On the Demand for "Humility" in Film Directors: A Few Thoughts

In Vincent Minnelli's cinematic classic The Bad and the Beautiful producer Jonathan Shields gets into an argument with director Von Eilstein over the shooting of a particular scene in their film. In the course of the subsequent argument Von Eilstein tells Shields that "In order to direct a picture you need humility."

Von Eilstein ends up out of the project, the direction of which Shields personally takes over in a spirit of "Humility? Humility? Why I'll be the humblest person you ever saw! You just watch me!"--and the all too predictable result is an artistic and financial cinematic disaster that finishes Shields' previously thriving career (such that the onetime Hollywood Player is, in the present day of that flashback-laden movie, all washed up and pleading with the people he betrayed to give him another chance).

Von Eilstein's remark stuck in my memory not just because of its significance within a film that has a lot to commend it, but as a reminder of an earlier era's notions of just what it is that directors do. That movie was made in the waning days of a studio system in which directors were important to filmmaking, and not always humble about that importance, but in which the image of the tyrant on set was more apt to be associated with the producer who so often had his name splashed across the poster David O. Selznick style, and studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn.

It was made, too, a whole decade before Andrew Sarris brought the "auteur theory" to America, with all that followed from it--the director not necessarily expected to know, to decide, to interfere in every last little detail of a movie's making for the sake of realizing their own authorial vision, but presiding over an unavoidably more collaborative endeavor, more like the technostructure-helming Chief Executive Officers that a John Galbraith wrote about in the age of "the organization man" than the dictatorial CEOs who are so fawned over by the elite's courtiers in the "leadership"-besotted business press so quick to call anyone with high office or a lot of money a "genius."

I suspect that, more than the writings of Sarris, lies behind our image of the film director today.