[Mb-civic] From page to screen - Boston Globe Editorial
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Sat Jan 7 07:30:57 PST 2006
From page to screen
January 7, 2006 | The Boston Globe
"BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN" has leapt from the pages of an Annie Proulx short
story to the silver screen, stirring up some readers' hopes that other
short prose favorites might make the jump.
Turning books and short stories into movies is old news. But doing it
well is a challenge. Jay Gatsby is still waiting for his cinematic
justice. Making compelling movies out of the least likely prose
candidates demands creativity, sometimes even wizardry.
In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Proulx said she had no
idea the story would become a movie, doubting that it would even be
published by a magazine because its subject matter, a gay relationship
between two cowboys, was ''not in the usual ruts of the literary road."
But The New Yorker published the story in 1997, and now it's a movie
sensation.
Hungry literature fans want to know what's next, what makes or remakes
of classics or new works might -- in the right, skillful hands -- become
films. Once upon a time, literary writers went to Hollywood and cranked
out screenplays, with varying degrees of success. F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Nathanael West, William Faulkner, and others all hammered away on
screenplays. At their best, they built bridges between words and film,
closing a gap by grounding movies in a literary sensibility.
And while Faulkner's prose can be tough to read, not to mention
translate to film, perhaps ''The Bear," with its layered images of
hunting and nature stretching over a young man's life, could be a good film.
In the opening sentence of Katherine Ann Porter's short story, ''María
Concepción," the title character ''walked carefully, keeping to the
middle of the white dusty road, where the maguey thorns and the
treacherous curved spines of organ cactus had not gathered so
profusely." She could well be on her way to the heart of a visually lush
movie.
Mark Twain dictated ''The War Prayer," a controversial small prose
explosion about an ''unnaturally pale" ''aged stranger" who speaks the
unsaid portion of a minister's prayer for victory, a dark plea that says
in part, ''O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody
shreds with our shells." It's risky to turn such a short piece with no
plot into a film, but it's intriguing to imagine a movie about an angry
prophet.
Filmmakers might also hunt through the short works of Raymond Carver,
Alice Munro, or Louise Erdrich or scan the short story anthologies to
find less well-known writers, such as Mary Yukari Waters.
There are millions of pages of possibilities that might fulfill the
first commandment of reading and moviegoing audiences: Show us in epic
detail what we haven't seen before.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/01/07/from_page_to_screen/
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