(2 of 4)
Nearly all directors were long denied complete authority over their creations. The final cut—editing before release —was done by the studio, a situation comparable to a publisher blithely excising chapters of a novel without the writer's consent. In recent years, a few enterprising directors—Stanley Kramer and Billy Wilder among them—have managed to escape the system by producing their own films independently. Paul Newman, John Cassavetes and a handful of other actors have also fought the studio scissors by controlling their movies from conception to editing.