Getting it right

• Daphne Merkin profiles Tom Stoppard in the New York Times Magazine.

A good bit from an otherwise kinda-fawning article (enough about his clothes, already):

Stoppard has written for film as well as television (his screenwriting credits include “Brazil,” “Empire of the Sun” and “Shakespeare in Love,” for which he won an Oscar), but his commitment to theater is very real. When I asked him why he chose it as his medium — and why he stuck with it — he responded via e-mail: “The standing of the theater in 1960 did have a lot to do with it. But it’s not just that. I like the smell of it, and the immediacy. Also the danger: getting it wrong in public. Also the thrill when you get it right in public.”

Tales from the Faulknerian crypt

• A long-lost William Faulkner manuscript is an unproduced vampire screenplay.

Makes a lot of sense, if you think about it.

Beginning in 1932, and intermittently over the next 13 years, Faulkner was a contract writer at MGM, Fox and Warner Bros. who mainly wrote screenplays for good friend and drinking buddy Howard Hawks. Their best and most notable collaborations are Faulkner's adaptations of Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" and Raymond Chandler's noir classic "The Big Sleep."

In the midst of all this, Faulkner apparently spun out a vampire saga set in an anonymous Eastern European location. Caplin plans to relocate the story to the Deep South and has a high-end computer-graphics firm on the hook to dress it up with modern effects.

So Anne Rice didn't invent the Southern Gothic vampire story after all...

From the page to the screen

• The Guardian picks the 50 best film adaptations of books.

Another list to nitpick, this time slightly less so. There's a definite British slant to the selections (The Day of the Triffids?), but it's a pretty good collection nonetheless:

1984
Alice in Wonderland
American Psycho
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Brighton Rock
Catch-22
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
A Clockwork Orange
Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
The Day of the Triffids
Devil in a Blue Dress
Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
Doctor Zhivago
Empire of the Sun
The English Patient
Fight Club
The French Lieutenant's Woman
Get Shorty
The Godfather
Goldfinger
Goodfellas
Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Jaws
The Jungle Book
A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
LA Confidential
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
The Maltese Falcon
Oliver Twist
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Orlando
The Outsiders
Pride and Prejudice
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Railway Children
Rebecca
The Remains of the Day
Schindler's Ark (aka Schindler's List)
Sin City
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
The Talented Mr Ripley
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
To Kill a Mockingbird
Trainspotting
The Vanishing
Watership Down

It seems that, unlike the WGA's recent "101 Best," they're judging the merits of the screenplay adaptations before the film itself, which is a tricky tightrope to walk; some books flat-out resist a filmed adaptation at every turn, where others are practically tailor-made for the screen. Some others I'd nominate:

Dolores Claiborne, scripted by Tony Gilroy and directed by Taylor Hackford, always gets my nomination for the most underappreciated Stephen King adaptation, second only to Rob Reiner and William Goldman's take on Misery. (I've never been a fan of either the film of The Shawshank Redemption or the original novella; it's King at his more preachy and ickily sentimental.) Dolores Claiborne is a book-length monologue by the title character; Gilroy restructed the story somewhat and despite a jarring, tacked-on courtroom finale, it's consistently gripping. Hackford's stylish take on the flashback sequences is amazing.

Waterland, adapted by Peter Prince from the novel by Graham Swift, is particuarly good, once you get past the Americanized plot elements that are rather obviously grafted on. Like Dolores Claiborne above, the story incorporates many flashback sequences that somehow maintain the heft and magic-realism weight of the novel. [It just so happens that the film is playing tonight -- 4/20 -- on the Independent Film Channel at 9:15pm. Unfortunately, the print IFC is using is panned-and-scanned; Stephen Gyllenhaal's filming of it takes every advantage of the Panavision widescreen process and can only be truly appreciated in that format. Image Entertainment will be releasing the film on DVD next month.]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, from the novel by Milan Kundera, tends to split people straight down the middle. Most people I know who've read the novel hate the movie, and vice versa. I like them both very much, but they are, by neccessity, very different beasts; the film is fairly linear, whereas the novel is decidedly not so. Philip Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carriere did the adaptation, and Kaufman directed.

The Woman in the Dunes, adapted by Kobo Abe from his novel, and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara. Abe is an acquired taste, but if your taste happens to run towards unsettling, threateningly erotic surrealism, then he's your man. This is the kind of adaptation you watch and, if you're familiar with both, you think, "It couldn't have been done any other way." It helps, of course, that Abe did the adaptation himself, but Teshigahara deserves a lot of credit for crisply visualizing Abe's strange, almost otherworldly textures and shadings. [Abe and Teshigahara collaborated twice more, on adaptations of Abe's novels The Face of Another (1966) and The Ruined Map (1968), both of which have yet to be released on video in America.]

Deliverance, scripted by James Dickey from his novel, and directed by John Boorman. This is the movie that's essentially responsible for every redneck-psychopath stereotype in every movie made since; apparently, there are many people in the world who truly believe there are toothless, shotgun-toting rapists behind every tree in the American South. Get past that, and you're left with truly one of the best movies ever made, one in which Dickey's poetic examination of masculinity versus nature is preserved with tremendous clarity and resonance.

There are plenty of other great adaptations that didn't make the cut -- The Last Picture Show, Wonder Boys, In the Bedroom, The Manchurian Candidate, The Pledge and especially A Simple Plan are others that come to mind -- but these are some I think are particularly worth singling out.

Math and art, strange bedfellows

• Writer Gregory K. Pincus has turned mathematics into poetry.

This is pretty cool:

Blogs
spread
gossip
and rumor
But how about a
Rare, geeky form of poetry?

THAT'S exactly what happened after Gregory K. Pincus, a screenwriter and aspiring children's book author in Los Angeles, wrote a post on his GottaBook blog (gottabook.blogspot.com) two weeks ago inviting readers to write "Fibs," six-line poems that used a mathematical progression known as the Fibonacci sequence to dictate the number of syllables in each line.

Within a few days, Mr. Pincus, 41, had received about 30 responses, a large portion of them Fibonacci poems. Most of them were from friends or relatives or people who regularly read his blog, which focuses on children's literature.

There is often an intriguing overlap between mathematical and dramatic theories. My favorite example is the Golden Section; a colleague of mine named Doug Adams once wrote a fascinating article on film music which included an intriguing discourse on the theory:

There exists a theory known as the rule of the Golden Section. Roughly paraphrased, this theory states that just under two-thirds (0.618034... and so on) of the way through anything there is some significant occurrence. The idea is that those things which humans naturally find appealing or stereotypically beautiful are most likely to adhere to these guidelines. Much of nature adheres to this rule. Many flowers have their largest leaves about two-thirds of the way up their total height. Multiply a human's height by .618 and you'll often find the waist. The eyes are approximately two-thirds of the way up the human face, the heart two-thirds of the way up the torso. Human-made art often follows these rules as well. Debussy was a strong believer in the Golden Section and structured his works accordingly. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" has some elements of the GS in its construction. "Alien"'s climatic cat-and-mouse chase begins at roughly around this ratio, as does "Star Wars"' trench battle.

In practically every writing course I've ever taken, mention was made of something similar in terms of the structure of whatever piece of writing you were focused on. For example, the Joseph Campbell model of screenwriting (which has been nearly beaten to death in the years since Star Wars first opened... thanks a lot, George) posits nine steps in the hero's journey:

1. The ordinary world.
2. The call to action.
3. Refusal of the call.
4. Crossing the threshold.
5. Tests, allies and enemies.
6. Ordeal.
7. Reward.
8. The road back.
9. Return and resurrection.

You'll note that two-thirds of the way through this list is "ordeal," which typically takes the form of a plot twist that changes the hero's goal -- the token damsel getting kidnapped by the bad guy, for example, thus giving the hero a new emotional investment in achieving his objective. (This device is also commonly referred to as the "third-act ticking clock," and was satirized hilariously in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.) The rhythm of certain styles of poetry -- cinquains and sonnets, for example -- follow this idea. Basic rules of composition for art and photography emphasize a one-thirds/two-thirds standard for filling the frame. And the musicians amongst you are already aware that typical 32-bar (AABA) song structure usually places the bridge about two-thirds of the way through the song.

Anyway, the point of all this is that this rule, ingrained as it is in typical perceptions of art and aesthetics, can be of great help to you in terms of the construction of your work, be it written, visual or auditory. If anything, it's a good jumping-off point. Not all works of art adhere to this rule, of course, but a lot of fun can be had in the manipulation of the rules... once you learn them, that is.

As an extension of that, I’ve found, more often than not, that exploring the strictures of math and science can in fact reveal new elements in aesthetics. Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation has many such passages that illustrate how one could inform the other. Mathematics, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, is entirely theoretical, and like any other man-made system of thought it’s subject to the same fallibility, and flexibility, as art.

Now I want someone to come up with a way to turn Occam's Razor into, say, a cell phone ad.

Yet another list to nitpick

• The Writers' Guild of America picks the 101 greatest screenplays of all time.

It's a surprisingly disappointing selection, even by the dubious standards of the list-mania that's been prevalent since the AFI started churning them out. Many, many obvious choices, with a whopping two foreign films getting a nod (Renoir's Grand Illusion and Fellini's 8-1/2, #85 and #87, respectively), with no respect whatsoever paid to Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, John Sayles, Francois Truffaut, Pedro Almodovar, Werner Herzog or Richard Linklater, writers all whose work put story and character first.

It's more of a celebration of LA-style studio filmmaking, as opposed to screenwriting. Casablanca, for example, was, at the time of its making, considered a run-of-the-mill studio installment, the script of which was cobbled together by a handful of writers, some credited, some not. Most of the scripts on the list feature more than one writer, and many of those had work done on them by writers who went uncredited (Tootsie being the most notorious example). It is nice, however, to see Groundhog Day get a nod, as well as Memento, Harold & Maude and The Wild Bunch.

Of course, the very nature of moviemaking makes the presentation of a singular point of view difficult, if not altogether impossible. Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, especially within the studio system, and the WGA's list reflects that attitude. Still, their choices and omissions are surprising, and not in a good way.