Hollywood likes to cash in on success. If anything, or anyone, is a hit, you can be sure that a movie will follow. As soon as The Da Vinci Code became the phenomenon it was, the only question was how soon the film would come out. With a book like that, you can dispense with the whole advertising budget.
Gone With the Wind, The Bridges of Madison County, Bridget Jones' Diary.
This process can sometimes get something onto the screen that wouldn't have had a hope had it not achieved success elsewhere. Alan Bennett's plays come to mind. I doubt very much if The Madness of King George or The History Boys would have impressed producers as original screenplays.
I mentioned a person being a 'hit', and thereby inspiring a film. Ali and Ray are recent examples of this. singers are particularly popular subjects, because you get the songs and that leads to another market. Al Jolson, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis are among the dozens treated to a biopic.
Even songwriters and composers from Lizst to Cole Porter have received the honour.
I can't think of any actors off-hand who've had a film devoted to them. Hang on, Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. But lookalikes turn up from time to time. I remember 'James Cagney' in The Cotton Club. In Gods and Monsters the whole cast of The Bride of Frankenstein turn up. Interestingly, that is one of the few films directed to a film director, James Whale. It seems that you have to be a really bad director, like Ed Wood, to merit a film of your own.
But there was The Aviator. (I'm obviously making this up as I go along, and what's more I'm getting into a hell of a mess trying to use bullet points, which I shall now dispense with. And I don't care that I've ended a sentence with a preposition).
To continue. It's not always about money. Sam Goldwyn, for example, liked a bit of class, with a capital K. Just as he like to fill his mansions with works of art, probably bought according to their surface area, every now and again he would make a film that he thought would make those snobby intellectuals out there sit up and take notice. Wuthering Heights and Arrowsmith were from serious novels and demonstrated how difficult it is to make that transition while being 'faithful'.
Pygmalion and The Little Foxes were more successful, because a play is halfway to a film anyway. I remember, with respect to the latter film, that GBS tried to puncture Sam's pretensions when He said, 'The difference between us, Mr Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art, while I am only interested in money.' Sarcastic old bastard, and if I've quoted him correctly, he put the 'onlys' in the wrong place.
Putting it on record. Maybe we are seeing a little more altruism. I'm sure there are producers and directors out there who genuinely want to record great performances, such as Edithe Evans in The Importance of Being Earnest, or make a great work of literature or drama more readily available to the wider public. Olivier and Branagh are great apostles of Shakespeare and take - or persuade others to take - financial risks to put him on celluloid. I've no doubt that there was a touch of arrogance as well, or a desire for some sort of immortality, when Olivier filmed Richard III.
Whether or not this leads to a decent film is another matter. Olivier's record is pretty varied. His Othello, for example, was unashamedly a filmed record of a stage play, not quite a view from the front seat of the stalls, but nearly so. Richard III is more cinematic, but still very studio-bound and processional until the final battle. On the other hand, Hamlet is almost like a film noir and seems to me the most cinematic. Some say too cinematic, with the camera roving around gloomy corridors, wasting time that could have been used to save some of the ruthlessly pruned text.
Henry V is the most experimental, cleverly opening out from a re-created Globe Theatre, to studio sets, to the open locations for Agincourt, and then reversing the process.
Orson Welles, who had two stabs at Shakespeare himself (Chimes at Midnight and Othello), was not impressed. He said that most Shakespeare films were like films of a cricket match. (Why did he say 'cricket match' and not 'boxing match'?). I think he was being a bit unfair on the efforts of Olivier, Branagh and Zefferelli, Mankiewicz and Polanski, but he does highlight the dangers. Frankly, when I think of Hamlet, Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar and MacBeth, he was being very unfair.
I feel the urge to mention Rio Bravo at this point. The legend is that Howard Hawks made this as a riposte to High Noon; that Zinnemann's film was leftist propaganda, that Gary cooper was duped by commie infiltrators and needed to be debunked. Now, you have to be pretty rich or self-important to make a film as a reply to another, especially when that other had been made about 8 years before and probably forgotten by the paying public. It was all publicity, wasn't it? It was, I accept, a different take on an old situation, but no more. And, it was a lousy film. It's odd - when John Carpenter made a 'Howard Hawks' film, Assault on Precinct 13, he did a better job than Hawks himself.
One last reason for adapting. Simple respect. You've got to be a top, respected director/producer to do this. And here I take my hat off to John Huston, who made Moby Dick and The Red Badge of Courage, both pretty good movies from classic novels. Huston was a man of many talents, a painter, a writer, a film-maker (not to mention boxer, lover, liar and all-round cad), a man I could listen to for hours. I've no doubt he loved those books and wished he had written them. But they were perfect vehicles for movies - if you were not too respectful to the originals. I think he did a pretty good job. I've often wondered: Did Huston make the films because he wasn't good enough to write the books; or, did he make the films because the authors didn't have the opportunity to do so themselves?
No comments:
Post a Comment