and Kim’s
boyfriend, Jim, wants his parents to buy him a car because they are rich, but Bill says that
maybe they want Jim to pay for the car himself, “it builds character.” Then Bill turns to
Edward, and comments that Edward is not charging for his gardening. Peg, Bill’s wife,
replies cheerfully that a neighbor made cookies for Edward today; to which Bill snorts
dismissively, “You can’t use cookies to buy yourself the necessities of this life. You can’t
buy a car with cookies, can you, Jim?”
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This cookie scene works in a satirical level, yet it
gives away the domestic tone of Edward Scissorhands. As I tried to explain, this plot and
dialogue, plus the style, could only have been written by Thompson.

All the nuances examined in this section give Thompson’s screenplay a unique,
authoritative and identifiable voice that shaped Edward Scissorhands as a movie, and they
will be examined in more detail in the next section dealing with the analysis of her
screenplay.

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SCREENPLAY ANALYSIS

The screenplay of Edward Scissorhands is unpublished as of the time of writing of this
dissertation. It is available for reading at the Scripts Collection of the Margaret Herrick
library in Beverly Hills, California. Because most film screenplays produced exist as
unpublished manuscripts, they are archived as rare
60
material at the Scripts Collection and
elsewhere. Also, they are considered rare because very few libraries in the world house
physical copies of screenplays. There are two screenplay drafts available of Edward
Scissorhands at the Margaret Herrick library, one from 1989,
61
and another one from
1990.
62
These two versions are extremely similar to one another, both are revised drafts,
and they are very close in date (about two months apart). After examining both drafts, I
decided to analyze the second most updated version of 1990,
63
which has the 20
th
Century
Fox logo on the title page, it resembles a final draft, and it must also have been the one
submitted to the studio.

We should keep in mind that the theatrical release date of the film
Edward Scissorhands in the United States was December 19, 1990.
64
The screenplay
analyzed in this chapter is a revised version from February 22, 1990,
65
according to the title
page, and it contains a last revision added on June 27, 1990.
66
This screenplay version is
very close to the actual release date of the film Edward Scissorhands, so this is the most
updated version accessible at present.

As argued earlier in this chapter, the screenplay of Edward Scissorhands is organized and
structured as a fairytale. It has a cyclical format by beginning the way it ends, with a
conclusion frozen in time that does not resolve Edward’s problem, yet elevates the story to
143
a fantasy realm typical of fairytales. The metaphor stays hanging in the air. This cyclicality
that does not obey the rules of physical time, established at the beginning and end of the
screenplay, allows Edward to be portrayed as someone almost human, a fantastical, make-
believe being, someone we can identify with and learn from, yet someone who is altogether
different from us from the audience. The beginning of the story starts with a question being
asked by a little girl to her grandmother. This question will be fully answered only at the
end of the story, but it functions as hook to jumpstart the movie and to introduce our
protagonist, Edward.

The little girl asks her grandmother, “Why is it snowing, grandma? Where does it come
from?” to which her grandmother replies, “Let’s see, it would have to start with scissors.”
The little girl is gripped:
GRANDDAUGHTER
Scissors?

OLD WOMAN
There are all kinds of scissors. And, once, there was even a man
who had scissors instead of hands.

GRANDDAUGHTER
A man?

OLD WOMAN
Yes.

GRANDDAUGHTER
Hand scissors?

OLD WOMAN
No. Scissor hands. Do you know the old mansion on top of the
mountain?

GRANDDAUGHTER
It’s haunted.
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OLD WOMAN
A long time ago, an inventor lived in that mansion…

As the old woman speaks, we MOVE OUT THE WINDOW.

OLD WOMAN (O.S.)
He made a lot of things, I suppose. He also made the man. He gave
him insides, heart, brain, everything. Nobody knows how, but he
did it. He’d just finished covering him over with a delicate plastic
that was exactly like skin. He only had the hands to go when…

GRANDDAUGHTER (O.S.)
When what?

We glide through the snowfall over the rooftops of the town and UP THE MOUNTAIN
toward the MANSION on the peak.

OLD WOMAN (O.S.)
When he died. What the inventor should’ve invented was a new
heart for himself…

GRANDAUGHTER (O.S.)
Couldn’t anybody help him?

OLD WOMAN (O.S.)
No one down here in town knew a thing about it. He was all alone.

As we get closer to the mansion, the snow stops.

GRANDDAUGHTER (full of pity)
He didn’t even have a name.

OLD WOMAN (O.S.)
Of course he did. His name was Edward.
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This scene plays from an interior shot inside the little girl’s bedroom at night, at bedtime,
while her window shows that it is snowing outside. From her window, we can also see
Edward’s gothic mansion – as written in the above quoted line from the screenplay: “we
glide through the snowfall over the rooftops of the town and up the mountain toward the
mansion on the peak.”
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This moving-camera point-of-view sentence re-establishes the
mansion seen previously in the title sequence as unequivocally Edward’s, as experienced
145
by the little girl and her grandmother. Its filming occurs in the film exactly as it was written
on the page. The camera “flies” in a “bird view,” as we listen off-screen to the conversation
continuing between the grandmother and her granddaughter. The camera ends at the
mansion on top of a mountain (blue lit like a castle at night), and the dialogue also ends
there at the mansion. Then the scene morphs into Edward at night looking at the city from
inside of his mansion (already established) – his story being told in a past timeline, as we
will soon realize. This bird-view camera “trick” adds magic and atmosphere to the film,
since it does not use realistic style filmmaking. Note however, that this trick was already
established in the screenplay in that one single sentence.

The film’s DNA is already there so to speak, despite Tim Burton’s beautiful images. All
the basic elements of the story were succinctly dealt with. The gothic mansion, the question
“where does snow come from,” and the “scissors” answer, are all vital introductory
elements for the understanding of who Edward is, as it is written in this first establishing
scene. We also learn that Edward was all alone there, and that his father,
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the inventor, had
died right before he was going to give Edward a pair of hands, leaving him stranded with
scissors instead. Basically, the whole screenplay has been set-up and framed in this brief
expositional scene.

At the end of the scene, the screenplay and the camera “cut to” to an entirely different
sequence. Consequently, the screenplay establishes two parallel timelines: one as the
present-time with the little girl and her grandmother, and the other one as the past, with the
grandmother explaining who Edward Scissorhands really was through a flashback. This
146
formatting decision on the part of the screenwriter Caroline Thompson is brilliant in that it
resembles how fairytales are told in real life. Therefore, the next scene literally transports
itself from one timeline to another, like in fairytale storytelling, where an adult tells a story
to a child, and we as the audience identify with the child listening to a story being told by
an adult. Suspension of disbelief is instituted, and we adopt the viewing position of the
little girl who literally starts “watching” the movie unfold as being told by her grandmother.
She starts imagining and having glimpses of what Edward looks like, and everything else
that happens. We get transported to another time; a timeline of the past, we get transported
to the world of Edward Scissorhands:
(2) EXT. MANSION ON MOUNTAIN. JUST BEFORE DAWN.

From his high vantage point, the LIGHTS of the town far below twinkle tantalizingly,
bedazzling as jewels.

A DARK SILHOUETTE keeps watch over them from one of the mansion’s ramshackle
upper windows, a casement window nearly the height of a French door. The silhouette is
visible from his head nearly to his toes. The curtains billow and swirl around him.

(3) In a moment, the first lights come on in the houses. More lights accompany the
breaking of dawn itself. Even as it grows bright, the figure gazes steadily. He doesn’t move
or fidget. His attention never strays. He looks on longingly. This is the man the old woman
has been describing. This is EDWARD SCISSORHANDS.

CUT TO:
(4) EXT. TOWN. MORNING.

What looked so romantic from Edward’s vantage point reveals itself in all its actual
banality. The streets form a dull, undeviating grid. Rows of sagging trees have been planted
at exact intervals. The houses are unimaginative variations on the same efficient tract house
design. The people hardly add life to the scene. We pass house after house and see little
activity.
70

Unlike the first scene, the above sequence of scenes has no dialogue (something quite
common in screenplays), and it introduces the world of Edward Scissorhands as it should
147
be “seen” by the audience. We grasp here the intrinsic pictorial format of a screenplay. We
get to understand that a screenwriter creates not only dialogue, but a garland of images the
way it should be watched in a movie. The director is not necessarily the creator of those
images, as I strongly argued before, what he does is to paint within the lines. The director
most often than not reads and interprets images with his own vision of what he has “seen”
pre-fabricated on paper. A film screenplay is much more image-ridden than a play, for
instance, and this visuality is crucial to our understanding of screenplays. We tend to think
screenwriters write mostly dialogue, while the director creates the look of the film. That
couldn’t be further from the truth, as the above scene illustrates. A screenplay is not only
dialogue (that is called a transcript), a screenplay is about the images, the dialogue, and
even the atmosphere of the story. It is whole.

This unleashing of the fairytale atmosphere of the story is achieved, as explained before,
through a cut between timelines – the real time of the present and the fantastic time of the
past – intertwined to each other through the narrator of the grandmother. Usually fairytales
start with the pronouncement “once upon a time.” In Edward Scsissorhands, the “once
upon a time” fantasy is effected with the basic configuration of an adult telling a story to a
child, and by the way Edward “looks on longingly”
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into a world he does not belong to.
There is an obvious split of two worlds. This split is very simple and straightforward to the
eye, so when we get to the end, we completely understand what happened to Edward and
the grandmother, since that has already been set-up and visualized in the first establishing
scene. This way the audience is able to experience the cyclical nature of the narrative. We
realize for the first time, at the very end of the movie, that the grandmother who was telling
148
the story of Edward Scissorhands is actually Kim – who has aged through the years. She
knows Edward better than anybody else and now we understand why:
(208) INT. LITTLE GIRL’S BEDROOM. NIGHT.

The old woman’s voice fades in.

GRANDMOTHER
She never saw him again. Not after that night.

GRANDDAUGHTER
How do you know?

The woman turns to give the little girl a look. Her face catches the light and, for the first
time, we can see her clearly. We recognize her. It’s Kim.

GRANDMOTHER
Because I was there.
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Towards the end of the script (scene 208), the grandmother is revealed to be Kim. The
audience is able to witness their faces as being of the same person, and realizes that she
was actually reminiscing about something lost in her past. After losing Edward, Kim most
likely got married, had children and grandchildren, that’s why she referred to herself as
“she” instead of “I,” and in the past tense as her dialogue line demonstrates: “She never
saw him again. Not after that night.” She was the person she was referring to in her story,
but her granddaughter is not altogether sure what really happened. Yet, we from the
audience share in her secret. The little girl continues probing her grandmother, suggesting
that Kim should try to see for herself if Edward is still alive in the mansion:
OLD WOMAN (V.O.)
No honey I don’t. I’m an old woman now. I’d rather have him
remember me the way I was…

(210) INSIDE THE MANSION

149
Edward climbs the staircase. He hasn’t changed at all during the long passage of time that
has turned Kim into an old woman. He looks exactly the same.

GRANDDAUGHTER (V.O.)
How do you know he’s still alive?

OLD WOMAN (V.O.)
I don’t know, I am not sure, but I believe he is…

(211) IN THE LITTLE GIRL’S BEDROOM.

She gazes out the window. It is snowing even more heavily than before. She opens the
window and puts out her hand. She catches a palm full of the shimmering snowflakes.

OLD WOMAN
You see, before he came down here, it never snowed, but
afterwards it did. If he weren’t up there, I don’t think it would be
snowing now.
(grins)
Some nights you can still catch me dancing in the stuff.

We move OUT the window , BEYOND the neighborhood, and UP the mountain TO the
mansion.

(212) OUT OF THE TOP FLOOR WINDOWS pours a stream of tiny snowflakes – this is
indeed the source of the snowfall. We follow the swirling snow into

(213) A HUGE DANK ROOM, ATTIC

Past several elaborate ice sculptures – cars, chairs, couches, the familiar objects of
suburban life.

Scissor hands, quickly and deftly, almost maniacally, chip away at a block of ice. Edward
shapes the figure of a girl. We recognize it is Kim as she looked when he knew her.
Shinning brilliantly, the snowflakes fly off his blades. They swirl out the windows.

(214) DOWN BELOW.

The town is being covered in the fresh blanket of snow.
73

This is the end of the screenplay, and even though Edward remained marginalized and
ostracized from everybody else, which makes the spectator ultimately sad for him, the story
spins around and delivers itself as a fairytale, with Edward elevated to the subliminal level
of time halted. He, as the protagonist, remains forever young, and brings snow and
150
amazement to the people in town. We can feel that he still loves Kim and the very same
town that ostracized him, and he is able to remain emotionally attached to them through his
work. However, in this case, we also perceive that Edward’s story is not only a fairytale,
but an outsider fairytale more precisely. Edward is depicted as the symbol of the outsider,
both longing and accepting his loss at being part of a world that has marginalized him at
birth. At one point in the screenplay, Joyce, the married woman who wants to sleep with
Edward (and ultimately turns against him), says, “Who’s handicapped? My goodness, don’t
be ridiculous. You’re not handicapped, you’re…what do they call it? Exceptional.”
74

However charming, handsome, and alluring to some women, or even sexy, Edward is still
the socially castrated outsider. He is perceived as handicapped. He doesn’t know exactly
where he fits in. He is also the artist – and he might stand in for the role of the excluded
writer (or female screenwriters in this case) – his artistic performance defines the only
positive side of his secluded existence. Edward exists secluded by his physical appearance
(whether alone or with people around him), and he feels incomplete. He feels different
from everybody else. He dreams of being “repaired” so that he can be “normal” one day;
which of course, does not come easily for him. In an interview for television, Edward
demonstrates his self-consciousness and discomfort about being so different, even when
people in the audience, like Joyce, insist that he is very special indeed, and interesting. His
embarrassment is evident at the end of the scene:
(100) INT. TELEVISION STUDIO. DAY.

Edward sits on the raised stage with the affable HOST of the local daytime talk show. He
wears the make-up Peg has devised for him – very thick, unnaturally white. He certainly
looks less scarred, but he also looks stranger. With him are a plant he’s trimmed, a dog he’s
151
groomed, and Peg – as an example of his hair styling skills. He fields questions from the
packed audience, mostly middle-aged women.

YOUNG WOMAN IN AUDIENCE
How old are you?

HOST
Now there’s a question most people hate to answer.

EDWARD
Seven.

The audience chortles uncomfortably.

OLDER WOMAN
What’s been the best part of your life here in town?

EDWARD
(with a glance at Peg)
The friends I’ve made.

The audience warmly oohs and aahs.

RED-HAIRED WOMAN
Have you considered corrective surgery or prosthetics? I know a
doctor who I think can help you.

EDWARD
Really? I’d like to meet him.

HOST
Will you give us the name after the show?

The woman nods and takes her seat again.

TEENAGE GIRL
But if you had regular hands, you’d be like everyone else.

EDWARD
(smiles wistfully)
Yes.

Peg tenderly pats him on the back. The audience oohs and aahs. He has won their hearts.

TEENAGE GIRL
But then nobody would think you were special. You wouldn’t be
on t.v. or anything.

PEG
152
No matter what, Edward will always be special.

The audience applauds. It makes Edward feel shy, but he maintains his poise.

RICH WOMAN
Your work is so interesting, so distinctive, so unique. I wonder if
you have plans to open your own beauty salon.

HOST
Hey, Edward, how ‘bout’ it?

The audience cheers. Peg nods in hearty agreement.

BLONDE IN T.V. AUDIENCE
Do you have a girlfriend?

Embarrassed, Edward looks away, straight into the camera.
CUT TO:

(101) INT. BOGGS’ FAMILY ROOM. SAME TIME.

Kim, sitting on the couch with Jim and Kevin, looks back, directly into Edward’s face on
the t.v. screen. It is as if they actually make eye contact. Jim playfully pokes her.

JIM
Sure he does. Right, Kim?

She bats him away. She doesn’t like this teasing and makes a face.

KIM
Gross…

KEVIN
(imitates Jim)
Right, Kim? Huh? Huh?

KIM
Terrific. Now you’ve gotten him started.

Jim lightly swats Kevin.

JIM
Knock it off, bubble butt.

KEVIN
But you did.

JIM
So?
153

(102) ON THE TELEVISION

Edward shyly wiggles in his chair. He hasn’t answered the question.

HOST
Go on, Edward. You can tell us. Is there someone special?

Edward stammers. His hands fly out nervously, catching the microphone cord attached to
the lapel – which accidentally snips in two.

The audience gasps.

His metal fingers glow. His hair stands on end. He is raised off his seat and jolted as the
shock runs through him.
75

In this scene, we see that Edward actually wants to be like everybody else. He wants Kim’s
heart. When the teenage girl in the audience remarks, “But if you had regular hands, you’d
be like everyone else,” Edward daydreams wistfully, “yes.” He longs to find a doctor who
would perform some kind of surgery on him to remove the scissors and give him hands
instead, which would make him feel normal once and for all. That never happens, though,
so it is Edward’s destiny and a burden to be that way forever. He will eventually get chased
out of town because the way he looks, and that’s the seriousness of it all, as we know will
happen later in the story. It seems that the simple mention of Kim’s name makes Edward
uneasy, since he feels he is not enough for her.

Kim and Edward come from two different worlds, and Edward is an introvert and a
beginner, he doesn’t know how to navigate the adult world yet. In many ways, he is almost
like a baby who was just born, trying to learn what he can and what he cannot do with
himself and others. When someone in the audience asks how old is Edward, and he answers
“seven,” Thompson writes that “the audience chortles uncomfortably.” In her essay “All
154
Too Human,” Julie Clarke notes about Edward that “no matter how capable, he is treated as
someone less than competent.”
76
Clarke observes that “Edward’s inability to socialize or to
touch another human being, and his exceptional abilities in one particular area, echo the
symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome.”
77
She explains that “often, individuals with
Asperger's Syndrome desire social interaction, but are unable to perform socially due to
this deficit in interpreting subtle and unwritten social rules.''
78
Psychiatric treatment tries to
bring Aperger’s Syndrome patients to the realm of the “normal” as much as possible. In
Edward’s case, nonetheless, it is not psychiatry what is used to teach and mold him to the
norm, it is domesticity.

This way, throughout the screenplay, Edward is portrayed as linked to some sort of
household situation or domestic scenario. He tries to eat, cook, cut hair, trim hedges, trim
pet’s hair, and break into a home just to please Kim. Despite his sharp and dangerous
scissor hands, Edward’s lack of virility was alleged one of the reasons Tom Cruise rejected
the role, which ended with Johnny Depp.
79
Edward Scissorhands is a domestic story told in
detail with make-up in the living room, in the bathroom mirror, in the yard, in the school
“show and tell,” in the neighborhood barbecue, and in the hair salon. We follow Edward
being highly artistic, yet he is unable to adapt to everyday life, because of his scissor hands.
In many ways, Edward’s domesticity and lack of macho bravado gives him a hard time
when it comes to blend in with the adult world he needs to learn from.

In other words, Edward is marginalized because he is so different. We can almost feel his
frustration as he tries to break out of his shell. His character might stand to represent
155
Caroline Thompson in the role of a woman screenwriter who resides at the center of the
action, yet as a screenwriter, she needs to remain at the shadow of the director. They co-
exist, yet they are detached. There is an echo between the two, a dualistic correspondence
and struggle between the ones who hold the power and the ones at its shadow. Edward is
the archetypical outsider at the shadow of power, as in this scene:
(136) INSIDE THE ENTERTAINMENT ROOM.

Bolts that had shot across the door retract. Calmly obeying, Edward goes to the door and…

(137) OUTSIDE.

He is blinded by spotlights. The neighbors murmur – they recognize Edward.

OFFICER ALLEN
Your hands up!

Edward obeys.

ANOTHER POLICEMAN
He’s got something in his hands, looks like knives.

OFFICER ALLEN
Drop your weapons.

Edward squints, still blinded, and edges forward.

OFFICER ALLEN
I repeat, drop your weapons.

The neighbors gasp.

OFFICER ALLEN
I’m going to ask you just one more time. This is your last warning.
Drop your weapons. If you fail to do so, we will have to open fire.
Don’t make us do that, buddy. Drop them. Now.

Confused, Edward doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He looks around to make sure the
guy is talking to him. He has no weapons.

OFFICER ALLEN
(lowers the megaphone)
Looks like we got a psycho. I warned him. Prepare to fire.

156
The cops cock their guns.

BYSTANDERS
(surge forward)
No-o-o-o!!!

Startled, the cops pivot and aim their guns at the crowd.

MARGE
(arrives out of breath)
Don’t shoot! Those are his hands. Those aren’t knives! They’re his
hands!

OFFICER ALLEN
What? Are you drunk, lady?

ANOTHER POLICEMAN
She’s right… He’s famous. I saw him on the news.

OFFICER ALLEN
You sure?

The other cop nods. Officer Allen sends two OTHER OFFICERS to approach, hand-cuff,
and frisk Edward. They drag him forward.

Officer Allen recites his rights.
CUT TO:

(138) INT. VAN. A LITTLE LATER.

Kim is crying. The other kids are drawn, afraid, pissed at her for making them feel guilty.

CUT TO:
(139) INT. POLICE INTERROGATION ROOM. LATER THAT NIGHT.

Peg and Bill are escorted into the bare room where Edward is being detained. Both are
fraught, especially Peg. She clutches to Bill as if for dear life.

PEG
I blame myself…

EDWARD
No.
PEG
I’ve failed you…

Bill wraps an arm around her. He glares at Edward.

BILL
157
Could you tell me what exactly was on your mind, please…

Edward’s head hangs.
PEG
(wails)
Why didn’t I set a better example? You saw how I envy Jim’s
parents, their money.

BILL
What were you planning to do with their things once you’d taken
them?

PEG
I blithely say, ‘we’ll get the money for the salon. Somehow. But I
didn’t mean stealing. Stealing isn’t the way to get it. Stealing is no
way to get anything.’

BILL
Except into trouble. And you’re in a serious heap of that.

PEG
What ever made you do it? Damn those t.v. programs. Or someone
put you up to this?

Miserable, Edward stares at the floor.
80

During this confrontation, Edward remains miserable and stoic, not blaming the real parties
responsible for stealing: the group of teenagers Kim hangs out with, but mostly Jim, who
wanted his parents money to buy a car for himself. When Edward was first duped into
breaking into Jim’s parents’ house with scissors, he soon realized what he was doing was
not right. But he did it anyway, just to please Kim. Also, to protect Kim – who he now
realizes deceived him – he doesn’t tell the true story to her parents. Bill and Peg, Kim’s
parents, end up thinking Edward did it all on his own. That is why Edward is the
representation of the outsider at the shadow of power, as written in this scene. Edward not
only is subdued by the police for a crime he didn’t commit, he is positioned outside of the
teen and the adult group as well.
158

Because all these groups hold some sort of power in relationship to Edward’s erratic body,
he is trusted into a position of being below the law, as well as in a position of social
isolation. There will be no groups left for Edward to belong to by the end of the story. Not
even the Boggs family that initially adopted him. Edward becomes completely shut off and
socially castrated, without a place to go. He ends up internalizing his fate, and resigns to a
fairytale realm where time and social relations don’t exist anymore. In view of that type of
narrative resolution, Edward Scissorhands evokes an example for the reader/viewer that
begs the examination of the role of the female/minority artist, writer, or screenwriter in
society. In the world of the story, in the end, Edward remains in love with a woman he
cannot have. He also remains deeply misunderstood. His only voice and redemption is his
work.

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CHAPTER 2 NOTES

1
Besides lines of dialogue in the screenplay referring to Edward as not being completely human, therefore
potentially immortal (Edward is depicted as forever young in the end of the screenplay while Kim grows old),
Caroline Thompson describes in the following manner why Edward is like that:

“Well, Edward was me and Tim and mostly my dog, Ariel. Ariel because she could almost speak, almost
participate, almost understand... she could almost be there but she couldn’t because she was a dog – and
Edward couldn’t because he wasn’t human.”

Thompson quoted in:

Eve Babitz, “‘The Secret Garden’ of Caroline Thompson,” interview by Babitz, Movieline.com, (1 May
1992), p.3. http://www.movieline.com/1992/05/the-secret-garden-of-caroline-thompson.php?page=all
(last accessed 10 April 2013).

2
See note above: the end of Edward Scissorhands shows him living lonely and forever young inside a Gothic
castle-like home. Edward is still looking young and full of energy – sculpting Kim in a block of ice as he has
done before at Kim’s house – and Kim, obviously, grew older, into a grandmother remembering her past.

3
Edward Scissorhands, film directed by Tim Burton and written by Caroline Thompson, (Century City, Los
Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, release date of 14 December 1990).

4
Caroline Thompson, Edward Scissorhands, unpublished screenplay, (Los Angeles: Margaret Herrick
Library Scripts Collection, Twentieth Century Fox manuscript copy, 22 February 1990), 116 pages.

There is another screenplay draft from 1989, available at the Margaret Herrick Library, see footnote 61.

5
Caroline Thompson’s screenplay credits (written, co-written, book adaptations, and written-directed) are:

-- Edward Scissorhands (1990, screenplay by Caroline Thompson, story by Caroline Thompson and Tim
Burton, directed by Tim Burton).
-- The Addams Family (1991, written by Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson, original characters by
Charles Addams, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld).
-- Homeward Bound, The Incredible Journey (1993, screenplay by Caroline Thompson and Linda
Woolverton, based on novel “The Incredible Journey” by Sheila Burnford, directed by Duwayne Dunhan).
-- The Secret Garden (1993, screenplay by Caroline Thompson, based on the book by Frances Hodgson
Burnett, directed by Agnieszka Holland).
-- The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993, screenplay by Caroline Thompson, adaptation by Michael
McDowell, story and characters by Tim Burton, directed by Henry Selick, produced by Tim Burton).
-- Black Beauty (1994, written and directed by Caroline Thompson, based on the novel by Anna Sewell).
-- Buddy (1997, written and directed by Caroline Thompson, based on book “Animals Are My Hobby” by
Gertrude Davies Lintz, screen story by Caroline Thompson and William Joyce, screenplay by Caroline
Thompson).
-- Snow White: The Fairest of Them All (2001, TV movie, written and directed by Caroline Thompson,
screenplay by Caroline Thompson and Julie Hickson, original story by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm).
-- Corpse Bride (2005, screenplay by John August, Caroline Thompson, and Pamela Pettler, characters by
Tim Burton and Carlos Grangel, directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson).
-- City of Ember (2008, written by Caroline Thompson, based on book “The City of Ember” by Jeanne
Duprau, directed by Gil Kenan).
-- Troubed Tommy’s Tales of Woe (2011, short animation, written by Caroline Thompson, directed by Stuart
Allan).
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6
Thompson quoted in:

Joel Engel (ed.), Interview with “Caroline Thompson,” in: Screenwriters on Screenwriting, (New York:
Hyperion, 1995), p.155.

7
Caroline Thompson, First Born, novel, (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983).

8
In the interview to Joel Engel, Thompson metions that the fetus/baby was “aborted at twelve weeks; a quasi
formed human” (Engel, p.148).

In the book First Born, Claire, the protagonist, talks on the phone with Dr. Strauss who first informs that she
is pregnant, measuring 6 to 7 weeks into her first trimester (Thompson, First Born, pp.21-22). Later in the
story, Claire decides to have an abortion to save her marriage. Claire had an abortion because she felt
conflicted. Even though her young husband expressed that he supported their pregnancy, and said he was
going to quit graduate school in order to find a proper job and suppor their new growing family, Claire felt
that her husband and she were too young to have kids. She felt her husband would ultimately resent her in the
future for abandoning graduate school and abandoning his dream of becoming a lawyer. Claire goes on to
arrange a secret abortion with Dr. Strauss, without telling her husband. She lies to her husband that she
miscarried the pregnancy. Later in the story, Claire’s husband finishes graduate school, becomes a partner in
an important law firm, so the couple buys a house and have a baby, Nedddy (her second pregnancy). All is
well until the house starts being haunted by some kind of creature, who has also been on the news lately –
other people had brief sightings of this creature in the town, trying to steal food, runing and hiding, etc. The
creature is described on the newspaper as “‘half-child, half-animal,’ ‘skinned baby,’ ‘mutated monkey’ . . .
reported to be under two feet tall, hydrocephalic, covered with welts ‘as though it had been burned or dipped
in boiling oil,’ asymetrical, naked, deformed. It runs on all fours, sometimes just on its feet, and it lists from
side to side’” (Thompson, First Born, p.99). Claire eventually finds the “half-child, half-animal, half-baby”
creature hiding in her house, and befriends him. She names him Joey. She is still haunted by her abortion, 7
years later, and pressures her doctor to tell her the truth if her fetus was aborted and disposed of alive, and if it
was “possible it could have survived” (Thompson, First Born, p.165). It turns out the doctor had
clandestinely sold a few of the living fetuses he aborted in his clinic to a university hospital which was doing
some experiment of investigating life outside of the uterus. All of them died; Joey was the only one to escape
and survive. Joey sets out to find his mother and embarks on a journey of being with her eventually; but he
has very limmited ways of communicating, since he has been surving on his own, hiding, and stealing food.
In many ways, Claire ends up bonding and loving Joey more than her normal toddler Neddy. She feels
needed by Joey in a way she never felt before, she finds a purpose in life. They have their own secret
together, and they build a family routine. Claire is trying to fix Joey, as well as her past and the painful
memories of her abortion – she still lives with the guilt. When her husband finds out Claire is hiding or lying
about this creature at home, they all think Claire went crazy and is severely emotionally disturbed.

The novel is organized in the form of a diary, with entries by Claire daily; “the way the Gothic novels of the
late nineteen century were often written . . . either in the form of letters or diaries” (Engel, p.146).

Caroline Thompson compares this fictional format of writing (diary-like) to the structured way screenplays
are written. She explains: “I found that with the book having the formal qualites of being written as a diary, I
was freed up: Within those boundaries I could really use my imagination better than I could trying to write in
a meandering, formless form; a novel can be anything. Strangely, I found that intimidating and
overwhelming. / Joel Engel: You need a structure, parameters. / Caroline Thompson: Yes. I think that’s what
eventually made me love writing scripts so much” (Engel, pp.146-147).

9
About the experience of writing First Born, Thompson recounts:

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“I supported myself while I sat down to write a novel as a free-lance book reviewer for the Los Angeles
Times, and doing occasionally, really terrible, celebrity interviews. The novel was called First Born,
eventually to be published in 1983 by Coward-McCann, a division of Putnam. Writing was an interesting
experience. My first draft was so bad that, after eighteen months of writing it, I read it and threw it away. /
Joel Engel: What was the subject? / Caroline Thompson: It’s the story of an aborted fetus that comes back to
find its mom. It’s a really angry send-up of growing up in suburbia, and of the compulsion of people to guard
their appearances. I’ve always loved metaphor, because I think it’s more powerful than so-called reality. /
Joel Engel: Edward Scissorhands. / Caroline Thompson: Right. And I’ve always been drawn to stories of
outsiders and isolation. Black Beauty also fits that. But the one in First Born is the strongest”

Engel, p.146.

10
Thompson mentions “Hollywood terms” and the two films Eraserhead (1977) and E.T. (1982), and adds:

“I was writing [the novel First Born, 1983] about the time those two came out, and when I went to see them I
felt a real kinship.” (my brackets)

Engel, p.148.

11
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Melissa Mathison, (Universal City,
CA: Universal Pictures, release date of 11 June 1982).

12
J. Hoberman, “Sharpies,” Village Voice, Film Section, (11 Dec. 1990), p.69; John Powers, “Edward
Scissorhands: Sentimental,” L.A. Weekly, (7-13 Dec. 1990), p.23.

13
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, (London: Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818).
This is the first and original edition of the novel, published anonymously at first.

14
Some of the texts that compare Edward Scissorhands to Frankenstein are:

Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: New Age Daydreams,” The New Yorker (vol.66, issue 44, 17 Dec.1990);
John Powers, “Edward Scissorhands: Sentimental,” L.A. Weekly, (7-13 Dec. 1990); J. Hoberman, “Sharpies,”
Village Voice, Film Section, (11 Dec. 1990); Alan Citron, “Warner’s Christmas Present to Fox: Fox 2
Holiday Season Box-Office Hits,” Los Angeles Times (21 Dec. 1990); Michael Wilmington, “A Modern Fairy
Tale: Director Tim Burton is Back on the Cutting Edge with ‘Scissorhands,’ Possibly the Most Original Film
Fantasy Creation of the Year,” Los Angeles Times, Movie Review, (7 Dec. 1990); Graham Fuller, “I Grew Up
Feeling Odd and Strange / The Most Persistent Thing in Life is the Nightmare,” interview with Tim Burton
and Vincent Price, in: Interview Magazine, (Dec. 1990); Nina J. Easton, “For Tim Burton, This One’s
Personal,” Los Angeles Times, Movies, (12 Aug. 1990); Mark Salisbury (ed.), Burton on Burton, interview of
Tim Burton, revised edition, (London: Faber & Faber, 2006).

15
Thompson quoted in Engel, p.147.

16
Thompson quoted in Engel, p.148.

17
Engel, p.148.

18
As mentioned by Thompson, see citation at the beginning of the chapter and its footnote 6.

Joel Engel (ed.), Interview with “Caroline Thompson,” in: Screenwriters on Screenwriting, (New York:
Hyperion, 1995), p.155.

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19
David Ansen and Donna Foote, “The Disembodied Director,” Newsweek, (vol.117, no.3, 21 Jan. 1991).
Reproduced in The Tim Burton Collective: http://www.timburtoncollective.com/articles/misc4.html (last
accessed 10 April 2013).

20
Ansen and Foote. (my brackets)

21
Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Gretel (1812).
Fairytale of German origin. First published by the Grimm Brothers’ 1812 book “Kinder und Hausmärchen.”

For an English version, refer to the beautifully illustrated and annotated Grimm Brothers’ book of fairytales:

Brothers Grimm, “Hansel and Gretel,” folk tale originally published in 1812, in: Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm
Grim, and Maria Tatar (ed. and trans.), The Annotated Brothers Grimm, (New York: W. & W. Norton
Company, 2004), pp.72-85.

22
Some of the various articles and books that examine Edward Scissorhands as a fairytale are:

Michael Wilmington, “A Modern Fairy Tale: Director Tim Burton is Back on the Cutting Edge with
‘Scissorhands,’ Possibly the Most Original Film Fantasy Creation of the Year,” Los Angeles Times, Movie
Review, (7 Dec. 1990); Sam McDowell, “A Cut Above: Tim Burton Follows Up Batman with a Heartrending
Fairy-Tale,” Village View, (7 Dec. 1990); Gilad Padva, “Radical Sissies and Stereotyped Fairies in Laurie
Lynd’s ‘The Fairy Who Didn’t Want to Be a Fairy Anymore’,” Cinema Journal, (vol.45, no.1, fall 2005);
Richard Alleva, “Sharp Edges: ‘The Bridges’ and ‘Scissorhands’,” Commonweal, (vol.118, issue 3, 8 Feb.
1991); Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: New Age Daydreams,” The New Yorker (vol.66, issue 44, 17
Dec.1990); J. Hoberman, “Sharpies,” Village Voice, Film Section, (11 Dec. 1990); John Powers, “Edward
Scissorhands: Sentimental,” L.A. Weekly, (7-13 Dec. 1990); Colette Maude, “Edward Scissorhands: Buried
Pleasure,” Time Out, London, (24 July 1991); Ray Morton, “Unsung Heroes – Part Three,” Script Magazine,
(vol.12, issue 6, Nov./Dec. 2006); Joseph Natoli, “Living Backward,” Bright Lights Film Journal, (issue 68,
May 2010); Jeffrey M. Anderson, “A Few Words with Caroline Thompson: Making ‘Snow White’,”
interview by Anderson, CombustibleCelluloid.com, (12 June 2002); Graham Fuller, “I Grew Up Feeling Odd
and Strange / The Most Persistent Thing in Life is the Nightmare,” interview with Tim Burton and Vincent
Price, Interview Magazine, (Dec. 1990); Alan Citron, “Warner’s Christmas Present to Fox: Fox 2 Holiday
Season Box-Office Hits,” Los Angeles Times, (21 Dec. 1990); Nina J. Easton, “For Tim Burton, This One’s
Personal,” Los Angeles Times, Movies, (12 Aug. 1990); Mark Salisbury (ed.), Burton on Burton, interview of
Tim Burton, revised edition, (London: Faber & Faber, 2006).

23
Snow White: The Fairest of Them All, written and directed by Caroline Thompson, co-written by Julie
Hickson, based on The Brothers Grimm story, (TV movie: Hallmark Entertainment, 2001).

24
Jeffrey M. Anderson, “A Few Words with Caroline Thompson: Making ‘Snow White’,” interview by
Anderson, CombustibleCelluloid.com, (12 June 2002). (last accessed 10 April 2013):
http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/interviews/cthompson.shtml

25
Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990), a 20
th
century child psychologist, wrote the influencial book The Uses of
Enchantment (1976), which explains the purposes and meanings of fairytales in children’s social and
emotional development, according to what he has observed in his patients. Bettelheim, like Freud, looks
closely at fictionalized narrative to explain human behavior, as well as human psychology. He also noted that
his mother was an avid reader of fairytales to him as a child.

Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: Meaning and Importance of Fairytales, (New York: Knopf,
1976).

163
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26
Colette Maude, “‘Edward Scissorhands: Buried Pleasure,” Time Out, London, (24 July 1991), p.27.

27
See: Kenneth Jones, “‘Edward Scissorhands,’ Tim Burton’s Dark Fairy Tale, Tested as a Play in Brooklyn,”
PlayBill.com, (23 June 2010); Bob Verini, “Edward Scissorhands,” Daily Variety, Legit Review, (15 Dec.
2006); Clifford Bishop, “Matthew Bourne Reinvented ‘Swan Lake’ but ‘Edward Scissorhands’ Was a Bigger
Test,” The Sunday Times, London, Cover Story, (6 Nov. 2005).

28
Clark Collis, Owen Gleiberman, Greg Kirschling, Jeff Labrecque, and Adam Markovitz, “Top 100 New
Classic Films Between 1983 and 2008,” Entertainment Weekly, (issue 999/1000, 27 June 2008), pp.18-33.

29
Eve Babitz, “‘The Secret Garden’ of Caroline Thompson,” interview by Babitz, Movieline.com, (1 May
1992), p.4. http://www.movieline.com/1992/05/the-secret-garden-of-caroline-thompson.php?page=all
(last accessed 10 April 2013).

30
In a nutshell, Eve Babitz explains the relation of First Born to Edward Scissorhands in Thompson’s career:

“‘I felt completely at home in L.A. from the first moment I got here, which was in 1964 when I was eight
years old. My parents brought us out here to visit Disneyland, and I immediately announced to them that I’d
be moving here when I grew up.’ Fifteen years later, after attending Harvard and graduating summa cum
laude from Amherst College with a degree in English and Classic Literature, that’s just what Thompson did.
She began her writing career, at age 26, with her novel First Born, a dark tale that got the attention of
Hollywood filmmaker Penelope Spheeris, who wanted to make a movie out of it. Thompson agreed to let
Spheeris develop the project if she’d teach her the rudimentary skills of writing screenplays as part of the
bargain. As Thompson explains . . . , this fleeting encounter with Tinseltown led, in turn, to her meeting
fledgling director Tim Burton, with whom she developed a close friendship that came to involve professional
collaboration.”

That first personal collaboration translated into Edward Scissorhands. Towards the end of the interview,
Thompson offers more detail: Spheeris “loved my novel and wanted to turn it into a movie, and we decided
that we’d do it together, so I could learn what screenplays were about. The deal was, I’d work at her place, I’d
drive in from Santa Monica and she’d cook me lunch. We worked on that project a long time, about a year. I
was getting a divorce and so was she, so it was a really traumatic year for both of us. I was so grateful to have
her house to go to. It was the best school I could have possibly gone to – Penelope’s a great, fascinating
woman, really, really smart and strong and funny. The movie never got made, but I still turn to her in times of
trouble.”

Babitz, pp.1 and 4.

31
Caroline Thompson quoted in:

Joel Engel (ed.), Interview with “Caroline Thompson,” in: Screenwriters on Screenwriting, (New York:
Hyperion, 1995), p.154.

32
Thompson quoted in Engel, p.154.

33
Thompson quoted in Engel, p.146.

34
Thompson quoted in Engel, p.153. (my brackets)

35
Joel Engel notes that “having grown up in Suburbia” was Bethesda, Maryland (Engel, p.150).

36
Thompson quoted in Engel, p.150. (my brackets)
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37
Thompson quoted in Engel, p.149. (my brackets)

38
Engel, pp.149-150.

39
Thompson says: “Tim’s initial impulse – and since it came from him I was inclined to respect it – was that
he wanted to try it first as a musical. At the time, he was having problems during preproduction on
Beetlejuice, getting so many questions about reality and unreality. He thought that if it was a musical that
everyone would accept the unreality of the character in this situation. That sounded fun to me. I came home –
immediately knowing what the scenes were, what the characters were. It was scary. / Joel Engel: How did
you know those things so suddenly and so effortlessly? Caroline Thompson: As I said, the metaphor was so
clear to me that the simplicity of finding ways to express that metaphor was immediately obviously clear. I
can’t explain it.”

Thompson quoted in Engel, p.150.

40
Engel, p.150.

See also:

Robert Olague, “Screenwriter Caroline Thompson Recalls ‘Edward Scissorhands’,” CreativeCow.net, (no
date provided). http://library.creativecow.net/articles/olague_robert/caroline_thompson.php#comments
(last accessed 10 April 2013).

41
Engel, p.151.

42
Engel, pp.150-151.

43
Engel, p.152.

44
Mike Lyons, “Scripting Film Fantasies,” Cinefantastique, (vol.28, issue 3, October 1996), p.43.

45
Lyons, p.43.

“I never even saw the drawing,” is my emphasis in italics.

46
The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick and written by Caroline Thompson
[screenplay], Tim Burton [story and characters] and Michael McDowell [adaptation], (Skellington
Productions and Touchstone Pictures, release date of 29 October 1993). The DVD’s cover, trailler, and the
film title credits read: “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

47
Engel, p.155.

48
Description of the making of Nightmare Before Christmas in Thompson’s interview by Joel Engel, pp.155-
157.

49
Eraserhead, written and directed by David Lynch, (Los Angeles: AFI, American Film Institute, release
date of 19 March 1977).

50
Robert Olague, “Screenwriter Caroline Thompson Recalls ‘Edward Scissorhands’,” CreativeCow.net, (no
date provided). http://library.creativecow.net/articles/olague_robert/caroline_thompson.php#comments
(last accessed 5 March 2013).
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51
What Thompson said about Tim Burton virtually shooting her first draft screenplay:

“Joel Engel: You shot a first draft? / Caroline Thompson: Yes, but we didn’t shoot it for years. Tim went to
Batman after Beetlejuice. I thought, Shit, he’ll never make out our movie after Batman. But, bless his heart,
Tim’s the real thing; he’s an artist and makes what he loves, not what he thinks they’ll love. In the interim,
other people became interested in my work based on that script, which got read a lot. During that time I went
to Disney, because I had loved The Incredible Journey as a kid, and said that I’d like to write a remake of that.
They agreed. And the next thing I knew I was writing that. Eventually, I was taken off it, because I wasn’t as
cooperative as they wanted me to be. And, eventually, I was brought back on, only to be fired and rehired
three more times. If I love something, the basis of something, I’ll try to stand by it and help it be what I think
it can be – personality and personal trauma de damned.”

Engel, p.152.

52
Engel, p.151.

53
Batman (1989). Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Sam Hamm (screenplay and story), Warren Skaaren
(screenplay), and Bob Kane (Batman characters), (Burbank: Warner Brothers Pictures, release date of June
23, 1989).

54
Mark Salisbury (ed.), Burton on Burton, interview of Tim Burton, revised edition, (London: Faber & Faber,
2006), pp.84-87.

55
Nina J. Easton, “For Tim Burton, This One’s Personal,” Los Angeles Times, Movies, (12 Aug. 1990), p.5.

56
Eve Babitz, “‘The Secret Garden’ of Caroline Thompson,” interview by Babitz, Movieline.com, (1 May
1992), p.4. http://www.movieline.com/1992/05/the-secret-garden-of-caroline-thompson.php?page=all
(last accessed 5 March 2013).

57
Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Gretel (1812).
Fairytale of German origin.

58
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), p.73.

59
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), p.48.

60
No photocopying is permitted there, for instance. The Margaret Herrick Library contains the largest
physical collection of screenplays in the United States (and possibly in the world), especially of films released
in the English language. Foreign language film screenplays are also available there. Several researchers travel
to Los Angeles to read screenplays from the Margaret Herrick archives. We should also note that most
screenplays are unpublished manuscripts thus rare material, sometimes they can be found online on the
Internet, but the most reliable sources are library copies. Besides, there might be more than one version of a
screenplay manuscript, and most certainly revised versions. Together with the final print of the film itself, the
screenplay is the most important source about the authorship of a film. But because they are so rare and
difficult to find, and are housed mainly in Los Angeles institutions, most often it is the case that the
information contained within a screenplay never surfaces to the general public for perusal, making them
seldom analyzed by critics and academics.

61
Caroline Thompson, Edward Scissorhands, unpublished screenplay, (Los Angeles: Margaret Herrick
Library Scripts Collection, studio unmarked copy, 15 December 1989), 121 pages.

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62
Caroline Thompson, Edward Scissorhands, unpublished screenplay, (Los Angeles: Margaret Herrick
Library Scripts Collection, Twentieth Century Fox manuscript copy, 22 February 1990), 116 pages.

63
Following is the description of the 1990 manuscript copy analyzed in this dissertation:

Caroline Thompson, Edward Scissorhands, unpublished screenplay, (Los Angeles: Margaret Herrick Library
Scripts Collection, Twentieth Century Fox manuscript copy, 22 February 1990), 116 pages.

-- This screenplay manuscript has 2 title pages.
-- An unpublished, revised screenplay. Revised February 22, 1990 (2
nd
title page).
-- Note that this copy was actually revised until June 27, 1990.
-- This screenplay manuscript is written in color pages (no white pages).
-- Logo of 20
th
Century Fox on the 1
st
Title Page.
-- Revisions: revision #1 (pink: March 15, 1990), revision #2 (green: March 17, 1990), revision #3 (yellow:
April 27, 1990), revision #4 (buff: May 7, 1990), revision #5 (salmon: no date), and revision #6 (blue:
February 22 1990 and June 27 1990).
-- This screenplay is displayed in color pages only (pink, green, yellow, buff, salmon and blue). Last revision
is in blue from June 27, 1990 (after the screenplay date on the title page).
-- Two screenplays are available at the Scripts Collection from the Margaret Herrick Library. This one is
dated from February 22, 1990.
-- Pages Missing: page 90 only.
-- Pages 11-12 are merged in one page.
-- Pages 101-103 are merged in one page.
-- Unreadable pages: none.
-- Screenplay Author: written screenplay by Caroline Thompson;
story by Tim Burton and Caroline Thompson.
-- Film Director: Tim Burton.
-- Film Release Date: 14 December 1990, USA (105 min).
-- Introductory Textual Page: None.

64
Edward Scissorhands, film directed by Tim Burton and written by Caroline Thompson, (Century City, Los
Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, release date of 14 December 1990).

65
Caroline Thompson, Edward Scissorhands, unpublished screenplay, (Los Angeles: Margaret Herrick
Library Scripts Collection, Twentieth Century Fox manuscript copy, 22 February 1990), 116 pages.

66
The last revision added on June 27, 1990 (7 pages) was coded in the color blue, same color as the revison
date on the title page: February 22, 1990, so I assume both of them are color-codded as the final revision.

67
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), pp.2-4.

68
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), p.3.

69
We assume and identify the inventor as Edward’s father.

70
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), p.4.

71
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), p.4.

72
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), p.114.

73
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), pp.115-116.
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74
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), p.34.

75
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), pp.57-60.

76
Julie Clarke, “All Too Human: ‘Edward Scissorhands’,” Screen Education, issue 50, 1 June 2008, (winter
2008), p.97.

77
Clarke, p.97.

78
Clarke, p.97.

79
Nina J. Easton notes that:

“Fox urged Burton to consider Tom Cruise for the role, but after several hours of meetings, the two parted
ways. One topic of those meetings, sources say, was Edward Scissorhands lack of virility. . . . ‘America has
been sold this perception of me,’ Depp says. ‘[Fox] had this product [21 Jump Street] and in order to sell it
they had to generate heat, so they sold this character I played on TV as if it were me.’ His real interest, he
says, is to work on offbeat projects with directors like Burton, Waters, and David Lynch. Depp’s role as
Edward Scissorhands is anything but macho. ‘Johnny played it like a little boy, which is a tough thing for an
actor,’ says Ryder. ‘[Male] actors have this thing, they don’t want to do anything to make them look innocent,
naive, vulnerable. They all want to be macho, to carry a gun.’ Says Depp: ‘It was strange because it’s not like
there was anything to base [the character] on. Edward is not a human being, he’s not an android, he’s not an
alien.’ To me he was like a newborn baby, with that kind of innocence…or like a dog that gives unconditional
love.”

Nina J. Easton, “For Tim Burton, This One’s Personal,” Los Angeles Times, Movies, (12 Aug. 1990), p.4.

80
Thompson’s screenplay Edward Scissorhands (22 February 1990), pp.78-80.

168

Chapter 3
“GRACE OF MY HEART:”
THE FEMALE WRITER AS OUTSIDER FROM WITHIN THE SYSTEM

SYNOPSIS

Grace of My Heart starts in 1958 with Edna Buxton (named Ethel in the screenplay, 20
years old), as she tries on dresses for a singing competition. First prize is a contract with a
major record label in New York. Edna comes from a family of old money in Philadelphia,
her mother is overbearing, her father is deceased, and she dreams of becoming a singer. At
the competition, Edna meets Doris, the only African American there, and they exchange
dresses and their views on music. Edna wins the competition and moves to New York.
However, despite her contract, she struggles for months on end to find someone to close a
record deal with her, since in the 1950s female singers or girl bands were not as popular as
male vocal groups. As Edna is almost losing hope, she meets Joel Millner, a producer who
hires her to write for him at the Brill Building. Edna tells him what she really wants is to be
both a singer and songwriter, not only to write the songs, but to also sing her own material.
Joel proposes that she first tries to make some money writing songs for him instead; and
right after he hires Edna, on the spot he changes her name, as it was custom in the industry,
fashioning her as Denise Waverly, a working class name, which conceals her roots.

Reinvented “working class Denise” eventually ends up composing various hit songs for
male vocal groups under Joel’s patronage. One day, after clubbing and unexpectedly
running into Doris performing in Harlem, also now in New York trying to pursue her
169
career as a singer, Denise convinces Millner to hire Doris and her back-up vocalists. With
Denise’s lyrics, Doris’ girl band beats all odds against the unlikely success of female
performers at the time. They collaborate on a string of more hit songs, establishing Denise
as a major songwriter, while she remains in the background of the success of the bands she
composes for. Denise writes deeply personal songs based on her own life and other
people’s pain. She ends up falling in love with another songwriter from the Brill Building,
Howard, a beatnik who is not as poetic as Denise, and fancies social issues, which is not
Denise’s style. Howard spells trouble, and they have conflicting views on everything. One
day Denise finds out she is pregnant, so they hastily get married. Their baby is born, and
eventually Denise discovers Howard is cheating on her, so she divorces him.

As a newly divorced, single mother, Denise strengthens her friendships with Joel and her
girlfriends, especially Doris and Cheryl. Cheryl is a new songwriter addition to the Brill
Building, and she helps Denise undergo an abortion, since Denise is not married anymore.
That is followed by a period of loneliness and adjustment, until Denise falls in love again,
this time with a married man, John, a father of three kids. John is a sensitive music reporter
and radio personality, on the topic of songwriting, and he develops a longtime crush on
Denise. He also greatly admires her writing. But this is the 1960s now: “concept” and
garage bands such as the Beatles start popping up everywhere on the charts, putting at risk
the old way of making and reviewing music that Denise and John were accustomed to.
Their fledging affair starts as an innocent friendship based on mutual admiration first, but
ends being disclosed publicly, so John decides to leave town and move to Chicago with his
family, where Denise will become an unthreatening, distanced memory. Denise feels sad at
170
John’s “betrayal,” and falls into depression again, something that creatively helps her as a
songwriter down the road. To help Denise out of her depression, while she suffers from an
affair with a married man that was never really consummated, Denise’s agent Joel promises
her first album through some new contacts he mustered in the industry. This will be
Denise’s first solo record, where she gets to finally write and perform her own music.

Again, times changed: this is not the 1950s anymore. Joel introduces Denise to a seemingly
silly surf music, rock band in California. Jay, the bandleader, helps Denise record her first
album. Denise is not working from the Brill Building in New York anymore, the music
industry got more personal and decentralized, and is moving West. Thus, Denise is caught
in the middle of two worlds: between her old work ethics as a music writer for other
people’s bands, and her newfound freedom as an individual composer and artist. She gets
married to Jay, and for the first time in her life, Denise truly feels happy; she married an
artistic equal. Granted, he does drugs sometimes (and who didn’t at that time?), but he is
also independent and experimental, and encourages Denise to focus on herself as an artist
first, instead of writing for others. He cherishes Denise’s kid, and is sweet and available to
her in ways that her previous lovers never were. However, he has his dark side, which is
slowly revealed to Denise as a delusional condition that makes him tormented and
disconnected from reality. Jay ends up committing suicide. Still, it was his heartfelt support
what helped Denise expand (as well as Joel’s staunch faith in her talent). In the end, Denise
overcomes her grief and becomes the complete artist she has originally intended. She
dedicates her album in 1970 to Jay, now her deceased husband, who after a long struggling
period with his affliction, first lovingly called her “the grace of my heart.”
171

ISSUES OF AUTHORSHIP, THEMATICS, AND PRODUCTION ANALYSIS

Grace of My Heart
1
(1996) is a screenplay
2
written and directed by Allison Anders
3
(born
1954). Its story traces the characters of Denise Waverly/Edna Buxton (played by Illeana
Douglas) and her agent Joel Millner (played by John Turturro) during the development of
the music industry from 1958
4
to the late 1960s, early 1970s.
5
Because Allison Anders is a
director, while Caroline Thompson (from chapter 2) is mainly a screenwriter, Anders work
is most commonly perceived as coming from an auteur director. However, as I argue in
chapter 1, Anders is an auteur not only because she is an established director, she is an
auteur also because she has written all the screenplays for her films. Therefore, it is certain
to assume that Anders holds a major creative role in her films’ production process, despite
five writing collaborations
6
in the nine films that she has written and directed. Most of her
writing collaboration is with Kurt Voss, Ander’s UCLA
7
fellow student in film school, also
a guitarist and songwriter for the alternative rock band Hindi Guns. Three of Anders’ films
(Border Radio, Sugar Town and Strutter), which are about the L.A. rock scene, were jointly
written and directed by Anders with Voss (Border Radio also with Dean Lent).

Allison Anders was born in Ashland, Kentucky. She attended the UCLA Film School, and
earned her bachelor’s degree in 1986. Presently, she teaches courses in “rock’n’roll film,”
“music supervision,” and “autobiographical writing” at UCSB, University of California in
Santa Barbara.
8
Much of her material is marked by unmistakable female protagonists, by a
clear interest in rock and pop music, and by her own personal life
9
experiences. Topics in
172
Anders’ writing include: gender inequality, single-motherhood, and women homosociality
(Mi Vida Loca, Gas Food and Lodging, Four Rooms, Grace of My Heart); themes of race
and class treated in a realist vein (Mi Vida Loca, Border Radio, Gas Food and Lodging,
Grace of My Heart); the post-punk L.A. rock scene with its struggling musicians living on
the fringes (Border Radio, Sugar Town, Strutter), the travelogue (Border Radio, Gas Food
and Lodging, Four Rooms, Sugar Town, Things Behind the Sun, Grace of My Heart); and
also a deeply personal examination of rape and survival (Things Behind the Sun). Anders
has also studied philosophy in junior college,
10
at one point had the intention of becoming a
film critic,
11
and has written and published poetry
12
before attending film school.

Grace of My Heart focuses on the story of Denise Waverly/Edna Buxton (played by Illeana
Douglas) as a songwriter and aspiring female singer who starts her career in 1958. The
story spans from 1958 to 1970, and according to one DVD sleeve dust jacket, it follows a
“woman striving to find her own voice in the male-dominated world of pop music.”
13
This
story about a female song-writer-musician bears a striking resemblance to Allison Anders
own career as woman in the powerful male-dominated world of Hollywood. It stands not
only for Anders struggle, but for the career struggle of women and minorities at large.
While the lead character Denise (Illeana Douglas) has pretensions to be an auteur, the truth
of the matter is that the record industry of the 1950s and 1960s is much more interested in
male vocal groups than in female singers. Denise does not fit that profit-making stereotype,
and that is essentially due to her gender. She wants to be a singer, but she only manages to
get a job as songwriter, and would not have accomplished that if it wasn’t for her newfound
173
friend and manager who gives her first break (played by actor John Turturro). As it regards
the character of the manager/agent, it should be noted that Anders in a Grace of My Heart
draft (dated from August 17 1994), and in the film (1996), named the manager in her
screenplay (played by Turturro) after her own agent (Joel Milner).
14

As it regards the main character, Denise, she desires to be an auteur; however, she
sacrifices her dream of becoming a self-reliant singer, who writes and sings her own
material, by making money writing songs for other people at her Brill Building job. The
type of musical talent carried out at the Brill Building,
15
which really existed as portrayed
at that time period in the film, is comparable to the Hollywood studio system of “enclosing”
writers, one which forces them to crank out screenplay after screenplay on demand,
according to the needs of an industrial mode of production. Most of the songs that Denise
writes become instant pop hits that make other people famous, so it is difficult for Denise,
who has achieved a steady paycheck, to rise against this established facelessness
institutionalized at the Brill Building, after having been trained there for most of her career.
These songs that make groups and singers famous overnight are the arduous product of
Denise’s writing and autobiographical inspiration. However, while these performers
achieve recognition, Denise as a writer remains at the shadow of the system. As the DVD
dust jacket illustrates about her trajectory: Denise “struggles to escape the shadow of pop
music icons and ultimately emerges as a singer in her own right;” and also: “For years her
songs brought fame to other people. Then she found her own voice.”
16

174
In many ways, Denise’s predicament as a songwriter is experienced by working
screenwriters in Hollywood, who write the material that makes iconic directors famous not
only nationally, but also worldwide. The character of songwriter Denise parallels the
character of female screenwriters in Hollywood. In an entertaining, not implausible style,
Allison Anders’ story emphasizes the labor struggles and gendered preconditions that
typify the work of female artists in the entertainment industry in the United States. Patsy
Kensit (actress as well as singer and songwriter in the 1980s British pop band Eighth
Wonder), and one of the actresses in Grace of My Heart (playing Cheryl, another song-
writer colleague of Denise), accentuates about the Brill Building: “Probably it was pretty
radical the fact that women were actually the talent behind the songs that were on the
radio.”
17

This observation by Kensit – a female songwriter herself which enables her to empathize
with the plot in that specific state of affairs at the Brill Building – makes even more
poignant the fact that the female writer is fundamentally being portrayed as an outsider
within the system in Grace of My Heart. Writers of songs, especially female writers in this
period, were players both credited and recognized as well as undervalued next to the iconic
names of the period (like screenwriters in Hollywood). In other words, Anders was able to
capture a fictionalized account of the real historical dichotomy of the institutionalization
and even recognition of songwriters coming from the Brill Building in New York, during
the late 1950s throughout the 1960s, at the same time that they somewhat obscurely
remained at the shadows of the success of their own hit songs that they have composed.

175
Anders was just the perfect filmmaker to create Grace of My Heart, both because of her
passion for music and her writing of poetry (which circularly was rooted in her love for
lyrics), as well as because of her fascination with screenwriters from the Classic Period.
Always blending the personal with the fictional, when I mentioned to Anders that her
writing of poetry made total sense because of her strong passion for music (which
eventually leads her to filmmaking), this is how Anders herself described her initiation with
poetry early on in her life (in an interview I had with her), which bares a visible
resemblance to the way Denise’s character composes her lyrics in the screenplay:
I would write down lyrics and these girls [in High School] were making fun of me.
Actually I was 14. These girls were making fun of me because I was a hippie. And they
were like, “What is she doing over there?” And they go, “Oh, she’s writing hippie love
poems” [Anders comically imitates their mocking intonation.] And I was like, “Uhm, I
should write my own stuff!” So that is how I started. As a challenge to these girls. I was
like, “Yes, I will. I will write hippie love poems. Screw you.” So I started actually writing
as a result of that. So, yeah, it came out of music; isn’t that funny?
18
(my brackets)

Copying the lyrics from her favorite songs led Anders to writing “love poems,” which led
her to publishing poetry, which eventually transformed Anders into a filmmaker interested
in music. Therefore, Anders understands the process of writing lyrics on multiple levels,
and this is evident in Grace of My Heart. She has the knowledge, interest, and a kind of
infatuation not only with poetry and music, but with the creative act of writing itself.
Anders may be an established director, yet because she is also a writer, she understands and
appreciates writers sometimes better than writers themselves. She has also developed a
quiet fascination with screenwriters who worked during the classic period in Hollywood:
I think I probably would have really loved to have written during the classic period in
Hollywood. I would have loved making movies then. It would have been rough. But you
would have done one movie after another, and you would really know your shit after a
while. After a while, you have to know what you’re doing, because you’re making so many
movies. And you go to the studio, or go to the set, and come home for dinner. It’s kind of
176
an amazing life; until things changed in Hollywood. So I think it would have been hard, but
I think there was something to that. And I like Classic Film. I really love classic movies.
19

This industrialized facet of screenwriters cranking out screenplays during the classic
Hollywood period, as well as its comfortable structure, parallels Anders’ account of the
work of songwriters cranking out lyrics at the Brill Building in New York. The work was
very intense, but their craft greatly benefited from this revolving production. Nevertheless,
for obvious reasons, this same system that nurtured writers, giving them a sense of stability,
was a system that the writers wanted to get rid of in order to become a true artist. So, both
the Brill Building songwriters, as well as Hollywood screenwriters, perceived themselves
as outsiders working within a system larger than life; since the recognition for their work
was never immediate or detached, because it was linked to a well-established star system
that, in a way, stifled them. In that sense, their “world” was also their innermost antagonist.

Screenwriter and USC professor David Howard, in “Where is the Antagonist,” divides
antagonists in a dramatic screenplay into three categories: the world as antagonist, another
character as antagonist, and the protagonist as her/his own inner antagonist.
20
These
“opposing forces in the story”
21
sometimes are easy or difficult to identify, but they are
necessary for the creation of conflict as well as for the protagonist’s character arc. In the
case of Grace of My Heart, we can pinpoint all the three antagonists pointed out by
Howard. The easiest one to identify is another character as the antagonist. In this case, we
can say that Denise struggles emotionally and professionally with the men in her life: her
two ex-husbands. She divorced unfaithful Howard Cazsatt, the Brill Building songwriter,
played by Eric Stoltz, and was severely traumatized by the suicide of her supportive, more
177
auteuristic husband and band leader on the West Coast, Jay Phillips, played by Matt Dylon.
Commenting about Anders’ creative process, Eric Stoltz says that she “wanted to write,
was fascinated with the girl groups from the Brill Building, and also wanted to incorporate
some of her relationships, strained relationships with men into that milieu.”
22
So, similarly
to melodramas from the classic Hollywood period, Denise was in conflict with her
husbands from within her marriages. In that case, Denise is not only battling with them, she
also feels deeply ambivalent about it, so this is also a battle against herself.

As David Howard notes, a character like this “is at war with [herself]. When the primary
conflict in the story is an internal struggle within the protagonist, [she] functions as [her]
own antagonist. [She] does not need to be schizophrenic or have multiple personalities;
[she] just needs to be torn between two impulses.”
23
With Caszatt, Denise is torn between
following her more poetical instincts in composing her songs, or following the social issues
of the time that interested her then husband Caszatt. Also, Caszatt was never truly faithful
to her, so she had that inner conflict as well. With Jay, the bandleader from The Riptides in
the film (loosely resembling The Beach Boys), Denise was torn between continuing to be a
songwriter for other people, as it was familiar to her, or re-inventing herself by investing
emotionally on her own singing career, as her second husband Jay urged her, and growing
into a kind of auteur like Jay. Because of the nature of such an inner conflict, Denise is
obviously also in conflict with her own outside world.

As David Howard says, “What if the ‘antagonist’ is really the world of the story and it isn’t
a mountain, meteor, tidal wave, a hurricane? How do you depict it, show it, dramatize it?”
24

178
These need not be clear-cut “villains,” here the antagonist is the system itself, the world
where she lives in as a woman and as an artist. It is depicted in the old system of the Brill
Building from the 1950s, to which Denise had to adapt to but wasn't completely fulfilled as
an artist and as a person; and is depicted in the new auteur system from the 1960s of more
conceptual bands that required from Denise a renewed commitment to her old career goals
as an adult. These two worlds represent Denise’s innermost antagonists. Thus she lives,
works, and thrives within the system, and at the same time, as I have attempted to explain,
she is also an outsider within the same system, negotiating her way around.

There is also the issue of race, which Anders explores throughout the screenplay in the
counter-position of two tangential circles: one Caucasian, and the other one African-
American. Because this is a story about the music industry (from the 1950s to 1970), the
African-American characters are depicted working in two types of bands: all-girl-bands or
all-boy-bands. Denise, the protagonist – young, white, bohemian and a musician –
circulates in both circles. A strong female friendship arises between Denise and the leading
black-girl singer (Doris, played by actress Jennifer Leigh Warren). Denise writes songs for
Doris and her ensemble, and eventually they are catapulted into a hit-recording all-black-
girl band – something that was difficult to predict at that time, since they were not only a
female band (male bands were more marketable), they were also part of an ethnic minority.
Thus the stratification between their two tangential worlds slowly starts to erode and is
greatly ameliorated during the screenplay. Denise and Doris go through similar trajectories
in their musical careers and personal lives, with similarities greater than their differences;
and both of them are able to achieve a certain degree of agency, recognition, and maturity
179
at the end of the film. Thus, the Grace of My Heart’s script is realistic, it dramatizes how
African-Americans had to grapple with issues not only of assimilation, but of inclusion, a
fact consistently written in Anders’s text.

Another issue in the film is the double trait of the individualist versus collaborative nature
of the music industry. One of the weaknesses of thinking about authorship in individualist
terms would be the history of rock and roll in the first to second half of the 20
th
century.
The appropriation of jazz, blues rhythms, and lyrics into a mostly white-male-and-
mainstream rock and roll scene in a de facto segregated Western society (one of the subtle
themes of Anders’ film Grace of My Heart) is an example of a weakness of thinking about
authorship in individual terms. Who gets the (authorial) credit for what is created in this
context? And highest remuneration? The individual record-seller musician backed by the
music industry has a few problems to face. Therefore, Grace of My Heart tells the story of
a wannabe female singer who writes her own songs. And even if she desires to be an auteur
– that is to both sing and write at the same time
25
– the nature of the system forces her to
settle and make a living instead by being a songwriter for future “hit” bands that she will
never be singing for. Through a Monday-to-Friday job in an imposing factory-style
building in New York (again the famous Brill Building Recording Studio), Denise
creatively flourishes in a confined world incredibly akin to the Hollywood studio system.

If screenwriters are part of a well-oiled machine cranking out narrative content for
audience-pleaser fictional movies, Denise Waverly produces songs for whatever musical
style is in fashion at the time. She writes for others, and even though her material is deeply
180
personal, she has a hard time finding her own musical voice. Being a woman is visibly the
main reason for this artistic crisis. For several reasons, Denise can only make a living at the
margins of the system. In the meantime, Allison Anders depicts a milieu in which African-
American female singers and African-American male-bands also had to struggle to have
their voices acknowledged. But the story is definitely enacted from a mainstream female
point of view (Denise, Caucasian), yet she does not live in a vacuum. A scene from the
script with the line, “Ethel lowers her eyes shamefully. The rich, like the poor, forever
denying where they come from”
26
gives us an example of the acknowledgement of this
social construction. The African-American bands, as well as the white female songwriters
from the Brill Building (including Denise and the male writers in the building, all hired to
write “hit” pop songs) never really achieve a concrete position of auteur-ship promised by
the American dream. Their dissatisfaction with a collaborative authorship structure that
renders them semi-invisible is not only part of their creative position in society, it is a
continual part of their everyday life.

Allison Anders earlier film Mi Vida Loca followed a similar pattern of collaborative
process, although in a comparatively smaller scope. The film Mi Vida Loca is a
documentary-style fictional-narrative that premiered in Cannes in 1993. In it, Anders mixes
a personal autobiographical style of writing that she calls “romantic realism” with an
ethnographic observation of her surroundings. Anders lived in Echo Park in Los Angeles at
the time she wrote the screenplay for Mi Vida Loca. Grace of My Heart also focuses on the
counter-culture music scene happening in Southern California (shifting from the 1950s
New York of the Brill Building to the 1960s bands of California). In Mi Vida Loca, Anders
181
was immediately drawn to the “pachucas-cholas-homegirls”
27
gang members’ style she
observed there on the streets: fiercely independent young women, usually single, who have
to grapple with the very real issue of single-motherhood and economic self-reliance at a
very young age.

Similarly, Anders experienced foster homes and jail during her youth, was very poor, lived
off welfare, had a baby at a very young age like in Mi Vida Loca, without a husband, and
was even raped at the age of 12 (an auto-biographical detail Anders explored in the film
Things Behind the Sun, 2001).
28
Anders also adopted a Latino boy (Ruben Anders) who
acts as a child (Carlos) in a small part of the same film Things Behind the Sun
29
(later
Ruben works with camera and photography in Anders and Voss’ film Strutter, 2012). All
the while, Anders incorporates very personal material from her own life, as well as from
music and its history, as we can see in Grace of My Heart. Because of that, Anders’ films
almost always have a somewhat documentary feel to them. In the case of Things Behind the
Sun, because the film re-works in a fictional format very personal experiences from her
past, such as her rape as a child/teen, Anders literally had to re-visit scenes from her past in
order to research the characters’ psychological make-up. Harrison Coltun asked her in an
interview: “How much of your own traumatic past influenced the trauma that the main
character deals with” in Things Behind the Sun? Anders responded:
Well, first it’s from a personal story. I actually shot the film in the same house and the same
room where I was raped as a child. When I made this movie, I first had to go back to this
town and deal with my past. I tried all sorts of 12-step programs, and everyone was very
concerned. I just wanted to be done with it. All my rape-survivor girl friends wanted to go
with me. I said no because then I would have to deal with their rape. I only wanted to deal
with mine, you know. When I went back on my own. It was an amazing experience. All of
that was personal in the film. Parts of the film actually happened to me. Rape and trauma
182
are a shattering experience psychologically. The thing nobody tells you is that you need to
go and pick up all those pieces and re-integrate them. When I made the movie I was able to
see every side of the situation. It was pretty intense.
30

In Mi Vida Loca, Anders became increasingly interested in the world of the Latina young
women she routinely saw in her neighborhood, and decided to interview them while
writing her screenplay. She mixed professional actors with non-actors, the same way she
has done with some of her other films, especially in Sugar Town (1999) and Border Radio
(1987), both of which have non-actors from rock and roll bands. The result is a non-
mainstream story, since gangs and violence are not glamourized, and the main characters
are women who, I believe, have agency and defy all odds. The point of the story lies in
altering antagonism and resentment into friendship and solidarity among women (without
being moralizing or having a clear-cut happy ending). The “female-gang” performs a social
function in face of the inadequacy of the state in matters of socio-economic relevance, and
in its detailed account of a vital and socially invisible culture niche that has been virtually
absent from the screen.

However, Mi Vida Loca has been criticized for not deconstructing the bleak stereotype of
Latinos and minorities as belonging to gangs without a positive future outlook; and it has,
at times, been attacked on the grounds that a white director, not a Latina, explored the
subject of representation of female gang members without being part of that community,
therefore misrepresenting them.
31
Rosa Linda Fregoso has two good essays on the subject
(1995 and 2003).
32
In “Hanging out with the Home Girls? Allison Anders’s Mi Vida Loca”
Fregoso says: “I must admit, this film has been difficult for me to review. Difficult because
183
its gender politics are great, because it’s the best mainstream film on Chicano gangs;”
33
and
also “difficult also because the aspect I am celebrating, its daring and gritty realism, is so
partial in its one-sided vision of ‘la vida loca’ (the crazy life, in gang parlance) or what I
prefer to call ‘la vida dura’ (the hard life). Indeed, the film is a splendid contradiction.”
34

So Fregoso is both fascinated with the story and its realistic depiction, as well as she is
suspitious and somewhat weary of Anders’ use of real real-life actors in the film.

Yet, it is important to note that the ethnic segregation we see in the Hollywood screen
(even on the “indie” and the avant-garde screens) is a result of the real segregation going
on in American society. One reflects the other. Mi Vida Loca subjects have agency and are
humanized (they are not pitiful subaltern people playing for laughs). However, Fregoso
mentions Salt of the Earth in her above mentioned article as one of her favorite films by a
white director (Herbert J. Biberman) about Chicanas and Chicanos;
35
yet Mi Vida Loca
(1993) is not like Salt of the Earth (1954) because Mi Vida Loca is about gangs, so Fregoso
is not altogether sure if Anders depicts “their reality through their own eyes.”
36
In this case,
nonetheless, even though Fregoso’s argument is valid, I think it is problematic to demonize
the already few representations of non-Caucasians we see on the media, because that only
segregates that space even more to a point of immobility and isolation. Besides, Anders’
screenplay in Mi Vida Loca, at its core, is one of fascination, non-assimilation and
collective agency, and not one of exploitation.

In that regard, even if Anders holds sole credit as a writer-director for Mi Vida Loca – as it
is usually the case in writing for cinema – the creative collaborative process of Mi Vida
184
Loca certainly embedded a method of working that problematized the individualist premise
of an all-knowing and all-encompassing single creative entity. This is the same process that
happened in Grace of My Heart, where Anders first wrote more than one complete draft of
the sceenplay without the lyrics, and then added the lyrics later on, building musicality by
collaboration from various known musicians from the world of pop music and rock and roll
(these lyrics, and only the lyrics, were written on spec for Anders by musicians such as
Elvis Costello, Burt Bacharach, Los Lobos, Carole Bayer Sager, David A. Stewart, Boyd
Rice, Sonic Youth, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Leslie Gore, Larry Klein, and David Baerwald,
among others).

In the case of Allison Anders’ body of work (writing and directing for cinema, and mostly
directing-only for television), it takes a great deal of perseverance and the nurturing of a
personal artistic vision to both maintain a creative body of work while also teaching at
university institutions. And then, of course, there is the case argument of screenwriting
when one weights the authorship concern. If cinema has been mainly a directorial affair in
terms of authorship analysis – sometimes star-based/actor-based as in the case of Richard
Dyer’s argument in “A Note on Authorship” in his book Stars
37
– screenwriting as labor
and screenwriting as an essential aspect of Hollywood has been consistently posited as
secondary. In other words, screenwriting has been posited as a “floor-plan” for the
directorial main feature, which is the film.

As David Kipen recounts in his book-manifesto, half a century ago well-meaning French
auteur theorists rescued us from the tyranny of producer and studio worship by putting
185
cinema on the map with the other arts, and by inaugurating a following era of both director-
worship as well as director-centric film criticism.
38
In this case scenario, the usefulness of
thinking about the authorship debate resides in the counter-examination of screenwriting’s
authorial voice as an indispensable element in the creation of cinema. This seems to be
Kristin Thompson’s argument in “Bombs, or What Makes Bad Films Bad”
39
when she
cross-examines Hollywood flops narratively, and assigns their failure not to their directors
or to the films’ directing, but to the screenplays’ precarious construction of story and
characters as the ultimate failure on not being able to engage and hold an audience on the
storytelling level.

Another argument in favor of screenwriting, as the major creative matrix for a film, is
concerning the very title of the film “Grace of My Heart.” Although Allison Anders's
Grace of My Heart was not a box office hit, it does have a considerable audience following
because of the music. Many viewers
40
noted (correctly) that they don't understand where
the title of the film is truly coming from, other than from having seen the last scene in the
movie (where we actually see the album cover “Grace of My Heart,” and the character
Denise singing on the piano and saying the words “grace of my heart” by the end of the
lyrics). However, this last musical scene does not explain or justify something as big as the
title of the movie, which is a big gap.

The fact is that the screenplay authoritatively fills in this gap. It shows that her late husband,
Jay (as previously mentioned, loosely based on the Beach Boys, the bandleader and his
brother) was the one who, in an important line of dialogue, had pronounced the words to
186
Denise: “you’re the grace of my heart.”
41
So, the screenplay explains the title of the film
and fills in this important gap. That is why her song, by the end of the film, pays homage to
him (as he is deceased then) by referring to him as the “grace of my heart,” the same way
he has emotionally talked to her while he was alive with her.

To recap, Grace of My Heart is a film from 1996. The USC unpublished script draft dates
from 1994. There is another unpublished draft from 1995 at the Margaret Herrick Library.
However, both screenplay drafts do not have in them any of the original lyrics we hear in
the movie. Allison Anders wrote the entire screenplay first, and filled in the lyrics later. So,
it is fair to say that Anders thought her whole movie as a running story first, and the lyrics
came in later to illustrate different points in the life of the main characters at each one of
her scenes. In other words, the written lyrics were worked out as individual “inserts,” in
order to be added later on, which was what actually happened in the production of the film.

This corroborates my argument about writing as the creative power in cinema. Hence, there
are two types of “original” collaborative writing here at work: the (original) script itself,
and the various (original) lyrics later. As Richard Corliss (screenwriting critic mentioned in
chapter 1) notes about the film: the lyrics in Grace of My Heart “support a movie
narrative.”
42
In other words, the “stories” inside each lyrics are tied in together with the
“stories” in each scene: the writing in the lyrics, thus, cannot be random, they all have to be
carefully planed out to match. Ann Powers,
43
at the New York Times, in a long article,
mentions that Allison Anders in fact outlined all the lyrics first, but them passed them on to
the various musicians, who were more than happy to collaborate with her, creating original
187
lyrics and music for Anders (diverse musicians from an earlier time such as Burt Bacharach
and Gerry Goffin from the famed Brill Building in New York, plus more contemporary
musicians such as Elvis Costello and Sonic Youth).

Because Anders has a great passion and respect for music (not to mention she is the
founder of a rock and pop music film festival
44
), as well as most of her films are about the
Los Angeles rock scene (this one is also about New York), she obviously wanted to pay
homage to the musicians themselves, instead of writing the lyrics on her own (which she
could have easily done, because she has written and published poetry before becoming a
filmmaker, as I have noted earlier in the chapter). The use of a diverse variety of real
professional musicians from two different eras made the soundtrack of Grace of My Heart
something of an “event,” with an eager following, as I have already pointed out.

With this analysis in mind, what kind of author do we have in Allison Anders? In my
opinion, she is both collaborative
45
and a writer-auteur. But most importantly, she is a
writer-auteur. The content of her screenplay Grace of My Heart, although different at parts
from the film, beyond doubt helped her shape and define the film’s final form. Without this
intrinsically personal story content, which mingles social aspects of its time with songs
written and composed by various musicians (inserted later on), Grace of My Heart could
not have been Allison Anders’s film. So despite her knowledge and connection with the
music world, and their ongoing collaboration, as a filmmaker, Anders writing remains
deeply personal.

188
SCREENPLAY ANALYSIS

The screenplay for Grace of My Heart is unpublished as of the time of writing of this
dissertation. It is available for reading at the USC Cinematic Arts Library from the
University of Southern California (the 1994
46
draft analyzed in this chapter), and at the
Scripts Collection of the Margaret Herrick library in Los Angeles (a 1995
47
draft). After
examining both drafts, which are very similar in terms of their writing (and close in date,
about 5 months apart from each other), I decided to analyze the earlier draft (1994),
48
since
I have analyzed a later draft for Edward Scissorhands in the previous chapter. Both drafts
are clearly comparable, nonetheless.

The 1994 screenplay draft carried at USC has a two year lag from the film’s release date
(which was released on September 13, 1996), yet it is remarkably similar to the film in its
final scene structure: carrying about 90% of the scenes, and showing only some minor
changes for character and fictional band names. Note that the name changes that set apart
the script from the film is very minimal, and only minor fine-tuning, because the changes
sound so similar. Therefore, it is not difficult to match who is who from the screenplay
with the film. For instance, in this screenplay, the protagonist (played by actress Illeana
Douglas) is portrayed as Ethel Buxton,
49
while in the film her name is very much alike: she
is called Edna Buxton. Joel Millner (played by John Turturro, no name change) changes the
protagonist’s name to Denise Scott
50
in the screenplay, while in the film her name was
changed to Denise Waverly. The fictional band The Twilites
51
(black male vocal group) in
the script was changed to The Stylettes in the film; while the fictional band The
189
Luminaries
52
(black female vocal group, leaded by Doris, one of Denise’s best girlfriends)
keeps the same name in the film. Jay’s last name in the script, Anderson,
53
was changed to
Phillips in the film; while his fictional band The Riptides
54
(resembling The Beach Boys)
keeps the same name in the film. Additionally, most of the dialogue on this script remains
the same in the film – with post-production editing
55
shuffling some scenes here and there,
and making other scenes shorter than what was it written on the page. Yet, this script and
the film ultimately match in essence, main characters, scene chronology, and in basic
structure.

The other screenplay draft (1995, stored at the Margaret Herrick Library) is 20 pages
shorter than the USC draft (1994) just described in the above paragraph. However, again,
both drafts constitute basically the same script: with almost the same order of scenes and
the same characters (except for Jeri, one of Denise’s girlfriends, who was deleted from this
script draft and from the film). This is a more tightened, edited down draft, so it is more
concise. This is happening because, generally speaking, screenplays often tend to run
shorter and more to the point when redrafted. However, the content of the action and
dialogue is still the same in this later draft; Allison Anders didn’t change those that much.
Also, by being a subsequent shorter draft, we can trace the script evolving and actually
making space for all the several lyrics that will be added later on to the story.

In terms of content, the screenplay in both drafts follows the struggles of a female
songwriter in a male dominated music business. Tom Charity, for Time Out, London,
describes the story in Grace of My Heart as a “soul searching melodrama,” and a “music
190
biopic following fictitious singer-songwriter Denise Waverly from the ‘50s to the early
‘70s.”
56
Another description in the press puts it this way: “Filmmaker Allison Anders has
always made personal films about other people. First with Gas Food Lodging and then Mi
Vida Loca, she presented uniquely uncompromising views of contemporary American
women living on the verge of society and the brink of another broken heart.”
57
In terms of
the setting, Jack Mathews, for the Los Angeles Times, makes the following historical
assessment:
The main setting for “Grace” is the famous Brill Building in Times Square, a song factory
where from 1958 to 1970 young writers barely out of high school wrote hit after hit for
artists recording right down the hall. Many of those writers wanted to become singers
themselves and some did. But few were women, and for Edna [the protagonist character]
(and Carole King), it was a matter of writing and waiting. “Grace” marvelously recreates
that atmosphere of sweatshop creativity, both the pressure and the joy, and [Illeana]
Douglas portrayal of a woman fighting for her own identity and a piece of the action gives
the story a solid emotional footing. Edna, like Judy Garland’s Vicky Lester in “A Star is
Born,” is a strong uncomplicated woman in a complicated business, and her decency sees
her through some stormy relationships.
58
(my brackets and italics)

This accurate description of the music business that went on at the Brill Building in New
York, in the 1950s and 1960s, with its factory-style separation of labor between writers and
musicians, is, as previously noted, absolutely akin to the studio system separation of labor
that went on in Hollywood between screenwriters and directors. The following scene
sequence depicts the quest for auteur agency (at the expense of writer’s anonymity), in that
“atmosphere of sweatshop creativity” (to borrow Mathews words), that was so
characteristic of that time period depicted through the historical image of the Brill Building.
The female protagonist’s urgent struggle to secure her a kind of auteur agency is what is at
the base of the story, as written in this sequence of scenes in the screenplay:

191
INT. DRUGSTORE - DAY

Ethel waits at a soda fountain drinking a coke. JOEL MILLNER arrives in a rush, late. He
wears a suit – but not a great suit – curly black hair and glasses. We can’t tell his age – and
we never will be able to – he’s just one of those guys. He and she check each other out.

JOEL
Ethel?

ETHEL
Joe Miller?

They shake hands. He sits down at the fountain.

JOEL
I’ve been trying to track you down for months. Well okay – for
weeks. All weekend. You don’t have a phone? Why don’t you
have a phone? Gotta have a phone. Can’t make it in this business
without a phone. What’re you drinking?

ETHEL
Vanilla Coke.

JOEL
(wincing)
That’s disgusting. Are you eating? I’m buying. Have a hamburger
or a BLT.

ETHEL
Thanks. I’ll have a grilled cheese. And onion rings.

JOEL
(calling to the waitress)
Can we get some service over here – we’ve been waiting twenty
minutes.

The WAITRESS stops and looks at him unphased with her pen poised. Ethel smirks at his
gall. He doesn’t look up at the waitress once as he orders for them.

JOEL
She’ll have grilled cheese and onion rings. I’ll have the
cheeseburger combo and a malted.

The waitress leaves without looking at him either.

JOEL
She was scarey – did you see how rude she was? Anyway – so –
your demo –

192
ETHEL
“In Another World”?

JOEL
That’s the one. Nice voice. Great song.

ETHEL
Thanks. I wrote it.

JOEL
I know you did. You know – it was funny – cause when I listened
to it I thought how nuts it was for a gal to be singing such strong
material.

Ethel sighs and shrugs and sips her coke.

ETHEL
Okay, so now I’m unfeminine too.

JOEL
And that’s what I like –

She nods dryly – he hasn’t even disagreed.

JOEL
– Only –

ETHEL
– You already have someone like me.

JOEL
No. I don’t think there’s another like you anywhere. You’re one of
a kind.

Ethel collapses in relief.

JOEL
I’d like to buy your song. I manage a male vocal group called the
Twilites – heard of ‘em?

ETHEL
Sure.

JOEL
This song is perfect for their voices. I think we could all make
some money. I bet you have other songs too and –

ETHEL
I’m planning to record my songs myself.
193

JOEL
Record your own songs – whaddaya mean?? Either you’re a singer
or a songwriter – which is it?

ETHEL
Both.

JOEL
Nobody’s both – you’re either one or the other.

ETHEL
Well, I’m both!

She turns around stubbornly and looks across the counter staring at her own reflection in
the mirror. The waitress brings their food. Denise chews an onion ring angrily. Joel turns
his stunned face to look at the girl in the mirror and talks to her through the mirror.

JOEL
Well. So you are. Okay. The day will come again when girl singers
are top ‘a’ the heap. Till the timing’s right why not make a little
money writing songs for other people?

Ethel considers this. Joel lifts his burger and winces.

JOEL
Didn’t I tell her “well-done”? “Cheeseburger well-done” I told her.
I can’t eat it like this.

He sets it down. Ethel turns to look at him.

ETHEL
Sell my songs to you, huh?

JOEL
Lemme prove it to you. I’ll book a studio – you can meet the fellas
– listen to them sing your song – if you don’t like it, I won’t bug
you again. Trust me, I’m Joel Millner – [I’m a nice Hebrew boy,
actually my mother is Italian.] a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey.

Ethel smiles wryly.

JOEL
Can I be perfectly honest? You gotta change your name. Ethel
Buxton – that’s the worst name I’ve ever heard in my life!
Where’re you from that would curse you with a name like that?

ETHEL
Philadelphia.
194

JOEL
Oh – ouch! It keeps getting worse! Wait a minute – The Buxtons
of Philadelphia – not Buxton Steel??!!

Ethel lowers her eyes shamefully. The rich, like the poor, forever denying where they come
from. She nods yes.

JOEL
Oh – we gotta do a little re-invention!

She offers him an onion ring. He takes it.

ETHEL
Can I be honest with you?

JOEL
I insist!

ETHEL
You ordered the cheeseburger combo, but there was no mention of
“well-done.”

JOEL
(smirking – busted)
I didn’t tell her ‘well-done’? Really?

Ethel shakes her head no, smiling. He laughs lightly to himself and blushes… picking up
his medium rare cheeseburger and eating a bite as if it’s his penance.

EXT. BRILL BUILDING – DAY

Ethel checks the Broadway address against the piece of paper in her gloved hand.

ETHEL
1619 Broadway…

She walks into the building.

INT. BRILL BUILDING/RECODING STUDIO – DAY

Ethel walks into the studio where THE TWILITES, a black male vocal group of FIVE is
assembled, rehearsing her song. Joel looks around and sees her.

JOEL
Hey kiddo – come on over here.

Ethel moves across the room as Joel welcomes her in.

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JOEL
Fellas – this is the young lady who wrote your next hit. I want to
introduce you all to DENISE SCOTT.

Ethel turns to him gasping in shock.

JOEL
Denise Scott from South Philli. Ever been to South Philli? Well,
she’s an original – to rise up outa those slums –

Ethel can’t believe her ears. Joel completely reinvents her on the spot. We will now know
her as Denise Scott. Denise awkwardly reaches out as the Twilites cordially shake or kiss
her hand, each acknowledging her by her new name – Denise or Miss Scott.
59

And two pages later:
INT. JOEL’S OFFICE BRILL BUILDING – DAY

Joel sits on top of his desk as Denise signs a contract.

JOEL
You’ll make seventy-five dollars a week and one cent on every
record we sell. You get the same percentage as me.

DENISE
Just so we understand each other – I’m only doing this till I can
record my own stuff. So when I make my record –

JOEL
Oh – absolutely – when the time’s right.

Denise hands him the signed contracts. A BOMBSHELL struts in and takes the contracts.
Denise gapes, and checks her out. Joel smiles sheepishly.

JOEL
Oh… My new receptionist… Judy.

Bombshell Judy files the contracts, Denise smirks, stunned.

JOEL
For now you worry about writing the songs. I want personal ones –
like “In Another World.”

DENISE
Well – now I am worried. What if I can’t “think up” another one
like that?

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JOEL
Keep your eyes and ears open – everyone is in pain. Come on – I
wanna show you your office.
60

This scene sequence from the first act in Allison Anders’s screenplay establishes a
relationship that will form between the main character Ethel Buxton (played by Illeana
Douglas, named Edna Buxton in the film) and her agent Joel Millner (played by John
Turturro). As we can see, Ethel/Edna is a young aspiring singer in the late 1950s, who also
happens to write her own songs. After their casual interview meeting at a small diner, Joel
eventually becomes her producer and agent, representing Denise as a writer. However,
what Ethel/Edna really wants to do in her life is to become a singer, not a songwriter
employee for other musicians, but Joel has different plans for her. As she clearly states, she
wants to “do both,” to which Joel comically replies, almost if amused (and as if Ethel had
no idea of what she was talking about), “Record your own songs – whaddaya mean? Either
you’re a singer or a songwriter – which is it?”
61
and “Nobody’s both – you’re either one or
the other.”
62

While Ethel has the musical pretension to be the equivalent of an auteur in cinema, the
truth of the matter is that the record industry of the 1950s and 1960s was clearly divided
between singers in bands and the songwriters who write their content (again, just like in
classic Hollywood, with writers’ “factories” versus directors). Also, this same record
industry, embodied in the factual manner and style of the Brill Building, is more interested
in all-male-bands than on women singers: so Ethel is not a profitable prospect in such
social context. The message in the scene is clear: Ethel is made to feel indebted to Joel
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Millner for having discovered her, as well as for having offered her first real entrance into
the music business as a writer instead of singer (breaking her ambitions into “you are either
one or the other” division of labor mode). Making matters worse, Joel wants to “do a little
re-invention”
63
on Ethel’s identity, completely crushing her already bruised artistic self-
esteem. But this is not Joel’s fault, since he is only playing by the rules of the system. At
this time in the United States, the entertainment industry, whenever possible, would make
the “talent” white, preferably middle-class (not too rich, not too poor), obedient (for the
money), and with a marketable all-American name (the favorite social “make-over” of the
time). Poor Ethel; now she has become…forever… known as Denise! By following this
path that has been passed on to her, at least Denise started to make “a little money writing
songs for other people.”
64
The rest of the film is about her creative struggle to break free of
this role.

In this way, the question of the writer’s function of anonymity that applies to my argument
can be perceived as two-fold. One, as it relates to the characters and themes of Anders’s
films/screenplays. And two, as in the relationhip to the field of screenwriting per se. The
function of anonymity is also a relational one (and philosophical). One that can be operated
as a possible explicative metaphor that helps us understand the relationship between
Anders’s work – in all its scope and materiality – and the historical, professional, and
cinematic context in which it is immersed. There is no point in studying only the textual
body of work of a certain artist, and not its circumstantial history; as well as there is no
point in being restricted only by theoretical issues surrounding that same work (which it
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would be too abstract). Both approaches work in sinchronity with one another. That way, in
analyzing a screenplay that deals with issues of anonymity function versus auteurist
privilege, mirroring the disputes between screenwriters and directors as auteurs, a path is
opened up for renewed possibilities of research into female forms of artistic expression.

By analyzing the screenplay sequence cited previously, we can start to inquire whether
Anders’s condition as a female writer-director might have anything to do with the
concerns/themes she portrays in her scripts and films. Does Anders feel in any way in a
somewhat restricted position that might be confining to her in a male-dominated
entertainment industry? Does that bear any effect on the construction of her characters?
How does she compare her own situation as a woman filmmaker, and that of Denise’s
character in Grace of My Heart? Does Anders understand and empathize with the confined,
restricted, and constrained space occupied by writers in a celebrity-based entertainment
industry? Is the recurrent identity “re-invention” of that period, in Hollywood and in the
music industry, a sign that all that is more “personal” and “authentic” in art should not
matter in business as much as their appearances and the mainstream image of the
assembled end product? Anders relate to every one of these questions with unquestionable
historical awareness, and through a deeply personal and artistic stance.

The same way that the character of Denise had her name changed and her identity “re-
invented,” another notable case of the period was Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen
Cansino), who changed not only her name in the 1940s, she also had to physically re-shape
199
her whole persona for visually performing as a Caucasian actress on the screen. Rita
Hayworth underwent painful electrolysis sessions for augmenting her hairline, changed the
color of her hair, as well as changed her whole body appearance through a strict exercise
regimen.
65
Therefore, ethnic identity (Latina, Jewish, African-American), as well as gender
identity, is something that gets concealed and manipulated in the name of the entertainment
business for a calculated effect: an effect aimed at achieving a standardized, homogenized
mainstream appearance that caters to an equally perceived mainstream audience. Thus, the
female author, or performer such as actress Rita Hayworth, as well as the fictional writer
Denise Waverly, get constructed as outsiders from within the system. In several parts of the
screenplay, we see this construction at play, since Denise as a character becomes
sidetracked into writing content for other bands, which is stately not her dream.

In that case, Anders wanted to discover Denise’s musical personal voice amidst her
songwriter trajectory. Anders says:
What was important was that she came from the pop world of the Brill Building and
everyone else came from folk. When you pick up a Joni Mitchell Record – and I still do,
pretty much on a daily basis – you knew you were going to get something deep, but when
you bought “Tapestry” [album by Carole King], who knew what you were going to get?
She wrote some really intense stuff, but we never thought about it in that way before. “Will
You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” is a girl singing to a boy, but it’s really an advice song for
girls. It says, “Will you still love me if I sleep with you tonight?” which is the big question,
the only question, really, for teenage girls. Where else were you going to get that kind of
advice in the ‘50s? But on “Tapestry,” it has so much more depth than it ever had before.
Then you go back and find she wrote a song called, “Crying in the Rain,” and that is such a
heavy song. She wrote the lyric, “He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss.” Wow! So she was
definitely an inspiration. There’s a book I read called “The History of Girl Groups,” which
went from the ‘50s to the singer-songwriter period, and pretty much gave me the structure
of the movie. It was important to follow that trajectory, because the power issues, women
gaining power, gaining a creative voice.
66

200
Despite all the bursting creativity going on in the background, Anders, as well as Denise, as
artists, inhabit a restricted position that is somewhat confined in a male-dominated
entertainment industry. It seems that Ander’s own experience might have had an effect on
the construction of her characters, since her work is so personal. Even in her afore-cited
account on the subject of the book about the history of girl groups – progressing from
1950s songwriting to a more open auteur “singer-songwriter” period – Anders follows the
issues of artists as outsiders when she says that: “It was important to follow that trajectory,
because the power issues, women gaining power, gaining a creative voice.” These are
outsider artists maturing from inside the system, they had to work extra hard and longer to
gain the same visibility that came more naturally to their male musician counterparts.

At the end of the screenplay, with a very touching personal scene, as mentioned before, we
realize that Denise based the title of her album, Grace of My Heart (final film scene), on
the conversation she had with her husband Jay (played by Matt Dillon) when they were
making up just before he decided to commit suicide. In that dialogue, Jay tries to convince
Denise on working harder to release her album, to have something to say other than writing
songs for other people. He also presses her, who he calls “the grace of my heart,” to bestow
her personal voice into her own individual music. Obviously, Denise behaves as an outsider
at the margins among all these male auteur bands that are so successful (such as Jay’s band,
based on the Beach Boys), because she doesn’t completely trust her talent, and most
probably feels overwhelmed. We should note that in the screenplay, as well as in the film,
most of the very personal scenes between Denise and her two husbands (plus between
Denise and John) always happen to mention something about her condition as a artist, since
201
the film is structured, scene by scene, on Denise’s own life experiences, which inform her
lyrics. As mentioned previously, we are able to witness where the title of the film, Grace of
My Heart, is really coming from, because this dialogue is not present in the film:
INT. JAY’S BEACH PALACE/STUDIO – DUSK

As Denise enters their house, sadly, she is shocked to see her husband up and dressed. He
plays back beautiful work he’s just recorded. He smiles at her sweetly – the man she loves
has mysteriously returned.

JAY
Hi baby.

Denise runs to his arms happily. They kiss sweet and passionate. They listen together to his
music, happily.

IN THEIR BEDROOM

The couple have made love. Denise is in a newfound world of peace and solace.

DENISE
There’s something so different about these new songs of yours –
they are not exactly peaceful but –

JAY
It’s all because of you, baby. You’ve taught me something I never
knew before… grace. You’ve given me – grace. You’re the grace
of my heart.

DENISE
Oh my god – that’s… so beautiful.

She looks at him with the deepest she is.

JAY
Baby, we need to work on your album now.

DENISE
My album? Oh no, I’m a humanist – I wouldn’t force myself on
the public again.

JAY
A concept album… Only – it would be better than what we guys
are doing, cause it’d be real personal and genuine – all about who
you really are.

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He smiles at her and musses her hair. She laughs sweetly.

DENISE
Dream on, sugar.

Jay’s face is overcome with seriousness now.

JAY
I want you to make that album, baby, more than anything I want
for myself. Can you dig that?

DENISE
(curiously)
Honey… (beat) Hey – let’s go out tonight! Doris is singing at the
Whiskey.

JAY
Sounds groovey! Lemme hop in the shower.

He gives her a big kiss on the cheek and heads off.

JAY
Oh hey – guess what I did today? I took Luma’s dogs to the vet
and got them their shots – one less detail for you to worry about.

Denise is happily stunned as she marches off to the bathroom. She lays back in happy bliss.
Her eyes fall on the nightstand.

ANGLE ON a stack of bills – all stamped PAID.

REVERSE of Denise, quietly amazed by what she sees. Jay comes out half wet from the
shower – but not fully.

JAY
Baby – you know – I just had a couple a flashes and I wanna lay
the tracks down before I forget them.

He climbs onto the bed where Denise pulls a fake pout.

JAY
And when you come home, we’ll get high and make love all night.

She welcomes him into her arms.

JAY
And baby… by the way – your mother – the great dame Buxton –
she was full of shit. You fit… you fit just groovey.

He kisses her more deeply than ever before.
67

203

In this reconciliation scene – soon after Jay’s self-imposed disengagement and manic-
depressive reclusion to one bedroom in the house – we can see that Jay professes his love
by saying, “You are the grace of my heart” to Denise. That line from Jay to Denise is still
there in the later script.
68
This obviously means that Allison Anders previously intended for
Jay to declare to Denise that she is the “grace of” his “heart,” since it is written in both of
the screenplay drafts. Also, the scene containing “you are the grace of my heart” line is
exactly identical in both scripts.
69
But in the film, this scene runs a bit shorter in dialogue.
So, most likely, this line must have been filmed, as written in the scene surviving in both
drafts, but later removed in the editing room. The scene in the film keeps Jay’s dialogue: “I
want you to make that album, baby, more than anything I want for myself;”
70
but it cuts
out: “You’ve taught me something I never knew before…grace. You’ve given me grace.
You’re the grace of my heart.”
71

Again, this screenwriting derivative scene proves where the title of the film is really
coming from, even though it doesn’t appear in the film itself. The title comes from the
screenplay: from the interaction between two protagonists: Denise and Jay. Because Jay
says that Denise is the “grace of” his “heart” – after their reconciliation regarding his
“spacing-out” and having forgotten the kids in the museum – the screenplay seems to
indicate that Jay feels that Denise embodies a sort of redemptive quality in his life. But
later in the night, right after their reconciliation, Jay surprisingly, and in a plot twist,
commits suicide. Denise is obviously shocked and struck by this abrupt tragedy, since a
few hours earlier, she found herself “in a world of newfound peace and solace,” and
204
thought “the man she loves” had “miraculously returned.”
72
They reconciled, made love,
and she believed that their life was back to normal. She was wrong.

Therefore, because the last scene of the screenplay, and of the movie, shows Denise
recording a song for her album “Grace of My Heart” –years after Jay’s suicide,
chronologically – the “Grace of My Heart” tone seems to symbolize personal and artistic
freedom as well as inspiration: for both Jay and Denise. It symbolizes being “personal and
genuine,”
73
as Jay comments about Denise’s style. As for Denise, it represents Jay’s
“belief in her talent.”
74
As Jay declared to Denise, in a deeply moving moment of self-
realization after a long period of depression: “You’ve taught me something I never knew
before…grace. You’ve given me grace.”
75
Jay did the same thing for her.

During screenplay time, as a vulnerable woman who had been in a string of unfulfilling
relationships, Denise needed strength: she had never been completely sure of her talent,
that she could be “both a singer and songwriter”
76
as she deeply wished (i.e. an auteur). In
that regard, Denise found an artistic equal in Jay, because he understood her and believed
in her. Not only that, he propelled her to believe in herself (other than her agent Joel), by
making her realize that she could make herself into an autonomous, independent “artist”
above anything else (even after his death). Again, Jay inspired this realization in Denise in
the auteur sense of the word. Denise did not need to circumscribe herself to remaining a
songwriter forever, writing songs for other people; she could be anything she wished,
including being a total artist just like Jay was. So Denise finds the “grace” she is looking
for in his attitude. He is sincere, and he mirrors herself back to her. In other words, the
205
“grace of my heart” utterance being referred to in the screenplay is of two human beings in
love who recognize the other person sometimes more than the person herself or himself.
They are a facilitator for the other’s own sense of self-recognition. They reflect back the
other’s potential, authenticity and inner truthfulness, thus the heartfelt gratitude symbol
contained in the sentimental declaration “grace of my heart” from one lover to another.

So the screenplay, at the same time that it amplifies the voice of Jay’s character, by
documenting where the title “Grace of My Heart” is coming from, it also relates to the
issue of Anders’ songwriter-collaborators, by assigning authorship of the lyrics in Grace of
My Heart to renowned musicians in the world of rock and pop music of the period. This
intentional collaboration (from Anders’ part) presupposes the co-existence of a pre-existent
individual auteur, in the figure of Anders herself, together with a kind of historical and
musical collective agency, in the figure of the songwriters and musicians who collaborated
for her and with her. Therefore, once the lyrics were written and finalized, they were
integrated into the main framework of the film. The bands, musicians, and Kristen Vigard
77

(singer who dubs Illeana Douglas’ voice) were then cued in and able to perform according
to the style required by each scene. In this case, even if an obvious contribution and
collaboration between obvious musician-auteurs from that music scene takes place, the
lyrics have been completely “manipulated” by Anders way in advance, since each lyric had
a role to play by fitting a priori into very specific niche scenes. In other words, the
songwriters knew exactly what Anders wanted and needed, and were contributing more
with their mystique and personality, than with pure content, which had been roughly pre-
206
drafted by Anders. As a writer-director filmmaker, Anders knew the screenplay she had
written, and thus she was aware of her story needs in each scene.

To wrap up the issue of the function of anonymity for writers as creators, screenwriters are
in some sense the “subaltern” within the Hollywood studio system, male and female, just
like some of the characters they happen to portray (i.e. Denise’s character). However,
female screenwriters, as I sought to demonstrate, inhabit a much more vulnerable position,
since as artists they exist in a much smaller number, something that is a reflection, a
symptom so to speak, of the society we live in. About the “dominant view,” there is the
position of mainstream dominant cinema, which homogenizes some points of view at the
exclusion of others. Usually, of course, favored points of view are not from minorities or
female agents. Female authors necessarily have to subsist at the margins of the system, at
least the great majority of this small pool. Therefore, because screenwriting is inscribed in
this context, certain kinds of “writing” will be privileged at the expense of alternative,
minority views which become at risk. In any regard, there is a great deal of works that have
been produced by female and minority writers. These works are significant – such as
Allison Anders’s work – in that they come in contact with the past, interact and reinterpret
existing timelines, and end up forging new artistic and audience relationships in the end.

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CHAPTER 3 NOTES

1
Grace of My Heart, film written and directed by Allison Anders, (Universal City, Los Angeles: Universal
Pictures, release date of 13 September 1996).

2
Allison Anders, Grace of My Heart, unpublished screenplay (Los Angeles: USC Cinematic Arts Library,
studio unmarked copy, 17 August 1994), 120 pages.

3
Allison Anders’ feature screenplay credits (written and directed) include:

-- Lost Highway (1986, unproduced screenplay written by Allison Anders: Awarded both Nicholl Fellowship
in Screenwriting and Samuel Goldwyn Screenwriting Award).
-- Border Radio (1987, written and directed by Allison Anders, Dean Lent, and Kurt Voss).
-- Gas Food Lodging (1992, written and directed by Allison Anders, based on the novel “Don’t Look and It
Won’t Hurt” by Richard Peck).
-- Mi Vida Loca (1993, written and directed by Allison Anders).
-- Four Rooms (1995, segment “The Missing Ingredient” written and directed by Allison Anders).
-- Grace of My Heart (1996, written and directed by Allison Anders).
-- Sugar Town (1999, written and directed by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss).
-- Things Behind the Sun (2001, written by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, directed by Allison Anders).
-- In the Echo (2002, TV movie, written by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, directed by Allison Anders).
-- Strutter (2012, written and directed by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss).

4
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.1.

5
The commune scene in California has the date of 1970 (no date for that scene in the 1994 script), and the
Malibu scene with the puppies on the beach has the date of 1967 (on the 1994 script, p.93).

6
See previous footnote with film credits for Allison Anders work.

7
Allison Anders (born 1954) and Kurt Voss (born 1963) were both UCLA film students, and they “edited by
night” Border Radio (1967) “at UCLA, which Anders and Voss attended in the mid-80s.”

Steve Appleford, “L.A.’s Music Sets the Pulse for Their Films; The Local Scene Has Figured Prominently in
the Work of Allison Anders and Kurt Voss: ‘Strutter’ Completes Triology Began in 1987,” Los Angeles
Times, (13 April 2013), p.D3.

8
Allison Anders is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UCSB, University of California, Santa Barbara:

http://www.filmandmedia.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/anders/anders.html (last accessed 10 April 2013).

9
About her life experiences, Anders has said about the writing and making of Grace of My Heart:

“The personal stuff is always pretty easy for me, because I can work things out, and I can also re-work them.
So I can work through a lot of feelings, and then I can turn them into what I wished it had been, you know. I
learned that trick really early on when I was a kid, so that part was not so hard. It was a little bit harder
shooting personal stuff, in some ways: ‘God, I lived this, why am I shooting this?’”

And actor Eric Stoltz had commented:

“From what I know: Allison wanted to write, was fascinated with the girl groups from the Brill Building, and
also wanted to incorporate some of her relationships, strained relationships with men into that milieu.”
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Allison Anders and Eric Stoltz, “Bonus Materials: The Making of Grace of My Heart,” Grace of My Heart,
DVD, written and directed by Allison Anders, (1996; Los Angeles: Universal Studios, 1999).

10
According to my personal interview with Allison Anders, before attending Film School at UCLA, Anders
studied Philosophy in Junior College, at Los Angeles Valley College. There she befriended another single
mother (like Anders): her senior “mentor” Lepska Warren (Janina Martha Lepska), who was the third wife of
Henry Miller (the wife who lived with him in Big Sur and their two children). Lepska Warren studied
Philosophy at Yale.

Allison Anders, unpublished interview with the author (at the Coffee Table in Los Feliz, Los Angeles), 21
Nov. 2008.

Daniel Bullen, “The Miracle Accomplished by Blood and Joy: Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin,” The Love Lifes
of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011), p.242.

Judy Stone, “Tough Road to Acclaim Allison Anders, Raped at 12, Catatonic for a Year, Has Seen Her
Fortunes Change. Her Survival Tale ‘Gas Food Lodging’ Won Fame in Film Festivals. Today It’s Back in
Town,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, (30 Sep. 1992). (last accessed 30 April 2013):
http://articles.philly.com/1992-09-30/entertainment/26021781_1_allison-anders-favorite-film-world-cinema

11
About Anders’ intention of becoming a film critic, which is consistent with Anders vast knowledge not
only about music but about film, see article by Judy Stone cited above on footnote 10.

12
According to my personal interview with Anders (cited above on footnote 10), before attending Film
School at UCLA, Anders had written and published poetry in a few Anthologies. This information is
corroborated by Judy stone (also above cited on footnotes 10 and 11), who says that Anders “enrolled at Los
Angeles Valley College, where she met Voss and began writing poetry, which was published in some
anthologies. The poetry helped her to get admitted to UCLA, where she thought she would study journalism
and film in order to become a film critic.”

13
“Dust Jacket Back Cover,” Grace of My Heart, DVD, film written and directed by Allison Anders, (1996;
Los Angeles: Universal Studios, 1999).

14
It seems that Anders modified the character name spelling from one to a double “L” in his last name. For
the character name of “Joel Millner,” manager, consult Anders film and screenplay on pages15 and 32:

Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.15 and 32.

For the name of Allison Anders agent, “Joel Milner,” consult:

“Biography: Anders, Allison (1954-),” in: Contemporary Authors, electronic online database, (Farmington
Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, Gale Reference Team, 2004).

15
For more on the history of the Brill Building and its music, consult:

Sarah Caissie Provost, The Brill Building: Sound and Style in a New York Hit Song Factory, (Hudson, NY:
Music Word Media Group, 2012).

Ken Emerson, Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era, (New York:
Penguin, 2006).

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16
Both citations respectively come from the back and front cover from the dust jacket:

“Dust Jacket Back and Front Cover,” Grace of My Heart, DVD, film written and directed by Allison Anders,
(1996; Los Angeles: Universal Studios, 1999).

17
Patsy Kensit made that comment in the DVD extra feature for Grace of My Heart:

Patsy Kensit, “Bonus Materials: The Making of Grace of My Heart,” Grace of My Heart, DVD, written and
directed by Allison Anders, (1996; Los Angeles: Universal Studios, 1999).

18
Personal Interview with the author, 21 Nov. 2008.

19
Personal Interview with the author, 21 Nov. 2008.

20
David Howard, “Where’s the Antagonist,” How to Build a Great Screenplay: A Master Class in
Storytelling for Film, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006), pp.14-15.

21
Howard, “Where's the Antagonist,” p.14.

22
See footnote 9.

Eric Stoltz, “Bonus Materials: The Making of Grace of My Heart,” Grace of My Heart, DVD, written and
directed by Allison Anders, (1996; Los Angeles: Universal Studios, 1999).

23
Howard, “Where's the Antagonist,” pp.14-15. (my brackets)

24
Howard, “Where's the Antagonist,” p.14.

25
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.17.

“Chapter 5: The Perfect Song,” Grace of My Heart, DVD, written and directed by Allison Anders, (1996; Los
Angeles: Universal Studios, 1999).

26
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.18.

27
Refer to Rosa Linda Fregoso’s chapter “Familia Matters” in Mexicana Encounters for more on the subject
of “pachucas-cholas-homegirls.”

Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Familia Matters,” in: Mexicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the
Borderlands, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
28
Widely available information about Anders.

In the DVD interview for Things Behind the Sun (2001), Anders says:

“I was 11 going on 12 . . . and after that, ‘Pretty Ballerina’ came out, and that was an important song for me,
because the circumstances of the film were based on my own experiences of my childhood rape, and so that
song, it was one of my favorite songs at the time, but it was playing in the house on the radio somewhere
when that happened. People often think ‘Oh God, you must hate to hear that song’ . . . but no, this song really
saved my life, because I’ve heard the song, and that was what I focused on, I mean, like with any trauma, you
focus on something very specific, and I focused on that song to sort of endure and kind of protect myself.”

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“Special Features: Interviews: Allison Anders,” Things Behind the Sun, DVD, directed by Allison Anders,
written by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, (2001; Los Angeles: Showtime Networks, 2003).

For more information about Anders, refer to:

“Interview: Allison Anders,” in: PBS: Frontline Report: The Monster that Ate Hollywood, (PBS, July 2001).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/hollywood/interviews/anders.html (last accessed 10 April
2013).

Harrison Coltun, “Artist in Profile: Allison Anders,” interview, in: The Daily Nexus, The University of
California, Santa Barbara’s Independent, Student Run Newspaper, (17 Nov. 2005).
http://dailynexus.com/2005-11-17/artist-in-profile-allison-anders/ (last accessed 10 April 2013).

Graham Fuller, Interview with Writer/Director, “Allison Anders, Shooting Straight from the Heart,”
Interview Magazine, (vol. 26, issue 9, Sep. 1996), p.70-72.

Maitland McDonagh, “Sad Girls,” Film Comment, (vol. 30, issue 5, September-October 1994), pp.75-78.

Elisabeth English, “Interview with Allison Anders,” Creative Screenwriter Magazine, (2001).
(not available, magazine doesn’t exist anymore).

James P. Mercurio, “Contemporary Melodrama: Interview with Allison Anders,” Creative Screenwriting,
Special Issue, (vol.3, no.4, 1996), pp.25-28.

Allison Anders, “Basic Info,” in: Facebook. (last accessed 7 July 2013).
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Allison-Anders/108214389201886?sk=info

29
Refer to footnote 28, and to the DVD film “Commentary” scene-by-scene with Allison Anders:

“Special Features: Commentary” by Allison Anders, Things Behind the Sun, DVD, directed by Allison
Anders, written by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, (2001; Los Angeles: Showtime Networks, 2003).

30
Harrison Coltun, “Artist in Profile: Allison Anders,” interview, in: The Daily Nexus, The University of
California, Santa Barbara’s Independent, Student Run Newspaper, (17 Nov. 2005).
http://dailynexus.com/2005-11-17/artist-in-profile-allison-anders/ (last accessed 10 April 2013).

31
Part of Keta Miranda’s argument in:

Marie Keta Miranda, Homegirls in the Public Sphere, (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003).

32
The works by Rosalinda Fregoso:

Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Hanging out with the Homegirls? Allison Anders’s ‘Mi Vida Loca’,” Race in
Contemporary American Cinema: Part 4, in: Cinéaste, (vol. 21, no.3, 22 June 1995), pp.36-37.

Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Familia Matters,” in: Mexicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the
Borderlands, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp.91-102.

33
Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Hanging out with the Homegirls? Allison Anders’s ‘Mi Vida Loca’,” Race in
Contemporary American Cinema: Part 4, in: Cinéaste, (vol. 21, no.3, 22 June 1995), p.36.

34
Fregoso, p.36.
211
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !

35
Fregoso, p.36.

36
Fregoso, p.37.

37
Richard Dyer, “A Note on Authorship,” in: Stars, (London: BFI, British Film Institute, 2002), pp.151-158.

38
David Kipen, The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American History, Melville Manifestos,
(Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishinb, 2006), pp.45 and 169.

39
Kristin Thompson, “Bombs, or What Makes Bad Films Bad,” Storytelling in the New Hollywood:
Understanding Classical Narrative Technique, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp.363-368.

40
Viewers at the IMDB message board comment that they don’t understand where the title is coming from:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116442/board/?ref_=tt_bd_sm (last accessed 10 April 2013).

41
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.108.

42
Richard Corliss, “’60s Going on ’90s: New Projects Cannily Re-Create The Sounds of Pop’s Adolescence,”
Time Magazine, (vol.148, issue 17, 7 October 1996), p.92.

43
Ann Powers says:

“To tell this tale, Grace of My Heart makes its soundtrack the movie’s real star. Ms. Anders recruited a
dazzling handful of artists for the project, wrote outlines for each song, and let the writers take it from there.”

Ann Powers, “Paying Tribute to the Music that Never Died,” New York Times, Film Review, (22 Sept. 1996),
p.16.

44
Don’t Knock the Rock Film and Music Festival in Los Angeles:

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/dont-knock-the-rock-2012/ (last accessed 10 April 2013).

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dont-Knock-The-Rock-Film-And-Music-Festival/8155609170 (last
accessed 10 April 2013).

http://www.myspace.com/dontknocktherock (last accessed 10 April 2013).

45
Allison Anders has collaborated with Kurt Voss, Dean Lent, Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez in writing
and directing, as well as pursued community collaboration and novel adaptation. And of course, she
collaborated on the lyrics for Grace of My Heart, by at least drafting their content in advance before passing
them on to each musician (see footnote 43).

46
Allison Anders, Grace of My Heart, unpublished screenplay (Los Angeles: USC Cinematic Arts Library,
studio unmarked copy, 17 August 1994), 120 pages.

47
Allison Anders, Grace of My Heart, unpublished screenplay (Los Angeles: Margaret Herrick Library
Scripts Collection, studio unmarked copy, 5 January 1995), 100 pages.

48
Following is the description of the 1994 manuscript copy analyzed in this dissertation:

212
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !
Allison Anders, Grace of My Heart, unpublished screenplay (Los Angeles: USC Cinematic Arts Library,
studio unmarked copy, 17 August 1994), 120 pages.

-- This screenplay manuscript has 1 title page.
-- It is an unpublished screenplay.
-- No studio or production company logo on the title page.
-- Revisions: no noted revisions on the draft.
-- This screenplay is displayed in white pages only.
-- This is the only Grace of My Heart screenplay available at the USC Cinematic Arts Library.
-- Pages Missing: page 83 only.
-- Unreadable pages: none.
-- Screenplay Author: Allison Anders.
-- Film Director: Allison Anders.
-- Film Release Date: 13 September 1996, USA (116 min).
-- Introductory Textual Page: None.

49
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.1.

50
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.19.

51
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.17 and p.19.

52
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.31.

53
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.89 and p.94.

54
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.89, p.93 and p.94.

55
Film editing by: James Y. Kwei, Harvey Rosenstock and Thelma Schoonmaker.

Thelma Schoonmaker has been a frequent editor for Martin Scorsese’s films during his career, even before
1996 which was the release year of Grace of My Heart. Scorsese was the one who suggessted Schoonmaker
to be an editor in Anders’ film, since the film footage was running long, and he acted as executive producer in
Grace of My Heart. Scorsese was also Illeana Douglas boyfriend at the time.

Schoonmaker edited the following films before 1996 for Scorsese: Ranging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy
(1983), After Hours (1985), The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptatuion of Christ (1988), New York
Stories (1989), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), and Casino (1995).

Tom Charity comments about the relationship between Anders, Scorsese, and Illeana Douglas:

“Anders made her mark with ‘Gas Food Lodging’ five years ago, but her subsequent output has been shaky. .
. . Still, Martin Scorsese had his eye on her: if Anders would care to collaborate with his girlfriend, actress
Illeana Douglas (‘Cape Fear’), he’d be happy to oversee the project as executive producer. Anders dug up an
old idea she had for a film about New York’s Brill Building – the famous ‘50s hit factory whre countless
songwriters plied their trade – and of course it was right up Marty’s street. ‘In fact, it turns out he and Illeana
met there,’ Anders laughs.”

Tom Charity, “Amazing ‘Grace…’,” Time Out, London, (19 Feb. 1997).

And Charles Fleeming comments about the relationship between Anders, Schoonmaker and Scorsese:

213
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“After an initial editing phase, Anders was left with a movie that, by all accounts, was a mess – too long and
unfocused, with musical numbers that dragged. Again: relationships: Scorsese and his longtime editor,
Thelma Schoonmaker – Oscar nominated for Woodstock and Goodfellas, Oscar-ed for Ranging Bull – were
editing Casino. When it was done, he promised, Schoonmaker would come and fix Grace. So she did. The
movie, which covers more than a decade in the life of Douglas’ Denise Waverly, has a graceful epic feel to it.
The live music and recording session scenes are dynamic: moving MTV moments with real emotional meat
on their bones.”

Charles Fleming, “Saving Grace: Allison Ander’s Relationship Picture,” LA Weekly, (13 Sep. 1996).

56
Tom Charity, “Amazing ‘Grace…’,” Time Out, London, (19 Feb. 1997).

57
Susan Lambert, “Grace of My Heart,” Box Office, (Sep.1996), p.118.

58
Jack Mathews, “‘Grace:’ Turbulent Life of ‘60s Female Singer,” Los Angeles Times, Movie Review, (13
Sep. 1996), p.14.

59
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), pp.15-19.

Film released in 1996. On the DVD these scenes are in “Chapter 5: The Perfect Song.”

These four scenes from the screenplay are basically the same as in the movie. With the exception of some
dialogue that was different, since John Turturro was cast as Joel Millner (the character got changed from a
“Jewish boy” to a “Jewish boy with an Italian mother,” probably to fit Turturro’s appearance). The band
name changed (from The Twilites in the screenplay to The Stylettes in the film), and Denise’s last name also
changed (from Scott in the screenplay to Waverly in the film).

60
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), pp.21-22.

61
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.17.

62
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.17.

63
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.18.

64
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.18.

65
Adrienne L. McLean, Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom, (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

66
Tom Charity, “Amazing ‘Grace…’,” Time Out, London, (19 Feb. 1997).

67
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), pp.108-109.

68
On p.108 in the 1994 draft, and p.90 in the 1995 draft.

69
On pp.108-109 in the 1994 draft, and pp.90-92 in the 1995 draft.

70
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.109.

71
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.108.

214
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72
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.108.

73
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.108.

74
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.117.

75
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.108.

76
Anders’ screenplay Grace of My Heart (17 August 1994), p.17.

77
Kristen Vigard is the voice and musician we hear when the Denise character sings (played by Illeana
Douglas). Among other articles, refer to:

David Kamp, “Pop in the Name of Love: The Soundtrack for ‘Grace of My Heart,’ Allison Anders’s Film à
Clef About the Early-1960s Blossoming of Artists such as Burt Bacharach, Carole King, and Brian Wilson, is
a Modern Homage to What Became Known as Brill Building Pop,” Vanity Fair, (vol.434, October 1996),
p.194.

215

CONCLUSION

Cinema seems to be an anomaly in the history of the performing arts. Historically, every
time there is a writer, usually the writer is considered the author. Cinema is a field where
this is not true. As I tried to analyze on Chapter 1, when the French started developing in
the 1950s what would become the auteur theory, for the most part they were writing about
writer-directors from contemporary French cinema. The term “auteur theory” hadn’t been
coined there yet, so they used the word auteur mainly to refer to “authors” (which is
translation for the word auteur). It wasn’t until the early 1960s, in the United States, that
Andrew Sarris “abbreviated” the bulk of this French writing on cinema, which was being
published at the Cahiers du Cinéma at the time, as simply the “auteur theory.”

The problem, however, was that film production in the United States was very different
from film production in France and elsewhere. In almost every country in the world, the
director is usually a writer-director. In the Hollywood studio system, however, there is a
strong and marked division of labor between writers and directors. But in the rest of the
world, including France, most directors need to be writers in order to exist and produce
their movies. In spite of this, with time, the French became so involved with Hollywood
cinema, and Americans became so involved with French theory, that the two ended up
“marrying” their discourse together.

Looking at what the French had written, Andrew Sarris proposed an endorsement of the
American cinema, then mostly viewed as the commercial byproduct of an industry. Sarris
216
offered that American directors working under the studio system in the United States were
not only auteurs, they were true artists in their own right; of the same stature as a Robert
Bresson, for instance, or of any other film author produced by European art cinema. The
French agreed with Sarris, and in many ways, Hollywood movies seemed so more exciting
to them than their own native product. Everyone became so excited by what Sarris was
saying, that the rest is history. In this France-U.S. relationship, Sarris was able to convince
the whole world that directors are the true auteurs in cinema. However, most of the time
this belief relegates screenwriters to a subaltern position. Thus, it was in these
circumstances that the “auteur theory” was born.

Nonetheless, one person will never agree with the Sarris’ auteur theory that the author in
cinema is the director: that person is the screenwriter. Screenwriters live in their own
parallel world where they act and see themselves as the creators of their own movies.
Because of that, albeit self-effacingly, many writers envision themselves as the creative,
intellectual, and imaginative force behind what has been created onto the page. They also
see the director as someone who comes down the line, and appropriates what has been
written by them. Because of this dichotomy, I tried to delineate a screenwriting counter-
theory to the auteur theory. Therefore in cinema, we should pay more attention to who
comes first in this process (the writer), instead of who comes second (the director). In
theatre, the director is not considered to be the author, neither on television. So cinema
seems like an anomaly in this context. And even though professional directors tend to be
considered preeminent authors in the United States, a perception solidified by Sarris,
writers still have to write and create their movies for them fist. A director can’t just show
217
up on the set one morning, with a bunch of blank pages, and create a film from nothing, as
many people seem to believe. In this regard, a director who is also a writer can logically be
considered an auteur, but not a director who doesn’t come up with his or her own material,
as Sarris tried to assert.

So while the French were writing about cinema as an art form in France in the early 1950s;
and the Americans through Andrew Sarris coined the term auteur theory in the early 1960s;
the early 1970s was already witnessing a wave of disagreement with the auteur theory as it
relates to screenwriting. In 1971, Pauline Kael wrote a book-length essay for the New
Yorker showing that screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz was actually the main writer in
Citizen Kane (1941), and not Orson Welles, as it was usually assumed. However, her
article was promptly attacked by several academics and critics (including Sarris is Citizen
Kael vs. Citizen Kane), and her argument is still criticized to this day. There was never a
shortage of people defending Welles’ “vision” against Kael’s “blasphemy.” On the other
hand, Kael’s essay established a trend that was to prove fruitful for screenwriters. Her
research initiated the inclination of taking into consideration the script if anyone is to write
about Citizen Kane, something which inadvertently benefited screenwriters, who at least
were being acknowledged now. Note, however, that this prerequisite of looking at the
screenplay, and at the screenwriter, obviously didn’t catch up for every film from then
onwards, only for Citizen Kane, because of the screenwriting function of anonymity in the
larger model of Hollywood cinema. In spite of this, since Kael’s essay was so thorough, the
screenplay could not just be ignored by film criticism anymore, if Citizen Kane is the
movie being analyzed.
218

In this meantime, the Writers Guild of America already had its unionization well under way,
as a form of protecting writer’s credits and salaries against the frequent mishandling by
directors, studios, and producers in the industry. Because of the division of labor in the
studio system, writers had learned quite early on that they needed to unionize, or remain
silent at the mercy of the system. One of my favorite rules by the Writers Guild of America,
of which Andrew Sarris was aware, stipulates that a director (or a producer, usually a
director) who has received assistance from a professional screenwriter, cannot claim major
writing credit on a screenplay, if that director had not contributed with at least 50% of its
original text. The burden of proof via pages always lays with the director. In addition, the
writers involved can always solicit an arbitration from the guild in case of a disagreement.

This 50% rule was crucial, since directors have been historically accustomed to the
employment of the possessive credit “a film by” on the screen, so contested by the Writers
Guild of America (which was Orson Welles’ case with Herman Mankiewicz and Howard
Koch). Now if directors are to covet a writing credit from somebody else, from a writer for
instance, they have to prove to the guild that they were the main writer on the screenplay,
or they cannot make such a claim. We can already witness, then, how much damage Sarris’
auteur theory has created on a good number of director’s inflated egos, for most directors
are not writers, so the Writers Guild had to engage in many negotiations with the industry
in order to intervene in situations like this. Now someone may ask, why would some
directors desire any more credit recognition than the directing credit itself, if everyone
already thinks the director is the creator of the movie anyway? The answer is simple.
219
Because directors know, deep inside, that if they have not written the screenplay, in clear
conscience they cannot claim the movie to be “his” (since the majority of directors are male,
the percentage of female directors is about 8%, and female screenwriters about 14%).

My case study chapters, then, analyze a screenwriter’s screenplay, as well as a writer-
director’s screenplay, in order to counterpoint the auteur theory promoted by Sarris. I am
not against the idea that a director can be the author or auteur of their films, what I think is
inaccurate is to assign topmost authorship to directors just because they are directors, even
though their films have been written by somebody else. So, Chapter 2 of this dissertation
analyzed the screenplay of Edward Scissorhands (1990), and was able to demonstrate that
Tim Burton (the director) could not have created the film by himself. Much of what we see
on the screen was the obvious product of Caroline Thompson’s imagination as its writer.
This fact is made even more noticeable since Burton and Thompson are of different
genders, thus making it easier to map out what Thompson had actually created. Chapter 3
had a slightly different situation; since it analyzes a screenplay written by a writer-director,
Allison Anders. Anders wrote and directed Grace of My Heart (1996), so she did not only
direct her own screenplay, she also created it. I consider someone like Anders to be a true
auteur in the more strict sense of the word. Anders deals with very personal issues in her
writing, employs mostly female protagonists, and is significantly immersed in the world of
rock and pop music, which is a recurrent theme in her films. She has also written poetry
before starting her career as a filmmaker, so her interest in music and film merge with one
another.

220
I hope these two case study chapters expose the inherent controversy, in terms of creation,
inside the auteur theory of the director. The film case analyses for Edward Scissorhands
and Grace of My Heart attempt to chart and call attention to what has been left out from
film analysis: screenwriting. A critical synthesis of this idea, as it exists in relation to
specific Hollywood films, prompts an application to each of the films written by Thompson
and Anders, which displays and generates the role and very specific creative and
intellectual contribution of female writers in cinema. Ander’s film is self-aware of this
condition as it depicts the traumas and tribulations of a female songwriter trying to make it
as a musician auteur in a masculine world of entertainment, where writers are perceived as
relatively anonymous, or as appendages to most celebrities. In Thompson’s screenplay, this
analogy runs even deeper and is more acute, since the protagonist Edward Scissorhands,
akin to screenwriters, is metamorphosed into a productive outcast by the end of the film.

To conclude, the notion conveyed in the “idea” of the author is not always an individualist
one. However, because authorship is not extended to everyone in society (at certain specific
historical contexts), authorship functions as constructed social privilege, as Foucault
seemed to imply. Thus, we should be careful not to undermine or take for granted
authorship forms that have been suppressed or are still largely insipient. This is certainly
the argument for race, class and gender, and as I would like to argue, for screenwriting. The
death of the auteur skepticism enabled a profound questioning of authorship as a
convention, fast forwarded its overdue rhetorical destabilization, as well as, ironically
enough, catapulted the deconstruction and relativization of the field of cinema (note that
cinema was not necessarily Barthes’ and Foucault’s line of attack in 1968 and 1969).
221

Nevertheless, it is my intent to take on the feminist argument that the death of the author
might offer a convenient critique of the implicitly white, heterosexual, male director; but
not of screenwriting in general, and certainly not of the subjects of my dissertation: Allison
Anders and Caroline Thompson. Their writing material precedes the final project of their
films. Note that the auteur theory created agency and a chain-reaction debate about cinema,
literature, philosophy and spectatorship in France; and it only further expanded
internationally ever since. Still, France and the United States are its originators. In other
words, after the French intellectual inquiry, the idea (and function) of the author was never
the same again, and that includes the feminist debate.

Therefore, the idea of the author necessarily involves individual authors engaged in
numerous stages and divisions of labor in cinema. While the collective exists with
collaborative work (and what is cinema if not collaborative work from beginning to end?),
it would be a wild romantic idea to imagine a pure and idealized absence of any author in
an utmost democratic and collaborative space. Somebody has to be in charge at some point.
Or at least be the catalyst. Human beings have the tendency of ascribing authorship and
narrative meaning to cultural productions (naming names and telling stories), and cinema
will not be the only field to escape this psychological human compulsion. The very idea of
authorship is a linguistic term. It is an important structural asset that should not be
dismissed or written off without further examination.

222

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244

Appendix A
THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA AND THE ISSUE OF POSSESSIVE CREDIT

The following is an edited copy of written passages from two documents from the WGA
(Writers Guild of America) pertaining to the issue of “possessive credit.” These passages
attempt to record the basic meaning of “possessive credit” in cinema given by the WGA.

The Writers Guild of America strongly opposes the use of “possessive credits” such as “a
film by” and other variations. Thus, the WGA insists in not recognizing the Auteur Theory
as the director’s territory in cinema. The first text is The Creative Rights manual for
Writers of Theatrical and Long-Form Television Motion Pictures (2002). The Minimum
Basic Agreement (MBA, 2008) is the second text, and it is still current for 2013; it
represents the contract between the WGA, on behalf of its writers for purposes of collective
bargaining, and the signatory companies and studios (through the Alliance of Motion
Picture and Television Producers) that pay for writer services such as screenplays.

“Possessive Credits”
according to
WGA Creative Rights for Writers of Theatrical and Long-Form Television Motion Pictures

Possessive Credits:

“The MBA [Minimum Basic Agreement] contains a preamble that highlights the Writers
Guild’s strong, longstanding objection to the use of possessive credits. The Guild believes
that granting possessive credits to directors inaccurately imputes sole or preeminent
authorship, and that the widespread use of the credit denigrates the creative contributions
of others in the collaborative art of filmmaking. During the negotiation of the 2001 MBA a
great deal of time was spent trying to reach agreement regarding limitation of “A Film by”
and other possessive credits. Although there was serious dialogue on the subject, no
agreement was reached. It was agreed that this issue would be addressed on an industry-
wide basis along with other credits issues. Until resolution of this issue, writers and their
representatives can assist in this effort by making known their belief that the granting of a
possessive credit to the director denigrates the work, not only of writers, but of all those
who contribute creatively to the making of a film.”
1
(my italics and brackets)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
“WGA, Creative Rights for Writers of Theatrical and Long-Form Television Motion Pictures: The Latest
WGA Provisions and Overscale Suggestions,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East, (2002), p.33.
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/creative_rights/creative-rights.pdf

!
245
“Possessive Credits”
according to
WGA MBA, Minimum Basic Agreement

The “Preamble Regarding so-called Possessive Credits”
2
in the Minimum Basic Agreement
is laid out in 4 parts:

-- “Purpose of Preamble”
-- “Defining Possessive Credit(s)”
-- “Statement of the Writers Guild of America”
-- “Acknowledging Statement by Each Company” (signatory to this MBA).

Defining Possessive Credit(s):

“The term ‘possessive credits’ refers to such credits as are generally regarded as such in the
film and television industry and which attribute, impute and/or which could be reasonably
construed to credit a person with the authorship of a film. It is understood that the term
‘possessive credits’ does not include any forms of writing or source material credits.
Examples of such credits are:

‘A Film by _____’
‘Pat Brown's [title of film]’
‘A Robin Smith Film’”

Statement of the Writers Guild of America:

“Since its founding, the Writers Guild has opposed the use of the so-called ‘possessive
credit’ on screen and in advertising and promotion when used to refer to a person who is
not the sole author of the screenplay. The Guild's historic, current and ongoing opposition
is based upon beliefs and principles which include the following:

Credits should, as far as possible, accurately reflect each individual's contribution.

The granting of a possessive credit to a person who has not both written and directed a
given motion picture inaccurately imputes sole or preeminent authorship.

The proliferation of the number of unnecessary credits on screen and in advertising
devalues credits in general.

The widespread use of the credit denigrates the creative contributions of others.”
3

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
“WGA, 2008 Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East,
(2008: Effective February 13, 2008 through May 1, 2011), p.1.
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/MBA08.pdf

3
Idem, p.1 for both sections “Defining Possessive Credits” and “Statement of the Writers Guild of America.”
246

Appendix B
COPYRIGHT LAW HIGHLIGHTS AND ISSUES OF AUTHORSHIP ON THE SUBJECT
OF SCREENWRITING

Copyright Law is an extensive area, however there are several elements that are important
highlighing in terms of their relationship to authorship in cinema, for screenwriting and
directing, for the purposes of this dissertation. This is a list of such highlights loosely
organized by related subject matter from Bill Seiter and Ellen Seiter’s book The Creative
Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright, Trademark, and Contracts in Film and Digital Media
Production (2012) and from the WGA’s manual Creative Rights for Writers of Theatrical
and Long-Form Television Motion Pictures (2002).

“A creator owns the copyright in a work simply by virtue of having created it.”
1

“Initial legal control of a script rests with the copyright holder. Specifically, copyright law
vests the copyright holder with exclusive ownership of five rights: 1) reproduction of
copies; 2) distribution of copies; 3) performance rights; 4) public display rights; and, 5) the
right to prepare derivative works. A creator owns the copyright in a work simply by virtue
of having created it.”
2

“The film is a derivative work of the screenplay, and it is also a derivative work of the
recorded music. The screenplay and the recorded music are each separately copyrightable.
The film is also copyrightable as a derivative work. In turn, if the screenplay is based on a
novel, it is a derivative work of the novel, and if the recorded music is a recording of a song,
the recording is a derivative work of the song.”
3

(my italics)

“Since a derivative work is based upon one or more preexisting works, the copyright in a
derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of the derivative
work. In creating a motion picture, the filmmaker gets a copyright in the film, as a
derivative work, but the filmmaker does not thereby get to hijack the separate copyrights in
the screenplay and the recorded music, or in the novel or song underlying them.”
4

(my italics)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
“WGA, Creative Rights for Writers of Theatrical and Long-Form Television Motion Pictures: The Latest
WGA Provisions and Overscale Suggestions,” WGA / Writers Guild of America, West and East, (2002), p.5.
http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/creative_rights/creative-rights.pdf

2
WGA, p.5.

3
Bill Seiter and Ellen Seiter, “Copyright,” in: The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright, Trademark, and
Contracts in Film and Digital Media Production, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p.7.

4
Seiter and Seiter, p.7.
247
“The Copyright Act creates rights in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible
medium of expression [such as paper, film, clay, etc]. . . . What does it take to make an
‘original work of authorship’? A Piece of Work. For there to be a copyright, there has to be
a ‘work’ expressed in tangible form, because what copyright protects is the artistic or
literary expression contained in the work, not the ideas the work expresses.”
5

(my brackets and my italics)

“Not all species of artistic activity are protected species under the Copyright Act. . . .
‘Original works of authorship’ currently include the following protected species:
‘Literary works;’ ‘pictorial, graphic and sculptural works;’ ‘musical works;’ ‘dramatic
works [include plays, film treatments, screenplays, scripts for radio, and teleplays];’
‘pantomimes and choreographic works;’ ‘sound recordings;’ ‘audiovisual works [include
film, digital media, etc]; ‘architectural works’.”
6

(my brackets)

“When you write an original script on spec [speculative screenplay], you own the copyright
by virtue of having created the script. Transfer of your copyright ownership to a production
company is a common element of virtually all purchase agreements. When an original
story, treatment or screenplay is sold, the writer usually is required to transfer the copyright
to the buyer. If you are hired to write a script under an employement contract, you are
creating a ‘work for hire’ which, under U.S. copyright law, vests the initial copyright with
the employer. . . . Ownership of the script copyright, whether by acquisition or under the
work-for-hire doctrine, is the practical means by which the companies preserve their rights
to exploit the scripts they pay for.”
7

(my brackets)

“The WGA MBA [minimum basic agreement] contains a unique contractual construct
called Separation of Rights, which separates out certain rights usually held or controlled by
the holder of the copyright and transfers them to the original writer. These provisions
entitle the writer to exploit these rights in defined ways, even though the writer no longer
holds the copyright. . . . Separation of rights is an inventive legal response to the custom of
U.S. writers transferring the copyright in their work to their employers. It partially
mitigates the effects of that transfer.”
8

(my brackets)

“Registration [of a screenplay] with the WGA is not a subistitute for filling with the U.S.
Copyright Office.”
9

(my brackets)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
Seiter and Seiter, pp.2-3.

6
Seiter and Seiter, pp.3-4.

7
WGA, p.6.

8
WGA, p.7.

9
WGA, p.9.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Bilhalva, Cristiani Michels (author)

Core Title Screenwriting double function of anonymity for female authors in Hollywood and critical issues of authorship in cinema: two screenplay case studies: Grace of my heart and Edward Scissorhands

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 01/23/2014

Defense Date 08/13/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag auteur theory,cinema,female writers,function of anonymity,OAI-PMH Harvest,possessive credit screenwriting

Format application/pdf (imt)

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Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor James, David E. (committee chair), Howard, David (committee member), Seiter, Ellen (committee member)

Creator Email cristiani.usc@gmail.com

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