The Author as Author: Restoring the Screenwriter to British Film History

Abstract

One of the most deleterious effects of the auteur theory’s cult of the director as the sole creative force within film-making has been to obscure the contribution of others involved in the production process: actors, cinematographers, editors, producers, set designers and, the focus here, screenwriters. There have been attempts to remedy this neglect in studies of Hollywood cinema — notably Richard Corliss’ Talking Pictures (1975) and Richard Fine’s exemplary Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 1928–1940 (1979) — but a singular absence of any comparable studies of British screenwriters.1 Studies of individual screenwriters in British cinema do exist, but almost all have been of those who have a literary reputation gained outside the cinema, and none of them situate their analyses within an historical overview of the development of screenwriting in the United Kingdom.2 This essay is a contribution towards such a history through a contextual study of Richard Curtis whose reputation has been gained entirely through his screenwriting, whom Variety called ‘Britain’s only billion-dollar screenwriter’, and Philip French ‘unquestionably the true auteur of all the pictures he’s worked on’.3

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