Agency and the Author

I see more confusion in who is the author. Selznick, a film director, for example, maintained his independence to make his own pictures. Still, he needed the big companies to distribute the films.
To stay independent, he needed to create a brand name and link certain developments in his films to the brand, so that anyone who watched his films would associate them with it, or what I see as an early version of a logo. He needed income, so he began to market items related to the film Rebecca (37). On one hand, his ingenious marketing lessened his dependence on the larger movie companies, but on the other hand, he faced dependency on the manufacturers for the marketed items, such as fashions and furniture.
As he was working on Gone with the Wind, Selznick grasped that he could not do it himself, but needed help. As a result, he brought in Alfred Hitchcock, another director.
He did not have the illusions of working by himself. Indeed, Selznick “understood…that individuals did not make movies but corporations did” (45). He now had Hitchcock, as well as the actors and the stage crew. The complexity of Selznick’s successful gamble rivaled that of the world of Kompare, in that authorship had become a more corporate affair.
Schatz also shows that the authorship was also a corporate thing. He explains that the movie industry changed, in that the parent company did not make films, but relied on the independents to do so. In one case, he stated that the financial giants in the East depended on the movie magicians in the West. For discussion, authorship is not only in hands of the top chieftains of the film companies, but even unto the directors and producers, let alone the screenwriters.
The idea of auteur is somewhat chastened by all this help. My understanding is that the auteur needed little assistance to craft a film masterpiece, but I can see now that this is hardly the case.
From the little I can understand of Bourdieu, he also deals with a question I asked last week as to who determines what work is legitimate. He points to a “collective belief” (35), which proclaims what a work of art is. The collective voice is dependent on those who the artist presents his work to. If he insists on making art for art’s sake, then he presents it to fellow artists. Bourdieu is biased here, and seems to say that this is the best idea. One possible reason is that the fewer people the artist presents to, the greater his autonomy, and the less money. The artist could also present to the elite, and receive praise and money from them, or—and what appears heinous to Bourdieu—the author could present to the commoners, and sink into “popular” art, and receive money and encouragement from them. In the latter two cases, the artist is dependent upon what the audience considers good art, and his autonomy is nil. From Bourdieu’s view, the author then sold out to the baser “collective belief.”
So, authorship depends on the ingenuity of the author as seen with Selznick, but it is also dependent on the staff the author worked with, and authorship is controlled to some extent by the audience of concern.