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A Radical Rewrite of American Film History
Melville Manifestos
Melville House
February 2006
150 pages
ISBN: 097665833X
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Non-Fiction
In this wonderfully witty and wide-ranging manifesto, noted
book and movie critic David Kipen takes dead aim at that old
film school canard, the auteur theory, and blows it
sky-high with a theory of his own that he supports with a
rollicking tour through movie history. Thanks to the
auteurists, everyone nowadays credits the director
with being the creative genius behind every movie. But, in
what may be the first significant counter-theory to the
notion invented by legendary critics Andrew Sarris, Francois
Truffaut, and others, Kipen says, "Au contraire."
Instead, inspired by "the mother tongue of America's
first screenwriters," he uses the Yiddish word for writer to
coin The Schreiber Theory, which decrees that knowing
who wrote a film is often a far better-and far more
consistent-guide to whether it was any good. Kipen's
new heresy topples the old orthodoxy by studying the careers
of the early writers who came to Hollywood from Broadway and
the modern scriptwriters coming out of TV. Most usefully,
the second half of the book is a who's who of screenwriters
past and present, with entries on over 40 of Hollywood's
most significant schreibers. There's plenty of
film-world gossip along the way, as well as smart discussion
of how the auteur theory took hold and what some
other opponents-such as Pauline Kael-had to say about it.
From the early days-when Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway
labored in Hollywood-to today, when international sales are
turning scripts into pidgin affairs, it's a clever and savvy
consideration of movie-making from a whole new perspective.
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