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Paragraph 2
This, then, 
(1)
was the basis of the auteur theory. The
director became the ‘author’ of the film, just as the
novelist was the author of the novel or a painter was
the creator behind a work of art. Indeed, according
to the critics who proposed the theory, the greatest
directors were artists in their own right, despite the
fact that they were working in an industrialised art
form aiming to create product for a mass world-
wide audience. Perhaps the major studios of
Hollywood were operated like factories, churning out
film after film to fill the programmes of the
thousands of cinemas that needed their product, but
individual ‘geniuses’, such as those mentioned above
and others that included Alfred Hitchcock, Samuel
Fuller, Otto Preminger, George Stevens and Robert
Aldrich, could manipulate the studio system to
impose their own vision on the raw material they
were presented with. 
(2)
The making of a film might
well be a collaborative exercise involving the talents
of screenwriters, actors, cameramen, composers and
all kinds of technicians, but to the proponents of the
auteur theory, there was only one guiding genius:
the director. 
(3)
If the director was a mediocrity, then
the film would be mediocre. If the director, however,
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was one of the chosen geniuses, then the film had
every chance of turning out to be a masterpiece. 
(4)