Except for someone like Keaton or Chaplin (who else could they cast?), I've always found the notion of actor/director rather odd. It seems like a cumbersome way of making a movie, particularly in the pre-video era.
So why do we see so many actors directing themselves? Perhaps there's something about the craft of screen acting that naturally develops a director's eye, bu it's far more likely that movie stars have lots of power and directing has a high glamour to work ratio.
Screenwriting, by comparison, has a notoriously low glamour to work ratio. Nonetheless there are examples. W.C. Fields wrote most of his own films. So did Mae West. (For their one collaboration, My Little Chickadee, West wrote the screenplay while Fields contributed one scene. Notably, though the film made a ton of money, the two stars never made another movie together.) Mel Gibson co-wrote his semi-comeback, Get the Gringo (Yeah, I know... but if you can get past off-screen Gibson and you enjoyed Payback you'll probably like this one better).
All of which is an excuse to link to another freebie from the Criterion Collection, The Horse's Mouth, written by and starring Alec Guinness.
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