This thesis is about authorship in cinema. However, the notion of authorship has always been a contentious concept in film. One of the most cultivated ideas about authorship in this realm is the notion of the auteur, or that the director is the author of a film and the primary meaning and creativity of a film comes from the director. A primary tenet of auteurism, though, is that not every director can be an auteur. Auteur indicates a certain level of quality that separates artists from functionaries. Despite this initial designation, the term auteur has increasingly been used to describe any director, especially in Hollywood where distinctiveness is a marketable feature. Studying what function the auteur concept plays in contemporary Hollywood is important because of the consistent return in all levels of film discourse – popular, critical, academic, industrial – to the idea that the director is the author of a film.