“Anthony. It’s easy. Plays are just like television except the scenes are longer.”
This was the advice a friend of mine gave me when, after decades working as a screenwriter, I embarked on my first play. My friend is also a screenwriter and has written quite a few plays, so I was swept up in his assuredness. “I can do this!” I thought.
I was also encouraged when I remembered that one of my favourite films, 12 Angry Men, was originally a play, along with as a bunch of other classic films I really liked – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Casablanca, A Few Good Men, Amadeus and, more recently, The Father.
The play I ended up writing was called The Norman Mailer Anecdote and was set in one room, over one night, as a wealthy family dealt with an historical sexual assault allegation brought against one of its members.
As you can imagine, the play was very timely and the acclaim it received, including a Queensland Premier’s Drama Award shortlisting, was a blessed relief more than anything. The subject matter is delicate and triggering and I was petrified I’d screw it up. Thankfully, by all accounts, I didn’t.
As a result, there has been interest in adapting the play into a feature film. I’ve already had a number of pitch meetings with fancy Sydney producers and received some funding (thank you Screen Queensland).
But now, instead of saying “I can do this!”, I’m thinking … How do I do this? You see, despite what my friend claimed, plays and films are really different.
Firstly, films are all about images. Movies gain their momentum by literally moving the characters from location to location in short sharp scenes that visually evolve with the story. One minute they’re in a desert, the next they’re in the boot of a car. They’re not called movies for nothing.
Not only that but the characters are literally changing size with the story – close up, medium shot, wide shot. In cinema, a well-framed angle can start a love affair or end an intergalactic war.
Stage plays, however, can’t change locations without some clever set design or exposition to tell the audience where they are now and they can’t suddenly do a close-up on the single tear rolling down the lead actor’s face.
As a result, plays are all about the words. Not only what the actors are saying, but how they’re saying it – the rhythms they create, the cadence, the poetry, the pace, the precarious tightrope act of emotion and meaning taking place between the actors in real time in front of a live audience. These are the “special effects” of stage plays (let’s see AI approximate that sort of corporeal magic anytime soon).
So, to land this adaptation the words of my play will somehow, magically, become the movement and images of film. Hard questions will be asked. A scene that builds with a fearsome velocity over 30 pages on stage might be recalibrated into shorter sharper scenes for the screen. Or a whole speech might be distilled into the quiver of an actor’s eyebrow. Or the single room of the play might expand to become more “cinematic” – a labyrinthine mansion. A neighbourhood. A city.
This is because adaptation is never a clone. It has the same DNA but it’s evolved. It’s a new beast. There will be cuts, there always are, and they’re always painful. But a lot will remain, of course. One room, one night, three characters, a life-changing dilemma.
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The play’s namesake, the titanic American writer Norman Mailer, famously hated the adaptation of his most famous book, The Naked and the Dead. He ended up creating his own semi-improvised films. He loved film (although Hollywood did not always love him back, not in the way literature did).
I love film too. It’s where I started, where I remain, but I’m seeing it with new eyes now. Or rather, hearing it via the language of theatre.
After a successful career as a screenwriter, Brisbane-based Anthony Mullins wrote his first play, The Norman Mailer Anecdote, which was a finalist in the Premier’s Drama Awards and enjoyed a sold-out season at Queensland Theatre. Now he’s adapting it to film.
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