Theatrical Adaptation
Movies sometimes use plays as their sources. William Shakespeare has been called the most popular screenwriter in Hollywood. There are not only film versions of most of Shakespeare's works but also multiple versions of many of the plays. Numerous spinoffs adapt Shakespeare's plays very loosely (such as West Side Story, Kiss Me, Kate, The Lion King, O, and 10 Things I Hate about You. Adaptations in languages other than English flourish around the globe, such as Akira Kurosawa's two epic films Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985), and Eric Rohmer's Conte d'hiver (A Tale of Winter, 1992).
Similarly, hit Broadway plays are frequently adapted, whether from musicals or dramas. On one hand, theatrical adaptation does not involve as many interpolations or elisions as novel adaptation, but on the other, the demands of scenery and possibilities of motion frequently entail changes from one medium to the other. Film critics will often mention if an adapted play has a static camera or emulates a proscenium arch. Laurence Olivier consciously imitated the arch with his Henry V (1944), having the camera begin to move and to use color stock after the prologue, indicating the passage from physical to imaginative space. Sometimes, the adaptive process can continue after one translation. Mel Brooks' The Producers was a film that was adapted into a Broadway musical and then adapted again into a film.
Read more about this topic: Film Adaptation
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