[Mb-civic] From page to screen - Boston Globe Editorial

[William Swiggard]

   From page to screen

January 7, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

"BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN" has leapt from the pages of an Annie Proulx short 
story to the silver screen, stirring up some readers' hopes that other 
short prose favorites might make the jump.

Turning books and short stories into movies is old news. But doing it 
well is a challenge. Jay Gatsby is still waiting for his cinematic 
justice. Making compelling movies out of the least likely prose 
candidates demands creativity, sometimes even wizardry.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Proulx said she had no 
idea the story would become a movie, doubting that it would even be 
published by a magazine because its subject matter, a gay relationship 
between two cowboys, was ''not in the usual ruts of the literary road." 
But The New Yorker published the story in 1997, and now it's a movie 
sensation.

Hungry literature fans want to know what's next, what makes or remakes 
of classics or new works might -- in the right, skillful hands -- become 
films. Once upon a time, literary writers went to Hollywood and cranked 
out screenplays, with varying degrees of success. F. Scott Fitzgerald, 
Nathanael West, William Faulkner, and others all hammered away on 
screenplays. At their best, they built bridges between words and film, 
closing a gap by grounding movies in a literary sensibility.

And while Faulkner's prose can be tough to read, not to mention 
translate to film, perhaps ''The Bear," with its layered images of 
hunting and nature stretching over a young man's life, could be a good film.

In the opening sentence of Katherine Ann Porter's short story, ''María 
Concepción," the title character ''walked carefully, keeping to the 
middle of the white dusty road, where the maguey thorns and the 
treacherous curved spines of organ cactus had not gathered so 
profusely." She could well be on her way to the heart of a visually lush 
movie.

Mark Twain dictated ''The War Prayer," a controversial small prose 
explosion about an ''unnaturally pale" ''aged stranger" who speaks the 
unsaid portion of a minister's prayer for victory, a dark plea that says 
in part, ''O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody 
shreds with our shells." It's risky to turn such a short piece with no 
plot into a film, but it's intriguing to imagine a movie about an angry 
prophet.

Filmmakers might also hunt through the short works of Raymond Carver, 
Alice Munro, or Louise Erdrich or scan the short story anthologies to 
find less well-known writers, such as Mary Yukari Waters.

There are millions of pages of possibilities that might fulfill the 
first commandment of reading and moviegoing audiences: Show us in epic 
detail what we haven't seen before. 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/01/07/from_page_to_screen/
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