And yet, for all that, he was an undisputed genius; pop's first studio auteur.
So Lee didn't quite crack the global formula, but he is not the first Chinese auteur to be feted in the west and ignored at home.
Mr. Miyazaki is the rare filmmaker who is at once realist and idealist, said Susan Napier, a professor of Japanese at Tufts University in Massachusetts, who called him the first recognized auteur of animated feature films.
But Steven Soderbergh, a three-time Oscar nominee best known for the "Ocean's" trilogy and the influential 1989 indie "Sex, Lies and Videotape," had just retired from making movies, which gave Cinemax its first resident auteur.
But the joke that some of the film's reviewers don't seem to have enjoyed very much is that Viktor is a fourth-rate auteur.
Carl Theodor Dreyer, one of cinema's first great auteurs, had nothing to do with the original musical scoring of "The Passion of Joan of Arc," his stark, silent masterpiece from 1928, and was never quite satisfied with any of the music that was subsequently attached to it.
It's bad enough that there weren't more women directors in classic-era Hollywood (there ought to be more now, for that matter), and all the worse that the one who may well have been the best of them, Ida Lupino, hasn't been celebrated as the first-rank auteur she was.
His extensive involvement in all of his films as director, producer, writer, designer, technician, publicist, editor, and often actor makes him one of the first cinematic auteurs.
