Implied Author - in Film

In Film

André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc and François Truffaut advocated the auteur theory: the director is the primary author of the film. They hated the Hollywood studio system, applauding the independent United States film movement of the late 1960s to early 1980s known as New Hollywood. This movement started to wane in the late 1970s following the commercial success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws and George Lucas's Star Wars. The more commercial Hollywood sensibilities heralded by Spielberg and Lucas resulted in films typically undergoing multiple rewrites by plural authors, and sometimes changes in director, during the production process.

Chatman said that films no longer have a real "author"; therefore, the implied author of the film must be postulated in order to analyze the story. However, advocates of post-modernism do not postulate an implied author.

Teruaki Georges Sumioka researched the modern filmmaking process, seeing it as an act of authorship by the body corporate of the film studio, not the director. In this way, he regarded film as a compilation work, similar to the way that United States copyright law treats a dictionary.