Theorem: every director is also a screenwriter, but not every screenwriter is a director. Here?s an extreme but exemplary anecdote. A few weeks ago, when my colleague Adam Gopnik and I introduced Vincente Minnelli?s rhapsodically beautiful Second World War romance ?The Clock? at the New-York Historical Society, we called attention to a remarkable scene?the hastily newlywed couple?s morning after at the small breakfast table in a room of a modest hotel. They have awakened from their night of love?the only one they?ll have before the groom (Robert Walker), a soldier on furlough, heads off to war?and the bride (Judy Garland) serves him coffee as they speak of their happiness, their hopes and dreams. At least, that?s how the scene (which kicks in at 5:35) was written (the script is credited to Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank). As Minnelli describes the shoot in his autobiography, he found the dialogue fatuous, inadequate to the delicate, intimate grandeur of the moment?and instead of calling Nathan and Schrank for a rewrite or tweaking it himself, he threw the dialogue out altogether, resulting in an amazingly delicate, breath-holding sequence of more than two minutes of wordless yet profound communion. Though Minnelli didn?t put pencil to paper, he took over the function of the screenwriter by assimilating it to his directorial insights and inventions.
Similarly, Nicholas Ray threw out the scripted conclusion of ?In a Lonely Place? and, working with his stars, Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, helped them to improvise a new?and agonizingly beautiful?ending. Howard Hawks completely reshaped the script of ?Come and Get It? while his producer, Samuel Goldwyn, was away from the set due to illness. As I?ve written here before, don?t trust the credits: even when directors don?t get writing credit, they usually should, especially if the movie?s any good.
Much of directing is directing against the script, of mining it for what?s latent in it?which often means breaking it open in some essential way. Yet writing a script has become one of the most popular paths to a directorial career?and, for many directors who start this way, directing has become a way not of taking off from a script but of protecting the script. That became one of the templates for the (mediocre) independent film, and it remains so. Many of them convey the sense that a director thinks it suffices to take pictures of actors emotively embodying the written action and spouting the written dialogue to get the fullness of the story across, to make it exist. And not just independent films; that?s also the thumbnail of the worst of so-called midrange dramas, with the general difference that the director and the screenwriter are two different people but that the director, who may well have come from the land of theatre, is in love with the script and may as well paste its pages onto the screen.
Corollary: there?s no such thing as a good or bad subject. That?s why I find the Black List?s list of the year?s ??most liked?? unproduced screenplays (as published here at ComingSoon.net) frustratingly opaque. There?s no particular reason to be automatically interested in the story of ?Draft Day,? which tops the list (about a football team?s general manager who ?trades for the number one draft pick? and ?must quickly decide what he?s willing to sacrifice in pursuit of perfection as the lines between his personal and professional life become blurred?); if the script is any good, it?s in the particulars. But the danger is that, the more prized the script, the tougher for a director to lay his or her hands on it vigorously?as suggested by this apparently unintended caveat that comes along from Daniel Lehman?s post about the list at Backstage:
Past Best Picture winners ?Slumdog Millionaire? and ?The King?s Speech? and 2012 films ?Argo? and ?Looper? are among the films that were recognized by the Black List before being produced.
The moderate merits of ?Slumdog Millionaire? have little to do with the script; the lockstep rigidity of ?The King?s Speech? and ?Argo? has everything to do with their scriptiness; and, as for ?Looper,? the director Rian Johnson (who also wrote the script) came up with some good directorial choices to bring some of the script conceits to life, but, overall, got caught up in the overplotted gamesmanship of his screenplay and its science-fiction setup; he?d have done better to thresh it vigorously and trust more in his clever visual sense. Otherwise he?s at risk of making an ?Inception?-like puzzle that feels directed by word processor and bulletin board.
It?s worth noting that a preponderance of movies on the list deal with political and/or historical subjects; does this reflect what the hundreds of polled industry insiders themselves like to see, or think would do the best business, or?Oscar-style?what they think is intrinsically most worthy? There?s a movie about young Hillary Rodham, torn between Washington and Bill Clinton; one in which ?a Mossad employed father and his C.I.A. agent son team up to hunt an escaped Nazi?; one about an apparatchik in the Stalin-era Soviet Union; one set in the Civil War; one about American soldiers in Iraq; one about a German spy?s plot to kill F.D.R. during the Second World War. We?re in the middle of the year?s sludgy season?the political self-importance of the season?s Oscar-primed and critically ballyhooed frontrunners?and the sun of experience and fantasy usually breaks through the winter sky early in the new year, with films that wouldn?t be atop the Black List, that may never make it onto the Oscar ballots, but which often, at least, make it onto plenty of year-end lists. The Black List suggests, if nothing else, that the gap between Oscar-land and the year?s true worthies may be growing ever greater.
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