 Auteurs and Managers: Class Struggle, Blacklists, Business Models, and Film Theory | Jan. 5th, 2008 @ 12:53 pm  |
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A Worker's Movement Perspective on the Authorship and Ownership of Creative Works
This is a post about unionization and artistic control in the Hollywood system. It is also a post about "film theory," and specifically about the ideological context of the auteur theory
. It is my contention that the auteur theory is essentially a managerial theory of film production. It is a theory of industrial production that masquerades as a theory of artistic creation; it is a description of executive authority which masquerades as advocacy for freedom of authorship. It seems to me that all of the important Hollywood struggles, including the current WGA strike, have been about "ownership" of the creative process. The constant battles by the so-called "producers" (studio executives, unit managers, and directors-as-foremen) to keep labor in line are actually class struggles over who will control the "stories" Hollywood tells.
When the Studios controlled the labor process completely, the real auteurs were the unit managers and producers. Then, as labor militancy increased, the Studios were forced to shift to a cooperative way of film-making. But with the decline of the studio system the struggle over who would control the creative process heated up again. As labor militancy declined, strong unions were gutted by blacklisting. Writers, camera operators, editors, set designers, were "brought into line" and became tools of the director, losing creative control in the cooperative labor process of movie making. The unions were purged, allowing the director to become the main "unit manager," the Hollywood equivalent of industrial foreman. I believe that any detailed look at the rise and fall of the various ways of production of movies and television, and their relationship to the social strength of working groups who created the movies and television shows, will reveal that the auteur theory is both justification and description of a certain kind of management style, that has been "necessary" since around 1946 in Hollywood. The necessity has been dictated by the needs of the owners to maintain control of their workforce.
These thoughts were suddenly triggered when I read a comment
expressing the professional animosity between the director and the writer, at the essential writers' strike weblog United Hollywood: January 3, 2008 6:02 PM
Jake Hollywood said...
Oh c'mon. It's okay to admit that the DGA always operates in their own self interest. They toss writers under the bus all the time. I mean, after all, they're the "authors" of every film ever made, right? Writers are essentially just glorified typist as far as the DGA is concerned--they're not unlike the AMPTP in this view of writers as, "schmucks with Underwoods". If the film is great or merely good, it's the director's "vision" that made it so; if the film is bad, it's always the writer's fault--"...you can't always fix a bad script."This is the WGA's fight. And it's a battle we writers must win, if for no other reason than to regain what little respect the industry tosses our way.
I wonder if the writer with the nom de blog Jake Hollywood, realizes the full significance of stating his objections to the auteur theory in the context of a labor struggle. It is a little-considered aspect of film history.
The WGA strike has spurred me to think through some of my ideas on film "theory" and history. I have always been opposed to the "auteur theory." For those who don't know, "the auteur theory" is the notion that the director of a film is its "author." Gore Vidal once referred to the "auteur theory" as the "brother-in-law" theory of Hollywood movie making.
With certain exceptions (Alfred Hitchcock, for one), the directors were, at worst, brothers-in-law; at best, bright technicians. All in all, they were a cheery, unpretentious lot, and if anyone had told them that they were auteurs du cinéma, few could have coped with the concept, much less the French. They were technicians; proud commercialites, happy to serve what was optimistically known as The Industry. (Who Makes the Movies? By Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books, Volume 23, Number 19 · November 25, 1976
I have always looked at movie making and narrative television as a cooperative art. Ideally the artistic works in these media would always be gathered under "collective authorship." In my view the proper "authorities" on any film or narrative television show are the writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, set designers, and then all the other technicians, not necessarily in that order. There are instances when a choreographer or set designer or (nowadays) a special effects designer can contribute more to a narrative work than the director.
Unfortunately in the United States system of movie making you also have to add the "money men," also known as "the producers".
The studio system was a factory system, with the factories on the West Coast and the business headquarters mostly in New York. This was a business model that bankers understood and thus they were willing to front the Studios the money to raise their yearly crop of movies. During the depression most of the bankers' capital dried up and the Studio heads turned to organized crime (bootleggers were overflowing with money), rent seeking
from politicians, and union busting to make up the difference. After the high times of World War II the studio system was busted apart by anti-trust actions and by television. By the time of the late 1950s the money men and women were often "the stars" of one type or another. By the late '70s The Industry had progressed to the point that the money was mostly gathered by agencies and their banking consorts who put together the deals. The wags have always said that deal-making is the true art of Hollywood. And if you look at how the deals get made you will know the relation between the capital collectors and the creators of narrative in Hollywood. The structure of these deals will often determine who the "authors" are in Hollywood.Variations of the deal making business model have continued since the decline of the studio system. But multinational corporations now own The Industry. To them this model looks inefficient and quite suspicious.
What has to be understood is that what happened to Las Vegas in the 1980s also happened to Hollywood and New York entertainment. The pre-1930s way to finance movies was to go to a bank and structure loans. Studios made movies in the same way that farmers grew crops. But in the 1930s the Las Vegas view of financing took over and much of the liquid financing came from "underground" investments from essentially tax-avoidance and money washing operatons. But in the same ways that multinationals corporations bought out the gangsters in Las Vegas, the multinationals bought out the deal makers in Hollywood. The big executives at the multinationals could have understood the old studio system business model, because essentially the studio system was a "Fordism"
model. But to the chairman of General Electric the Hollywood "deal making model" must look as if he were putting a number of free-wheeling middle managers in charge of mergers and acquisitions of 250 million dollar factory units. Further more these factory units are run by mad men and women - creative types and bohemian wanna-bes.. And the crowning absurdity is that each factory unit is temporarily picking up employees and equipment and sets for eight months or five years and then breaking them down again. It must look to these new bosses as if a traveling three ring circus has been hired by General Motors to assemble their cars on a year-to-year basis. It just doesn't make sense to them. Part of the current crisis of Hollywood is a conflict between the creators of works and the new multinationals that don't believe that anything is created except for their profits and the "properties" they own. Peter Chernin of News Corp., Roger Iger of Disney, Barry Meyer of Warner Bros., Brad Grey of Paramont, Harry Sloan of MGM, Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal, and Michael Lunton of Sony are perfectly willing to let the public think that "directors" or "show runners" or "writers" or actors or any number of other people are creators. They even don't mind if those same people think of themselves as "creative". But they know that such people create nothing that is real. And what is real is what is profitable; what is real is what is "property" and "capital". These big boys consider themselves the people that build the products and obtain the properties ("intellectual property" in this case) for themselves and for the future corporate investors. For them the primary issue is control; control of the capital, the resulting "product," and the "(intellectual) property" that can be bought, sold and built upon. Their capital and their property must suffer no interference. Creative types are potential interference once they look at themselves as more than just employees. Now that corporations own the copyrights to "their" "intellectual property" for almost 95 years the stakes have become higher for them. They must have authority and control and they must teach everyone a lesson who gets in their way. Eventually the intention is to change what they consider the antiquated production process of the "deal making system". But in order to do this they must first neutralize or destroy the people who are in the best position to take control of a new creative production methods in Hollywood in New York. This is primarily the writers, but also directors, actors and, for the first time in a long time, below-the-line workers.
It is good to remember that it took almost fifteen years for the old studios to recognize that the writers could bargain as a group. It was only because the U.S. was in the midst of World War II and the Franklin Roosevelt administration was worried that Hollywood would not be ready for the propaganda effort to win the war that the Labor Secretary of the Roosevelt adminstration insisted that the studios recognize the writers union. So what was it about? Why were the studios so resistant to recognizing the old SWG? It is because they realized that since the coming of sound the writers were the creative fulcrum of Hollywood.
The blood-letting between studio management and the SWG, which endured for nine years, showed where the real conflict in Hollywood lay—not over money, but over the control of moviemaking. The producers willingly paid gargantuan salaries to the best actors, directors, and screenwriters, but steadfastly resisted any encroachment on creative decision-making. (The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund)By the end of World War II the most important creative person in Hollywood was the writer and not the director. Directors who were also writers had an advantage but a director like Cuckor was nothing without the good script. Some writers such as Preston Sturges, Joseph Manckiewicz, and Robert Rossen became sick of having their scripts butchered by the brothers-in-law club and made bids to direct their own films. By the end of World War II the studios were losing control of the stories. The strength of the Hollywood unions meant that the unit producers were having less and less influence on the set and over the creative process as a whole. The decision making for the creation of movies, for the first time since the early days of United Artists, was more and more in the hands of a cooperative group of writers, directors, camera operators, set designers and editors. The writer was recognized by most as the creator of the story and thus for the director-story teller like Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock the most important aspect of their work was to supervise the script from origins to filming.
In a thoughtful article
at a socialist website David Walsh states: "Since the early days of sound films writers have been perceived as a potential threat by their employers." He continues:Writers and other film artists with integrity are impelled to report on life honestly. Such work is inevitably socially critical, sympathetic to the exploited, hostile to the rich and arrogant, outraged by injustice. It must always contain an element of protest. In the end, these sentiments and qualities are incompatible with the industry executives’ drive for profits and need to conceal the harshest social realities. The record of the struggle between these two imperatives, now out in the open, now concealed, is the history of Hollywood. (A socialist perspective for the film and television writers strikeThis states the situation clearly. It is a conflict between those who create and those who look at those creations as their property, and all who work for them as tools to serve the purpose of profit without disruption of the social structure. Granting creative power to writers is a threat to the bosses'] world view. In 1945 the writers had begun to gain some measure of control over the creative process. So what changed?
Gore Vidal says
Then out of France came the dreadful news: all those brothers-in-law of the classic era were really autonomous and original artists. Apparently each had his own style that impressed itself on every frame of any film he worked on. Proof? Since the director was the same person from film to film, each image of his oeuvre must then be stamped with his authorship. The argument was circular but no less overwhelming in its implications. Much quoted was Giraudoux's solemn inanity: "There are no works, there are only auteurs."
Vidal goes on to say that soon young intellectuals, art historians, and graduate students were interviewing directors and treating them as "authors" while the writer fell by the side. There is some truth in this but all and all this gets the reception in the United States of the "auteur theory" a bit backwards. There was a point in Hollywood history of about seven years, during the period of classical Hollywood cinema when writers were the effective "authorities" of story telling in Hollywood. That changed because first some of the below-the-line unions were broken and purged of "reds." For the studio bosses the term "reds" was not a designation of people who were socialist or communist but of all people who wanted to maintain some control over the industrial (creative) process. The Congress of Studio Unions was the first union to go, and the set designers as members of this union were the first of the creative people to lose their part in decision-making in films.
In 1945 the bosses of business across the U.S. were complaining that they had lost control over the shop floor. The shop stewards were the main authorities on the shop floor and the foremen simply watched over the shop stewards. In the movie business this meant that the unit producer and director had lost control over the production unit and had to act in true cooperation with the creative people. The bosses attempted to stop this trend. And the model for stopping it came out of Hollywood in 1945 and 1946 when the militant Congress of Studio Unions was busted. Gerald Horne says it best in his book Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950.
Executives all over the nation were complaining about the perceived erosion of management's rights and repsonsibilities, but the jurisdictional spat between the CSU and IATSE gave Hollywood's version of this story special resonance. By ridding itself of the CSU, the moguls were able to reassert almost absolute control over the production process and thus to make the movies look the way they wanted them to look, while avoiding the restraints imposed by "union auteurs".
And then the writers' union was purged of any person who was in favor of a militant union. The main issue was supposedly "communism." But the greater issue was whether the business men would control the creative process. The purging of the writers' union meant a decline in overtly socially conscious writing. Fudamental social criticism was censored from Hollywood production for almost a decade, occasionally finding release in allegory.
The Hollywood studios made a deliberate decison to put directors in charge of their production units. Directors were, after all, close to management. Directors were often the equivalent of factory floor managers or foremen. This coincided with the decline of the studio system as a factory model and the rise of the deal-making model of Hollywood production. The director as "auteur" is a contingent fact of the history of the industrial process. It is neither inevitable nor desirable. The auteur theory is the ex post facto justification of this contingent fact.
I am not saying that the auteur theory is completely wrong. My belief is that in the narrative arts "telling the story" is the most important aspect of movie making. How you determine who is responsible for "story making" and "story telling" is a question not of principle but of empirical investigation. It is also contingent on historical and economic struggle. The reason that the auteur theory appropriately came out of France is also contingent. The structure of the industrial process of film making in France gave some reality to the idea that directors were "authors" in that country, and in most countries in Western and Central Europe. Directors in France, by force of circumstance, also had to be unit managers, fund raisers, executive producers, and often enough editors and writers. The reception of the auteur theory in the U.S. was also contingent on social circumstances. It became a description of reality, behind the back of the promoters of the theory. But in fact it became a description of the results of a industrial process that was created through strike breaking, union busting, purges, blacklists, marginalization of workers, and other methods of bosses to impose control over "their" factories.
Let me close with some more promised quotes from Gerald Horne's book Class Struggle in Hollywood
:"Nevertheless, as Thomas Guback has reminded us, moviemaking is a collaborative, labor-intensive industry; film analysis often stresses only content -- which it ascribes solely to member of the "talent guilds," notably directors and actors and screenwriters, ignoring production relations. However, factoring the latter into the equation 'shifts the terms of analysis from what we see to the social relation that are implicit in the industry and that govern the terms on which the industry operates.'
"An analysis of production relations inevitably prompts an analysis fo labor, the too often forgotten 'actor' in the production of films. Michael Nielsen has observed that 'if one single quality distinguishes Hollywood's product from the bulk of world cinema productions, it is the quality of unobtrusiveness -- the refusal of the film to draw attention to the process of filmaking itself by weaving a seamless whole that engages the viewers' attention completely. The quality is rooted in the craftmansship [sic] at every level of production.'"
I highly recommend Class Struggle In Hollywood, 1930 – 1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists
by Gerald Horne for anyone who wishes to gain an historical perspective on the current situation that led to the WGA strike and in union movements in general.
Jerry Monaco
5 January 2008
New York City
[Caveat: I am not a member of the WGA, nor do I speak for any of the officers or members of that union or any other union. I have been a member of other unions in the past and I am a supporter of a stronger union movement in the United States. J.M.]
This work is licensed under a Creative
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