Reshaping the Director as Star

Abstract

In the week before his fifth feature film was released, a picture of director, producer, and screenwriter M. Night Shyamalan filled the cover of the August 5, 2002 edition of Newsweek. Next to the image, the magazine claimed Shyamalan to be “The Next Spielberg” and suggested he was “Hollywood’s Hottest New Storyteller.” Editor-in-chief Mark Whitaker discussed the unusual choice of Shyamalan for the cover in his weekly column, suggesting that the potential of the young director earned him both this comparison to Spielberg and the extensive press coverage he received by the magazine. In defending the choice of Shyamalan on the cover, Whitaker claimed:

We don’t do “Hollywood covers” very often, and we don’t always get them right. In retrospect, we’ve done some that were pretty silly. (“Can a Movie Help Make a President?” was our line for the 1983 astronaut epic, The Right Stuff. Within months the candidate in question, John Glenn, withdrew from the race.) We’ve also lived to regret putting a movie our reviewers didn’t like on the cover because we thought it would have big box-office—and newsstand—sales. (Remember Pearl Harbor [2001]? Disappointing on both counts.) But we’ve done many show-business covers we’re proud of, and they usually have one of two things going for them. They tap into meaty social, political or historical debates (JFK[1991], Saving Private Ryan [1998], Malcolm X[1992]). Or they introduce our readers to an actor or director who is particularly promising—well ahead of the media pack. (4)