I had a vague recollection of the reviews being less than great, but it’s a wonderful, funny play (I remember fondly a production at the NJ Shakespeare Festival 25 years ago), and I figured “Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon – how bad could they fuck it up?”
The answer is – whoa. Pretty damn bad.
I was kind of taking it in stride – willing to ignore the addition of the slapstick byplay between Algy and Jack – but then, but then, my friends – well, I don’t know whether to spoiler this or not, so I will –
They show Gwendolyn getting “Ernest” tattooed on her creamy white English butt.
Wordsworth. Thackeray. Fitzgerald.
Ebert gave it three stars, because of the wittiness of the dialogue – apparently he’s never seen the actual play performed, because he seemed unaffected by the travesty that was this effort to appeal to modern moviegoers.
I would go with the film version of Ian Flemming’s The Spy Who Loved Me. Granted, with the exception of the first two James Bond films (Dr. No and From Russia with Love) there has been very little similarity between the two media, but the only similarity between the two in this one were two of the characters’ names (Bond’s being one).
If you are talking about musical theater to film:
I would go with** A Chorus Line**. They invented a whole nother lead character (who neither danced nor sang-I might add) with his own plot line for the film which completely changed the ending of the show.
If you are talking about stage to film:
I would go with Waiting for Godot with Burt Lahr. Lahr was so busy doing his “bits,” little of the strange yet wonderful play comes through.
Oddly enough, this is one case where you can’t really blame the filmmakers - Fleming sold the rights to the name, but not the story. They really couldn’t, legally, use the plot of the book.
They probably wouldn’t have anyway – it had been a while since the Bond films had resembled the book they were nominally based on (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service being the last time previously, although, two films later For Your Eyes Only was remarkably faithful to Risico and For Your Eyes Only, and a better film for it.)
If you’re looking for the worst book-to-film adaptation, I nominate the ever -maligned [B[Starship Troopers**. Even if you are a supporter of the film, you have to admit that it’s an abysmal adaptation, diametrically opposed to Heinlein in philosophy, used awful science, and terrible characterization. I, Robot would be a close runner-up.
Bad play adaptation? It was a good movie, but as an adaptation of a play, Lenny bears almost no resemblance to the play at all. And I do think i was, at least nominally, a adaptation.
My biggest disappointment in play-to-movie asdaptation was Amadeus, which definitely was adapted by the playwriter from his w work. In the play, you got inside Salieri’s fantasy and believed it. Nt so easy in the film. And the film made it harder to remember that this wasn’t supposed to be a biopic. Shaeffer’s play was never supposed to be confused with reality.
It would be hard to beat the sheer awfulness of the film version of Man of La Mancha.
Leonard Maltin was right when he wrote, “Beatiful source material has been raped, murdered, and buried.”
Also, they made a lot of changes to the middle as well.
Come to think of it, the book and the movie were only similar in that they were both had the same title, were set in early colonial New England, featured characters who had the same names, and involved a woman who was ostracized for having an out-of-wedlock child.
I’m not the first one to think this but I wonder if any high school student who was assigned to read The Scarlet Letter and didn’t bother to read it ever try to use the movie as a “study aid” for an exam or book report.
They also had to change some of the film’s plot since it was too close to a script treatment Kevin McClory wrote for a James Bond film he was planning to make. (The whole McClory story is pretty weird. He worked with Ian Fleming on the script to the Thunderball movie, and later claimed that he created the cinematic James Bond, who is different from the James Bond in the books. He sued the owners of James Bond to make his own movie, and has lost twice or so. And Never Say Never Again has something to do with this.)
Nicholai Gogol’s biting social satire is transformed into zany musical comedy starring Danny Kaye. Absolutely horrible. Actually, it’s got some nice songs, its just that this is totally the wrong place to use them.
I would nominate About Last Night – purportedly based on the David Mamet play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, which I’ve seen performed, and the plots of the two bear hardly any resemblance.
Actually, I didn’t think it was too bad. I was so relieved that they left the dialogue alone (for the most part) that I was willing to give them a pass on everything else.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and think about Frances O’Connor (Gwendolen) for a while.
Much the same can be said about Jerry Lewis’ Vist to a Small Planet. As a Gore Vidal play it too was a biting sociall satire but as a Lewis comedy, it was a …no, it wasn’t zany…no, it wasn’t musical (although it had some interesting bongo music)…
You could argue the television show that came later Mork and Mindy was much truer to the social satire. I have heard that My Favorite Martian was drawn from the play also but it seems more a child of the film.
I haven’t seen many plays. But I did see *Bullshot Crummond, which was recorded live, on a cable channel back in the '80s. The Palmdale Repertory Theatre did Bullshot Crummond a couple of years later. The professional play was hilarious. The local production had a few parts that were actually funnier than the other.
So I was excited when Bullshot (the movie) came out. I was disappointed.
Paint Your Wagon the stage musical is entirely different than Pain Your Wagon the movie.
The stage show centers on a white woman married to a native man while the movie centers on a a white woman married to two white men…and Clint Eastwood sings.
Bye Bye Birdie, which cut out the entire second half of the stage show.
I seem to recall reading somewhere about how A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was butchered on the way to the screen, but damned if I can remember how or why. Can anyone set me straight on that one?
