A Complete Lack of Direction

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Special Artsy-Craftsy Section.

I had launched this undertaking convinced that the only people who really care about directors are pretentious snobs who regularly attend foreign films. Inevitably, this led me to the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the one-stop multiplex for all your basic show-offish needs.

The afternoon I planted myself at the top of the elevator ferrying audience members out of the bowels of the subterranean cinema (this is what they mean by underground films), the proprietors were screening three snooty films: The Story of Qiu Ju by Zhang Yimou, Un Coeur en Hiver by Claude Sautet, and Orlando by Sally Potter. No one, but no one, could tell me who had directed The Story of Qiu Ju. No one, but no one, could tell me who had directed Un Coeur en Hiver, though one woman did say, "Claude something," always a safe bet when discussing French films.

Amazingly, however, five of the 10 people I polled knew that Sally Potter had directed Orlando. More amazing still, all five people were women accompanied by men who could not identify the director. In retrospect, I realized that because Orlando is a film about transsexualism and transvestism, it is very possible that the five women who could identify Sally Potter as the director were actually men in drag, while their five male companions were females dressed up to look like pretentious, male art-film buffs. All things considered, given the enormous number of transsexual foreign-film buffs based in New York, I do not think we can learn a whole lot from these figures. Result: 5/30.

WHAT THE NUMBERS MEAN.

All told, over a three-day period, I asked 134 moviegoers coming out of 14 different movies if they could tell me who had directed the film they had just seen. (I actually asked 25 different people if they could tell me who had directed Last Action Hero without finding anyone who could, but for purposes of methodological fairness, and out of compassion for John McTiernan, who did, after all, direct Die Hard, only the first 10 responses were used in my final tabulations.) Similarly, I have only included four responses to the question about the director of Howards End because there were only four people in the theater at the time, and it was a really hot day, and I didn't feel like hanging around for almost three hours waiting for the next screening to end. This is the only methodological blemish on what is otherwise a flawless, seamless work of statistical clarity and yes, perhaps even beauty.

The results are not pretty. Of the nine conventional, American-made films that I investigated, only 6.75 out of 90 people could tell me the name of the director. Throw out the universally famous Steven Spielberg and the percentage drops to 1.75 out of 80, or 2 percent. Pathetic. And even in Spielberg's case (50 percent), the rate-of-recognition numbers were much smaller than for James Ivory (100 percent).

Worse still, Spielberg's 50 percent rating put him in exactly the same class as an obscure, English female director of a cross-dressing drama that is only playing in about six movie theaters on the entire planet. The inescapable conclusion that must be drawn from this data is clear: Americans could give a (as in one single) fuck about who directed Posse, and couldn't even give that many fucks about who directed Indecent Proposal, Dave, Sleepless In Seattle, Last Action Hero, Cliffhanger, Menace II Society or Guilty As Sin. Proving, once and for all, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, that this is not France.

BUT ARE YOU SURE YOU'RE BEING COMPLETELY FAIR?

As a final test of my hypothesis that even bothering to include a director's name in an American film's credits is a hopeless affectation, if not a huge crock of shit, I decided to wrap up my study by visiting several New York theaters and determining whether any of the theater personnel, as opposed to theater patrons, might be familiar with the auteurs in question and capable of rattling off their names.

"What time does the Ivan Reitman film start?" I asked the cashier at the Loews Columbus Circle theater in New York. The moviehouse, which only has one screen, had been showing Dave for about five weeks.

"Who?" she replied.

"Ivan Reitman. What time does the Ivan Reitman film start?"

"We're showing Dave," she answered, shaking her head. "We're not showing an Ivan Reitman film."

I moseyed uptown to a neighborhood six-plex, the mammoth Loews 84th Street VI at 84th and Broadway.

"Two tickets for the John McTiernan film," I told the cashier.

"Who?" she asked, puzzled.

"John McTiernan. Two tickets for the John McTiernan film."

She consulted her computer screen, visibly confused.

"I don't know the name of that actor. What movie is it?"

"The John McTiernan movie. My girlfriend said to meet her at this moviehouse and get two tickets for the John McTiernan film."

"Well, I don't know the name of that actor."

I got out of line for a few minutes, asked 10 people if they could tell me who had directed The Firm, which had just opened that day, did not get a single "Sydney Pollack" in response, then went back to the cashier's booth.

"Can I have two tickets for the John McTiernan film?" I asked.

The cashier looked at me, a grim glimmer of recognition in her stare.

"I don't know the name of that actor."

"Okay, then let me have two tickets for the Nora Ephron film."

"I don't know the name of that actor either."

I think that says it all.

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Joe Queenan wrote about Hollywood's castration obsession in the September Movieline.

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