Forgive me if I'm getting ahead of the text here, but i just got finished reading a line of Janet Staiger's essay and I wanted to comment on it before I trudged on. The part I'm referring to is on page 32, where she talks about Kael's statement that "Mankiewicz's authorship has been obscured in favor of Welle's contributions..."
The idea of community authorship is one that I bet pops up in this book many many times, but speaking in the present, film and video productions are interesting in terms of authorship, as so many authors are involved. The fact that a film is derived from a screenplay, which is in some sense the "true" work.