Director Displacement

When a work—usually a film—is better known as the work of its producer than as the work of its director. Often a result of marketing, as the name of a well-known producer may be used prevalently in advertising a film where the director is a rookie or largely unknown.

Examples of Director Displacement include:

• Poltergeist was directed by Tobe Hooper, but most people think of it as a Steven Spielberg film.
  • To the point where it was rumored that Spielberg was the real director. Given that he was busy with ET the Extraterrestrial at the time, these rumors are unfounded; nonetheless, they basically ruined Hooper's career.
    • Spielberg was on set for much of the production (and even saved actor Oliver Robbins' life when the clown prop nearly choked him to death). And Hooper was battling a cocaine addiction at the time, so he likely needed someone on set to keep an eye on him.
• Anything Judd Apatow has produced (but not directed).
• Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas- actually directed by Henry Selick.
  • ...which confused people in regard to advertising for Coraline stating that it was from the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas (thus leading people to mistakenly assume it was a Tim Burton film) to the point where Neil Gaiman had to address this in his blog.
• The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are viewed as George Lucas's works (and they are, in a way), but they were directed by Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand, respectively. However, this has been less true of Empire in recent years; Lucas had a very hands-off role in its production, leaving those duties to Kershner and producer Gary Kurtz. In the wake of the prequel trilogy, his critics have been fond of pointing out that the movie he had the least creative involvement with is also considered the best.
  • The Star Wars Holiday Special is frequently blamed on George Lucas, even though he had nothing to do with it. Maybe that's why he's so hell-bent on erasing it from existence.
    • That's not entirely true. He wrote a basic story outline for CBS and they went from there. The finished product was so awful, Lucas refuses to ever see it released on DVD or Blu-Ray or anything.
  • For that matter, Lucas gets most of the blame for Howard the Duck (William Huyck), Willow (Ron Howard), and Radioland Murders (Mel Smith); he executive produced all three and did come up with the stories for the latter two, but he didn't write the scripts or direct them.
• With the exception of The Shining, which everybody knows as the work of Stanley Kubrick, all of the films based on Stephen King novels are more popularly associated with him than their directors. Unsurprising if you look at what happens to his novels...
  • With that in mind it makes one wonder how The Langoliers isn't commonly affiliated with its director considering the dvd cover where, in massive outlined, metallic letters, the name of TOM HOLLAND can be seen clear as day, taking over 2/3 of the credits.
• More people associate District 9 with Peter Jackson than with Neill Blomkamp.
• Gone with the Wind went through several different directors, but it is mostly remembered as the work of producer David O. Selznick.
• The primary creative force behind Casablanca was producer Hal B. Wallis, and not director Michael Curtiz.
• Val Lewton produced a series of classic horror films for RKO in the 1940s (Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Curse Of The Cat People, The Body Snatcher, Isle Of The Dead, The Seventh Victim and Bedlam). These are almost universally referred to as 'Val Lewton films' rather than being referred to by their directors names.
• Hero (Zhang Yimou) and Hostel (Eli Roth) were both marketed as "Quentin Tarantino Presents (film name)", owing to his production role in those films although in the case Hero his role was limited to "presenting" it to the US audience.
• Cloverfield is more commonly associated with J.J. Abrams than its director, Matt Reeves.
• Nimrod Antal directed Predators, not Robert Rodriguez
• Michael Bay has had this happen a lot in recent years, being the producer of horror remakes like Friday the 13 th. He's also been announced as producing the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot. In spite of this, many people often point any flaws present in these films as attributed to him, despite not actually being the director.
• Thomas Edison had a habit of putting his name, and only his name, in the films he produced.
• Many people think Gremlins was directed by Steven Spielberg but it's actually directed by Joe Dante.
• From Dusk till Dawn was directed by Robert Rodriguez not Quentin Tarantino. The same goes for Planet Terror.
• The Dilemma was directed by Ron Howard but you would think that Vince Vaughn was the driving force of the film (seeing how most of the film's controversy was focused around him and the fact that it looks like a lot of Vaughn's other films).
• The James Cameron-produced film Sanctum was directed by a first-time director from Australia but many are convinced that Cameron actually directed the film. This has created the same amount of Hatedom that Avatar suffered.
• If you talk about the earlier films in the Disney Animated Canon, nearly everybody on this world will think about Walt Disney. Only animation fans know the names of the directors. Since the Disney Renaissance, this changed however. Directors like Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise or Ron Clements & John Musker have at least SOME name recognition.
• The James Bond films are rarely ever viewed as the works of anyone other than Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and later Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.
• Howard Deutch directed Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, but they're viewed as John Hughes films (Hughes was the screenwriter).
• Jon Favreau wrote and starred in Swingers, and then went on to direct a number of other films, including its Spiritual Successor Made, but it was Doug Liman who actually directed Swingers.
  • Which in a way is unfair to Favreau, since the main problem with Swingers is the directing. All of Favreau's directorial projects have been better directed than that film (and possibly every film directed by Doug Liman).
• Some movies that had more than one director tend to get this, especially if one of the directors is more well-known than the other. These examples include:
  • Slumdog Millionaire (directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan)
  • City of God (directed by Fernando Meireilles and Katia Lund)
  • Fantastic Mr. Fox (directed by Wes Anderson and Mark Gustafson, this is notable in the fact that the film's cinematographer mentioned that Gustafson spent much more time on set working on the animation and with crew while Anderson would direct scenes by e-mail and therefore felt that Anderson's credit shouldn't have been as high as it was)
  • Beavis and Butthead Do America (directed by Mike Judge and Yvette Kaplan)
• Tyler Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman was directed by Darren Grant, but many people believed that Perry directed it himself.
• John Lasseter is given sole director credit on Cars 2 despite the fact that he was brought in midway through production to replace original director Brad Lewis (who was fired due to lackluster material). Lewis still gets a separate co-director credit though.