Broadway to Hollywood: Part One

Stage language vs Film Language

When adapting a stage work to film, Alfred Hitchcock's advice was, "Don't open it up."*

In Hitchcock's view, the very thing that makes a play a success on stage is in its structure--the exact thing that the process of 'opening it up' for film treatment would jeopardize. The two films Hitchcock made of stage works, Dial 'M' For Murder and Rope, are claustrophobic in nature. The action takes place mostly in small rooms - focusing on a single location, mimicking the setting of the works as they appeared on stage.

Other stage-to-film transfers have succeeded without substantial departure from the stage structure. Reportedly, Elia Kazan was not originally interested in reproducing the stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire for film, and initially conceived of an elaborate opening-up of the material which would have incorporated scenes that are only talked about in the play--going back to Belle Reve where Blanche's downfall prior to coming to stay with her sister and husband began. Ultimately, Kazan abandoned the concept, opting to go with a script and film-staging that would stick closely to the original play and using three of the four original stage stars (and incorporating Vivien Leigh from the London production).

Other adapters of stage works for the screen, however, would opt to re-structure stage works for film, attempting to provide in filmic language that which was communicated on stage through dialogue and other more theatrical language.

Language, in fact, becomes the preeminent element in a discussion of the translation of stage works to the movies. Works for the the theatre tend to focus on the written/spoken word as their basis, often leaving much of the action of a given plot to the imagination of the audience. Movies, on the other hand, excel in the use of visual language.

Perhaps because movies began life as a wordless set of moving pictures, movies learned to tell stories in pictures rather than words. Theatre works, on the other hand, had survived the centuries primarily through the written text. Ancient works from Greece and Rome survive today as texts, and though we still have limited knowledge as to the actual performance practices of the time, from the texts we learn that these plays, like the texts that would come after them for centuries, tended to provide action in words--with much of the action of a given story described in speech as an off-stage event.

The works of Shakespeare, which have survived five hundred years of various performance practices, also remain today essentially as written texts. These texts, while bound to their words, are wide open--often taking place in many different locations and employing very large casts, unlike the traditional late 19th and 20th century drama which became bound to scenery and often limited itself to a few scenic locations and often, smaller casts.

Scholars argue about the suitability of classic texts, particularly Shakespearean ones, to the cinema. While some argue that Shakespeare's works are perfect for film in their vast number of locations, and often epic sweep, others complain that Shakespeare, as a verbal medium, is at an immediate disadvantage on film, with the camera being able to provide that which Shakespeare must provide in words, making his texts redundant on film.

In the earliest days of stage performance, we have learned that often masks would be employed to convey the overall persona and sometimes emotional state of a character. The actor became the vessel through which a story would be told, but the actor's delivery was not expected to mimic the reality of life as later acting would.

By the 19th century, however, stage acting had developed to the point that George Bernard Shaw described a performance of the great Eleanor Duse as being so real, spontaneous, and life-like, that he actually saw her blush on cue.

As 'mimetic' acting developed in the 20th century, film arguably became an even more relevant medium than the stage for catching the nuances of acting performances which attempted to simulate life as realistically as possible. The close-up was able to see the tiniest facial movements, the look behind the eyes, and the slightest glimmers of emotion. On stage, even an audience in the first row may not see such nuances, so the language of the theatre needed to remain somewhat separate from the movies. While a close-up could tell you much about what a character was thinking, the theatre audience, seated hundreds of feet away from the actor, needed a theatrical equivalent to tell them what was happening in the mind of the character.

It is perhaps, no coincidence, that just as The Method was beginning to take a hold of actors in New York (and later Hollywood), Rodgers and Hammerstein were solidifying the revolution that had begun in the world of the Broadway musical. Though there had been many, many steps on the developmental road to Oklahoma!, and it was not exactly, as it is often called, the first integrated musical, it did bring about an enormous change. After Oklahoma! and the Rodgers and Hammerstein follow-up, Carousel, musicals began to be an art form to take seriously on their own. The "musical play" as it was sometimes called (as opposed to the "musical comedy" which even in the era of Integration still showed its roots in vaudeville and burlesque), was a new opportunity for musicals to communicate as serious art.

Opera had become a serious form of music-theatre in previous centuries, but often opera spoke in languages not known to the ears of its audiences, and even though many operas had extremely complicated stories, the music was the focus. The mid-twentieth century musical, with its combination of spoken scenes, story-driven dances, and musical sequences sung in a language the audience could understand, provided the stage with the exact thing it needed to compete with the burgeoning world of 'mimetic' acting on the screen and the live television drama. The musical theatre became a language all its own, and for that reason, it would become a notoriously tricky proposition to translate this language, built in opposition to the tools of the camera, to the language of the movies...

*According to Peter Bogdanovich