When Two Heads Really Are Better

Someone should have told Paul Thomas Anderson that his script for "There Will Be Blood," nominated for an Academy Award as Best Picture of the year, is an unholy mess. Or that Daniel Day-Lewis, with his cigarette holder and thespian limp, nominated as Best Actor, runs away with the movie and turns any possible moral contest between the foundational energies of American capitalism and American religion into an unfair fight.

Some of the same liberal critics who have bashed "Juno," partly because its lead character decides not to have an abortion, have given a free pass to a film that plays fast and loose with the nation's history. Anderson's symbolism is murky at best. He sets up as antagonists an oil man and an evangelist, even though American business has never viewed the lust to make buckets of money in opposition to the humble dictates of Christianity. John D. Rockefeller argued that the two impulses can happily coexist. As a result of Rockefeller's becoming the richest man of his era and a leading philanthropist, corporate America has never seen any need to deviate from this convenient line of thinking. Seeing the risks to mind and limb taken by Day-Lewis's character, I gained new admiration for Exxon-Mobil. If that's what it takes to locate and bring oil to market, they deserve every billion in windfall profits they can squeeze through a congressional loophole.

While Day-Lewis's murderous character can hardly be called a hero, he's at least more forthright than the duplicitous whiner played by Paul Dano, a minister who abuses his own father. However wretchedly Day-Lewis may behave toward those around him, he's still played as a creative force, not a fake. Not so Dano the Christian, portrayed in Anderson's script as the worst sort of American villain: a parasite and a failure. (It would be interesting to know how Upton Sinclair, whose book "Oil!" is the unrecognizable source for Anderson's script, would react to a film that gushes over the demonic power of free enterprise. Sinclair hated Rockefeller and went to jail in 1914 for demonstrating against the oil man after his militia had shot coal strikers in Colorado.)

Of course, no one retooled the disjointed story or dampened Day-Lewis's flamboyance, because Anderson performed the dual role of screenwriter-director. Like an increasing number of younger filmmakers, from Quentin Tarantino to Paul Haggis, he seems to believe that the best chance he has of maintaining artistic say-so in a system notoriously hostile to integrity is to control as much of the process as possible. Making a Hollywood feature film typically requires years of soul-killing compromises. Directing one's own script is as close to writing a book as can be hoped for in what is a collaborative medium.

But are these filmmakers right in their belief? And even if they are correct in thinking that writing and directing are compatible activities, do the best films emerge when one person, indivisible, has the license to do both? There is plenty of evidence that the chances for success are as good—or better—when these two vital tasks are divided between at least two people.

Much of that evidence comes from the history of cinema. The percentage of film masterworks with a sole director-screenwriter is pitifully small. Take, for example, the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 American films of all time. Only six qualify as pure writer-director efforts: "Star Wars," "All About Eve," "Platoon," "City Lights," "Modern Times," "The Gold Rush." On the AFI's list of top 100 comedies there are 11: "Airplane," "The Producers," "There's Something About Mary," "The Great Dictator," "City Lights," "Broadcast News," "Bull Durham," "Sullivan's Travels," "The Lady Eve," "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" and "The Palm Beach Story" (the last four all written and directed by Preston Sturges).

For those who find the AFI list too dependent on mass appeal, sample the 1,000 films ranked by an international group of critics on the Web site They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?. Of the top 100 only six—"The Gold Rush," "Persona," "The Seventh Seal," "All About Eve," "Man With a Movie Camera," and "Aguirre, the Wrath of God"—were made by a director solely responsible for his own script.

So the public as well as critics tend to agree that their favorite films have been those with multiple writers, or at least one who was not the same as the director. The works of Chaplin, Sturges, and Bergman are the only conspicuous exceptions. Outstanding films have resulted when a strong director joined forces with a strong writer. Orson Welles had Herman Mankiewicz on "Citizen Kane." Roman Polanski had Robert Towne for "Chinatown." Federico Fellini had Ennio Flaiano for "I Vittelloni," "La Dolce Vita" and "8½." Francis Ford Coppola had Mario Puzo for "The Godfather" and "The Godfather II."

Indeed, before the breakdown of the studio system in the '60s, the vast majority of cinema's most celebrated directors—Griffith, Eisenstein, Gance, Murnau, Pabst, Ford, Hawks, Wellman, Lang, Huston, Wyler, Hitchcock, Walsh, Renoir, Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Ray—almost invariably shared their duties.

Even in recent decades, after the major studio model splintered into a thousand pieces, many directors lauded as auteurs—Kubrick, Truffaut, (early) Godard, Lean, Peckinpah, Spielberg, Eastwood, Scorsese, Burton—have chosen to work with a screenwriter for most of their projects. They understand that writing is its own time-consuming craft, and completing more films means apportioning themselves. As directors they know they already have ultimate control anyway.

Dividing the artistic load often allows more freedom, not less. Robert Altman could improvise to his heart's content because he had solid scripts by Joan Tewksberry on "Nashville" and Julian Fellowes on "Gosford Park." Billy Wilder always teamed up with an accomplished writing partner. Joel and Ethan Coen have each other. Even so, "No Country for Old Men," their best film in years, was made by hewing closely to Cormac McCarthy's novel, in some places line for line.

Last year all five nominees in the Best Picture category, including the winner, "The Departed," were products of the usual division of labor; this year two of the five were steered by writer-directors. More films around the world are being produced now in this mode than ever before, and many of them benefit from this fused personality. Mike Leigh in England, David Cronenberg in Canada, Werner Herzog in Germany, Pedro Almodóvar in Spain, Michael Haneke in Austria, Hayao Miyazaki in Japan, Guillermo del Toro in Mexico, Cristian Mungiu in Romania, and a number of Americans (Woody Allen, David Lynch, Albert Brooks, Charles Burnett, Todd Solondz, Lisa Cholodenko, Todd Haynes, Tarantino and Anderson) have consistently realized personal films that have also pleased critics and the public.

This proliferation has resulted in part from such films' being easier to finance. Investors get a package deal: two expensive jobs for the price of one. Anderson was able to bring in "There Will Be Blood," with a large cast and oil rigs that were historically correct, for the relative bargain price of $25 million.

Given the long odds against any of these complex and expensive vehicles ever making it to a theater, and given the numbing standard fare that critics are subjected to on a daily basis at screenings, it's understandable that they cheer unpredictable projects like Anderson's, however badly flawed. Who wouldn't prefer it to another soulless remake, sequel or audience-tailored blockbuster? Perhaps his script should be best viewed not as a parable about American business but about the dangers of writing and directing a feature film by oneself. The Day-Lewis character is an independent oil prospector who refuses to sell out to the majors. More than one American director—most unforgettably Coppola, with "Apocalypse Now"—has veered toward madness in trying to finish a huge and risky project.

Independence should be encouraged, when warranted. Many distinctive films would never have happened without one person taking on both roles. No duo or team of writers could have dreamed up "Eraserhead" or "Killer of Sheep." Finding a simpatico author can at times be more trouble for a director than doing both jobs alone. Hsiaou-hsien Hou, the Taiwanese director, is unusually lucky to have found T'ien-wen Chu and Nien-Jen Wu, his longstanding screenwriters.

And the better movie is not always the most thrilling. "Michael Clayton," written and directed by Tony Gilroy and another contender this year for Best Picture, is more finished and satisfying than "There Will Be Blood." It's also more gimmicky, and I'm not sure I would sacrifice the first 45 minutes of Day-Lewis's bravura performance, as he seduces the trusting locals out of their land, for the more rounded ensemble work, headed by a likably depressed George Clooney, in a melodrama that caricatures lawyers and big business in familiar Hollywood fashion.

But a forceful co-writer might have pointed out to Anderson where his script is too ambitious and breaks apart, and how to repair the fractures. Just as Samuel Beckett was not the ideal director of his own plays, Anderson need not do it all. He has proved himself supremely caring about actors and suave with a camera. But narrative structure is not his strength in "Magnolia," "Punch-Drunk Love" or "There Will Be Blood."

The cult of the writer-director with his or her uncompromising vision deserves more skepticism from film critics. The economies of scale that come from putting one's own words up on the screen can just as easily result in one function or both being short-changed, or in cinematic solipsism. I am not the first to suggest that Woody Allen, whose best films were collaborations with Marshall Brickman, should perhaps slow down and take on a colleague to help with a few rewrites. John Sayles might let someone else realize more of his gritty scripts. And maybe Lynch should stop trying single-handedly to find plots in the streams of images that bubble up during his TM sessions. Time to bring back Mark Frost, his co-author on the pilot for "Twin Peaks"?

The release later this year of "Synecdoche, New York" will allow audiences to judge the directing debut of Charlie Kaufman. The most daring screenwriter of his generation, responsible for both "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," his movie (starring Philip Seymour Hoffman) is guaranteed to be out of the ordinary. Whether its visual assurance will match its verbal and metaphysical audacity is another matter.

Uncompromised vision, when unchecked, can be as much of a waste of time as dumbed-down, audience-tested appeasement. It was parodied to devastating effect on HBO's "Entourage" in the episodes where monomaniac writer-director Billy Walsh almost destroys Vincent Chase's career in the stink-bomb "Medellín." We also saw it for real back in 1980, when Michael Cimino gave us "Heaven's Gate."

The finest wines, more often than not, are blends of the finest grapes.