Total Control Doesn't Equal Total Quality

 Last month there was another of those annoying clickbait articles on my Facebook feed proclaiming something like, "Army of the Dead and The Snyder Cut Prove Zack Snyder is Better Without Studio Interference!"  And in the comments there was some naive dork saying how it's always better when the creator has complete control.

Which is completely false.  We really have to look no further than Zack Snyder's own creative masterpiece Sucker Punch, which was basically a lot of misogynist action movie/video game cliches sewn together into an utterly incoherent movie.  It does have some cool visuals and plenty of sexy violence, but it was a critical and financial failure.

And then we have the Star Wars prequels, all written and directed by George Lucas.  They were financially successful but critical failures and roundly maligned by fans.  Episode VIII was written and directed by Rian Johnson and while it was a critical and financial success, it's divided fans.

Another high profile disasterpiece:  Gigli was written and directed by Martin Brest and was a huge critical and commercial failure.  But on the bright side it helped destroy "Bennifer" v1.0.

Fans of Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000 are familiar with some real turkeys that were written and directed by the same person.  Plan 9 From Outer Space is probably the best known and widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever made.  But there are plenty of others in its weight class like Birdemic, Star Games, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Hobgoblins, Blood Theatre, The Dark Power, Alien Outlaw, Galaxy Invader, and a lot lot more!  There was even a joke in a Rifftrax:  "Written and directed by the same guy, that usually works out well for us, doesn't it?"

The point being that for every Citizen Kane, there are probably three movies written/directed by the same person that were completely awful.  It's really difficult for someone not only to come up with a brilliant idea but to be able to successfully mold it into something great all on their own.  Usually what you get is like those movies I mentioned above where it's either hacky garbage or self-indulgent crap.

It's pretty much the same way with books.  Pretty much every great book has had someone else edit it.  In the old days especially the relationship between a writer and editor was really important to make a great book.  

Really I think the books where I had help from other people like Where You Belong, A Hero's Journey, and Chance of a Lifetime were better than ones I did all on my own.  It'd be nice if I had the time and money to have someone edit the Eric Filler books.  So often it's good to have another pair of eyes connected to another brain with its own experiences to spot things that don't work and to provide an added perspective.  It really requires a lot of hubris to think you can do everything on your own as well as a group of talented people.

Especially with non-creatives, I think there's a tendency to think great movies or books or music or whatever springs fully formed like Athena from Zeus's forehead.  In reality it takes a lot of work to hone any creative endeavor into something great.  It's really hard to do all of that work alone.

But when it comes to movies, the opposite can also be true.  If you see in the credits a movie has like 7 different people listed as writers, then it's also probably a piece of shit.  Something with so many writers usually means it's been kicked around a lot and had a bunch of different treatments done.  Is there a perfect number of writers?  Not really.  It all depends on who's doing the writing.  Still, doing everything by yourself is more often than not a recipe for disaster.