No, the affair that filmgoers have had with Shakespeare didn't begin when
Joseph Fiennes outbatted Gwyneth Paltrow in the eyelash department, or when
Tom Stoppard rewrote Marc Norman's dialogue into the smash hit that would have
made Shakespeare into his own green-eyed monster. But the film "Shakespeare in Love"
has rekindled the flames, and Shakespeare lovers cannot help but be pleased.
*************************************
In Love With Shakespeare
By Jack Mathews
Among the many observations about commercial storytelling
in John Madden's "Shakespeare in Love" is the notion,
expressed several times by Geoffrey Rush's character,
theater impresario Philip Henslowe, that despite all that can go
wrong with a production, the one under way will turn out well.
Why?
"It's a mystery," says Henslowe.
Indeed it is. Whether a story is being
prepared for the stage or the screen, it
is at least a mystery when audiences
experience an evening of genuine
magic. As "Shakespeare in Love"
writers Marc Norman and Tom
Stoppard acknowledge with a scene
where a nervous Shakespeare listens
to an audience cough its way through
"The Two Gentlemen of Verona," not even the Bard could dream
of such success.
In fact, if Shakespeare were here, he'd be as surprised as anyone
at the success of this outrageously clever comedy that imagines his
being inspired to write "Romeo and Juliet" by his own star-crossed
romance. He might find it an even bigger mystery that in the prose,
poetry and nobility-deprived age of MTV, Cliffs Notes and Bill
Clinton his life's work has become one of the hottest commodities
in pop culture.
Shakespeare is chic, and in varying degrees, has been since
movies were invented.
An Internet search of movie databases turns up a list of more than
300 film and television adaptations of his plays, the first of which
— Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree's "King John" — was made in
1899. Thus, as he himself becomes the subject of "Shakespeare in
Love," we celebrate 100 years of Shakespeare on film. In fact,
we're in the midst of a decade-long Shakespeare frenzy that has
seen 45 film and television adaptations in the 1990s alone. And
there are a half-dozen more at some stage of production.
"I think now is a good time to be doing
Shakespeare," says Leslie Urdang,
co-producer of "A Midsummer Night's
Dream," due in theaters in May.
"Partially, it's because of the
millennium. It's a time for looking
back."
Look back no farther than Kenneth
Branagh's 1989 "Henry V" for the start of the current Shakespeare
cycle. That robust battle epic was a surprise box-office success,
and propelled such subsequent hits as Franco Zeffirelli's "Hamlet,"
with Mel Gibson, Branagh's "Much Ado About Nothing," and Baz
Luhrmann's 1996 Leonardo DiCaprio/Claire Danes urban update
of "Romeo and Juliet."
Next up is Disney/Touchstone's "10 Things I Hate About You," a
retelling of "The Taming of the Shrew" through a group of high
school friends, then "A Midsummer Night's Dream," directed by
Michael Hoffman as a straight-ahead adaptation of the Bard's
puckish comedy, with Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania and Kevin Kline
as Bottom.
Among others in the pipeline:
"Love's Labour's Lost"
— The first of three new
Shakespeare adaptations that Branagh has been
commissioned to make for Miramax, the distributor of
"Shakespeare in Love." Being done as a 1930s musical,
with the songs of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and a cast
that includes Branagh, Nathan Lane and Alicia Silverstone,
the comedy has inspired several TV movies, but this will
mark its film debut.
"Hamlet" — Ethan Hawke is the Dark Prince in a
contemporary update of film's most often adapted
Shakespeare. Set in the corporate world, it co-stars Sam
Shepard as the Ghost, Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius and
Bill Murray as Polonius. It's directed by Michael
Amereyda, whose best known past work was the erotic
vampire thriller "Nadja."
"O" — This treatment of "Othello," going into production
this week, casts a contemporary version of the Moor as the
only black student in an otherwise all-white prep school.
"Titus" — Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange co-star in
the screen's first adaptation of "Titus Andronicus." Julie
Taymor, who knocked out Broadway critics and audiences
with her staging of "The Lion King," is making the film for
Disney.
Farther down the road are Branagh's planned productions
of "Macbeth," which will see another Shakespearean
journey into the corporate world, and "As You Like It,"
which the director plans to set in Kyoto, Japan.
To coin a phrase, what's up with that?
The truth is, Shakespeare has never been far from the minds of
film makers, for all the obvious reasons. His stories are heavily
plotted, rich in character, with universal themes and plenty of sex
and violence. You can adapt him without paying him or his estate a
fee, or worse, gross participation in the profits, and use his name
as an implied endorsement, even if you butcher his work beyond
recognition.
Shakespeare's enduring appeal over the centuries is his insight into
human nature, and his poetic gift for exploiting its range of
emotions, motivations and foibles. Some define the strength of his
work as a universal humanity; Columbia University literature
professor James Shapiro says it's his use of "universal anxieties."
"Scrap the humanity stuff, that doesn't wash," Shapiro says.
"Shakespeare had his finger on the pulse of cultural anxieties.
That's why his plays work for every generation. Those anxieties
are always with us."
Why they are with us now more than ever, has to do with the
changing of attitudes and of the conventional wisdom in
Hollywood. Shakespeare has always been a tough sell, but now
that Branagh, Zeffirelli and, in particular, Luhrmann have
demonstrated its commercial appeal, the Bard is a player.
"Luhrmann's ‘Romeo and Juliet' broke the mold," says Gil Junger,
the director of "10 Things I Hate About You." "He's the key
player in taking Shakespeare and putting him in the mainstream as
something hip and intriguing."
But before Luhrmann, there was Mel
Gibson, whose decision to play
Zeffirelli's "Hamlet" proved to be
neither a career embarrassment nor a
stunt. He did Hamlet proud, brought
people to the play who might
otherwise not have seen it, and his
willingness to defer his normally
gargantuan fee in order to test his mettle with the Bard inspired
other stars to make the same deal.
Ethan Hawke has been quoted as saying he signed on for the latest
"Hamlet" because "I don't want to wake up at 65 not having done
it."
"Actors are attracted to great material, and there is none better
than Shakespeare," says Urdang. "They also know a Shakespeare
film will never be ‘Titanic,' and they're eager to participate in
telling
one of the Shakespeare stories without inhibiting it [with high
salary demands]."
In a way, the current Shakespeare wave is a summary of all that
has been done before. In the silent era, and into the ‘30s and ‘40s,
Shakespeare adaptations tended to be done as literally as
possible, given the time constraints of the new medium.
Shakespeare did go on.
In the 1950s, as the film studios attempted to stave off the erosion
of their audiences to television, Shakespeare plots found their way
into other genres. "The Taming of the Shrew" informed the stage
and screen versions of "Kiss Me Kate." "Romeo and Juliet"
became a story of crosstown, star-crossed lovers in the musical
"West Side Story." "Othello" was updated as a tale of interracial
love between a singer and her bandleader in "All Night Long"
(Iago is on drums). And "The Tempest" was the template for the
1956 sci-fi classic "Forbidden Planet."
The gangster movie "Joe Macbeth" and the Western "Johnny
Hamlet" speak for themselves.
Meanwhile, in Japan, Akira Kurosawa reimagined "Macbeth" as a
samurai lord in "Throne of Blood," and would later do the same
for "King Lear" with his last masterpiece, "Ran."
Hollywood returned periodically to Shakespeare in the '70s and
'80s, but left most of the heavy lifting of the Bard to "Masterpiece
Theatre" and the BBC, where, unfortunately, his modern
reputation as a literary boy toy for the cultural elite was
perpetuated.
It's one of the great modern ironies that history's most popular
mass media — film and television — feel unworthy of its most
popular storyteller. Shakespeare was merely a genius, not a snob.
"I concur with the idea that if
Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be
writing movies and television,"
"Richard III" director Richard
Loncraine told Cineaste magazine
recently. "He was obviously a man of
the moment, and he was not averse to
commerciality."
Says Junger: "If he were here, he'd be closing a $36 million,
three-picture deal right now, and driving around in a Porsche."
In his place, Branagh has a three-picture deal, with Miramax, and
his willingness to put the lyrics of Porter and Berlin into the mouths
of Shakespeare characters reveals no lingering embarrassment
over broadening the master's appeal to contemporary audiences.
"When Nathan Lane sings ‘There's No Business Like Show
Business,' audiences will love it," says Miramax co-founder
Harvey Weinstein, who just returned from the English set of Love's Labour's Lost."
"If Shakespeare were around, he'd be the
biggest proponent of these movies."
Will "Shakespeare in Love" put even more of his plays into action
in Hollywood? Count on it.
"The film business … has never been an easy marriage of art and
commerce," says Loncraine. "But if a Shakespeare film makes
money … then it will encourage studios to make other
Shakespeare films."
Of course, the movies have to be good to make money, and
there's the rub. No one can predict when or how one will turn out
well, and a look at its 10-year struggle to reach the screen shows
that no one knew "Shakespeare in Love" would make it, either.
Inspired by a passing comment from his son, veteran screenwriter
Norman took the scenic route through development hell, watching
helpless on the sidelines as the project lurched along on the news
that Julia Roberts would play Viola … no, Winona Ryder, no,
Jodie Foster, no, Meg Ryan.
Would "Shakespeare in Love" have worked as well with any one
of those actresses? Surely, Gwyneth Paltrow art more lovely. If
Stoppard, a playwright with a proven record of matching wits with
the Bard ("Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"), had not
been brought in to add most of its inside-theater dialogue, would
the film's fans still include dazzled Shakespeare scholars? If original
director Ed Zwick, a man with a passion for action and spectacle
("The Siege," "Legends of the Fall"), had made it, would it have
been as warm and wise?
Would we still be talking about its 13 Oscar nominations, its
healthy popularity at the box office and the likely forward
momentum it will give the current renaissance of filmed
Shakespeare?
The certainty is that any change in "Shakespeare in Love's"
creative pedigree would have produced a different movie, one that
would have had to defy all odds to turn out half as well. The
defining moment of "Shakespeare in Love" comes near the end,
when Henslowe's promised mystery unfolds, and a knocked-out
audience at the afternoon premiere of "Romeo and Juliet" realizes
what they've just seen.
Their reaction to the play is our reaction to the movie. It's a
moment of perfect theatrical symmetry — fictional and live
audiences in sync. Shapiro credits the brilliance of that moment to
the staging of "Romeo and Juliet" that precedes it.
"The five minutes of ‘Romeo and Juliet' in the movie are the finest
five minutes of Shakespeare I have ever seen, or ever hope to
see," says Columbia University's Shapiro.
Shapiro and other Shakespeare
scholars have embraced the film both
for its entertainment value to them, and
for its inevitable impact on the culture.
It's an old saw; anything that
introduces Shakespeare to a reluctant
mainstream audience is good, even if
Shakespeare, a man of ambivalent
sexuality, is reinvented as a horny, literary pack rat who can't get
his pen moving without a proper muse.
"My sense is that once in a decade, a Shakespeare movie comes
along that changes the way we think about Shakespeare or one of
his plays," says Shapiro. "I'm waiting to see which of the [coming
films] is going to emerge from the pack. But for now,
‘Shakespeare in Love' stands outside of it."
And it's almost pointless to wonder why.
"You need every miracle, every lucky break, and in the darkest
hour, you can't panic," Weinstein says. "And when it all works,
you still don't know how it happened."
It's a mystery.
‘Hamlet' rules!
Sarah Bernhardt was the first and Ethan Hawke will be the next to
play the Danish prince in "Hamlet," which, with 45 film and
television adaptations, leads the list of most frequently adapted
Shakespeare.
1."Hamlet" (41 adaptations)
2."Romeo and Juliet" (25)
3."Macbeth" (24)
4."Othello" (22)
5."A Midsummer Night's Dream" (18)
6."King Lear" (16)
7."The Merchant of Venice" (12)
8."As You Like It" (10)
9.(tie) "Much Ado About Nothing"
Will and Oscar
The 13 Academy Award nominations for "Shakespeare in Love"
are the most for any movie about or adapted from the works of
William Shakespeare. But it will have to win almost all of them to
depose "West Side Story" as the all-time Shakespeare Oscar
winner.
1."West Side Story" (1961) — Eleven nominations. Ten
wins, for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (George
hakiris), Supporting Actress (Rita Moreno), Art
Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing,
Music and Sound.
2."Hamlet" (1948) — Seven nominations. Four wins, for
Best Picture, Best Actor (Laurence Olivier), Art Direction
and Costume Design.
3."Julius Caesar" (1953) — Five nominations, including
Best Picture. One win, for Art Direction.
4.(tie). "Romeo and Juliet" (1968) — Four nominations,
including Best Picture and Best Director. Two wins, for
Cinematography and Costume Design.
5."A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1935) — Three
nominations, including Best Picture. Two wins, for
Cinematography and Film Editing.
6."Ran" (1985) — Four nominations, including Best
Director. One win, for Costume Design.
7."Henry V" (1989). Three nominations. One win, for
Costume Design.
(Thanks to Paula Brait)
After 41 Hamlets & 25 Romeos, H'wood proves there's much ado about Will
Daily News Movie Critic
February 28, 1999
"Antony and Cleopatra" (1)
"A Double Life" (1947) — Four nominations. Two wins,
for Best Actor (Ronald Colman) and Music.
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