Jaime M Christley wrote:

> I'm having a hell of a time duking it out with some youngsters on
the
> Rotten Tomatoes discussion board
>
> http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/showthread.php?t=309894

Pretty interesting discussion, though I got exhausted well before the
end. One thing that struck me was the mention of Paddy Chayevsky, who
also turns up in an interview I was reading today with a more recent
champion of the screenwriter-as-author:

www.theonionavclub.com/4006/feature1.html

I'm not very familiar with Chayevksky's work, but I saw THE GODDESS a
couple of months ago and it did indeed seem like "a film by" its
screenwriter -- quite good on its own terms but basically treating
the film medium as a delivery system for the script. It may be that
I'm unfair to Chayevsky or to the film's director, John Cromwell, as
I don't know much about either of them -- I believe that G. Cabrera
Infante, who had pretty hip tastes in the '50s, admired Chayevsky's
work.

> And this line had me throwing up my hands:
>
> "Those things you mention [the director's aesthetic decisions] are
> means to an end, that end being presenting as best as possible the
> content of the scribt [sic]."

Wasn't Biette quoted as saying something superficially similar --
that the director "extracts the content of the script" or some such?
These terms are very ambiguous: I suspect that "realising" a script
in cinematic terms is diametrically opposed to trying to preserve the
integrity of that script as a (verbal) artwork in its own right,
which I presume is what Chayevsky wanted.

A question I have left over from when people were discussing comic
books -- could there be a comic book equivalent to auteurism,
maintaining that the guy who draws the pictures automatically takes
precedence over the guy who writes the story? If not, why not?

JTW

PS: I remember seeing an interview with Nancy Meyers where she said,
roughly: "Nobody cares what the actors are saying in a Scorsese
movie, but in a James L. Brooks movie, it's all about the words." She
thought this was paying Brooks a compliment. Actually Brooks' mise-en-
scène isn't bad, from what I remember.