In the history of the classical Hollywood studio system there were only a handful of producers with an authorial voice which could be read in the overall body of their work. Among them I would place Walt Disney, Val Lewton and Arthur Freed.
Disney of course owned his own studio, which operated just outside the Hollywood mainstream. Disney didn't write, design, draw or direct the great animated films on which his reputation rests, but he exercised total control over all these functions and he communicated a vision to his in-house artists of the films he wanted them to make. He was technically a producer, but so involved in the minutiae of artistic decision-making at his studio, and in such absolute command of them, that he is rightly considered the primary author of his films.
Lewton and Freed operated independent units within more traditional studios. They both specialized in genre pictures -- B-horror films and musicals, respectively -- and as long as they turned out profitable examples of these genres, they were given an unusual degree of control over their films. Lewton was subject to more interference from higher-ranking executives at RKO -- Freed enjoyed a close personal friendship with MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer and Mayer had an unshakable faith in Freed's judgment, which allowed Freed extraordinary freedom of action within his designated sphere. It was only with Mayer's ouster from MGM that succeeding studio heads began to interfere drastically with Freed's films, but even then only on his non-musical efforts.
Other prominent producers of the studio era achieved great power and prestige, but none of them communicated a clear authorial voice in their work. The films Hitchcock made for legendary producer David O. Selznick are best read as Hitchcock films, and even Gone With the Wind, Selznick's greatest triumph, owes its voice more to the artists who actually made it than to Selznick's vision as its producer. (Duel In the Sun, which may be the best expression of Selznick's "vision" as an artist, is a sprawling, unwieldy mess -- the vision at the core of it is in fact a vacuum.)
John Houseman, another legendary producer with a reputation for independence and good taste, was capable of producing both Citizen Kane and The Bad and the Beautiful, a film that consciously evokes Kane -- but the two films couldn't be more different in sensibility, in political and moral orientation. They better reflect the visions of their directors, Orson Welles and Vincente Minnelli, than the authorial voice of Houseman. (James Naremore, in The Films Of Vincente Minnelli, has written a brilliant analysis of the fundamental ways in which these two films differ.)
Of course no one person is ever the sole author of anything as complex and collaborative as a Hollywood studio film, on which many hands leave their mark. One can discover themes in Selznick's work, consistent from film to film, and a level of taste in Houseman's films which characterize all of them. But most great films are organized around a single vision, a single sensibility, despite some remarkable exceptions to the rule -- like Casablanca, for example.
That single vision may in fact be the result of a harmonious meeting of two or more minds -- between Toland and Welles, say, or, Freed and Minnelli -- but it remains singular all the same. Toland never worked on another film like Kane and Minnelli made different kinds of films when he worked apart from Freed.
Most great producers in the studio system functioned as editors function in the literary world. Editors in both realms can exert enormous influence, for good or bad, on the work they edit -- proposing subjects, making crucial artistic suggestions, cutting superfluous material or asking for additional work. But we don't confuse even the most brilliant and creative literary editors, like Maxwell Perkins (above), with the authors of the books they edited -- and by the same token we shouldn't confuse even the most powerful and celebrated Hollywood producers, like Thalberg, Selznick, Zanuck and Houseman, with the authors of the films they supervised.
But I would argue that Freed, like Disney and Lewton, was more than an editor, more than a supervisor.
Disney's freedom of action flowed from his ownership of his studio -- Lewton's and Freed's flowed flowed from other conditions, which were quite unusual. As I've said, both worked in conventional genres. They were specialists who were presumed to know as much about their specialties as anyone above or below them in the chain of command. As long as their films reached and pleased their intended markets, their bosses had no incentive to second-guess them, even when they indulged in radical innovations, as both did.
RKO market-tested titles and handed the most popular of them over to Lewton, who was expected to come up with films that matched them. In fact, he came up with very strange takes on these titles, films that were unlike any other horror films ever made, but they performed well at the box office and that was all RKO cared about.
Freed, as I've noted, had the friendship and the strong personal backing of his top boss in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer -- but even that went only so far in terms of corporate support. It was the four films Freed produced at the start of his career starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney that ensured his independence. These films were made at relatively low cost (for musicals) and earned a fortune. From then on he rarely faltered in terms of profitability for the studio. He had only a few flops and a few films that broke even -- the rest made good money. Mayer was inclined to let Freed do what he wanted -- the bottom line on Freed's films allowed him to justify this to his corporate overlords in New York.
It's instructive to note, however, that when the public lost interest in Lewton's type of horror film, almost no one in Hollywood had much interest in working with him -- and he himself didn't quite seem to know what to do with himself. And when Mayer was ousted as MGM's studio head, Freed's position grew more and more precarious. He was still given his head on musical productions, but his non-musical films were interfered with and sometimes mutilated beyond recognition. He had no inherent prestige or power as a filmmaker. When it was felt that audiences were losing interest in musicals, or more precisely that their costs made them too risky a gamble, Freed stopped being able to get projects off the ground altogether. He left MGM heartbroken over his failure to make a bio-pic about Irving Berlin, which he felt would be the culmination of his whole life's work.
Disney, Lewton and Freed were also artists in their own right. Disney may not have been a great animator but he could do it. Lewton was a writer who contributed not only ideas and stories to his films but also co-wrote some of them, under a pseudonym. Freed was a very successful lyricist who had contributed songs to many different kinds of musical theater. The direct contributions all three made to their films were not as significant as the fact that each knew how to talk to the artists who made them as peers. They conducted their editorial and supervisory business in the language of artists, not the language of corporate production.
The point to be made by all this is that producers in the Hollywood system needed very special personal qualities and very special circumstances in which to create an authorial voice, and so it's no wonder that there weren't more of them who did.
Walt Disney has received an enormous amount of critical attention, and there are numerous studies of Lewton's films, but Freed's films, as a body of work, have been covered in only one book -- The World Of Entertainment by Hugh Fordin, from 1973. Fordin's study is largely anecdotal, and while it draws on a great deal of documentary evidence, much of it apparently supplied by Freed himself, and on extensive interviews with some of Freed's collaborators, it is hardly a scholarly work. Nor does it offer much critical insight into the films as artistic achievements.
The neglect of Freed can be partly attributed to the fact that many of his greatest films were directed by Minnelli. There are lots of critical studies of Minnelli, and these seem to "cover" Freed's contributions to the Hollywood musical by treating him as little more than an enabler of the auteur director. But, as I say, the films Minnelli made for other producers are very different from the films he made for Freed, and the films made by other directors in Freed's unit at MGM have many crucial things in common with the Freed-Minnelli collaborations.
Freed's body of work has a coherence, a distinctive and unifying sensibility, which deserves examination on its own. His artistic vision developed in a systematic way -- its progress is comprehensible and illuminating, as are its roots.
I think a case can be made that Freed was just as much an "author" as Disney or Lewton and that his films, taken as a whole, are just as important as theirs -- which makes them very important indeed.