  The well-known American film scholar and reviewer, Andrew Sarris, adopted Truffaut's theory in order to legitimate film studies as an academic discipline. For Sarris, the auteur theory was a theory of film evaluation, for it suggested to him that the works of great directors were the only significant ones. In his somewhat idiosyncratic use of the idea, he even argued that the flawed works of major directors were artistically better than masterpieces made by minor ones. A more defensible aspect of his ideas was the emphasis on the entire ouvre of a director. Within film studies, the emphasis on synoptic studies of individual directors is derived from Sarris' version of the auteur theory.