Proof of her rather rare notoriety for a TV author, Fanny Herrero was entrusted with the presidency of the jury of the Canneseries festival, organized until Wednesday on the Croisette, after the launch of her new series "Funny" on Netflix.

A small victory for a profession that rebels and challenges "the tradition of the all-powerful author-director" rooted in France, drawing inspiration from the Anglo-Saxons who value writing, according to Fanny Herrero.

"The two essential elements for the success of a series are the writing and the incarnation, the actors", she recently judged with AFP.

"That doesn't mean that the direction isn't important, but the writing, the score, the characters, the situations and how they are going to be interpreted, that's the main thing, that's what makes let's get attached to it".

However "for a long time" the screenwriters were "completely ejected from the artistic process", without "any right of inspection", estimates Fanny Herrero, who left "Ten percent" before its end, tired of fighting to keep control of series.

talent war

With the arrival of platforms, the race for original content and the "war for talent" between broadcasters, "we are now starting to be in a position of strength and we have to take advantage of it", adds the designer, calling for artistic and financial recognition.

For screenwriter Déborah Hassoun ("Skam France"), the profession has also "worked a lot for its visibility in recent years at the level of unions, collectives of authors".

"A series is a collective work," she explains, refuting any "ego" war.

Badly paid, robbed, cut off from the credits ... the grievances reported in the Facebook group "words of screenwriters" highlighted last year the fed up of the profession, especially behind the scenes of the phenomenon series of 'Art "In therapy".

In conflict with the production, the screenwriters of season 1 left the ship, failing to have obtained "citizenship at the table of decision-makers", as the author David Elkaïm had explained at the time.

Producer at Banijay ("Skam France", "Germinal"), Carole Della Valle says she "understands perfectly" the movement of authors.

“Mistakes, inelegances, we have undoubtedly made them”.

"Afterwards, the work of the director should not be minimized either", she insists, "tired" of the term "showrunner" (author-producer) imported from the United States, "more and more" claimed by " people who don't know what that means. It's being on the sets absolutely every day and not just choosing the actors at the time of casting".

winning trio

Same observation for the screenwriter and director Arnaud Malherbe, ("Moloch"), who, if he salutes the movement, is worried to see "lots of young screenwriters" believing that they are necessarily "the bosses", "paternity absolute of the creator-showrunner" being according to him "not the acme nor the magic solution, the unique way of manufacturing series".

"It is legitimate to put the story back at the heart of the machine, a fortiori on long, serial series".

But the directors, many of whom are also deprived of their liberty and "in pain", are not "service providers".

"I don't think we explain to Fabrice Gobert ("The ghosts"), Hervé Hadmar ("Pigalle, the night"), Olivier Abbou ("The black butterflies") or Thierry Poiraud ("Infiniti") who we must cast, how we should stage", he insists.

"You need a winning production/screenwriter/director trio to make a good series", sums up Jeanne Le Guillou, co-author with Bruno Dega of the TF1 mini-series "Visions", presented out of competition at Cannes, delighted with her meeting. with director Akim Isker.

"It has happened to us many times to have directors who" monopolize the script and rewrite it, abounded Bruno Dega.

With Akim, "we exchanged, we rewrote things in relation to his vision (...) It's magnificent when it happens like that".

© 2022 AFP