Scott Tobias: The conflict between director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga—who ended their collaboration after the acclaimed triptych of Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and the new Babel—is good jumping-off point for a subject that's been simmering in Hollywood and critical circles lately. Namely, are screenwriters getting enough credit for their work? Critics generally talk about films in terms of the director, which of course denies any contribution the writer could have made, as does the "a film by" credit, which basically posits the director as the author of the film. I'm going to argue, perhaps quixotically, that screenwriters are currently not getting the credit they don't deserve. And since Babel illustrates—and to some degree refutes—my point pretty nicely, let's start there.
First, a little more on the Iñárritu/Arriaga feud. The rift was first reported in the "Scriptland" column in the Los Angeles Times, which has received some (well-deserved) knocks for reviewing screenplays before they go into production. According to the Times, Iñárritu was ticked that Arriaga had claimed too much credit for 21 Grams, and he banned the writer from appearing at Cannes 2006 for the world première of Babel. (Iñárritu would go on to take the Best Director prize.) The L.A. Times piece was followed by a more detailed think-piece in The New York Times by Terrence Rafferty, which in turn led to Babel's producers buying an ad damning both articles for getting the story wrong. They claim that the collaboration between the two men had just "run its course," though they also acknowledge certain "philosophical differences."
Here's the money quote from Arriaga: "When they say it's an auteur film, I say auteurs film. I have always been against the 'film by' credit on a movie. It's a collaborative process and it deserves several authors."
In Arriaga's case, I think the "auteurs" label is appropriate, because he's one of the few screenwriters with a distinctive voice and a continuity to his work. Yet along with credit comes blame, too. I'd argue that much of what is good about the Iñárritu/Arriaga collaborations—and everything that's good about Babel—is Iñárritu's dynamic, texturally rich direction and not so much the humorless machinations of Arriaga's scripts. The best passages by far in Babel are the wordless sequences, like the disorienting pulse of sound and image in the Japanese discotheque, or the plaintive guitar that strums as an entire Moroccan village takes a wounded Cate Blanchett into its collective care. With a lesser director, I think you've got Crash 2, an inelegant, deeply contrived narrative about the ripple effects of violence across the globe, or some such pretentious nonsense. Noel Murray's review of the film declared "Hallelujah" at the news that the two were parting ways, and to that I can only add an "Amen, brother," though I'm not entirely convinced that the prudish Iñárritu will choose material best-suited to his undeniable skills as a pure filmmaker.
But again, Arriaga really does deserve credit—maybe "co-auteur" credit at that—though I can't see much evidence that he's being denied it, either. I haven't read a single review of Babel that doesn't bring up his name, because elements like the interlocking multi-story structure and the subtle achronology are obviously his to claim. Yet I'd say that a good 95 percent of the time, directors are either wholly responsible for a film's success or failure, or the issues of attribution are so murky that giving the screenwriter credit is extremely problematic. And by making this claim, I'm discounting all films by writer-directors, who are of course free to bask in all the glory or infamy that's thrown at them.
Those two main points—that directors are responsible for a film's success or failure, and that attribution problems make it hard to give writers credit—require a lot of explanation on my end, so I'll lob it back to you for now and get into more detail later on. What do you think? Are screenwriters getting the short end of the stick, or should they quit their complaining?
Keith Phipps: Well, to my eyes at least, the Arriaga/Iñárritu case illustrates just how crucial screenwriters are, although my proof of this depends a lot on my own personal taste. For me, the pairing has been a case of diminishing returns tied to the quality of the scripts. Amores Perros had three gripping narratives, but the follow-ups lost a lot of the urgency and nuance of that debut. There's a lot I respect about 21 Grams, particularly the performances and Iñárritu's always-compelling eye, but I also think it devolves into one miserable slog after a while. I liked Babel better, but it ran into some of the same problems, and some new ones tied to some weird failures in logic. (Do Moroccan police really just open fire whenever they see suspects?) I could get into some more specific problems with the film, but overall, for me, the partnership has illustrated that the better the script, the better the film.
I'm not even sure you'd argue with that. So here's something for you to argue with: Screenwriters regularly get screwed. It has a lot to do with the sausage-factory way movies get made and scripts get rewritten, and I'm not averse to thinking in "a film by" terms, but if there's no script, there's no movie. (Most of the time, at least.) The prominence of writer-directors has made it even harder not to think this way. But I'd argue that most directors work by carefully choosing the right scripts for their sensibilities.
Let's look at Steven Soderbergh, for an example. He's indisputably a distinctive director, but one who, best I can tell, seeks out interesting screenplays and creates his films around them. Nothing ever feels like it was pounded into a Soderbergh-friendly shape, even if there's no mistaking one of Soderbergh's films for anyone else's. Or consider Scorsese, who works very closely with screenwriters developing films. I'm not saying that, say, The Limey should read "a film by Steven Soderbergh and Lem Dobbs." I don't even want to upset the primacy of a director. But I think the whole "a film by" notion is a kind of pernicious. You can't build a house without blueprints, and you can't make a movie without words.
Or am I spreading the credit around too generously?
ST: You're right that screenwriters get screwed in Hollywood—says I, one of the screwers—because many scripts are subject to rewrites, and the arbitration process can lead to some truly mysterious rulings. There have been cases when a screenplay has been thrown out and entirely rewritten from scratch, and the original writer has received full credit for that work. Just doing a Google search right now (keywords: "script," "thrown out," "arbitration"), I find a photo of Terry Gilliam burning his Writers Guild of America card over the WGA's ruling on Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. The WGA initially decided to credit the screenplay to Alex Cox and Tod Davies, even though Gilliam and his screenwriting partner Tony Grisoni asserted that they wrote one directly from Hunter Thompson's book. The WGA eventually gave in and credited all four of them, but there have been circumstances when they haven't been so generous or just.
But setting aside the problems that sometimes occur when you try to attribute a screenplay to a particular writer, you can make some generalizations about what a script is responsible for doing. As you say, "you can't build a house without blueprints," and that's exactly right, though I'd hesitate to call screenwriters architects. To switch metaphors abruptly, they provide the narrative backbone—the story, the structure, the characters, the dialogue (though that last one can get a bit tricky, given how much the process can alter it)—but it's up to the director to provide the flesh and blood. To me, how a script is executed is so much more crucial than the quality of the script itself, especially within the last half-century, when film has moved away from its stage roots and become a director-driven medium.
You mention Steven Soderbergh and Lem Dobbs. Their contentious commentary track for The Limey is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Dobbs complains that Soderbergh, in his decision to shoot the film in an elliptical style, cut out a lot of elements of the script that he feels would have made for a better movie. Soderbergh, for his part, absorbs the abuse in good humor and tells Dobbs something to the effect of "hey, why don't you try directing, hotshot?" To me, this is solid evidence of the hierarchy at work: Ultimately, the key decisions on a film are made by a director, and when that director has Soderbergh's vision, it's his fingerprints that are all over the movie. Not to take too much away from Dobbs, whose reputedly excellent screenplay for Kafka Soderbergh botched eight years earlier, but this was definitely a case of a director having his way with the material.
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