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."