The Status of the Director

The pressures of mass production continued unabated as the decade progressed. Because the necessity of meeting the needs of exhibitors was often at odds with the creative impulses of moviemakers, the moguls resisted any encroachment on their prerogatives. In fact, the shift to unit production resulted in greater specialization in the design and execution of motion pictures as studios attempted to satisfy a cross section of audience tastes, particularly interest in big-budget prestige pictures.

To keep artistic personnel in line, studio chiefs had formed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. Conceived by Louis B. Mayer, the Academy was created to “improve the artistic quality of the film medium” and embraced five categories of filmmakers—producers, directors, actors, writers, and technicians. These employees apparently were given sufficient financial rewards to forestall serious labor organizing among their ranks for five years. Labor problems with the rank and file during the Depression were solved quickly and expeditiously. Among the talent groups, art directors, cinematographers, and editors joined unaffiliated professional associations, such as the American Society of Cinematographers and American Cinema Editors, which kept them content throughout the decade. Directors, actors, and screenwriters formed unions. Working conditions for these groups somewhat improved as a result, but the control of production remained firmly in the grip of producers.

Describing the status of his profession, Frank Capra, in his capacity as the founding president of the Screen Directors Guild (SDG), sent the following open letter to the New York Times in early 1939:

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 all agree with you when you say that motion pictures are the director’s medium…. [But] we have tried for three years… to have two weeks’ preparation time 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.… It has taken three years of constant battling to achieve any part of this. I would say that 80 per cent of the directors today shoot scenes exactly as they are told to shoot them without any changes whatsoever, and that 90 per cent of them have no voice in the story or in the editing. (Quoted in Leo Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, The Movie Makers [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941], pp. 302-303)

Capra echoed a common complaint. Not only directors but most artistic personnel chafed at the demands of rigid production schedules. Once a dominant creative force behind the motion picture, the director did not retain even the right of the final cut by the thirties. Clearly, the decline in status of the director vis-à-vis the producer resulted from the efficiencies mandated by the   reorganization of studios during the Depression. Wall Street’s opinion of the director can be glimpsed from a piece by C. F. Morgan, who said,

What is the biggest production obstacle? The director. Five years ago he was king; today almost generally he’s a liability. Any man who is so unsure of what he is doing and so lacking in confidence that he has to shoot 100,000 feet of film to be sure of 7,500 for his resulting picture, should be sent back to whatever he was doing before he began to infest the picture studios. (“Sanity Reaches the Movies,” Magazine of Wall Street, 11 November 1933, p. 98)

Describing the function of the director, David O. Selznick said that at MGM, for example, “the director, nine times out often, is strictly a director, in the same sense that the stage director is the director of the play. His job is solely to get out on the stage and direct the actors, put them through the traces that are called for in the script.” Elaborating on his point, Selznick noted that at Warners, the director is “purely a cog in the machine” for “ninety per cent of the Warner films” and is “handed a script, usually just a few days before he goes into production.” A similar situation existed at 20th Century-Fox. Zanuck became deeply involved in script development, but he backed off during the shooting. However, while watching rushes he gave comments to the director, dictated notes to the editor, and chose the takes he wanted for the picture.

The concept of authorial freedom as it is understood today did not exist in Hollywood during the thirties. Not even when Paramount made Ernst Lubitsch head of production in 1935. Although Lubitsch’s short tenure marked “the only time in Hollywood studio history that such a noted director was given full creative control of a major studio’s product,” Lubitsch, in his capacity as production chief, disregarded so-called directors’ prerogatives and used previews and the “retake and remake” method to improve pictures. 11 At best, the top directors such as Frank Capra at Columbia, John Ford at Fox, Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount, King Vidor at MGM, and a few others enjoyed ample preparation time, participated in story conferences, and consulted with the editor and music director. In this manner, they were able to exercise a measure of influence over the entire production process.

In an attempt to reassert its prerogatives over production, a group of seventy-five directors organized the Screen Directors Guild on 16 January 1936 (the name was changed to the Directors Guild of America in 1960). The guild’s manifesto stated, “It is the firm conviction of the Screen Directors’ Guild that rehabilitation lies, first in changing the present ‘system of production’ which pervades the Industry, namely, eliminating the involved, complicated and expensive system of supervision which separates the Director and Writer from the responsible Executive Producers.” 12 To lead the fight for recognition, the guild elected Frank Capra as its first president.

Capra undoubtedly enjoyed more authorial freedom than any of his fellow directors. Capra earned it by directing a string of enormously popular pictures, by parlaying this success into control over production, and by constructing with the compliance of Columbia Pictures what Charles Wolfe called “the notion of what a successful, yet self-respecting and in some sense ‘autonomous’ filmmaker in Hollywood might be thought to be like.”

When Capra joined Columbia Pictures in 1927, the studio serviced the low end of the market. A member of Poverty Row, the studio owned no theaters, had no stars under contract, and generally operated on shoestring budgets. To make it into the majors, Columbia had to produce an occasional class-Á picture. Harry Cohn, Columbia’s president, gave Capra this job. Capra responded by directing a series of inexpensive but well-received comedies. Trading on his value to the company, Capra insisted on having more authority over his work and on receiving public recognition for his labors. Columbia complied and, by the end of his first year of work, billed his films as “Frank Capra Productions.”

Going into the thirties, Capra’s stature as a director of class-Á pictures grew with each successive release. By the time he made AMERICAN MADNESS in 1932, critics were referring to him as “one of Hollywood’s best.” After IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934) swept the Academy Awards, Capra literally became a star and received top billing in Columbia’s ads. “A New Frank Capra production” and other such heralds thereafter became standard. To promote LOST HORIZON (1937), Columbia’s most expensive picture of the decade, “Columbia launched a promotional campaign that stressed Capra’s direct supervision of all aspects of the lavish production.… By 1938 a special place for Capra as a filmmaker controlling all aspects of his work within the context of the studio system had been clearly established in popular commentary on the movies.” The Saturday Evening Post, for example, published a profile by Alva Johnston entitled “Capra Shoots As He Pleases.” Time featured Capra in a cover story about the status of the director in Hollywood. During the production of YOU CAN’T TAKE T WITH YOU , Life ran a photo spread entitled “How Frank Capra Makes a Hit Picture,” in which Capra is seen studying the set designs, discussing the script, directing the cast, viewing the rushes, and even physically cutting the film. Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune proposed that Capra was “the most important figure in motion pictures today,” by defining “the importance of the director in the complicated business of turning out a photoplay.” 15 Columbia, which lacked big-name stars, had created a star out of its top director. In the process, the studio gave the illusion that it was possible for a talented director to achieve the status of an auteur within the studio system.

When Frank Capra was fighting for recognition of the Directors Guild, 244 contract directors were working in Hollywood. More than half had started out in silent pictures, and only twenty-one had come from Broadway. Using Film Daily’s annual poll as a measure of critical esteem indicates that Frank Capra and George Cukor led the pack with six pictures; followed by Sidney Franklin with five; Clarence Brown, William Dieterle, W. S. Van Dyke, and King Vidor with four; John Ford, Edmund Goulding, Henry King, Mervyn LeRoy, and William Wyler with three; and Richard Boleslawski, Frank Borzage, Jack Conway, Victor Fleming, George Hill, Robert Z. Leonard, Frank Lloyd, Leo McCarey, and Lewis Milestone with two.

The directors who won recognition in the Academy Award sweepstakes during the decade were Frank Capra, with three Oscars, followed by Lewis Milestone, Norman Taurog, Frank Borzage, Frank Lloyd, John Ford, Leo McCarey, and Victor Fleming. Every picture that won an Academy Award for best direction also appeared on Film Daily’s Ten Best.

The directors whose pictures as a group made it to Variety’s annual list of box-office winners were W. S. Van Dyke with four mentions; Frank Capra and   George Cukor with three; followed by David Butler, Michael Curtiz, George B. Seitz, and Norman Taurog with two. Victor Fleming was mentioned only in 1939, but that year his two pictures, THE WIZARD OF OZ and GONE WITH THE WIND , grossed more money in one year than any other group of pictures by a director in the decade. Practically all the above-named directors who were active in 1938 are listed in Leo Rosten’s roster of the forty-five highest-paid directors, which is to say, directors with an annual salary of more than $75,000. 16 As might be expected, a close correlation exists between a director’s compensation and the number of times his name appeared on the lists, particularly Variety’s. But more interesting is the correlation between a director’s esteem as measured by the number of times his name appeared on the lists and the types of pictures he directed. This comparison reveals that the prestige picture most often constituted the prism through which a director’s talents were measured.

Although contract directors were expected to be versatile and skillful technicians capable of directing up to six pictures a year, the elite corps also specialized in superspecials constructed around a studio’s top stars. George Cukor made his reputation as a woman’s director, eliciting remarkable performances from such famous stars as Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, and Joan Crawford at such studios as RKO, MGM, and Columbia. Clarence Brown made his reputation directing Greta Garbo—two silents and five of her most successful sound films at MGM. Henry King was best known for his pictures recreating Americana, but Darryl Zanuck also entrusted him with Fox’s top stars, Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, and Don Ameche, in two big prestige pictures, ALEXANDER’S RAGTIME BAND (1938) and IN OLD CHICAGO (1938).

Michael Curtiz’s forty-two pictures for Warners during the thirties consisted of horror films, crime films, women’s films, swashbucklers, and comedies, among other types. However, Curtiz also specialized in handling the studio’s newest young stars, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, in a series of swashbucklers. W. S. Van Dyke, MGM’s work horse, directed MANHATTAN MELODRAMA (1934), a gangster film; MARIE ANTOINETTE (1938), a historical drama; the Thin Man detective series; an Andy Hardy family comedy; and three Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy operettas.

The Directors Guild finally won recognition in February 1939 after Capra threatened to call a strike of all directors in Hollywood. The contract the studios signed with the guild gave most contract directors “greater freedom at the expense of the associate producers and supervisors who held power over them” and won for elite directors the status of producer-director. Unlike the contract director, the producer-director was allowed to select his own writers, cast, and cameraman, and to see his film through to the end. Moreover, he was allowed to concentrate on maybe two or three pictures a year instead of rushing through five or six. For his efforts the producer-director was paid a salary ranging from $90,000 to $300,000 a year and might even earn a share of the profits. 17 However, in every case the studio invariably retained rights of approval over the key ingredients of a production—namely, the underlying property, the script, the budget, and the stars—and, of course, over how the picture was to be marketed.

Rosten estimated that around thirty directors had achieved producer-director status in 1939, among them Ernst Lubitsch and Mervyn LeRoy at MGM; Cecil B. DeMille and Wesley Ruggles at Paramount; Frank Capra and Howard Hawks at Columbia; David Butler at RKO; and John M. Stahl and Rowland V. Lee at Universal. Warners and 20th Century-Fox were the only studios that denied any director producer status.

Capra, the leader of the pack, gained the most autonomy over his work by becoming an independent producer. Leaving Columbia at the end of 1939, he formed Frank Capra Productions in partnership with his screenwriter-collaborator, Robert Riskin. To make his next picture, he signed a production-distribution deal with Warners and secured financing from the Bank of America, a package that gave him rights of approval over the creative ingredients as well as authority over marketing. 19 By taking this step, Capra joined the vanguard of the industrywide shift to independent production that took place over the next ten years.