Walter Salles: Road Movies in the Rearview Mirror

Walter Salles, the director of the upcoming film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, penned a nice essay on the history of the road movie which appears in today’s New York Times Magazine. In it, he traces its origins, first back to Homer’s Odyssey, then, at the prompting of Wim Wenders, further back to “our nomadic roots, in mankind’s primal need to leave an account of its passage on earth,” making the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira the earliest trace of the narrative impulse.

I suppose that ultimately that would depend on whether the cave paintings function as documents of Cro-Magnon life as well as ritual tools. Salle himself draws an interesting parallel between road movies and documentary film: “The road movie is not the domain of large cranes or steady-cams. On the contrary, the camera needs to remain in unison with characters who are in continual motion — a motion that shouldn’t be controlled. The road movie tends, therefore, to be driven by a sense of immediacy that is not dissimilar from that of a documentary film.” This naturally dovetails with the reports of his On the Road being filmed with hand-held cameras (which in turn led me to draw parallels between Kerouac’s spontaneous prose and the mumblecore aesthetic in a previous post).

Salle must know what he's talking about, being the director of two very individual and critically well-received road movies, 1998’s Central Station and 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries. “In doing different road movies, I also came to realize that a good screenplay grants you more freedom to improvise than a weak one. It’s like jazz: the better the melody, the easier it is to wander away from it, because it will also be easier to return to it later.” I like how Salles slips in another Kerouac trademark here, jazz as the essence of improvisation, only unlike Kerouac he emphasizes the importance of the core melody, or theme. Which parallels, interestingly enough what screenwriter champion David Kipen says (and which I reference in another recent post): a director without a strong screenplay may very find himself or herself on some very questionable back roads.
PHOTO CREDIT: Wim Wenders

The Schreibers Strike!

“The writer is the most important person in Hollywood. But we must never tell the sons of bitches.”
– Irving G. Thalberg, legendary production honcho at Universal and MGM

Every few years the film industry feels the wrath of its unsung auteurs — or schreibers, as author David Kipen calls them. We are now in the midst of a new screenwriters strike, and the effect has been immediate, at least on television, as the late night talk shows (scripted — who knew?) go into reruns. I think this is as good a time as any to recommend Kipen's little manifesto The Schreiber Theory, which bestows ultimate creative ownership of a film on the screenwriter — a formal refutation of the auteur theory (director-as-auteur) popularized by American film critic Andrew Sarris, which of course is as solid as the theory of evolution amongst film critics and fans alike. The few writers with any real recognition or following are themselves directors or have, like David Mamet, made a name for themselves outside of film altogether.

Needless to say Kipen's thesis is controversial (even "perverse" as a film/culture critic friend has suggested). Yet his detractors seem to brandish the same pantheon figures (Hitchcock, Ford, Fellini, Bergman) in defense of the auteur theory. One could counter that these are in essence dependable "blue-chip" directors, who would never even begin to plan a film without a solid script. It's worth looking at Kipen's examples of celebrated directors who ultimately fall from grace through acts of hubris such as coming to rely on style over content, or employing editor as fixer and partner-in-crime. Ultimately, even if you don't agree with the Schreiber Theory, Kipen's index at the back of the book listing classic studio films by screenwriter rather than director is a fascinating cross-reference of Hollywood history and will have a salutary effect on your Netflix queue.

The Writers Guild of America's list of 101 Greatest Screenplays