American Theatre Magazine

By Charles Evered

Should a playwright making a movie stick to his guns?

Visions of calamity dance through the heads of playwrights when they think of exposing their work to the world of film. When I told people I was hired to direct a feature version of my play, most of my playwright friends peered back at me with scrunched-up foreheads and questioning eyes: “Why?” they would inevitably intone. (I couldn’t help thinking of Charlton Heston at the end of the first Planet of the Apes: Whyyyyyyyyy!!!?)

Some of their comments were: “You’ll be fired within two weeks.” “They don’t care about character.” And, of course: “Didn’t you see Barton Fink?”

A bit of background: The film Adopt a Sailor is based on a ten minute play I wrote in 2002 that was part of an evening of short plays presented at Town Hall in New York City in a program called “Brave New World,” meant to commemorate the first anniversary of the attacks on 9/11. A few years after that I wrote a longer version of Adopt a Sailor that, like most of my plays, was published by Broadway Play Publishing; soon after that, I decided to take a stab at adapting the longer version for the screen. It was this adaptation that attracted the interest of a film producer on the West Coast.

Now, it is at this point, (after the initial news of interest from the West Coast) that things usually go wrong for playwrights. However, there are things one can do to, if not prevent, at least mitigate these unavoidable developments. First, you have to understand at least the underpinnings of basic business 101. When you sell something, you no longer own it. In the world that we travel in, that means the following: Once you take “Hollywood money,” you’re an employee. A writer for hire only.

This is something people do voluntarily. I note that, because I don’t know if there’s anything more grating than hearing the lament of a well-compensated playwright complaining about how “awfully” Hollywood has treated him or her. If you don’t want to expose yourself to the possibility of mistreatment, by all means don’t sell your material to movie people. In fact, don’t even go out for coffee with them.

Thanks, however, to amazing technological advances lately, (namely cheap cameras), we have a few more choices. People can make credible movies themselves for very little money—in some cases, if you have lots of inspired friends with skills, no money at all. Feature films, (completed ones), are in fact, the new spec scripts— there are, in short, way too many of them. The bottom line: People should not make movies because they can but because they must.

Before I jumped off the cliff, I made sure my producer and I were on the same page. Did my producer and I agree on everything? Absolutely not. But at the same time, I didn’t assume that just because I wrote the play that I knew everything there was to know about making the movie version of it.

One of the first things my producer and I agreed upon was that a lot of movie adaptations of plays go wrong because the filmmakers tend to overcompensate and feel they have to rip apart the essence of the play in order to “open it up”—for fear of it being too “play like” in its final cinematic form. What I realized, after studying lots of films based on plays, was that, yes, sometimes the narrative benefitted from “opening” scenes up, but in just as many cases, “opening something up” just for the sake of it often diminished what was so powerful about the play in the first place.

So I decided that structurally I would indeed “open it up”—but only when it made narrative sense. The story remains the same: a sophisticated couple from Manhattan “adopts” a sailor from Arkansas during Fleet Week. The three of them have dinner—and change each other’s lives forever. That’s it. That’s the movie.

Now, did moving forward like this win the trust and utter confidence of all in the room? Not always. In fact, it was the theatre process that again saved me. We rehearsed the scenes, sometimes, just before shooting—just as we would during a theatrical production. When the producers saw how well the scenes worked—that they were taut all by themselves—it made them feel more confident the film might work this way.

What I’ve learned is: Audiences won’t mind if your characters talk a lot as long as they care about what it is they’re talking about. There were, of course, notes at some points about “adding a character here” or “a little more action there.” Why shouldn’t there be? But it was my job to convince the producers that within the context of our little film, Patricia burning the chicken, for instance, constituted all by itself an “action scene.” When a theatre artist opens his mind and heart to melding the intersection of the stage and the world of the cinema, wondrous things can happen. And more important, good work can get done.

When Bebe Neuwirth (who plays Patricia) was asked why the film successfully built on its dramatic origins, she said, “It works for the same reason it worked as a play: You know and see everything you need to within a spare but elegantly profound framework.”

Peter Coyote, (who plays Richard), added, “It’s the way the film was shot. The story was allowed to breathe internally—both in the writing and the filming. And when a story contains three complicated characters, there isn’t as much need to explore outside of the space between them.”

And so what did I learn? Well, mostly this: Don’t run away from the fact that you’re a playwright. Sometimes the best thing to do is to run toward it.