Don't blame the French, even though their word for author allowed generations of American film critics and scholars to simplify the art of cinema. Sure, at mid-20th century a coven of Parisian film critics, all wannabe directors, conspired to coin the auteur theory. But once François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard began making their own movies, American academics imported the theory along with Breathless, wine, and Camembert. Soon our own film critics became poseurs, and a cultural blight eroded common sense. Directors gradually assumed the power to make two-hour-and-40-minute “thrillers” and three-hour “epic remakes” with unlimited budgets.

At long last an antidote to such extremism has been published: The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (Melville House, $12). David Kipen, former book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, currently director of literature at the National Endowment for the Arts, makes a fierce argument for the screenwriter's contributions. Schreiber, Yiddish for writer, was selected as a moniker because it's “closer to the mother tongue of many of America's first screenwriters.” And it restores the right balance to christen an American aesthetic with a humorous title instead of French hauteur. Kipen is the first to admit that his Schreiber theory could also become “a new heresy.” But he writes that someone must “explode the director-centric farrago of good intentions, bad faith, and tortured logic that goes by the name of auteurism, and to replace it with a screenwriter-centered way of thinking about film.”

During a national book-promotion tour, Kipen paused in Los Angeles to revisit his wife (their first home is in Malibu) before returning to his houseboat on the Potomac. The following interview was conducted appropriately in the Writers Guild.

Richard Stayton: The Schreiber Theory first materialized in the San Francisco Chronicle as an essay, and its popularity led to this book. Correct?

David Kipen: I initially wrote the piece for the Atlantic Monthly, and I'd like to believe it was rejected because the auteur theory is so firmly entrenched that it went against the grain. So it was a shame to let it go to waste, and I was working for the Chronicle as their book critic, so I offered it to their Sunday magazine, and they were happy to run it. And I think the Writers Guild linked to it on its website at one point.

When you published in the Chronicle, did it get a positive reaction?

It did, but first of all, you're writing about screenwriting in the Bay Area, which doesn't quite have the shock value as writing about it in Southern California. Second of all, the Chronicle Magazine is not the part of the paper that people turn to first, so I got trickles of attention, but, thinking back, it was the link on the Writers Guild page [that led to its initial notoriety].

You're now the NEA's director of literature. Do you envision screenplays being read like fiction?

Well, I guess if people can bring themselves to write screenplays, with all their funky tab settings, then we're getting to a point where more and more people can bring themselves to read them. And once we get to that point, then it will be like just another form of weirdly phonetic poetry, and reading it will be no more alien to somebody than reading any kind of literature other than prose. But, I've been watching movies and reading books since I knew how to do either, since I was a little kid, and I don't really think of them as all that separate.

You were born and raised in Hollywood. 

I was born in what was then Cedars of Lebanon Hospital at Vermont and Sunset, and now it's painted blue and owned by the Church of Scientology. My dad was chief of surgery at Cedars, or about to be when he was diagnosed with cancer at an absurdly young age. But he took out, they say, Edward G. Robinson's gallstones and had Lee J. Cobb for a patient. It's only occurred to me recently, since I came out with this book, that he probably had all kinds of screenwriters for clients too. I've been trying to find my dad's patient files. Wonderful screenwriters could be there whose guts my dad was pawing around in.

You went to Beverly High.

Yes, and lived right around the corner from the Writers Guild Theater. I used to go to movies there, double features there, when it was the Doheny Plaza. I remember when it was taken over by the Guild. I was probably feeling really gypped, because obviously it was going to be this private screening venue, and I wasn't going to be able to see a matinee of Family Plot any more like I could then. I took drama classes in high school because it was fun, and I liked being in plays, but I never suspected myself of being gifted at it. When I made a decision between junior and senior year that I was going to take English classes at UCLA my senior year and drop out of the drama program at Beverly [High], my drama teacher took me aside very solemnly and said, “It isn't drugs, is it, David?” He'd had students before who'd given up on the drama program, and it meant they were becoming juvenile delinquents. But, no, I just wanted to take college_level English classes and film classes at UCLA.

Did you ever write screenplays?

Not long out of college, I wrote a thing-a friend of mine was working for Francis Coppola at the time. This was when they were on the Columbia lot. Jeff Kleeman, a smart guy-I went to college with him-had an idea he'd always wanted me to turn into a script. Coppola was always off gallivanting around the world, buying grapes or something, so I said, “Lock me in your office for eight hours a day and at the end of a month, I'll have a script for you.” And a lot of computer breakdowns later, I did. It didn't go much of anywhere, I never saw any money, and I put it behind me.

Did you ever work in the business?

I did coverage for a development executive, never full time, but every month or so covering either a script or a novel. But I trace it back much further because, as you say, screenwriting is just another form of literature. Even if I didn't read my first screenplay until God knows when, I remember I did some theatricals in high school, and I was always looking for monologues. While everybody else was fishing things out of plays, I was remembering my favorite movies, so I would go to the AFI back when it was at Greystone or the Margaret Herrick Library back when it was still on Wilshire Boulevard. I would do some monologue from Dr. Strangelove, and just weird off_the_beaten_path stuff. 

Despite being raised in Hollywood, your pursuit became book criticism.

I didn't know whether I would wind up one kind of writer or the other, or a critic. Probably earliest on I was thinking of myself as a writer of prose fiction, but  to paraphrase something Nicholas Meyers said last night [at a debate about the auteur vs. Schreiber theories] at Red Cap, it's all storytelling, and as long as it's the written word, I prefer not to discriminate. 

In your book's credits, you have brief biographies of prominent screenwriters, yet you've left out Paddy Chayefsky.

I do mention him in passing in my listing on Richard Matheson because I consider them both great pulp existentialists. But it's an absurd omission. Here's a guy [Chayefsky] who is such a visionary writer and has such an idiosyncratic, unmistakable voice that even Arthur Hiller couldn't ruin either The Americanization of Emily or Hospital. But, not to speak ill of a rival Guildsman, the fact that the same man could direct a masterpiece like The Americanization of Emily and a movie like Teachers, or even Love Story, is all the refutation that the auteur theory needs in my mind. But this is not a biographical dictionary of screenwriters. I'd love for somebody to give me an advance someday to take a swing at something like that. This is a manifesto with a reference-book-shaped goiter growing out of its neck. At some point I would love for the back end to be more comprehensive, maybe even start to look like the book with a manifesto growing out of its neck instead. But it was absurd of me to leave out Chayefsky. It was absurd to leave out Harold Pinter, who, for crying out loud, is now the first screenwriter to win the Nobel Prize.

When you say it's absurd, was the omission intentional?

No, not intentional at all. Space and time limitations. I was reviewing two books a week for the Chronicle, and then before I knew it I was changing jobs to go to work as a federal arts bureaucrat. There are all kinds of things I would have loved to put in the book and didn't have time to. So, the passing mention that I give Chayefsky is an IOU for a fuller discussion that I'd love to undertake at some point. I would love to have some sort of DVD column so that when a movie comes out in a reissue, you can contextualize the film in the screenwriter's career instead of the director's career, like so many people do without thinking.