Books, Arts & Manners: Addled Adaptations

As long as people lack original ideas for a movie, they will turn to adaptations. Short stories, novels, and especially plays are grist for the adapters’ mills, which, unlike God’s, grind fast and exceeding coarse. Theater, since the dawn of cinema, was considered the ideal source for photoplays, as moving pictures used to be called with nouveau-riche pretension. The prestigious thing for the movies was to capture some New York stage star in a hit vehicle for transfer to the screen; nowadays the traffic tends to be reversed, as Hollywood blockbusters are turned into Broadway musicals, and big- and small-screen stars are coaxed into offering themselves up live to their hungry fans.

Yet movie adaptations of plays have presented, from the beginning, pitfalls galore. Film is a restless medium, suffering from acute dromomania, and can stay put for any length of time only with great difficulty—or great directorial knowhow. Conversely, theater, though it too enjoys an outing or a change of scene, is perfectly content to tarry among the same three walls for an entire evening. Though in need of some action, theater dotes on talk; whereas nothing seems to make movies more nervous than public speaking. I could list further differences, but all this is well-known to everyone except the unfortunates who keep making movies out of plays; even if their tribe does not increase like Abou Ben Adhem’s, it will never go begging for bridge partners.

JS

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John Simon

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As long as people lack original ideas for a movie, they will turn to adaptations. Short stories, novels, and especially plays are grist for the adapters’ mills, which, unlike God’s, grind fast and exceeding coarse. Theater, since the dawn of cinema, was considered the ideal source for photoplays, as moving pictures used to be called with nouveau-riche pretension. The prestigious thing for the movies was to capture some New York stage star in a hit vehicle for transfer to the screen; nowadays the traffic tends to be reversed, as Hollywood blockbusters are turned into Broadway musicals, and big- and small-screen stars are coaxed into offering themselves up live to their hungry fans.

Yet movie adaptations of plays have presented, from the beginning, pitfalls galore. Film is a restless medium, suffering from acute dromomania, and can stay put for any length of time only with great difficulty—or great directorial knowhow. Conversely, theater, though it too enjoys an outing or a change of scene, is perfectly content to tarry among the same three walls for an entire evening. Though in need of some action, theater dotes on talk; whereas nothing seems to make movies more nervous than public speaking. I could list further differences, but all this is well-known to everyone except the unfortunates who keep making movies out of plays; even if their tribe does not increase like Abou Ben Adhem’s, it will never go begging for bridge partners.