Adam Sandler has taken many roles over the course of his filmmaking career, from acting to writing, but none have allowed him as much control over his own projects as that of producer. With 33 films under his belt, Sandler the producer has curated a catalog of comedies that bear a signature arguably as recognizable as that of an auteur director. It is the aim of this essay, then, to identify the aspects of Sandler’s produced filmography that form, as Sarris puts one of his criteria for auteurism in Notes on Auteur Theory, “certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as [the director’s] signature.” (Sarris, 562), despite his lack of directing credits. Sandler’s career as a producer came on the heels of box office success found through his early lead roles. Vehicles such as Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison, starring and written by Sandler, offer an early look at the filmic traits that would go on to be hallmark motifs of Sandler productions. Both films operate on a fish-out-of-water storytelling dynamic, placing the everyman Sandler character into an established formal system in which he must learn to adapt to some customs while other customs are proven inferior to his own casual attitudes, creating a new social equilibrium where good humor and kind-heartedness prevails over stuffy over-seriousness and negativity. In Happy Gilmore this effect impacts golf culture, in Billy Madison it takes on the culture of K-12 academia, and in Sandler’s first project as producer, The Waterboy, it takes on the culture surrounding collegiate football, remaining Sandler’s primary storytelling tactic for much of his filmography as producer.

The Waterboy, being his first production, is a prime example of Sandler’s attitudes towards violence as a tool of moral good, attitudes acting as yet another pattern throughout his productions. Bobby Boucher, played by Sandler, is portrayed as a southern simpleton obsessed with water, abused and ignored by the society around him until he proves his worth by showcasing his ability to fly into a violent rage. Initially provoked when the water he values is disrespected by a highly regarded football player, Boucher’s rage is considered his only skill by those around him. It is here that a major distinction is made between the positive use of physical violence and the abject negativity of personal insults, another aspect of Sandler’s attitudes that becomes pattern. This aspect is best exemplified in Boucher’s interactions with a professor who insults his intelligence, saying “There’s something wrong with his medulla oblongata”, the part of the brain responsible for aggression. Boucher responds by tackling the professor, saying “It’s okay to fight back, Coach Klein said I could.” While Boucher’s pulled off of the professor before the film cuts to the next scene, this is the last of his negative repercussions from the public assault, the most significant impact instead being that his professor is now more respectful and soft-spoken towards him. This concept, that verbal disrespect is a problem and violence can and should be used to solve that problem, is one of Sandler’s most prevalent motifs, expanded most robustly upon in his later production, Mr. Deeds.

By the time of Mr. Deeds’ release, Sandler had launched his own production company, Happy Madison, named after his early vehicles: Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. Telling the story of Longfellow Deeds, a small-town pizzeria owner whose estranged uncle leaves him forty billion dollars, Mr. Deeds functions as a character study of a man with simple tastes launched into a world of opulence. One early scene is another pointed example of Sandler’s attitude towards violence, in which Deeds is seated at a dinner table next to the likes of an opera singer and a writer for the New Yorker. When they begin to insult his simple tastes, asking if he writes poems with a crayon, Deeds ends the dinner by saying “I may seem funny to you, but if you came to Mandrake Falls, you might seem funny to us. Only nobody would laugh at you and make you feel stupid, cause that wouldn’t be good manners” before punching out three of the high society types for laughing at him. Rather than any negative repercussions for this outburst, we are instead treated to a John McEnroe cameo where he approaches Deeds to say “I saw what you did to those guys who were making fun of you, nice work,” again treating violence as a tool which has solved a problem.

The positive use of violence isn’t the only aspect of Sandler-produced screenplays that sees repetition. The value of family and friends is another point of focus in these films. In 50 First Dates, the first Happy Madison-produced rom-com to feature recurring co-star Drew Barrymore, this aspect is explored in the dynamic between Lucy and her family. The film follows Sandler’s character in his attempts to form a functional relationship with Barrymore’s Lucy, who suffers short term memory loss. Lucy’s family acts, throughout the film, as a support system. Her father and brother repaint the garage white every day so that she can spend part of her day painting a mural over it, doing their best to make sure she’s happy and avoid any discomfort on her part around the fact that she forgets every mural the next day. This focus on love and support within a family went on to become the main theme of later Sandler feature Click. In Click, Sandler plays a married father of two who finds a universal remote allowing him to skip through the monotony of family time in order to focus on his career, realizing by the end that truly important moments of his life are those he spends with his family. Another largely recurring aspect of Sandler’s films, as seen in the case of Barrymore, is their casting. Character actors such as Peter Dante, Allen Covert, and Jonathan Loughran appear in almost every major Sandler film, alongside equally frequent roles from more well-known names such as Steve Buscemi, Norm Macdonald, and Henry Winkler. Out of such a wide range of collaborators, the most notable by far is Rob Schneider. In addition to appearing in several of Sandler’s own vehicles, Sandler’s produced five films through Happy Madison in which Rob Schneider’s taken the lead role. These films, despite Sandler’s absence from the screen, continue to maintain the recurrent characteristics of style that make up his signature as a producer. In Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, for instance, we still find the threads of Sandler’s particular flavor of fish out of water story, as well as a focus on the value of family and the use of violence. In the film, Bigalow is thrown into the world of prostitution. One early scene displays him engaging in physical combat with a female prostitute over who should pay who, which ends with her realization that he is housesitting for a more well-known male prostitute who regularly and successfully uses threats of violence. This male prostitute is the standard Deuce aspires to through much of the film, a role model whose most prominent characteristic besides his sexuality is how often he’s implied to use violence as a tool. As far as the value of family is concerned, Deuce’s father, Bob, is a continuing presence throughout the movie. Deuce asks him for advice when he first entertains the idea of prostitution as a career, and he appears later when Deuce introduces him to his love interest.

Outside of leading roles, Schneider operates under a secondary function within the rest of Sandler’s productions: minority. Every role Sandler’s given Schneider, without fail, has had at least a foreign accent, and at most an entirely different skin tone than his natural color. In The Waterboy, he played a Hispanic townie, in 50 First Dates, he played a native Hawaiian named Ula, and in Click, he played a Sheikh named Prince Habeeboo. These characters are never integral to the plot and serve mainly as an outlet for ridiculing people of color, with Sandler’s characters often treating them as friends or allies while making fun of their goofy mannerisms at the same time. This begs the question, what happened to the use of violence in order to solve the problem of disrespect? If any of these characters were played by Sandler, he would immediately start swinging at the first person to laugh at his accent. The distinction here, throughout the entire catalog of Happy Madison productions, remains that the main character, often played by Sandler, is the final arbiter of what is and isn’t appropriate to joke about. By the standards of these films, poking fun at one’s appearance, intelligence, and abilities is acceptable only when it comes with the caveat that this is all in jest and his characters are laughing with those he mocks, not at them. If this mockery comes from another source, however, the assumption is that it is meant to hurt and create a sense of superiority. It is in this scenario that violence becomes an option. In other words, the worldview formed by these films is one in which only Sandler’s characters and those they like are allowed to make the jokes, and if anyone else does it they’re an antagonist who should be dealt with physically.

At this point in the analysis of Sandler’s filmographic style, it appears that not all of his patterns are beneficial to the films he’s produced, most apparently the racism inherent to Schneider’s roles throughout them all, in addition to several other recurring aspects that form a fairly flawed worldview. This, consequently, would be the most likely reason for critical distaste around Sandler’s filmography. In his review of The Waterboy, Roger Ebert laments, “It would give me enormous satisfaction (and relief) to like [Sandler] in a movie. But I suggest he is making a tactical error when he creates a character whose manner and voice has the effect of fingernails on a blackboard, and then expects us to hang in there for a whole movie.” Years later, his review of Click displays a loss of patience. “The movie is being sold as a comedy, but you know what? This isn't funny.” For many theorists, the term auteur is synonymous with genius, and this sort of critical disparagement may run contrary to the claim that Sandler is an auteur. The source of that attitude, that good filmmakers (auteurs) can do no wrong, and that bad filmmakers are incapable of making a good film, can be traced back to auteur theories origins in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema. However, Bazin critiques this line of thinking in Les Politiques des Auteurs, citing his disagreement with other Cahier du Cinema writers, “Surely one can accept the permanence of talent without confusing it with some kind of artistic infallibility or immunity against making mistakes, which could only be divine attributes” (Bazin, 16). Extending that point, it is this essay’s claim that auteur cinema, specifically producer-driven auteur cinema, is not automatically “good” by virtue of being created by an auteur.

Kevin Feige’s helming of the Marvel franchise is another arguable example of this. While maintaining the role of producer over that of director on every project he’s been involved with, Feige’s influence has shaped the superhero genre through his own recurring traits such as quippy dialogue and direct interconnectivity between films. And yet many of his films have been met with equal critical disdain. On Thor, Ebert said, “Nothing exciting happens, nothing of interest is said, and the special effects evoke not a place or a time but simply special effects.” And yet, regardless of critical response, Marvel films as helmed by Feige have dominated the box office for over a decade, and the form of each has been determined by him. While Sandler’s case has never reached the height of success Feige’s found himself at, the form of each of his productions remains determined by him. It is in this respect, through maintained filmic patterns over a number of productions regardless of critical reception, that both Feige and Sandler can be understood as auteurs.

The concept of the producer auteur is not, however, a new one. As Stam mentions in his discussion of the critiques around auteurism’s underestimation of the collaboration inherent to film, “Given this kind of collaboration, some argued that producers like Selznick, performers like Brando, or writers like Raymond Chandler could be seen as auteurs.”(Stam, 91) As soon as auteur theory reached mainstream film discussion, rebuttals surrounding the collaboration of other forces with directors in the making of film came into play. As television criticism reached a point of respect almost parallel to that of film, the discussion entered this space, as Stam goes on to point out “In television, some argued, the real auteurs were producers like Norman Lear or Stephen Bochco.” (Stam, 91). In both cases, the idea that a producer could be seen as equally an auteur as a director was not far behind the initial claim.

Why then, in light of the abundance of evidence pointing toward the conclusion, is Sandler not more commonly considered an Auteur? A large part of the reason may be that his films are not actively discussed in an academic context because they are not considered meaningful, rather, they are most commonly identified as feel-good films. “Meaningful films are categorically set apart from pleasurable films, which are associated with light and bouncy feelings, relaxation, and energy. Feel-good films are typically assigned to this latter category…[Ellen Rees] defines [feel-good films] as a hybrid of drama and comedy films with a strong focus on the protagonists’ interpersonal relationships and their social integration into a community” (Sarkhosh, 56). The feel-good film then, as a genre, encapsulates every Happy Madison production, however, this classification leads to an unfortunate predisposition on the part of academics, “In most film criticism, ‘feel-good film’ serves as a derogatory term for films that are found to be purely commercial, aesthetically conventional, intellectually undemanding, and emotionally manipulative.” (Sarkhosh, 57). It is under these circumstances that critical ignorance towards the mechanics of Sandler’s films becomes understandable. However, acknowledging ignorance is not the same as combating it, and to truly understand the culture of film, we must analyze all pictures with the same level of scrutiny, regardless of the level of prestige (or lack thereof) associated with them. It is under this level of critical scrutiny that a conclusion can be reached on the matter of Adam Sandler: He is an Auteur.