"The Auteur Myth" by Jonah Leher, 7.27.11

It’s a provocative analogy, but I think we tend to overemphasize the singular impact of auteurs, at least in the film business. (I’ll refrain from speculating on the internal workings of the uber-secretive Apple.) Consider the career of Alfred Hitchcock. Although the director is often cited as the quintessential auteur – every Hitchcock film overflows with “Hitchcockian” elements – his films were also a testament to his artistic collaborations. This helps explain why Hitchcock flourished under the studio system, as the studios helped make such collaborations possible, signing the talent to long-term contracts. (In the late 1940s, Hitchcock actually experimented with independent cinema, and set up his own production company. He folded the company after his first two films flopped.) At first glance, this seems surprising: Why would a genius like Hitchcock need the constraints of the studio system? Shouldn’t all the other people and the feedback of executives held him back? Auteurs aren’t supposed to need collaborators.

The reason the studios were so important for Hitchcock is that they allowed him to cultivate the right kind of creative team. While the director relied on many longstanding partners, such as his decade-long relationship with the editor George Tomasini and cinematographer Robert Burks, he also routinely brought in new talent, including John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler and Salvador Dali. For instance, on North by Northwest, a classic Cary Grant thriller, Hitchcock insisted on working with Ernest Lehman, a screenwriter best known for Sabrina. It was, at first glance, a peculiar choice: Sabrina was a romantic comedy, and Hitchcock had been hired to create a dark suspense movie. But Hitchcock knew what he was doing. In fact, he gave Lehman a tremendous amount of creative freedom. (Hitchcock’s only requirement was that the plot contain three elements: a case of mistaken identity, the United Nations building and a chase scene across the face of Mt. Rushmore.) Although it took Lehman more than a year to write the script, the wait was worth it. “I wanted to write the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures,” Lehman said. And that’s exactly what he did.

Interestingly, the collapse of the studio system in the late 1950s led to a marked decline in Hitchcock’s creative output; the auteur began making mediocre movies. As Thomas Schatz writes in The Genius of the System, an illuminating history of the Golden Age of Hollywood: “Now that Hitchcock could write his own ticket” – he was no longer forced to work within a single studio – “both the quantity and quality of his work fell sharply…The decline of his output suggested that in order to turn out quality pictures with any consistency, even a distinctive stylist and inveterate independent like Hitchcock required a base of filmmaking operations.” By the early 1960s, each Hitchcock movie was an utterly independent venture, so that the director was often the only point of continuity from one film to the next. The end result was a series of financial and critical failures, such as Torn Curtain and Topaz.

I certainly don’t meant to disparage the genius of Hitchcock or Steve Jobs or to defend uninspired data driven design. But it’s also important to remember that nobody creates Vertigo or the iPad by themselves; even auteurs need the support of a vast system. When you look closely at auteurs, what you often find is that their real genius is for the the assembly of creative teams, trusting the right people with the right tasks at the right time. Sure, they make the final decisions, but they are choosing between alternatives created by others. When we frame auteurs as engaging in the opposite of collaboration, when we obsess over Hitchcock’s narrative flair but neglect Lehman’s script, or think about Jobs’ aesthetic but not Ive’s design (or the design of those working for Ives), we are indulging in a romantic vision of creativity that rarely exists. Even geniuses need a little help.

PS. One of my favorite Jobs stories comes from Andy Hertzfeld, a lead engineer on the Apple team that developed the first Macintosh Computer. In his book Revolution in the Valley, Hertzfeld describes Jobs as constantly challenging and inspiring his design team with a series of strange ideas. First, Jobs wanted the Mac to look like a Porsche, to “have a classic look that won’t go out of style.” (Jobs was the proud owner of a Porsche 928.) The following month, after a trip to Macy’s, Jobs insisted that the computer should look like a Cuisinart food-processor – he liked the transparency of the kitchen appliance – and so that became the new template for the Mac. Although these concepts didn’t pan out, Jobs never stopped insisting that “It’s got to be different, different from everything else…” The point, though, is that although Jobs was performing an essential function, he wasn’t inventing the new machine by himself. Rather, he was acting a lot like Hitchcock, telling Lehman that he needed to incorporate a chase scene across the face of Mt. Rushmore.

______

"The Auteur Myth" by Jonah Leher, Wired : Weird Science, 7.27.11

"The Auteur vs. the Committee" by Randall Stross, 7.23.11

AT Apple, one is the magic number.

One person is the Decider for final design choices. Not focus groups. Not data crunchers. Not committee consensus-builders. The decisions reflect the sensibility of just one person: Steven P. Jobs, the C.E.O.

By contrast, Google has followed the conventional approach, with lots of people playing a role. That group prefers to rely on experimental data, not designers, to guide its decisions.

The contest is not even close. The company that has a single arbiter of taste has been producing superior products, showing that you don’t need multiple teams and dozens or hundreds or thousands of voices.

Two years ago, the technology blogger John Gruber presented a talk, “The Auteur Theory of Design,” at the Macworld Expo. Mr. Gruber suggested how filmmaking could be a helpful model in guiding creative collaboration in other realms, like software.

The auteur, a film director who both has a distinctive vision for a work and exercises creative control, works with many other creative people. “What the director is doing, nonstop, from the beginning of signing on until the movie is done, is making decisions,” Mr. Gruber said. “And just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art.”

“The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge,” Mr. Gruber pointed out.

Two years after he outlined his theory, it is still a touchstone in design circles for discussing Apple and its rivals.

Garry Tan, designer in residence and a venture partner at Y Combinator, an investor in start-ups, says: “Steve Jobs is not always right—MobileMe would be an example. But we do know that all major design decisions have to pass his muster. That is what an auteur does.”

Mr. Jobs has acquired a reputation as a great designer, Mr. Tan says, not because he personally makes the designs but because “he’s got the eye.” He has also hired classically trained designers like Jonathan Ive. “Design excellence also attracts design talent,” Mr. Tan explains.

Google has what it calls a “creative lab,” a group that had originally worked on advertising to promote its brand. More recently, the lab has been asked to supply a design vision to the engineering and user-experience groups that work on all of Google’s products. Chris L. Wiggins, the lab’s creative director, whose own background is in advertising, describes design as a collaborative process among groups “with really fruitful back-and-forth.”

“There’s only one Steve Jobs, and he’s a genius,” says Mr. Wiggins. “But it’s important to distinguish that we’re discussing the design of Web applications, not hardware or desktop software. And for that we take a different approach to design than Apple,” he says. Google, he says, utilizes the Web to pull feedback from users and make constant improvements.

Mr. Wiggins’s argument that Apple’s apples should not be compared to Google’s oranges does not explain, however, why Apple’s smartphone software gets much higher marks than Google’s.

GOOGLE’S ability to attract and retain design talent has not been helped by the departure of designers who felt their expertise was not fully appreciated. “Google is an engineering company, and as a researcher or designer, it’s very difficult to have your voice heard at a strategic level,” writes Paul Adams on his blog, “Think Outside In.” Mr. Adams was a senior user-experience researcher at Google until last year; he is now at Facebook.

Douglas Bowman is another example. He was hired as Google’s first visual designer in 2006, when the company was already seven years old. “Seven years is a long time to run a company without a classically trained designer,” he wrote in his blog Stopdesign in 2009. He complained that there was no one at or near the helm of Google who “thoroughly understands the principles and elements of design” “I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide,” Mr. Bowman wrote, adding, “I can’t operate in an environment like that.” His post was titled, “Goodbye, Google.”

Mr. Bowman’s departure spurred other designers with experience at either Google or Apple to comment on differences between the two companies. Mr. Gruber, at his Daring Fireball blog, concisely summarized one account under the headline “Apple Is a Design Company With Engineers; Google Is an Engineering Company With Designers.”

In May, Google, ever the engineering company, showed an unwillingness to notice design expertise when it tried to recruit Pablo Villalba Villar, the chief executive of Teambox, an online project management company. Mr. Villalba later wrote that he had no intention of leaving Teambox and cooperated to experience Google’s hiring process for himself. He tried to call attention to his main expertise in user interaction and product design. But he said that what the recruiter wanted to know was his mastery of 14 programming languages.

Mr. Villalba was dismayed that Google did not appear to have changed since Mr. Bowman left. “Design can’t be done by committee,” he said.

Recently, as Larry Page, the company co-founder, began his tenure as C.E.O., , Google rolled out Google+ and a new look for the Google home page, Gmail and its calendar. More redesigns have been promised. But they will be produced, as before, within a very crowded and noisy editing booth. Google does not have a true auteur who unilaterally decides on the final cut.

_________________

"The Auteur vs. the Committee" by Randall Stross, New York Times 7.23.11