Auteur

American actor Jerry Lewis directed his own 1960 film The Bellboy via sweeping control, and was praised for "personal genius".

The auteur concept has also been applied to non-film directors, such as record producers and video game designers, such as Hideo Kojima.

In a 1954 essay,[14] François Truffaut criticized the prevailing "Cinema of Quality" whereby directors, faithful to the script, merely adapt a literary novel.

[15] To represent the view that directors who express their personality in their work make better films, Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des auteurs", or "the policy of the authors".

French film critics, publishing in Cahiers du Cinéma and in Positif, praised Lewis's results.

Sarris applied it to Hollywood films, and elaborated in his 1968 book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, which helped popularize the English term.

[8] Film historian Aljean Harmetz, citing classical Hollywood's input by producers and executives, held that auteur theory "collapses against the reality of the studio system".

[31] She argues that there is no shortage of non-American women directors that could be considered auteurs, and lists Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion, Liliana Cavani, Claire Denis, Marleen Gorris, Agnieszka Holland, Lynne Ramsay, Agnes Varda, and Lina Wertmuller as being among them, but goes on to say that women are rarely afforded financing for films in the United States.

[36] Journalist Richard Williams wrote: Spector created a new concept: the producer as overall director of the creative process, from beginning to end.

He took control of everything, he picked the artists, wrote or chose the material, supervised the arrangements, told the singers how to phrase, masterminded all phases of the recording process with the most painful attention to detail, and released the result on his own label.

Anytime a band or musician disappears into a studio to contrive an album-length mystery, the ghost of Wilson is hovering near.