By and large, films are collaborative works of art. Most films have a separate director, writer, producer, and editor; several individuals may also share these duties. Single-person productions are very rare in professional filmmaking, which means multiple people are behind the success (or failure) of a film. As such, some people may ask, ‘Who among them is the most important?’ or ‘Who contributes the most?’
According to Frederick Marx, an Oscar- and Emmy-nominated filmmaker with a 45-year career making movies, the answer is actually complicated and requires delving into film history.
Frederick Marx, Oscar- and Emmy-nominated filmmaker
Marx says that, in a tradition dating back to cinema’s inception, the person Hollywood considered to be the foremost “artistic creator” behind a film was most often the producer, due to their role supervising the film’s production, securing story rights, and hiring all the key principals, including the director. However, in the 1950s, French film critics, including Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, argued in the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma that it’s the director who should be seen as the main artistic force, the “author” of a film. This idea, known as the Auteur theory, impacted cinema worldwide and has stuck until the present day. While the distinction of being an auteur is what most filmmakers aspire to, others, including the late Alan Parker, differ, reaffirming film’s nature as the ultimate collaborative art form.
This notion of the director being the film’s primary creative force landed in Hollywood in the 1960s and became only more dominant over the years. It then carried over from mainstream Hollywood filmmaking into the documentary world, particularly into the independent documentary community. Marx says that, while the director’s role is absolutely essential to a documentary, the excess of emphasis on it has led to other important roles being diminished.
Marx’s most successful film to date, Hoop Dreams, released 30 years ago in 1994, is an example of this. For the film, Marx received an Academy Award nomination for Best Editing, along with the film’s other two editors, Steve James and Bill Haugse. Hoop Dreams is one of the highest-grossing non-musical documentaries of all time in the US, and has been named by the International Documentary Association as “The Best Documentary of All Time”. Marx has credits for producing, writing, and editing Hoop Dreams. However, since he did not have directorial credit for the film, his contributions are sometimes downplayed by the media and often go unrecognized in the public eye.
Theatrical Movie poster for Hoop Dreams
Anticipating that eventuality before the film’s release, Marx insisted that he and the two other filmmakers share an “A Film By” credit as a testimony to the fact that the film was not created by a single person. Contractually, that acknowledgment must always be listed first in the sequence of credits known in Hollywood as the “billing block,” and it appears that way on the movie’s posters and on the movie itself. This was unusual, as the “Film By” credit, in keeping with the Auteur Theory, typically goes to the director (or the director/writer if they’re the same person). Despite having that “Film By” credit along with all his other credits, Marx is often omitted in mentions of the film in media and popular culture.
Marx, along with the other filmmakers and the film subjects, does receive his fair share of income from residuals of the film. But he says that not being properly acknowledged for the film’s creation has harmed his career. The lack of recognition, he says, limits the opportunities and respect received from the industry. “The inordinate amount of credit given to the director can discount the immense amount of talent and effort other filmmakers poured into a film to ensure a coherent and well-made final product.”
“Looking at the entirety of my body of work, Hoop Dreams is the only film in my 45-year career that I do not have a directing credit on. The irony is it’s the most successful one. So it puts me in a paradoxical position,” Marx says. “Fortunately, there’s a movement afoot in the contemporary documentary community to correct this misconception and make it clear that documentary producers need to be recognized at the same level as directors, as co-creators of the film. In a Hollywood film context, it’s typically the writer and director who is credited as the artistic force behind the creation of a film and that’s as it should be. But that formulation doesn’t really hold up in the documentary context, especially not independent documentaries. I believe that really needs to change.”