We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
detail and leave the director with the comparatively minor role of following the written instructions. In America, moreover, the producer is generally much more closely concerned with the creative part of production than is his British counterpart. The American producer almost invariably supervises the editing of the film — a stage of production which in most Hollywood studios is no longer held to be the director's responsibility.
There are only half a dozen directors in Hollywood who are allowed to shoot as they please and who have any supervision over their editing . . . We have tried for three years to establish a Directors Guild, and the only demands we have made on the producers as a Guild were to have two weeks' preparation for "A" pictures, one week preparation time for " B " pictures, and to have supervision of just the first rough cut of the picture . . . We have only asked that the director be allowed to read the script he is going to do and to assemble the film in its first rough form for presentation to the head of the studio. It has taken three years of constant battling to achieve any part of this ... I would say that 80 per cent of the directors to-day shoot scenes exactly as they are told to shoot them without any change whatsoever, and that 90 per cent of them have no voice in the story or in the editing. Truly a sad situation for a medium that is supposed to be the director's medium.1
While Capra's letter gives a picture which is no longer quite accurate, the improvement does not seem to be very marked. Against it, it must be said that some of Hollywood's leading directors have managed to get round this seemingly hopeless situation : Preston Sturges and John Huston write and direct their own films ; Chaplin writes, produces and directs ; Ford is generally his own producer ; Orson Welles was in sole charge of Citizen Kane. The success of the films made by these directors would seem to prove beyond doubt, what common sense alone indicates : that the editing (whether planned before shooting in the script, or supervised after shooting in the cutting room) and the direction should be done, or at least controlled, by one person.
But who should ideally be responsible for the writing ? Some directors, as we have seen, appear to be at their best with their own scripts. (This does not necessarily mean — as in the case of Sturges — that the director needs to invent his own story : he may only collaborate on or supervise the writing of the shooting script.) Thorold Dickinson has put forward a strong case for this arrangement as being the only possible one.2 But it does not necessarily apply to all directors. John Ford is said to direct his films {The Grapes of Wrath, for instance) very faithfully from other people's
1 From a letter to The New York Times, published 2nd April, 1939. Quoted in America at the Movies by Margaret Thorp. Yale University Press, 1939, pp. 146-7.
2 Sight and Sound. March, 1950. The Filmwright and the Audience.
57