Hunting for an idea for a screenplay? Why not take out one of your old plays and see if it can be adapted to the screen. Many plays will not make the passage.
by William S. E. Coleman
In London and now New York Stones in His Pocket is a hit. In it two fine actors play all the roles, male and female, on a simple set. The entertainment value of the play is seated in its being a virtuoso two-hander. Rumor has it that it has been purchased for the screen. I think that is an imbecilic idea.
If the play is adapted to the screen, it will have to be drastically changed. If it is successful as a film, it will not because the audience wants to see two actors doing a variety of roles. It will be because they want to see the impact of a Hollywood production crew on a small Irish village.
Several years ago an agent tried to talk me into turning my two-hander, Goodtime Charley, into a screenplay. In it, two characters get roaring drunk and make a series of prank calls, manipulating those who have wronged them into embarrassing and farcical situations. The agent said, “All you have to do is write the embarrassing situations.”
I think she missed the point of the play. The fun of it on stage was that the audience imagined the off-stage farcical situations via each actor’s monologue/call. They had to imagine the off-stage characters, just as we imagined the visuals in old-time radio drama. I decided to take a pass on the project.
A basic problem with turning a stage play into a screenplay is that screenplays rarely have more than five pages of dialogue to a scene. Plays can take an entire act to present a dialogue between two characters. Many writers “open up” the play by moving the dialogue to different locales. Finding a way to get the actors to that location and to give the feeling that this is another scene is not easy.
If you want to see how this is done, rent the Elia Kazan A Streetcar Named Desire and then the film adaptation of Death of a Salesman. Both were released in 1951.
Both are fully discussed in Scenario in Al McKee’s article “Curtain Up. And Action!”
Streetcar succeeded, the Salesman failed miserably. Why? Kazan managed to maintain the poetic realism of Williams with a limited setting. There were shadows and mood, and most of the dialogue was preserved. Mercifully forgotten Laslo Benedek turned the poetic realism of Salesman into cold realism, even in its fantasy and memory scenes.
On paper Salesman seemed the more cinematic of the two plays. It moved freely in time and even ventured into hallucinatory scenes with Uncle Ben. Some of the fault lay in the direction. Everything was coldly real. There were few shadows and less atmosphere. Kazan, on the other hand, maintained a suggestion of the mystery that lurked in Jo Mielziner’s magical setting for the play.
Williams’ The Glass Menagerie also failed. The reason was more than its happy ending—the gentleman caller comes bounding up the alley at the end. Much of the play remained intact. It did not work in its entirety.
According to McKee the key to the success or failure of these projects was in who adapted them. I would argue it is more deeply seated. First, there is the direction and production design. Kazan’s New Orleans alley, street, and interior are not quite real. The cinematographer did not blaze a ton of light into the scenes—except when Blanche is forced to look at her aging face at a climatic moment.
Salesman has no mystery, none of that mistiness seen on stage. It is crystal clear in its cinematography, and Frederic March acts for the stage rather than the camera. Willy comes off as a madman, rather than a troubled soul coping with a failed economic system.
With The Glass Menagerie a lot goes wrong. The cast is respectable. Tom is the always brilliant Arthur Kennedy, Gertrude Lawrence was adequate as Amanda, Jane Wyman was too old—even then—for Laura, and Kirk Douglas was quite good as the Gentleman Caller. The setting had the foggy impressionism of Warner Brothers films of that time. Max Steiner’s heavy, Teutonic score was a heavy anchor for the production to drag.
In brief, a lot can happen between the final draft and the final cut.
In the set of films I mention, only Williams adapted his own play, Streetcar. McKee, in his article, notes that some other successful adaptations were not by the playwright. He especially cites Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End. No common factor runs through his article, or in my own experience as a viewer of many adaptations.
I started writing screenplays when I adapted my World War II play, A Stranger to the Past. The play is set in a backyard in a mill town near Pittsburgh. A dark secret lies in the memory of its central character, a wounded infantryman who has come home to find the bigotry he fought against lurking in his own backyard. The play is not quite well made. It has a big hole at its center, or at least in my mind. It seemed to work in its only production at Drake.
In working through the play, I found I needed to write additional scenes, to pare away two thirds of the first act’s dialogue, and move the play about. In the screenplay I filled the hole that had been bothering with a succession of short, cinematic scenes.
The reactions to the play have been varied. It was a Finalist (final 3) out of a couple of thousand screenplays in the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s annual New Plays for the Media Competition.
An out-of-state judge sent me a very critical letter regarding the play when I entered it in the annual IMPA competition. I came in third.
The youthful out-of-state reader insisted that some of the actions and attitudes of the characters could not have existed. Actually, some of those attitudes and actions were drawn from my own life. He did not believe that people at that time spent a Sunday afternoon reading the Sunday paper, drinking lemonade and eating homemade cookies. Obviously, he did not grow up in a strict Methodist family. Another reader of the play did not see the marriage of a Protestant to a Catholic as a key plot point of conflict. Again, he had never come home from a date and had his parents grill him on the religion of the date.
I did break one rule of the period. The key characters have sex. In that time, there was a lot of petting, but not much real sex. Nobody wanted to become parents and there was no safe form of birth control. The profundity of having sex then was a serious emotional commitment, a step away from marriage, a risk, too. That risk and commitment does not carry over to the present generation. Most couples who go together for any length of time now usually have regular sex.
I failed to translate to a younger audience in a more liberal time (or what they believe to be a more liberal time!). Indeed, the problem in the play, I fear, is that I failed to make that era real enough to a younger reader. In a screenplay you can’t sit your characters down and have them discuss whether they should have sex. Sex, as in any time, happens, or it doesn’t happen. Fifty years ago we did have our guard up and were more cautious.
Finally, he said the screenplay was old-fashioned. I have gotten that reaction elsewhere for the work in both mediums. I had hoped that would be a virtue.
A more successful adaptation, to me, and one that did get optioned, was my light romantic comedy, Kefi. The play again had a single setting, a terrace on an Aegean island. The first act is a set of scenes where a jaded book editor, Ted, enters into a summer fling with a free-spirited young Austrian, Birgit.
Much of the first act is focused on language and cultural differences. Ted has found his personal Zorba in Nikos, a local wheeler-dealer. Nikos has learned American profanity and teaches it to Birgit, whose English is fractured.
The act ends with his female boss—and former lover—arriving on his terrace.
We did not really know that the boss was a woman, or that the key male character had been her lover until the opening of the second act.
To make the play work, I ditched this surprise and showed why the central character had fled his woman boss, showed the end of his affair with her, and his hating his work. I then cut between her trying to keep her business going without her top editor and Ted’s finding his kefi (Greek for a spontaneous burst of emotion).
In the process, I had to ditch a lot of dialogue I dearly loved and which had in stage performance proved to be very funny. The conflict remains—will Ted go back to New York or stay free? Will Birgit commit to a long-term relationship or will she return to Austria?
Amidst all this there is one reality. In a two-hour screenplay there is about an hour of dialogue—at most. In Stagecoach, for instance, John Wayne became a star with less than thirty lines of dialogue. Even some supporting characters had more lines.
In Kefi an extended love scene in the play became a walk on a moonlit beach. As a trail of moonlight streamed across the sea, Ted reached out and took Kefi’s hand as they walked. I suggested that bouzouki and strings pour in. On screen my dialogue for the love scene seemed superfluous. The visuals did my work for me.
As I learned to write screenplays I had the good fortune of having one of my students review my work. Jim Uhls adapted Fight Club from a novel. When he read my first work he sternly told me that fifteen- and twenty-page-long dialogue scenes would never get past a studio reader. They had to be broken up. Actions had to substituted for dialogue.
A 160-page script had to come down to 120 pages—and no more than that. The discipline of doing this taught me to write for the screen. I learned in the process that I had gained a great deal of freedom. I could take my characters many places. I could flash back and flash forward.
Recently when I wrote three long new plays, I found I had another freedom—the chance to let my characters talk and interact one to one at great length.
To transfer your play to another medium requires your acceptance of the nature of its new platform. The interesting point in all this is that plays can be transferred to the screen. They cannot go the other direction, unless they become a musical!