The Screengrab : nicol williamson

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:30:00 GMT

EVITA (1996)

The Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice pop-rock opera tells the story of a breathtakingly ambitious woman who sleeps her way to the top, then demands to be taken seriously (to the point of deification), yet no amount of money, power or adulation can ever satisfy her ravenous ego. For some reason, Madonna thought she’d be perfect for the part, and even learned to sing (fifteen years into her career as a singer) to hit the high notes of theater geek staples like “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” Unfortunately, the Material Girl’s participation in the project didn’t end with acting: while the Broadway production was about a flawed despot’s wife who embodies style-over-substance “truthiness" (imagining herself as a savior of the common people while really serving no one but herself), Madonna apparently insisted on scrubbing away her character’s flaws, transforming the story into a historically dissonant La Isla Bonita version of A Star Is Born, featuring a scrappy, sexy gal who uses her moxie to make it big (and wear a lot of swanky ‘40s fashion), robbing the musical of most of its thematic purpose and resonance and rendering Antonio Banderas’ role as Evita’s antagonist essentially pointless.

HAMLET (1969)

The movie versions of John Osborne's "angry young man" plays Look Back in Anger (starring Richard Burton) and The Entertainer (starring Laurence Olivier) -- plays that Richardson himself had staged in the theater -- are marred by clumsy film technique and the deadness one associates with inept efforts to "open out" stage plays, but they remain valuable records of great performances by legendary actors working with material that changed the face of theater. But Richardson's Hamlet, which wears its staginess on its sleeve and stars Nicol Williamson in the title role, is an embarrassing relic of its moment: a disastrous attempt to make Shakespeare relevant to the 1960s by pimping it out with sexual overtones (some of them supplied by Marianne Faithfull, who plays Ophelia, and who comes across as sweet, hard-working, and very confused) while emphasizing the generation gap angle (despite the casting, as Hamlet's stepfather and mother, of performers, Anthony Hopkins and Judy Parfitt, who were younger than Williamson). Williamson's performance itself is some kind of landmark in bad Shakespearean acting: too self-contained to connect with the other performers and wearing a fresh layer of varnish on his popping eyeballs, he gives a demonstration of how it's possible to use the lines to show off the speed of one's word rate and the showiness of one's delivery without using the words to express a thing. From several years' perspective, the whole thing may be best seen as an inside joke done in preparation for Williamson's performance, two decades later, as John Barrymore in Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet. Which had its own problems.

KING LEAR (1971)

Peter Brooks' controversial, celebrated 1960s production was reportedly modeled on Samuel Beckett, with a resigned attitude towards the horrors that befall Lear and the other characters, and with the star, Paul Scofield, employing what Susan Sontag described as "arbitrary vocal mannerisms that deadened the full emotional power of his lines." "Deadened" is an accurate term for the production as it comes across in this black-and-white movie version, which seems to be an attempt to "modernize" the text by making it as far from moving as possible.

MACBETH (1948)

In his greatest Shakespeare movies, Chimes at Midnight and Othello, Orson Welles managed to draw inspiration for striking and powerful images from the desperation caused by his lack of funds, but he came a cropper here, working on too tight a budget and shooting schedule for Republic Pictures. In his cutting and reshaping of the text, Welles sometimes made dramatic logic subservient to his requisite Big Idea, that the witches and their cat's-paw, Macbeth, represented a barbaric, Druidic religion at war with the coming of Christianity. (He didn't do himself or the ears of his audience any favors with his other big idea, that the actors should attempt Scottish accents.) Other problems were beyond his control, such as the cheapo costumes that Republic supplied him with: the movie may be most notorious for its headgear, especially the sight of Welles in a "crown" that looks like a square box with three triangular points glued to the side, which Welles himself acknowledged made him look like he was playing the Statue of Liberty. It must be said that, as befits a play with a curse on it, Macbeth has probably inspired more rotten movie adaptations than any other great play, the most recent being a 2006 Australian movie, directed by Geofrey Wright, which was set among modern drug dealers in Melbourne, with leads who might have stepped out of a photo spread in Maxim; it plays like Miami Vice spoken in verse, with an Aussie accent. And that's not even taking into account all the movies that dump the bard's dialogue while, with a wink to the audience, using his plot. (These include the 1990 gangster movie Men of Respect, starring John Turturro and his wife Katherine Borowitz, and the godawful Scotland, Pa., in which James Le Gros and Maura Tierney attempt to rise in the fast-food industry by feeding their boss, Duncan, into the deep-fat fryer.)

LOVES LABOUR'S LOST (2000)

When Kenneth Branagh's Henry V opened months after the death of Laurence Olivier, critics rushed to embrace its young director-star as Olivier's heir apparent. But though Branagh has certainly had his moments since then, his directing career has been heavier on the Princess and the Showgirls than on the Hamlets. Bad as his attempts to experiment outside his Shakespeare roots (such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Peter's Friends) have been, he really found the worst of both worlds with the first-ever movie version of this Shakespeare comedy, staged as a musical and crammed with actors who lacked experience in both classical theater and singing and dancing. Miramax Studios took one look at the results and flushed its three-picture deal with Branagh down the toilet, thus establishing once and for all that Harvey Weinstein is a Friend of the Theater.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)

Norman Jewison is a lousy director, and his thoroughly inept Fiddler On The Roof (source material I don't really care about one way or the other) did me a great service when I was a teenager by demonstrating (years before I'd seen Kevin Smith movies) exactly what inept mise-en-scene looks like. Early on, Topol is dancing in the barn. The frame is widescreen, and Jewison has so little idea of how to fill it that one half of the screen is Topol; the other half is a cow's ass. This is one of the crowning insults in the long history of rejected visual innovations on-screen. Why, if only I could find an amateur video of a Japanese stage production, even that would be an improvement. Oh wait, there it is!

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

APT PUPIL

Bryan Singer's adaptation was not the first version of this Stephen King novella. In 1987, British Director Alan Bridges had Nicol Williamson and Ricky Schroder in the leads of this story concerning a teenager discovering his elderly neighbor's Nazi past. Unfortunately, the film ran over budget and with ten days of filming left, the financing ran out and the film shut down. Accounts vary of just how much was left to shoot. Stephen King had reportedly seen a 3/4 rough cut and commented it was "really good" while the writers, Ken and Jim Wheat, reported seeing an assemblage of forty minutes' worth of footage. By the time financing was found to complete the shoot a year later, Schroder had grown too too old to continue in his role and there was no way to finish the film short of a full re-shoot. To date, the footage has never been shown to the public, though if there's ever a special edition of Bryan Singer's version, one hopes that the director would be able to snag the rights to include Alan Bridge's version as a bonus feature.

IN GOD'S HANDS

It is a tragic fact that many early feature films have been lost forever due to negligence and poor preservation. What's horrifying is to find out that even in the 21st Century, an entire feature film can be lost due to an accident, especially when its not the new Eddie Murphy comedy but it comes from someone like filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan. In God's Hands was produced by Stephen Soderbergh's Section Eight outfit and starred Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a couple who've lost their child. Unfortunately, the entire camera negative of the film was damaged, causing it to be lost. I'm still stunned that someone on the film didn't realize something was wrong after the first few days of shooting just by checking the rushes, but the damage had been done. Kerrigan, who bounced back with Keane, has expressed no interest in trying to re-shoot In God's Hands. This is one of those cases that could be used as a backhanded argument for abandoning film to shoot digital.

THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER

This British animation has the distinction of having had the longest production phase ever. Renowned animator Richard Williams started the project in 1965, animating it part time and financing the project through the odd commercial jobs and work on other films, such as Murder on the Orient Express, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the credit sequences on some of the "Pink Panther" films. After endearing himself to the powers that be by serving as animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams was finally able to get financing to complete the film, but a variety of factors resulted in its being taken away from him by Mirimax and handed over to television animator Fred Calvert. Despite numerous promises from various parties to try and complete the film according to Williams's original design, this probably won't be happening anytime soon. The original workprint of the film can be found on YouTube. The "completed" bastardisation edition can be bought from your local Blockbuster Bargain bucket, hidden under a couple hundred copies of Norbit.

MY BEST FRIEND'S BIRTHDAY

Unofficially considered by those in the know as Quentin Tarentino's directorial debut, this is a far cry from Reservoir Dogs. Shot on Super 16mm over a few years, the completed 70-minute cut was lost in a fire, and so what survives is about 30-40 minutes of rough footage. Is it watchable? It has certainly has had a cult following grow around it, and despite its technical issues, it is in, IMHO, a far more enjoyable time waster than Death Proof.

ARRIVE ALIVE

Jeremiah Chechik is one unlucky man. His second film was supposed to be a comedy featuring Willem Dafoe as a hotel manager who falls for Joan Cusack as one of the guests. It was co-written by National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live veteran and self-styled "dangerous comedian" Michael O'Donoghue and produced by Art Linson. Unfortunately after two weeks of shooting, Linson pulled the plug and wrote off a couple of million dollars. Why? Apparently, it was due to Dafoe's performance, an attempt to bring "edge" to a romantic-comedy leading-man part that Linson, in his book A Pound of Flesh, described as "terrifying". Chechik managed to bounce back with Benny & Joon before his career was nearly destroyed with The Avengers, one of those productions where 50% of the production ended up on the cutting room floor.

QUE VIVA MEXICO

This was to be Sergei Eisenstein's first film made outside Russia, co-produced by renowned American novelist, Upton Sinclair. Unfortunately, after cost-overruns and other problems, Eisenstein was summoned back to the Soviet Union by Stalin (who can refuse an invitation like that?) leaving behind over 200,000 feet of unedited footage. Despite promises to send the footage to the USSR for the director to edit, this never came to pass, and instead several different edited versions of the film have appeared under different titles over the years, most of them falling into obscurity. None of the versions come close to what Eisenstein may have wanted but the film is still inspiring people to take a shot at it. (This YouTube clip is a trailer to promote the latest attempt at a restoration from Lutz Becker).

--Phil Nugent; Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 1.

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

6. DR. EUDORA NESBITT FLETCHER (MIA FARROW) in ZELIG (1983)

For much of his film career, Woody Allen usually showed his full intensity when he applied himself to two kinds of scenes: those dealing with his search for the perfect woman, and those dealing with his search for the perfect therapist. He reached an apex of some sort in the parody documentary Zelig, where Allen's human-chameleon character finds the perfect woman in his psychiatrist, who helps him deal with his condition, and even rescues him from Nazi Germany. This paragon, who eventually marries her patient and lives happily ever after with him in wedded bliss, is of course played by Mia Farrow, who at the time was auditioning for the role of the director's idea of the perfect woman in real life.

7. DR. SIDNEY SCHAEFER (JAMES COBURN) in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

Dr. Schaefer is the embodiment of the hip shrink in the swinging '60s era, a strutting, phallic super-intellectual who is the psychiatrist as member of the Best and the Brightest. Lured away from his hepcat bachelor pad, he is brought into the halls of Washington power to serve his country as best he can--by giving the President of the United States someone to unburden himself to. Unfortunately, Dr. Schaefer grows increasingly paranoid as the president shares more and more secrets of his office with him in the course of his treatment. Even worse, it turns out that he's not paranoid at all: foreign powers are out to abduct him to find out what he knows, and government agents are ordered to assassinate him so that he won't be a potential threat. In the end, Schaefer endears himself to the smartest of the American agents (Godfrey Cambridge) and Russians (Severn Darden) on his trail by helping them deal with their neuroses, and together they bring down the ultimate threat, a sinister, monopolistic telephone company.

8. DR. ROBERT ELLIOTT (MICHAEL CAINE) in DRESSED TO KILL (1980)

In what's widely acknowledged to be the lamest and most interminable scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, psychiatrist Simon Oakland helpfully explains Norman Bates' split personality by positing that whenever Norman was aroused by a woman, the Mother side of his personality would take over and kill the object of his lust. Leave it to apt Hitchcock pupil Brian De Palma to turn this already perverse idea on its ear in his most Psycho-like film, Dressed to Kill. The pitch: "what if Norman Bates and Simon Oakland were really the same person?!?!?" By day, Dr. Robert Elliott is a psychiatrist catering mostly to bored Manhattanites. Dr. Elliott's couch-side manner is sound, somewhat distant but always professional, even when the occasional patient comes on to him. But all is not right in Dr. Elliott's life- he keeps getting menacing calls from a former patient named Bobbi, by his/her own admission "a woman trapped in a man's body." And what's happened to the doctor's straight razor? In case you hadn't guessed, Bobbi is Dr. Elliott, and vice versa, and like Norman Bates, the Bobbi personality takes over whenever Dr. Elliott gets turned on, like when hot-to-trot patient Angie Dickinson comes on to him. He deals with the situation by stalking her as she enjoys a hot afternoon with an anonymous pickup and knifing her to death in an elevator. Dr. Louis Judd would be regard the outcome as a welcome victory for his side.

9. DR. SIGMUND FREUD (ALAN ARKIN) in THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION (1976)

Herbert Ross’ appealing adaptation of Nicholas Meyer’s winning novel is chock-full of tall orders in the casting department. Ross scored big right off the bat by getting Nicol Williamson to play the role of the world’s greatest detective in his revisionist Sherlock Holmes yarn, and followed it up by getting heavy hitters like Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave to round out the cast. But who would he feature as Dr. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology and the rogue physician to whom Holmes appeals to cure his insidious addiction to cocaine? Would you believe. . . Alan Arkin? And would you further believe that Arkin is damn near the best thing about the movie? It would have been easy enough to play his hand as one of the most towering cultural figures of the 20th century entirely as a goof, delivering some variant of his then-current New York sharpie persona. But instead, he’s downright charming, underplaying the man from Vienna nicely, which allows his interactions with the histrionically intense Williamson as Holmes to become wondrous little bits of acting. The movie’s plot is a bit woozy, but Arkin – who, twenty years later, would play a somewhat less adventurous shrink in Grosse Pointe Blank – is still a delight.

10. [TIE]: DR. STIRLING (ANNE HECHE) in PROZAC NATION (2001) and DR. GIBBON (MEL GIBSON) in THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003)

To tell the truth, these are both terrible movies — Prozac Nation didn't even get released theatrically — and neither of these characters is especially notable. But we just get a kick out of the fact that somebody thought it would be a good idea to cast these particular actors as mental health professionals.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.