Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

The word auteur has come to mean this: It is the director who creates the film. (None of any of this is meant in any way to denigrate directors, by the way. They serve an important function in the making of a film, and the best of them do it well.) But creator? Look at it logically. Studio executives are not stupid, and they are, believe it or not, aware of costs. If the director creates the film, why does a studio pay three thousand dollars a week for a top editor? Or four thousand for an equivalent production designer. Or ten thousand plus a percentage of the profits to the finest cinematographers? It’s not because they’re cute. And it’s not because they want to. They have to. Because that’s how crucial top technicians are. Crucial and creative. One example now, not because it’s famous but because it’s absolutely typical: This is the way things are. Peter Benchley reads an article in a newspaper about a fisherman who captures a forty-five-hundred-pound shark off the coast of Long Island and he thinks, “What if the shark became territorial, what if it wouldn’t go away?” And eventually he writes a novel on that notion and Zanuck-Brown buy the movie rights, and Benchley and Carl Gottlieb write a screenplay, and Bill Butler is hired to shoot the movie, and Joseph Alves, Jr., designs it, and Verna Fields is brought in to edit, and, maybe most importantly of all, Bob Mattey is brought out of retirement to make the monster. And John Williams composes perhaps his most memorable ...