On Design Observer, Michael Bierut initiated an interesting conversation comparing the collaborative arts of graphic design and filmmaking (initially, it was just screenwriting).
Most discussion is about credit and credit-taking, and presupposes some ideal of creative--that is to say, individual creative--control. Not until Pauline Kael is evoked in the way down in the comments does that myth get debunked.
"The director should be in control not because he is the sole creative intelligence but because only if he is in control can he liberate and utilize the talents of his co-workers, who languish (as directors do) in studio-factory productions. The best interpretation to put on it when a director says that a movie is totally his is not that he did it all himself but that that he wasn't interfered with, that he made the choices and the ultimate decisions, that the whole thing isn't an unhappy compromise for which no one is responsible; not that he was the sole creator but almost the reverse ń that he was free to use all the best ideas offered him.-from Pauline Kael's anti-auteur Raising Kane and Other Essays
