What Homicide: Los Angeles Leaves Out About the Phil Spector Murder Case

This article contains spoilers for Homicide: Los Angeles episode 1. Phil Spector was a music legend and Los Angeles celebrity royalty. He revolutionized rock and roll with his “Wall of Sound” production, and went on to finalize The Beatles’ Let It Be. This means nothing to investigators on Homicide: Los Angeles. On Feb. 3, 2003, […]

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Film critic Andrew Sarris changed his profession forever when he introduced, to English-speaking cinephiles at least, the concept of “auteur theory.” The general conceit is that some rarified directors are so gifted, or commanding, in their control over the process of film production that they alone can give a film a “personal or unique stamp.” They are the ones who become the author of the movie you’re watching. If anyone. It’s a seductive theory which encourages the critic to look for points of narrative, visual, or thematic similarity between a filmmaker’s work. The more ideas or images that rhyme, the potentially more impressive the auteur’s command over the medium becomes.

However, while it is hard to dispute the existence of auteurs, the concept at times devalues the contributions of a film’s many other collaborators—especially if they’re, say, editors, production designers, or cinematographers a certain director likes to work with time and again. It also tends to devalue some filmmakers whose most remarkable gift is not their ability to burrow ever further down into their exploration of personal themes and ideas, but rather their stunning versatility to do the opposite. There are indeed some directors whose entire careers are defined by the uncanny and chameleonic ability to shift between styles, tones, and even cinematic perspectives. They might still qualify as that elusive thing we call “the auteur,” but their strength is in their diversity instead of uniformity. Here are some exactly such helmers.

George Miller

It’s become a recurring joke on social media to remind folks that the same madman who gave us characters like “Immortan Joe” and “Imperator Furiosa” is also the guy behind Babe and Happy Feet. Which is somewhat true. While