As the person responsible for both the creative and technical form of a film, the director occupies a pivotal position in a collaborative art form involving people, talents and money In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century American directors have become integral to the packaging of movies, whether Hollywood or independents. Yet, this vision of director as the film’s primary author belies his or her status under the studio system.

The earliest directors had wide-open opportunities: D.W. Griffith became a founding father of Hollywood. His own studio legacy however, converted subsequent directors to workers within the system. While some became identified with distinctive styles and genres—e.g. Howard Hawks or John Ford with the western—others held control only through constant battle. Alfred Hitchcock manipulated the system; Orson Welles went into exile. Still others, though they produced masterpieces with materials and stars given them, rarely achieved “ownership” and faced arbitrary assignments. The well-established George Cukor (1899–1973), for example, was replaced after only ten days work on Gone With the Wind (1939).

Re-evaluation of the director’s role came with the studios’ collapse and the development of a film theory of “auteurship” based on European theory and practice of more autonomous control. In the 1960s and 1970s, older figures were re-evaluated, while new idiosyncratic visionaries arose, ranging from Sam Peckinpah to Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Sylvester Stallone. Directorial ranks opened to film school graduates and the less prestigious realm of television directing.

In the new Hollywood, the director is a key player to be negotiated (along with stars) in a producer’s creation of a picture. Directors command power and prestige because of their vision (Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese) or their box office (James Cameron, Jonathan Demme). Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have become uniquely powerful through their own economic success. Others build directing on their acting (John Cassavetes, Barbra Streisand). Directorial centrality also pervades the formation and aspirations of independent cinema, despite anti-Hollywood trappings.

The budgets and operations of Hollywood, since the 1920s, also have attracted skilled directors from abroad. Ernst Lubitsh, Josef von Sternberg and Billy Wilder came from Central Europe; Czech Milos Forman made his US debut in 1971. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood has drawn the Taiwanese Ang Lee and Hong Kong’s John Woo.

Yet, even so, directing has remained a predominantly white male role for most of Hollywood’s history. Despite pioneering work by Dorothy Aznar and Ida Lupino, women rarely have directed bigger-budget American movies; not one woman has been nominated for Best Director. Some early skilled African American directors like Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) were able to produce and direct forty feature-length films within a segregated Black cinema, but integration was slow. Photographer-essayist Gordon Parks, for example, despite his sensitive Learning Tree (1969), found his career confined to blaxploitation films. Since the 1980s, Spike Lee, John Singleton and a few other black males have directed features; only Lee, however, has developed a substantive career. Recognition for black women remains minimal. Women, African Americans and other minorities—Asian, Latino, publicly gay people (after many closeted Hollywood directors)—have also directed independent and documentary cinema.