Authorship as Promotional Discourse in the Screen Industries

Selling Genius

Leora Hadas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367356514
• eBook ISBN: 9781000074659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Authorship
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book discusses the use of authorship discourses and author figures in the promotion and marketing of media content, dealing with the U.S. mainstream media, including franchise film, network television, and triple-A video games.

The research takes a unique approach studying ideas of authorship in promotion, diverging from extant approaches looking at the text, production, or reception. Conceptualizing authorship within the logic of media branding, the book studies the construction of ideas around creativity and the creative person in marketing and publicity content where media industries communicate with audiences. A cross-media approach allows the book to take a broad look and make comparisons across the increasingly integrated media industries.

The book will be of great relevance to academics in the fields of film, television, and media studies, including postgraduate students, conducting teaching and research around authorship, media industries, and media promotion.

1 The author in promotion

Strange as it may seem, the central thesis of this book is excellently demonstrated by a man being slapped with a fish. On November 9th, 2014, comedian John Oliver aired a segment on Last Week Tonight (HBO, 2014–) concerning his discovery of a ‘salmon cannon’ which propels fish across dams. With a home-made version, he then commenced firing plastic fish that, through the magic of edited clips, appeared to hit other contemporary entertainers. Victims included Jon Stewart on The Daily Show (Comedy Central, 1996–), Anderson Cooper on CNN News, Tom Hanks in an advertisement, Homer Simpson of The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–), and J. J. Abrams on the set of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). The odd man out here may not be the cartoon. Abrams alone had the dubious honour of being hit by a salmon in a behind the scenes setting. Indeed, he was the only guest appearance whose work is done exclusively behind rather than in front of the camera. His inclusion implies that the audience of Last Week Tonight were expected to recognise him on sight, and to be sufficiently interested in him as to be entertained by his slapstick plight. It is still not a common occurrence that a film director becomes as popularly well known as a two-time Academy Award winning actor; it is rarer yet for it to be a director of summer blockbusters and franchise films. Yet there Abrams was, and his presence captured in a moment a tale of continuity and change, tradition and transition.

The protagonist of this tale is authorship: one of the most central concepts in media studies, analysis, and criticism, yet one of the most challenging to pin down. Some forty years after Andrew Sarris (1962) had introduced auteur theory from Cahiers du Cinéma to U.S. film studies, Gerstner and Staiger’s assertion that ‘every scholar (even those who subscribe to the “death of authorship”) speaks of going to a Robert Altman film’ (2003: xi), encapsulates both the struggles and resilience of that theory. First within film studies, then expanding into television and new media, the auteur has been celebrated, challenged, pronounced deceased, rediscovered, and undergone divergent evolution alongside changing industrial conditions and theoretical frameworks. The persistent core of the theory began the idea of an active agent – usually the director – who imposes full, deliberate control over the work through heroic struggle against the soulless assembly line of the industrial system. The Cahiers scholars in the 1950s located the auteur among the Hollywood directors working within the studio system, and ‘sought to demonstrate how the true individual artist rose above the industrial formation of the Hollywood system to clearly relate their unique visions’ (deWaard and Tait, 2013: 34). deWaard and Tait describe three criteria of auteurism that emerged with this first incarnation:

[A] distinctive visual style, achieved through technical mastery; a continued, intentional set of thematic concerns and patterns; and finally, a struggle with the industrial process of cinema’s production, embodying the unavoidable tension between art and commerce.

(Ibid.)

In 1960s U.S. criticism, auteur theory quickly became associated with the Hollywood Renaissance and its European inspirations, and with ideas of the ‘maverick’ director essentially opposed to the studio system, devoted to creating personal films as art in an industry interested strictly in the bottom line. Despite their differences, however, French and American takes on the auteur theory both converged on ‘the still-dominant popular view that individual, artistic directors stand at the center of the creative enterprise in film’ (Caldwell, 2008: 198). The question of the relationship between the individual director and the Hollywood system would continue to trouble and fracture auteur theory; as would the struggle to square the concept with the circle of the intensely collaborative nature of film work. Mark Gallagher notes that ‘discourses surrounding authorship tend to isolate individual creative workers both from their immediate production teams […] and from larger institutional and commercial systems’ (2013: 57). A range of scholars and approaches have made the attempt to relocate authorship within collaborative production practices – as indeed Gallagher does, suggesting ‘a system of collaborative authorship in contemporary screen production’ (76). Another strand located authorship not in any individual but in ‘the genius of the system’ itself (Schatz, 1988), proposing the classical Hollywood studio as author: an idea that Jerome Christensen (2012) developed into a theory of corporate authorship, originating from the corporation as ‘person’. Recently, the theory has grappled with the transition of arthouse and independent directors into the most common incarnation of the blockbuster in contemporary cinema: the franchise film. Observing the cases of Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, Sam Raimi, and his own case study of Ang Lee, Martin Flanagan examined critical discourse surrounding what he calls the ‘blockbuster auteur’, and argued that ‘[the] structuring opposition of art and commerce seems unequipped to deal with the economic and aesthetic realities of the contemporary multimedia landscape’ (2004: 25).

In television, meanwhile, the usefulness of the author concept has been questioned in light of views of the medium as highly standardised and collaborative (Fiske, 1987). Yet not all scholars have dismissed it. An auteurist discourse has found purchase in academic and critical debate on the figure of the showrunner, emerging since the early 2000s to take up the mantle of the TV auteur. The concept may be traced to Horace Newcomb’s and Robert S. Alley’s seminal The Producer’s Medium, which theorised the writer-producer as the central creative agent, ‘the head of the creative team, […] both businessman and artist’ (1983: 8). Newcomb and Alley used a number of auteurist tropes, focussing on the writer-producer’s creative agency and centrality; their consistent, personal styles and thematic concerns (albeit in writing rather than the director-auteur’s mastery of the visual); and their struggle to work within the oppressive, bottom-line-oriented system. In pioneering the concept of ‘quality television’, Feuer, Kerr and Vahimagi (1984) associated the idea with narratives of authorship, examining MTM as corporate author and studio brand. Later scholarship would alternate between picking up on auteurist frameworks, producing ‘artist and work’ analysis (for example Fahy’s edited collections on Aaron Sorkin [2005], Alan Ball [2006], and David Chase [2007]); and pursuing its own exploration of the relationship between individual and system, singularity and collaboration (such as Caldwell’s industrial auteur theory [2008], discussed later in this chapter.) The showrunner, however, has become entrenched in critical and popular writing as ‘the life blood of a television show’ (Film Festivals and Indie Films, 2014), now credited with bringing about a new golden age of American TV (Martin, 2013). Much as it had done for American cinema during the Hollywood Renaissance, auteurism has become a source of legitimation for the medium as an art form (Collins, 2014): where there are artists, there is art.

Under the influence of poststructuralist theory (primarily Barthes, 1977; Foucault, 1979), and of industry and production studies, the idea of the auteur as an individual genius elevated from his (and it is almost exclusively his) circumstances was largely dismantled throughout much of academia. deWaard and Tait argue that ‘auteur film […] is now regarded as a discursive site for the interaction of biography, institutional context, social climate, and historical moment’ (2013: 36). Yet they, alongside virtually all scholars describing the rise and fall and uncertain rise again of auteur theory, also notes the persistence of auteurism – as a discourse rather than theory – as a critical and reception framework. Gerstner (2003: 5) remarks that ‘[T]he urge and desire to discuss theoretically and market films in relation to the auteur are striking’. However much we challenge authorship as a concept, it seems to grow back with the stubbornness of something essential, something with roots too deeply in our media cultures for it to matter how we trim the discursive greenery it sprouts. The bulk of this research on the author as a discursive site has been located in the study of production practices – as in the above theorising of creative agency within collaborative production – and audience and critical reception, examining audiences’ use of authorship to classify, evaluate, and discuss media (for example Brooker, 2012; Scott, 2012). As Gallagher notes, however, ‘authorship is also a category of attribution […] authorship depends on recognition’ (2013: 76) – a statement that calls attention to the promotional practice of establishing authorship: the presentation and narrativisation of authorship to the industry by the audience.

The promotional use of author figures and of authorship as a concept has hardly waned with the complicated life of the author in academia: if anything, it has expanded. deWaard and Tait observe that ‘the extent to which marketers will exploit previous authorial successes has reached a trivial, almost empty fruition, as Godzilla (Roland Emmerich, 1998) is sold as “from the creators of Independence Day”’ (2013: 74) – an observation that aligns with Flanagan’s noting the emergence of the ‘blockbuster auteur’. In contemporary television, if the writer-producer was historically largely anonymous, the 90s saw creators of cult television such as Joss Whedon, J. Michael Straczynski, and Chris Carter gain considerable visibility and currency among their fanbase. Today television authorship has come, as Pearson (2011) puts it, from a feature of cult television into ‘digital television’s cutting edge’. In 2010, The Hollywood Reporter began publishing its ‘50 Power Showrunners’ list, and it is now rare to see a drama or comedy of any note whose showrunner is not present on social media, interviewed in popular papers, and celebrated as a creative authority who leads the show with their unique, authentic vision. Most recently, auteurism has made its way into video games (for example Ashcraft, 2010; Hosie, 2013). Authorship is again equated with legitimation, the presence of auteurs with artistic value, with the question of whether games are ‘serious’ enough, ‘mature’ enough as an art form to have auteurs. Independent game creators such as Jonathan Blow are posited in binary opposition to the massive commercialism of major studios, and some of those independents – such as, memorably, the creative director of Unravel (Electronic Arts, 2016) in E3 2015 (Romano, 2015) – act as public faces for their product and turn into key promoters for it.

In brief, the author is not dead: the author is a celebrity. Media creators are prominent in the promotion of media products, providing valuable selling points in such taglines as ‘created by’ or ‘from the creator of’. Their names are advertised in posters and trailers, they are interviewed in the popular entertainment press, and appear to their fans in enormous conventions. The internet and social media permit audiences to talk directly to those creators they associate with their favourite media; and as those creators are called upon to answer, become a site for complex visible interactions beyond any that were possible through the historical practices of fan letters and campaigns. This is hardly surprising: as author figures after the mould of the auteur as described above, all the way back to the Cahiers and Sarris models, remain totemic to audiences and critics, they thus provide an important source for value, both monetary and cultural, for the media industries.

Timothy Corrigan coined the term ‘commerce of auteurism’ for the concept of authorship as a device by which the media industries promote and market content and manage audiences’ reception, calling auteurism ‘a commercial strategy for organizing audience reception… a critical concept bound to distribution and marketing aims’ (1991: 103; emphasis in original). The commerce of auteurism focusses on authorship as industrially constructed, intimately tied in with media texts as products that are distributed, advertised, and sold in the market to a mass audience. It is not inherent in the text, as in traditional auteur theory, but acts as a device within the system of industrial and commercial surround. As Yannis Tzioumakis says:

Authorship […] is negotiated through intertext, regardless of whether a filmmaker could be constructed as an auteur through more traditional, textually determined processes. This […] could potentially reveal ‘a different author,’ an author whose presence is assigned institutionally, which often makes sense only in light of distributors’ attempts to market a specific product to a particular audience. […] The concept of the extratextual authorial agency […] produces […] arguments that take into consideration the increasingly complicated relation between audiences and film-related forms of media (magazines, interviews, on-location reports, reviews, and the making-of featurette), through which a celebri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The author in promotion
• 2 Into the authorship matrix: promotional authorship in the franchise blockbuster
• 3 ‘Starry-eyed, tough-as-nails’: the television showrunner as auteur and as brand
• 4 Opening the branding bottleneck: new models of promotional authorship
• 5 Welcome to the team: promotional authorship in the video game industry
• 6 Conclusion: the undying author
• Index