Talking Pictures: It's the Writer, Stupid

"Novellas make the best movies," says David Kipen in The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (Melville; paperback, $12). This is a wrinkle on the conventional wisdom about fiction turned into film: that bad novels often make good movies, while good novels rarely get to the screen in decent aesthetic shape. For Kipen, size matters -- inversely. His real aim, however, is much broader. He's out to show that the true progenitor of a movie is not the director but the screenwriter -- that, for example, the figure most responsible for the artistry of Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" is not the corpulent wag with the plummy British accent but Alec Coppel, who wrote the script based on a French thriller. In making this point, Kipen pays tribute to a critic who thinks much as he does: Richard Corliss in his book Talking Pictures (1975), which is to the screenwriter-rules theory what Andrew Sarris's American Cinema (1968) is to the director-as-king theory -- namely, the Bible.

Kipen observes that one reason Corliss's stance hasn't made more headway is that he failed to give it a catchy label, whereas Sarris planted his philosophy firmly in mind by calling it the auteur theory. So far, so good. But will Kipen do any better by naming his and Corliss's alternative "Schreiber," after the Yiddish word for "writer" (and not, as one might suppose, after the movie actor Liev Schreiber)? Yiddish has many virtues, but you can't beat French when it comes to lofty theorizing. Wouldn't "écrivain theory" be closer to le tag juste?

Speaking of the page-to-screen transitions, three new books capitalize on the popularity of "Brokeback Mountain." If you buy the Schreiber/écrivain theory, you can examine Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (Scribner; paperback, $16) to see what Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana wrought from Annie Proulx's story, originally published in the New Yorker: The book presents both incarnations, followed by essays by all three writers. (Two other books simply reprint the story as a stand-alone item; both are published by Scribner, one as a $14.95 hardback, the other as a $9.95 paperback.) McMurtry and Ossana cite director Ang Lee for having the courage to saddle up and ride a screenplay that had stood unbroken in the corral for years, and Proulx singles out Heath Ledger, "who knew better than I how [his character] Ennis felt and thought, whose intimate depiction of that achingly needy ranch kid builds with frightening power." Maybe the lesson is to hell with theory: In a movie as good as "Brokeback Mountain," it would be simplistic to crown any one person as genius in charge.

-- Dennis Drabelle