| re: The whole "uncinematic" thing | |
| Posted by: | LegitOnce 08:47 pm EDT 08/15/14 |
| In reply to: | The whole "uncinematic" thing - AlanScott 05:21 pm EDT 08/14/14 |
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| I would argue that Long Day's Journey Into Night is a bit of a special case because the play (as Lumet clearly realizes) is in large part about a sense of entrapment, of, metaphorically speaking, the inability to escape from the family home. The "action" of the play is immobility: no one even has enough energy to turn off the lights and go to bed. So a film that is true to these qualities is by its nature not going to be "cinematic" is the more superficial sense of the term, "opened up," as this sort of play would traditionally have been done on film. (Compare, for example, William Wyler's adaptation of The Little Foxes that introduces new characters and new situations moving the action far outside the Giddens drawing room.) The one major misstep I think Mike Nichols takes in his beautiful film of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the roadhouse sequence: once everybody gets out of the house the tension dissipates somewhat. It's handled brilliantly in a technical sense but it's still a mistake thematically. | |
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| re: The whole "uncinematic" thing | |
| Posted by: | AlanScott 12:36 am EDT 08/16/14 |
| In reply to: | re: The whole "uncinematic" thing - LegitOnce 08:47 pm EDT 08/15/14 |
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| The roadhouse sequence seems be one of the few very things they keep from Lehman's script. I think it's possible that they might even have been better not going outside for the George-Nick scene. Here are a other film versions of plays that work as movies (whatever that means) while hardly moving out of a single room or apartment or house: The Homecoming Dial 'M' for Murder The Caretaker The Boys in the Band Personally, I don't really know what the word cinematic means. Some plays take easily to being opened up. Others resist it, yet can still be made very effectively into movies, without even needing fancy camera work or lots of cutting. Personally, I think lots of cutting is often more damaging than helpful. I think it arguably requires more imagination to successfully film a play without opening it than to try to make a play into something that seems more like a conventional movie. | |
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| re: The whole "uncinematic" thing | |
| Posted by: | WaymanWong 08:24 am EDT 08/16/14 |
| In reply to: | re: The whole "uncinematic" thing - AlanScott 12:36 am EDT 08/16/14 |
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| Albee says Ernest Lehman, who was the screenwriter and producer of ''Virginia Woolf,'' wrote two lines: ''Let's go to the roadhouse'' and ''Let's come back from the roadhouse.'' In Mel Gussow's bio of the playwright, he adds, except for the roadhouse scene and the scene under the tree outside George & Martha's house, ''It's my play f*cking word for word.'' | |
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| re: The whole "uncinematic" thing | |
| Posted by: | AlanScott 03:52 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
| In reply to: | re: The whole "uncinematic" thing - WaymanWong 08:24 am EDT 08/16/14 |
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| According to Mike Nichols, in the recent talk with Jack O'Brien, Lehman wrote a screenplay with many changes from the play. The Lehman screenplay was essentially thrown out and the dialogue from the play restored. | |
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| re: The whole "uncinematic" thing | |
| Posted by: | Chazwaza 04:35 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
| In reply to: | re: The whole "uncinematic" thing - AlanScott 03:52 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
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| And yet how was Lehman allowed to retain full sole credit for the screenplay? He was even nominated for an Oscar for it... just him, not Albee. An uncredited intern could probably have done as much work "adapting" the play's dialogue into screenplay format for what was actually in the movie... | |
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| re: The whole "uncinematic" thing | |
| Posted by: | AlanScott 05:20 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
| In reply to: | re: The whole "uncinematic" thing - Chazwaza 04:35 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
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| Contracts. He was an Oscar-winning screenwriter. It was probably in his contract that he would have sole credit. | |
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| re: The whole "uncinematic" thing | |
| Posted by: | Chazwaza 06:02 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
| In reply to: | re: The whole "uncinematic" thing - AlanScott 05:20 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
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| I just don't understand why Albee's contract would allow that... not to mention that that isn't really how the WGA does things, though perhaps it was back then. These days if you've written 30% of the original, i think, or 50% of the re-write, you get co-writer credit. Whatever it is, it would easily have allowed Albee to have at least co-writer credit on the screenplay. | |
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| re: The whole "uncinematic" thing | |
| Posted by: | AlanScott 06:50 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
| In reply to: | re: The whole "uncinematic" thing - Chazwaza 06:02 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
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| It's a good question that I can't answer. Albee was certainly annoyed about it (and who can blame him?). | |
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| re: The whole "uncinematic" thing | |
| Posted by: | Chazwaza 06:56 am EDT 08/17/14 |
| In reply to: | re: The whole "uncinematic" thing - AlanScott 06:50 pm EDT 08/16/14 |
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| And rightly so, yes. And it's not just this movie... this happens with plays being turned into movies quite often, and did more when more were adapted. A screenwriter who mostly just takes the majority of the play's dialogue and the plot, characters and how they are illustrated, etc, and puts them in screenplay format and sometimes "opens" the play up gets credit as the sole script writer, and nominated for "best adapted screenplay" as if they took a novel and created, out of 400 pages of descriptive prose, a 120 page screenplay fit to be shot.... the idea that re-imagining and already written script for the cinema is on par, to the Academy's eyes, with creating a new script out of a book, is beyond my understanding and would INCENSE me if I were a screenwriter adapting a book or a playwright whose play was adapted by someone else. | |
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| "cinematic" is a word few people who use it seem to understand | |
| Posted by: | Chazwaza 10:16 pm EDT 08/15/14 |
| In reply to: | re: The whole "uncinematic" thing - LegitOnce 08:47 pm EDT 08/15/14 |
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| And "opening up" a play for a movie is not the same thing nor is it the only way to make it cinematic. | |
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