Can A Screenwriter Be An Auteur Too?

Doree Shafrir from Slate.com considers the question:

"In last Sunday's New York Times, Terrence Rafferty wrote about the fight between writer Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu over their new film Babel, which opens today. Rafferty quoted Arriaga as saying, 'When they say it's an auteur film, I say auteurs film. I have always been against the 'film by' credit on a movie. It's a collaborative process and it deserves several authors.' Rafferty went on to write that Arriaga's 'relatively uncombative tone may … disguise a rather more aggressive agenda.'

...It's clear that González Iñárritu, director of highly stylized films Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and now Babel, is making a play for auteur status. (A wide variety of directors have achieved such renown, from Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen to Luis Buñuel, Wong Kar-Wai, and Jean-Luc Godard.) Arriaga's response is, 'Wait one second—I've written all three of those movies. You can't have all the credit.' On the surface, this seems a reasonable request, but it gets to the essence of who, in fact, makes a film. Unlike a book written by one author, a film is worked on by a team of many people. Is only González Iñárritu's vision being communicated in these three films? Or is Arriaga's as well?"

At the end, Shafrir mentions an interesting book by David Kipen: The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, that has elicited quite a few rabid comments on Amazon.com.

As a bonus, here is a link to a few screenwriter cartoons.