I'm reading about Hawks right now, and it seems to me that--in spite of his general reputation as a necessarily aloof, insensitive ringmaster--he only managed to shoot himself in the foot whenever he stole material/walked off a project/betrayed a friend/etc. This behavior is more legendary and therefore seems to inform his successes without actually accounting for those successes when one takes the trouble to chart the development of his career. I would wager that he would have been far more successful had he spent less time trying to take credit for the contributions of other people, for example.domino harvey wrote:The four greatest directors of the Classical Hollywood era-- John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Otto Preminger-- were by most accounts total and complete assholes and they consistently made skillful, important, and valuable contributions to cinema. I haven't seen this movie but I-- underline, bold, italics, larger font size-- don't care if a director is a dick if it results in a great film. I have no idea if this is one, but out of hope for greatness, I reserve the right to not care about the "ethics" of the construction of any film, good or bad.
At any rate, none of what I say intends a boycott of material produced by occasionally mean people. I only maintain that those directors' successes owe nothing to their reputations as "complete" assholes (which I'm scare-quoting in order to challenge; Hawks, for one, could be a perfect gentleman on the set, and often remarkably hands-off when actors were performing well; for example, the set of His Girl Friday seemed like a dream of creative latitude, permitting improvisations from Russell and Grant in order to suit the manic temper of the film).
