"The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks"
About this Quote
The key move is his pairing of the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild as a two-front war. Writers are the romantic “origin” of story; producers are the pragmatic controllers of money and schedule. By claiming both are “trying to diminish” the director, Frankenheimer frames directing as the threatened middle power - the person who turns script and financing into a coherent work, but who can be squeezed from both sides. It’s also a strategic act of coalition-building: he’s implicitly rallying directors to see themselves as a collective with common enemies, rather than as individual auteurs competing for prestige.
Context matters. Frankenheimer came up in an era when Hollywood’s assembly-line model was colliding with postwar auteur talk, then reshaped again by the New Hollywood generation and the growing formal power of guilds. His complaint isn’t nostalgia for artistic purity; it’s anxiety about leverage. “Importance and strength” signals two currencies: cultural status (who gets credit) and labor power (who gets final say). The subtext: if directors don’t defend their turf, they become high-end technicians - blamed for failures, replaceable in success, and increasingly managed by paperwork rather than vision.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Frankenheimer, John. (2026, January 16). The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-first-thing-is-that-were-being-attacked-by-92636/
Chicago Style
Frankenheimer, John. "The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-first-thing-is-that-were-being-attacked-by-92636/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-first-thing-is-that-were-being-attacked-by-92636/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.
