The History of the Famed Hollywood Hyphenate: Writer-Directors

This year's helmers are also nominated as scribes, a first for Academy history

This year, all the Oscar-contending directors are nominated for original screenplay: the Daniels (Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert), Todd Field, Martin McDonagh, Ruben Östlund and Steven Spielberg (writing with Tony Kushner).

This is the first time it’s happened in AMPAS history.

The only year that came close was 2017, when all five helmers had written or co-written their scripts, though they didn’t all get writing noms.

So here’s Film History 101.

In Hollywood lore, Preston Sturges is often credited as the first scribe to become a hyphenate, as writer-director of the 1940 “The Great McGinty.” But as with all Hollywood “facts,” there is only an element of truth here.

In the next few years, he was joined by some heavyweights: Orson Welles (“Citizen Kane”) and John Huston (“The Maltese Falcon”) in 1941; Leo McCarey (co-writer of “Going My Way”); Billy Wilder (writing with Raymond Chandler) for “Double Indemnity” in 1944; and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (“Dragonwyck”), 1946.

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However, a writer-director wasn’t an innovation. The silent era had such double-duty (or triple-duty) filmmakers as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lois Weber and D.W. Griffith. But this was before the studio chiefs reorganized the structure of filmmaking and before guilds were formed in the 1930s. Credits were often less structured then.

It may come as no surprise that Hollywood did not invent moviemaking — or hyphenates.

Jay Weissberg, critic and film historian, tells Variety about writer-directors in Japan including Kaeriyama Norimasa as early as 1918 and Yasujirō Shimazu in 1922. Yasujiro Ozu (“Tokyo Story”) began working as a hyphenate on “Zange no Yaiba” (1927) and “Dreams of Youth” (1928).

Weissberg also cites France’s Abel Gance and Marcel L’Herbier, and Soviet Union’s Yakov Protazanov (including a 1915 “War and Peace”) and Dziga Vertov, who had years of credits before his influential 1929’s “Man With a Camera.”

That’s not even mentioning many countries with a long history of filmmaking, including Argentina, Britain, Egypt, India, Italy and Mexico.

So while Sturges is in the filmmakers pantheon, he wasn’t exactly a pioneer. And while Hollywood execs balked at changes to their system, voters at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences quickly embraced the hyphenates. Sturges won an Oscar for “McGinty” and was nominated again for his 1944 classics “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “Hail the Conquering Hero.” The following year, Wilder won for his fourth film, “The Lost Weekend,” as both writer (with Charles Brackett) and director.

Welles scored three noms in 1941 for “Kane” and shared in the glory of the best-pic nom (before 1951, AMPAS cited the studio, not individual producers). By the time Warren Beatty was up at bat, he earned four apiece for “Heaven Can Wait” (1978) and “Reds” (1981), nominated as producer writer, director and actor.

Most of this year’s directing nominees also have a third nomination, as one of the film’s producers.

Does having multiple noms increase your odds of winning? Well, if you’re nominated for three, you have tripled your chances. But throughout the years there have been two dozen triple nominees, and some went home empty-handed, including such icons as Stanley Kubrick (multiple times!), Michael Mann and Robert Rossen.

Triple crown winners as writer, producer and director include: Leo McCarey (1944, sort of, since the studio was the official producer); Wilder, “The Apartment” (1960); Francis Ford Coppola, “The Godfather, Part II” (1974); James L. Brooks, “Terms of Endearment” (1983); Peter Jackson, “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2003); Joel & Ethan Coen, “No Country for Old Men” (2007): and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, “Birdman” (2014).

And Bong Joon Ho set a lot of records at the 2020 ceremony, when he took home four Oscars for “Parasite.” So the directors of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Tar,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Triangle of Sadness” and “The Fabelmans” are joining a long and proud Hollywood tradition.

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Larita Shotwell

Update: 2024-08-15

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