Latest / Secret Movie Club Podcast / SMC Pod #218: From the stage to the screen-Adapting plays into movies

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SMC Pod #218: From the stage to the screen-Adapting plays into movies · Secret Movie Club Podcast

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Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 218,
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Theater to Film Adaptations.
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My name is Craig Hamill. I'm the founder, programmer of Secret Movie Club.
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It is awesome, as always, to have you.
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Today, we're going to talk about a very specific kind of movie,
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which they've been making almost from the beginning, which is adaptations of stage plays,
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which is a very different thing than adapting a novel or adapting a biography
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or a live story or an original script.
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And I recently saw Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey Into Night,
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and it just got me thinking about them.
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And they're all over the map, like any kind of adaptation is.
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But I think it's actually really instructive to look at them,
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both for the pros, which are a lot, and then the cons, which I actually think are also a lot too.
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And we're going to get into all of it. We had a great week last week.
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I'm biased, obviously, but we did our first triple feature of 2026 at the Million Dollar Theater.
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We did the Animatrix, the incredible anime Redline from 2009,
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and Speed Racer, the Wachowski Speed Racer.
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You guys were great. We had a great audience. Everyone was clapping and yelling.
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And June 21st, Father's Day, we are doing an Indiana Jones Father's Day triple
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feature on archive 35 millimeter prints.
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11 a.m. we're doing Raiders of the Lost Ark. 2 p.m. we're doing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
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And 5 p.m. we're doing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
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All on 35 millimeter film. This is in about a month.
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Sunday, June 21st. the best value is the all-day pass.
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That's $30. You get to see all three movies. Breakfast, lunch,
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and dinner, you can just go next door to the Grand Central Market.
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Right now, you can also get early bird tickets to any of the individual movies
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until a week before the event, so until about June 14th.
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And right now, those tickets are $12.
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The final week, they're going to go up to $14, and then the day of, they're $16.
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So there you go. And then in the next few weeks, I don't know when,
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but it's probably knowing how things work going to be sometime in June.
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We'll finally be able to tell you the dates on our Sixth Sense Unbreakable double feature, M.
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Night Shyamalan double feature, also on 35 millimeter, also at the Million Dollar Theater.
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And I am working already on the events that are going to come after that.
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And I'm just grateful we're showing movies again. It's wonderful to have you.
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You can always write us, email us at community at secretmovieclub.com.
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If you don't really know a lot about us, go to secretmovieclub.com, create a free account.
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We are going to be having an after party for the Indiana Jones event.
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So we have on the website, you'll see it along with things that we've had for a long time.
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We have a social network where you're going to be able to talk to other people who love movies.
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Other people are coming out to the events and we're going to throw as we can
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pre-parties, after parties.
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So it's what cinema...
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Should be, which is we have this communal experience. And one of the great things
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about movies then is getting together with everybody and talking about it.
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So, but also just partying and being together. So go to the website to check
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out all of that good stuff.
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Our socials at secret movie club, bit by bit, we are building our TikTok.
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So you can see us there. And then we're on Instagram and Facebook and threads
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and blue sky and X and all the YouTube, all the usual suspects.
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So there you go final bit
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here in the intro secret movie club podcast 219
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which will come out next week is on the
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music video director generation these are the music video directors who went
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into feature films in the 80s and 90s you know the names now many of them it's
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so funny to think how time flies are now considered the grand lions of cinema
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back then they were the young turks And these are folks like David Fincher,
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Michelle Gondry, Michael Bay, Zack Snyder.
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Antoine Fuqua, F.
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Gary Gray, to name Spike Jonze, to name just a few.
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So Sofia Coppola, we're going to talk about them.
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It's always fascinating to me how in movies, each generation of great filmmaker
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often comes out of a medium that the older generations kind of have a snobbery about.
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The TV generation produced Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg and Sidney Lumet
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and Patty Chayefsky and all this incredible talent came out of TV.
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And at the time, they were sort of looked down upon.
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By film critics and by movie makers. And then the music video directors all
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came out and they were looked down upon because they were making music videos for MTV.
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And, you know, in just a week or so, we are going to have what everyone thinks
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is going to be this huge opening of a movie called Backrooms,
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which I'm excited to go see, a horror movie from A24,
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directed by a 20-year-old who
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blew up virally with a YouTube Backrooms series he made when he was 16.
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And so we're now, I think, clearly in the YouTube TikTok era.
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And we probably have been in it for a while because I think you could make an
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argument that Lonely Island, the Please Don't Destroy Folks,
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that a lot of the filmmakers that came out of SNL presaged where we're at.
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But we're going to talk about the music video director generation.
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One of my favorite living, working directors is David Fincher.
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And although I, you know, I think
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he's a prickly dude and I'm sort of fascinated by him and his persona.
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But, you know, movies don't lie. He's made some great films.
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He's an incredible filmmaker.
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And so we're going to get into all that next week. Okay.
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A week or two ago, I watched Sidney Lumet's adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill
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play Long Day's Journey Into Night.
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I had read the play about three or four weeks ago, and it blew me away.
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First thing by Eugene O'Neill I'd ever read. I'd seen John Ford's adaptation
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of The Long Voyage Home, which I love. I love.
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Shot by Greg Dolan, starring John Wayne.
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But I'd never read a Eugene O'Neill play. I knew about him, never read it.
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And the play blew me away. And I thought, oh, yeah, that's right.
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Sidney Lumet filmed that in the early 60s. And so I watched it.
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And as I was watching it, this is a movie that stars Katherine Hepburn,
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Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, Dean Stockwell. as I was watching it,
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it just got me thinking about adaptations of stage plays.
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And I think it's a worthwhile topic because there's actually,
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like everything, a crazy spectrum of these adaptations. Some you would almost
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forget were adaptations of stage plays.
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And I think in looking at them, we can see what the strengths are,
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what the weaknesses are, the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies when you adapt to play.
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And I'm just going to put forth what I think some of the successful adaptations
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are, what I think some of the limitations are when you do it.
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And I hope it's worthwhile. You have everything from...
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The straight ahead adaptations like Long Day's Journey in the Night,
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Lamed also did 12 Angry Men, Elia Kazan's very famous adaptation of the Broadway
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play he directed, Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams.
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And then Tennessee Williams had so many of his plays adapted into films.
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There are the Shakespeare adaptations, which have been happening since the beginning of cinema.
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And then there are the ones that we revere that are direct adaptations because
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Shakespeare wrote in English by Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh or Orson
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Welles, who tends to be one of my personal Welles,
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my personal favorite adapter, filmic adapters of Shakespeare.
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And then there are the Shakespeare adaptations that adapt the plots,
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but not the dialogue, and update them.
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I think these are really fascinating movies you may love that you may not have
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even known came from Shakespeare, like the Heath Ledger, 10 Things I Hate About
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You, or the Amanda Bynes, She's the Man,
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or the Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, Strange Brew.
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There's also the very famous Kurosawa adaptations of Macbeth,
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which he adapted as Throne of Blood,
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Hamlet, which he adapted as the Bad Sleepwell and is my personal favorite of
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the Kurosawa Shakespeare adaptations, and Ron, which many people revere,
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rightfully so, which was an adaptation of King Lear.
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There are other adaptations.
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There's Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of Rope, which was a play.
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There's Richard Linklater's adaptation of a movie, adaptation of a play called
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Tape, starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Richard Sean Leonard.
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I hope I'm getting that right.
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Which is one of the lesser seen Linklater's, but a very fascinating movie.
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There's the Lars von Trier adaptation of Euripides Medea.
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And so the Greek tragedy is an incredible fertile field.
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Although it's interesting, not as many people adapt.
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Greek plays, although Spike Lee recently did it with Chirac.
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Partly, he adapted Lysistrata, which I believe is by Aristophanes, very famous comedy.
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There's Mike Nichols' adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia
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Woolf, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
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There's Milos Forman's Academy Award-winning Amadeus, which is an adaptation
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of a stage play about Mozart and Salieri.
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Tony Kushner coming on to write. Now, these aren't adaptations,
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Kushner plays, although Kushner's Angels in America was adapted by Mike Nichols for HBO.
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But Kushner was brought on by Steven Spielberg to write Munich and Lincoln and
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West Side Story and The Fablemans.
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Tom Stoppard, very famous playwright, was brought on by Spielberg to write Empire
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of the Sun and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which he was uncredited on.
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There are people like Ben Hecht, who co-wrote one of my favorite movies.
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They co-wrote a play called The Front Page, which Howard Hawks then adapted
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and changed one of the male leads into a female, turned it into a romantic comedy,
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screwball comedy, called it His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
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And it's one of my favorite films of all time in my top 35.
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So this, I mean, we're talking about all over the gamut. And I didn't even think
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about the John Ford, Eugene O'Neill until I mentioned it.
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So the way I think that I want to break this up is...
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I'm going to start with Lumet and Twelve Angry Men and Long Day's Journey Into
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Night, and then we're going to bounce around, but we're going to end with just
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talking about, as a filmmaker,
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what happens when you adapt a play? What happens when you adapt a novel?
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What happens when you're working on an original story? What happens when you
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adapt a historical event or a biography?
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I want to look at those different aspects of adaptation, but here we go.
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So, Sidney Lumet is one of the great directors. That's not a newsflash.
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Probably most known to most of us for Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon,
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Network, the movies that he made in the 70s, fairly close together when he was
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probably at the height, you know, in his incandescent heat.
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Nevertheless, Lumet directed movies from the 1950s to right when he passed away
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in the 2010s, I believe, or right at 2010, right there.
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And he went out on a hell of a movie before The Devil Knows You're Dead with
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Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, just I think Joan Plowright, too.
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Incredible cast, incredible movie. lamette came
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out of tv and lamette was one
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of those 1950s television cats who
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was directing live television but back
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when tv was still experimenting and doing crazy quality
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stuff on network television like adapting plays or teleplays and you had writers
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like rod serling and patty chayesky it's kind of like broadway or off broadway
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on the tube a pretty crazy time And Lumet came out of TV and his debut film
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is often considered one of his best.
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The adaptation of the play 12 Angry Men starring Henry Fonda.
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12 Angry Men, which you probably know about, is it's all in the deliberation
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room where a jury has just.
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Finished hearing a case, and they have to determine if the defendant is guilty or innocent.
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And it's 12 angry men debating this.
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And when it starts, 11 of them want to find him guilty, and one lone holdout,
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Henry Fonda, is not so sure he's guilty.
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And Lee J. Cobb is in the movie in an incredible performance,
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along with other tremendous actors.
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And the movie and the play followed these very heated deliberations as Henry
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Fonda works juror to juror to point out why he doesn't think the defendant is
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guilty and why they should not convict him.
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It's a great movie. It's a great play. And Lumet cracks it open filmically by
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introducing film language into it.
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So, you know, somebody who's not cinema minded or filmic minded would the the
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origins of a movie as a play, they often you can often see them even if someone is amazing filmically.
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Like, I still would argue you do start to feel, oh, I think this must have been a play.
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And you definitely feel that in Long Day's Journey into Night,
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which Lumet also adapted.
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And they're just some things that have nothing to do with the director.
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Often the plays are about language. And so the language is incredibly poetic.
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It's not the way people really speak.
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It's very condensed. It's very concentrated. And you just get this—.
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Artifice in live drama, as there always has been. And artifice is actually part
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of what makes live drama so great.
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Fassbender, man, Jeremy Fassbender was one of those theater film cats.
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Bergman was a theater film cat.
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And Bergman directed Shakespeare, directed Strindberg, directed Ibsen,
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directed almost all the great playwrights, just like Orson Welles did.
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But when Bergman would make a movie, it was almost always original.
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I think he rarely adapted anything other than his own work and his own original ideas.
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And that's really fascinating to me. And then Fassbender was the same way.
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Fassbender kept his plays and his movies separate, but he would take what Bergman
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and Fassbender would take what they loved about theater and they would find a original story.
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So rather than adapting a Strindberg or adapting an Ibsen or adapting a Shakespeare,
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Bergman would make a Strindberg-inspired original idea or an Ibsen-inspired
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original idea, or there'd be elements of that. And I think that's an interesting way to go.
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It's almost as if they knew, you know, let's let the theater be the theater.
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And if I want to make that kind of thing, I'm going to take what I know and
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I'm going to write something original. So I have a little play space,
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a little playroom for the cinema.
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That's also an interesting lesson. And Fassbender adapted a number of his plays.
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Not too many, I don't think, but he adapted a few of his plays into films.
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Kosselmacher, I think, being one of them. But,
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And Bergman, I don't think Bergman wrote actually too many original plays.
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I think most of his original stuff was for cinema.
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And he would go back to the Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden,
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and he would direct Pierre Gintz or Shakespeare or Ibsen or Strindberg.
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And then he'd go and he'd direct like a crazy play, and he'd direct a crazy movie every year.
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Man was a workaholic. Even though Lumet introduces great film language into
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both of the movies we're talking about here, you do become aware of certain
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things. Oh, this is one location.
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Oh, there are only 12 characters in 12 Angry Men.
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In Long Day's Journey into Night, there's basically four characters.
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Those things sort of give away the play roots.
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I always liked 12 Angry Men. I don't love it like other people do.
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And that's not damning it with faint praise. is if someone put on 12 Angry Men
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right now, I'd watch it in a heartbeat. The film is great.
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It's just for me...
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I can, with the Lumet adaptations, I could see him, and maybe I'm reading into this,
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but I could almost see him trying to jazz up the style a little too much to
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the point where I've always been a little aware of,
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oh, he's trying to make it filmic with how he's pushing the camera in,
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or he's editing this way, or he's using this film language here,
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he's using that film language there.
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That may be me reading too much into it and just being a movieaholic and all
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that stuff. And people who watch the film probably never even think about it.
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The long day's journey into night is also tremendous.
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And Lumet does do a dynamite job.
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The one thing I want to commend him on is I think the biggest danger is when
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a director goes against the source material in a play because they're just too
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insecure and they want to be too authorial.
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And they come up with some concept or something where they want to put their
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stamp on it, their signature on it.
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And it's just not what that play was about. It's not what the dynamics of the
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play or the story of the play, the emotion, the themes of the play.
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And that I think is wrong.
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If you're going to adapt the play, I definitely believe in the inside out,
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which is understand, you know, it's what Cato the Elder said,
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grasp the subject and the words will follow.
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So if you're adapting a play, I almost feel, this is me personally.
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Grasp the soul of the play and ask yourself, do I want to make this?
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I mean, it would be the same like a novel.
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Why would you adapt a novel if you don't want to bring out the soul of the novel?
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If the novel didn't move you or the play didn't move you, don't do it.
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If you're going to do the play, if you're going to do the book,
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it's because you really feel a connection to the material.
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You really feel you have a take on it. And, you know, I would imagine you feel,
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I would hope, or really, again, this is me projecting, but that you have a way
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of bringing out its strengths in the strongest possible way in cinema.
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That's inside out. Definitely see it that way. And Lumet does that.
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Lumet does that in both 12 Angry Men and Long Day's Journey Into Night.
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I will say about Long Day's Journey Into Night that it's really a showcase for
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the four actors, and they are all amazing.
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Interestingly, I mean, in Dean Stockwell, who's very young and channeling James
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Dean a little bit in the movie, he holds his own against Robards,
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Ralph Richardson, and Katherine Hepburn.
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That's saying something when you have to go up against those folks.
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The biggest revelation to me in Long Day's Journey Into Night was actually Kate
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Hepburn. I love Katherine Hepburn.
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I've always found, though, or worried that.
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You know, she is in that top tier of classic Hollywood actor like Jimmy Stewart,
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like Cary Grant, like Gary Cooper.
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You know, you can name so many others where their persona is so important that
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they're not necessarily chameleons.
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Now, Kate Hepburn could do drama. She could do comedy. She could do almost anything.
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But you often know it's Katharine Hepburn when you watch it.
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And that's often why you're going to see it. You're going to see it for Katharine Hepburn.
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So I was a little nervous that I was just sort of going to get the Kate Hepburn show.
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And I was like, really? She's going to do Eugene O'Neill? She's going to play
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a morphine addicted mother who disappears into a narcotic haze in this film?
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And sure enough, even though she is Katharine Hepburn, her choices are dynamite.
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And it was a revelation to me. And kudos to Lumet again, where Lumet,
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his process, if you've never read Sidney Lumet's book, I think it's called On
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Directing, but it's something like that. It's just the book he wrote about directing.
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He talks about how he always insisted on two to three weeks of rehearsal with
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his actors before they would do the movie.
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And i am not that
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way personally i'm a little more of the i love
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improvising i love building character i totally believe in if i can get a week
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or two of that with the performers maybe doing improvisations of scenes that
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come before the script so they can build characters and get to know each other
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i love all that stuff i believe in that i don't like rehearsing the script.
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Because if something happens in the rehearsal and you're chasing it,
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I'm really of the, you know, if I can get it in the one-to-fifth take and I
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come super prepared, I mean, I'll go beyond that if I have to.
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I'm not dogmatic about anything.
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You keep going until you have it. But I usually am a one-to-five take director.
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I don't like to rehearse. I do like a certain freshness and surprise on the set. That's me.
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Now, amazing filmmakers are the exact opposite in all sorts of ways.
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And Lumet is somebody who would insist on at least, I think, two weeks of rehearsal.
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And in Long Day's Journey, I was like, I get it.
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Because even though you can see the seams a little bit in Katharine Hepburn's
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performance, her decisions, the way she plays the scenes.
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You know, the mother is in some ways the sun around which the planets of the
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men orbit in that play. and it's incredible.
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Nevertheless, I could see the seams.
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I could see the S-E-A-M-S in long days, especially in how Lamette was directing it.
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And I felt like he knew he was in the house and the whole play takes place in the house more or less.
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He opens it up so that the first act takes place outside the house,
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which it doesn't in the written play.
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The whole play takes place inside the house and he took it outside the house for the first act.
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And then the next choice is he's just, he's moving the camera.
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He's doing a whole bunch of things.
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It never detracts, but I did feel like it was a little much.
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I wish I could say that better, but it's tough.
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Look, it's tough, man. And I get the director, the directorial instinct to,
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I'm going to make this cinema. But the funny thing is,
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I almost think you have to forget that it was a play. And rather than feeling
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I've got to compensate for the fact that it was a play by really diving into
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the cinema of the editing and the camera, I think you just have to treat it as source material.
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How best do I get this up on screen? And that's probably going to be my answer
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for when we talk about other adaptations. But there you go. Let's move on.
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Shakespeare, maybe. so probably the
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the easiest category of
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theater to film adaptation we could talk about
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are shakespeare adaptations they're evergreen because you don't have to pay
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royalties on them so at this point you'd be adapting shakespeare you know it's
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a great source to go to and people have gone to the shakespeare well a lot but
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i've said this if the movie i'd show the aliens is Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.
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The book I would take on a deserted island, if I could only take one book,
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is the collected works of William Shakespeare.
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I love Shakespeare. I love those plays.
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It's not just the language, although the language is incredible.
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It's just, you know, there's only one William Shakespeare, no matter,
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and I'm not trying to throw shade on the dozens, if not hundreds of brilliant
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playwrights there have been.
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And I definitely don't rank Shakespeare necessarily higher than Greek playwrights
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that I'm obsessed with, like Aeschylus.
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I love Aeschylus, and the worst eye is incredible, or Euripides and the Bacchae.
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But nevertheless, that's the book I take. So you have so much material,
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and everybody always goes to the Shakespeare well, and one day I may go to the
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Shakespeare well, who knows.
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But Shakespeare adaptations are really fascinating to me.
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You have the Lawrence Olivier's and the Kenneth Bronagh's Shakespeare adaptations
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where they are more or less, with Olivier more so than Bronagh,
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they're more or less faithful to,
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his adaptations of the plays worked to be the best that they can be.
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That's definitely Olivier.
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Branagh, as he's gotten older, has taken more chances. Like he did Love's Labor's
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Lost as a World War II piece.
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And he did As You Like It, I think, as a kind of anachronistic,
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what time period are we in sort of piece.
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But Branagh has also, by and large, been very faithful. His Hamlet was fairly
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faithful to the time period.
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His Henry V, which is maybe his most famous adaptation, was fairly faithful.
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His Much Ado About Nothing, which is very funny. I really like his Much Ado About Nothing.
25:43
Maybe, I know this might be heresy, but his Much Ado and his Henry V are probably my two favorites.
25:50
But that's one way to go. And look.
25:53
Branagh, Olivier, theater trained. They come out of a background and an education
26:00
that we'll never have as Americans and an understanding we'll never have as
26:05
much as we love Shakespeare.
26:06
And they're almost like those cooks that can just get the natural flavors out of this dish.
26:14
And I'm all for that. I'm also, you know, interestingly, one is coming out,
26:21
and I heard it's going to be really fascinating.
26:23
There's a Hamlet coming out, I believe, soon, updates Hamlet to London,
26:30
modern day, in an immigrant community.
26:32
And I'm all for that as well, but it keeps the language.
26:35
And that happens quite a bit. And those adaptations, you know,
26:40
there was an Ethan Hawke Hamlet there.
26:43
Recently, there was Joel Cohen's adaptation of Macbeth with Denzel Washington
26:46
and Francis McDormand, which was, you know, fairly faithful,
26:51
actually, to having it be a Scottish play.
26:54
There was Roman Polanski's adaptation of Macbeth as well.
26:58
A lot of people have adapted Macbeth. In fact, Macbeth is the through line.
27:03
And I get it. In some ways, it is the most cinematic.
27:07
It's violent. It's bloody. The dynamics of it are great.
27:11
Orson Welles adapted it. And then Kurosawa, who we'll talk about in just a moment,
27:16
did it as Throne of Blood with Toshiro Mifuni.
27:18
Probably, I would say, considered the greatest Macbeth adaptation.
27:21
And i think the reason it is
27:24
considered that it's for the very reason that he didn't adapt the language and
27:28
i think that freed him up kurosawa and we'll talk about this from maybe a reverence
27:34
which you cannot have an adaptation and i think that that's the danger one of
27:39
the cons of adapting a play and it could happen in any other source too but when you adapt a play.
27:46
You're not really going to rewrite the dialogue because there's some famous
27:50
playwright usually who's like, what are you doing?
27:53
And so when you have to have a reverence for the play as it is written,
27:57
when it was written for a completely different medium, what makes a stage production
28:04
work is not what makes a movie work.
28:07
And you have to be blasphemous to be effective in adapting.
28:14
And I think Kurosawa, blessedly, because he was Japanese, didn't really have
28:19
to take a lot of heat on that because naturally, if he's making the movie in
28:22
Japan, he's adapting it to Japanese.
28:23
And so if he doesn't want to use the original English, it's not like a bunch
28:27
of people are going crazy about it. But if you're doing Shakespeare in English,
28:32
depending on how you do it, you can get in trouble.
28:34
Now, my favorite English adaptations of Shakespeare are the Orson Welles.
28:40
Specifically, I am a huge Chimes
28:42
at Midnight fan. In fact, I will tell you that Chimes at Midnight...
28:47
Probably my favorite Wells with Citizen Kane. I love Wells. I love Wells,
28:52
and we will do some kind of Wells retrospective.
28:56
When you're talking about somebody who made Magnuson Ambersons and Lady from
29:00
Shanghai and Touch of Evil, and I even love The Immortal Story is a movie not
29:06
a lot of people talk about, but I love that.
29:07
I am a big fan of his Macbeth, although of his adaptations, He didn't have a
29:13
lot of money for that one.
29:14
And so it's actually my least favorite, although it's great.
29:17
And there's a shot in it. Oh my goodness.
29:19
When the murder, basically when Macbeth kills, I think it's Duncan.
29:24
I hope I'm not getting that wrong, but when he kills King Duncan at the,
29:28
the early in the play, that shot it Wells does this incredible one,
29:34
or with this incredible set and lighting and light.
29:38
And it's, it's just devastating.
29:41
It's so incredible. Maybe my favorite part of that whole adaptation.
29:44
Wells' Othello, which he shot more or less on location, is...
29:49
The editing of that, Wells was in the 50s. He was essentially,
29:53
for all intents and purposes, an expat in Europe.
29:55
And his Othello really starts to show Wells going nuts in a great way with editing.
30:03
So I always think of his Othello as like his Eisenstein film.
30:06
There's a murder sequence or attempted murder sequence in a sauna or a bathhouse
30:12
that just has incredible, incredible editing.
30:15
And it's really montage-y, short bits of film editing.
30:19
And, you know, you will see that flourishing of Wells' style really hit its
30:24
apotheosis, I think, in F is for fake.
30:27
But you see the starts of that and his playing with it in Othello.
30:30
Chimes at midnight though it may
30:33
be it may be yeah that and kane are
30:37
my two favorites and chimes was wells's uh favorite
30:40
of his own films and what he did was he adapted richard
30:43
ii henry the fourth parts one and two and henry five but he reconfigured the
30:48
story to really be about uh falstaff who is a character that appears in henry
30:53
henry the four henry the fourth parts one and two He doesn't really appear in
30:59
Henry V. He's dead already at that point.
31:01
And then Richard II really are events before Falstaff.
31:06
Falstaff is one of Shakespeare's great creations. He's sort of this representation
31:10
of merry old England, a scoundrel, a drinker, a partier, but a good soul, a good soul.
31:17
And Prince Hal is living a dissolute life with Falstaff in the pubs of London.
31:27
But ultimately, Hal knows that he probably one day will have to return to inherit
31:33
the crown from his father, Henry IV, and Hal will become Henry V.
31:37
And in fact, that play was written, Henry V.
31:39
And Kenneth Branagh did adaptation of it.
31:42
As I talk about this, I'm reminded that Gus Van Sant, and we'll ping pong to
31:48
this real quickly in just a moment,
31:49
he did one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations in a movie called My Own Private
31:53
Idaho, which was a Henry IV one and two adaptation, partly,
31:59
but starring Keanu Reeves in the Howe character.
32:02
And the fall staff character is there, but it's LGBTQ hustlers going around the country and Europe.
32:13
And Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix play lovers and best friends.
32:17
And it's just, I love my own private Idaho.
32:21
One of my favorite Gus Van Sands, if not my favorite Gus Van Sands film.
32:24
Again, I think a successful movie because it doesn't adapt the language.
32:28
It's a blasphemous adaptation, and I think it's a great adaptation because of its blasphemy.
32:35
With Chimes at Midnight, Wells plays Falstaff. It is an incredible film.
32:41
He had almost, you know, very little money. He was doing what John Cassavetes
32:45
was doing, just in a different way.
32:47
Cassavetes would mortgage his house and take his acting earnings to make his films.
32:51
And Wells would do the same to make his movies, as well as try to hustle financiers his whole life.
32:58
And so it took a few years to do Chimes. But it's it's for me,
33:04
the thing about Chimes is Wells clearly feels it is it is like Kane,
33:12
an autobiography of Wells.
33:15
And there is such emotion and pathos to it.
33:19
And the filmmaking is great, but it is not pretentious or self-conscious as
33:28
Wells could sometimes get or show-offy.
33:32
So it is a kind of sublime maturation of Wells' style, which in some ways was
33:40
at its most intense in Citizen Kane.
33:42
By the time you get to Chimes at Midnight, which came out in the mid-60s,
33:46
almost 25 years after Kane,
33:49
Wells, almost as if he senses that he really does not want to blow it,
33:56
that he really wants to make one of his greatest movies ever.
33:58
There is a discipline in Chimes that.
34:03
Marries to his restless experimentation of cinema.
34:06
And it is probably my favorite English language adaptation of a Shakespeare piece.
34:12
Final thing I'll say here is that many filmmakers learned, and,
34:16
you know, Gus Van Sant was one who showed the way, although I'm sure this had
34:21
been happening for many years prior, where they would adapt the story, but not the dialogue.
34:27
So these are movies like 10 Things I Hate About You, which is a great rom-com
34:33
that is an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew in high school.
34:37
She's the Man, which is an adaptation of Twelfth Night in private school and a lot of fun.
34:45
Strange Brew, which is with Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas.
34:51
Crazy comedy that basically adapts Hamlet from the point of view of Rosencrantz
34:55
and Guildenstern before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,
34:59
which was an actual play and did the same thing.
35:01
But with the actual source material, Strange Brew is just a comedy where these
35:05
two, if you've never seen it, it's great based on two characters from SCTV who
35:09
have like a cable access show.
35:11
In a weird way, it was like Wayne's World before Wayne's World,
35:14
but they're more like working class men children and they love beer and they
35:20
end up wanting to get a case of free beer.
35:23
So they go try to lie about why they're owed a case of free beer and they're
35:27
told to go to Elsinore Brewery.
35:29
And there's a lot of familial intrigue. Maxon Seidow is in it.
35:33
There's hilarious Star Wars hockey. That's a crazy movie.
35:37
But again, blasphemous because they had the great idea of let's make this ridiculous
35:43
comedy, but let's do it as an adaptation of Hamlet. I think that's how you do it.
35:47
We will end this part on just talking about the Kurosawa adaptations.
35:52
Throne of Blood, I think, is usually the consensus favorite for the greatest
35:58
of the Shakespeare adaptations?
36:00
But Ron is a close second, often comes first for a lot of people.
36:04
Both those adaptations, they're very different, made by Kurosawa in different periods of his life.
36:10
Throne of Blood made when he was still a relatively young man in the 50s with
36:13
Toshiro Mifune as Macbeth.
36:15
Ron made when he was in his mid-70s.
36:17
Kurosawa's wife died when they were shooting Ron and Kurosawa was 76.
36:23
And he is an older man. He's making a movie about an older man looking back
36:27
at the world and life in a way with King Lear. And it's a older man's movie.
36:31
I love Ron, by the way. I never want people to misunderstand me.
36:35
There are some older men's movies that are just too removed.
36:38
For me, that is not Ron. I love Ron.
36:41
But there is a there is as brilliant as Ron is, and it is brilliant.
36:47
There is a distanced kabuki. No, let's take a step back. and we're more looking
36:55
at the story than viscerally in the story.
36:58
And I even feel that a little bit with Throne of Blood. And I love Throne of
37:02
Blood. I love Throne of Blood.
37:04
But there is a bit of a kabuki no in Throne of Blood.
37:07
Although the visuals in Throne of Blood are some of Kurosawa's most famous visuals.
37:12
And the death of Macbeth at the end is obviously not called Macbeth in Throne of Blood.
37:17
But Toshiro Mifune's death where the armies come to his castle,
37:23
essentially, and kill him with hundreds, hundreds of arrows, is a crazy scene.
37:30
Very famous. Often one of the film stills you recognize, even if you've never seen a Kurosawa film.
37:36
But my favorite Kurosawa adaptation is The Bad Sleep Well, also with Toshiro
37:41
Mifune, and it's an adaptation of Hamlet.
37:42
And actually, I think in many ways, the most imperfect of the three adaptations.
37:48
The Bad Sleep Well divides people. Ron and Throne of Blood are usually loved,
37:52
considered great films.
37:54
But Bad Sleep Well is an adaptation of Hamlet into what was then the modern
38:00
Tokyo, was a modern Tokyo adaptation.
38:01
It was meant to be 1960s Tokyo. And Kurosawa
38:05
was so angry about business corruption and how the Tokyo or the Japanese business
38:13
salaryman type who does everything for the company without any consideration
38:18
to morals or ethics or how it affects families or how it affects people.
38:24
Kurosawa had an anger, and he did carry anger about greed and corporate greed
38:29
and the way that people with money and power dismissively treat people.
38:36
Working class people, poor people, people who don't have a seat at the table,
38:40
people who aren't born even on first base, who don't even get to go up at bat.
38:44
Kurosawa had such a profound feeling for those folks.
38:48
And The Bad Sleep Well is one of my favorite Mifune performances.
38:52
It's one of the rare performances where he's very contained, very buttoned down.
38:56
He plays Hamlet brilliantly. I love the filmmaking of that film.
39:01
I love the cinema of that film. The opening where Mifune marries his boss's
39:07
daughter and we get all the exposition from these paparazzi journalists who
39:12
are covering the wedding is one of the greatest examples,
39:14
I think, of Kurosawa's screenwriting talent.
39:17
And again, it is a blasphemous adaptation.
39:20
It deviates from Hamlet quite a bit in certain aspects, but it is clearly Hamlet,
39:26
and yet it is also clearly an original Kurosawa piece.
39:29
That's why I think of all the Shakespeare adaptations, the best ones are hands
39:33
down Wells and Kurosawa. That's my own take.
39:37
I'm totally ready to be annihilated for that view. Okay, moving beyond Shakespeare.
39:46
When you adapt a novel just as when you adapt a play i think the danger is being too faithful,
39:54
You know, a novel, especially a long novel, unless you're willing to make it
39:58
three or four movies or a miniseries or a limited series, you're going to have
40:04
to make a different movie.
40:05
You're going to have to make a different thing. You're not making the novel.
40:08
You just don't have the time.
40:09
And, you know, novels, you can do these psychological monologues, soliloquy,
40:16
stream of consciousness things that work beautifully in a novel that you can't
40:21
unless you adapt it to the language of film like editing and imagery and cinema.
40:28
You can't quite do it. You can adapt biographies, but of course the danger there
40:34
is if you're sanitizing the life and making it hagiography,
40:38
if you're trying to cover the whole life, which usually ends up just feeling
40:42
like a medley rather than a movie, often the greatest I find ever,
40:48
Movies about real people are movies that focus in on really just one portion of someone's life.
40:54
Raging Bull really only shows Jake LaMotta from when he was really the great fighter.
41:01
Angling for a title fight to when he came through the other side and had gone
41:09
through hell and prison and was trying to just sort of get by and survive.
41:13
Maybe a 20-year period of his life. And really,
41:16
it only focuses on a few years when he's at the top of boxing and maybe a year
41:22
or two when he is falling and then a day when or two when he comes up plays.
41:29
The big danger when you adapt plays are people are going to sense that it's
41:34
an adaptation of a play because it only takes place on one set.
41:37
And then the danger then is the director tries to overcompensate and then the
41:41
movie feels overdirected. the language, especially if it's an English play and
41:47
I'm, you know, I'm talking to you in English, so that's where I'm coming from.
41:49
You're, you're really in danger because you're going to want to be faithful
41:53
to the dialogue, but in being faithful to the dialogue, it might end up just
41:57
sounding too artificial for what films really allow.
42:01
And then also performance, I would say, you know, So, roles for the stage are
42:09
incredible. And I actually, I wasn't in sports when I was a little kid.
42:13
I was in live theater and I love live theater. I love live theater.
42:17
But it's a different beast than film acting. You can be big in theater. You can be theatrical.
42:24
I wish I could explain this better, but you can adopt a kabuki or no style, a big style.
42:34
You can do things in theater that don't necessarily work in cinema.
42:40
In cinema, But if you think something, the camera picks it up.
42:45
And I think that's why often the greatest film performances,
42:49
people who are on set will tell you it didn't look like he did anything or she did anything.
42:54
And then they see it and they're like, this is incredible. I didn't know they were doing all that.
42:58
And the reason is because I think many of the greatest film actors know that
43:04
if the camera is just a few feet from your face, you don't need to do anything,
43:08
but really be present and really figure the truth.
43:14
Now, there are things that you certainly need to do, doing something unexpected,
43:17
having that charisma and vitality.
43:19
Those are all key, key things, just as they are in theater.
43:24
But theater acting and film acting are different beasts.
43:27
And I think one of the dangers is when you're digging into a role that was originated in a play,
43:35
you can get big in a way that doesn't serve cinema necessarily.
43:42
And people can also see that.
43:44
So all that being acknowledged is some of the cons, some of the dangers.
43:48
Some of the movies I'll just talk about briefly. Aaliyah Kazan's adaptation
43:52
of Tennessee Williams, The Streetcar
43:55
Named Desire, starring Vivian Lee and Marlon Brando, is incredible.
44:01
You know, yes, it's mostly powered by Brando's Stanley Kowalski.
44:05
Yes, it's mostly powered by Vivian Lee's Blanche Dubois taking the place of
44:11
Jessica Tandy, who had been one of the originators of the role on Broadway.
44:16
But when I see Streetcar, I am hypnotized and captivated by Brando.
44:21
There's no way around that. And I am hypnotized and captivated by the raw sexuality of the film.
44:26
If you've never seen Streetcar, I think even today in 2026, to see a husband
44:33
brutalize his pregnant wife, get drunk.
44:37
This is Brando's character, then come back and scream for her forgiveness and
44:43
have her come down and forgive him more because she wants to have sex with him
44:48
because she's so turned on by him and can't turn away from his raw,
44:53
primal sexuality and carnality.
44:57
I mean, to me, what Kazan did, that's actually a great adaptation I would just put forward.
45:03
And again, I love Kazan and I love Lumet. They're different directors. I love them both.
45:08
But Kazan did a lot of theater directing.
45:11
And I think, ironically, was a great film director because of it,
45:15
because he knew. And I think you see this with theater directors.
45:18
It's probably why Fassbender and Wells, Kazan, Bergman, Murnau.
45:23
These filmmakers that came out of theater, they just intuitively know that theater
45:27
can do one thing, film can do another, and they're able to bring out the theater
45:31
aspects, but then also the movie aspects.
45:34
And I also think that because they come out of theater where often they're working
45:38
with other people's material, not their own material, they come from,
45:41
OK, how can I bring out the best essence qualities of this material?
45:46
They're working with the material, not against the material.
45:49
And I think that the greatest adapters of plays know to do that.
45:55
And they don't have the insecurity of a filmmaker who had nothing to do with
45:58
the play, who just insecurely wants to somehow put their stamp on it,
46:02
which is not what you should be doing. If your stamp, your stamp's going to
46:05
go on it if you make a great movie.
46:07
It's like you kind of just have to trust your craft and who you are and what
46:11
you're going to naturally bring out if you do the best that you can do.
46:14
I think it's almost impossible not to have your authorial stamp if you go that route.
46:19
But you have the added benefit of having been true and trying to really bring
46:23
out the best of the material.
46:25
So I think that Streetcar Named Desire, the movie, is a great example of a director
46:31
who knew the material, had directed it on Broadway, made it filmic and cinematic,
46:36
but didn't overcompensate in any kind of way.
46:38
And so it's just a wonderful film, incredible film, disturbing film.
46:43
Hitchcock did Rope a few years earlier with Jimmy Stewart, 1948, I believe, 1947, 48.
46:49
And that's Hitchcock's very famous movie where he wanted the whole movie to
46:54
feel like one take decades before Inarudu tried to do it with Birdman.
46:59
But he did that by shooting about 14, I think, different shots and then having hidden cuts.
47:06
It was an adaptation of a play. I do feel like you do feel the play's roots
47:11
because it's all in an apartment.
47:13
It really feels like a rough draft for a rear window to me. But I still love Rope.
47:17
And over time, I feel like Rope has climbed in the Hitchcock canon and is now
47:25
one that a lot of people love to watch.
47:27
The cinema of it is amazing. The Oners are incredible.
47:30
And it's a fun movie. I think, interestingly, Rope is not served by the source
47:36
material, which is good.
47:38
It's, you know, kind of a variation or adaptation of the Leopold and Loeb murders.
47:44
People, you know, very coded, different sexuality, different psychology,
47:51
killing, and then Nietzsche politics, kind of a crazy play.
47:56
And now you look on it and the material is both a little pretentious and a little light.
48:04
But, you know, Hitchcock cinema really gives it a ballast and a heft that I love rope.
48:11
I love rope. But you do you do sort of see that it's a play.
48:15
And I think what's interesting is that Hitchcock did a few other single location movies like Lifeboat.
48:21
Rear Window is a single location movie, but because it's a whole apartment complex
48:25
and really the courtyard and then all the windows you can see.
48:29
It is a bit bigger scope, bigger canvas than your, you know,
48:35
inside the house or in one room type movies that are adaptations of plays.
48:39
But I think when you watch Hitchcock's Lifeboat, which I do really like,
48:43
and you watch his rope, you can see the difference.
48:46
Lifeboat was written by John Steinbeck, novelist John Steinbeck,
48:50
and always intended as a film.
48:52
And it feels like a film, just feels like a film on a lifeboat. rope
48:56
was a play that reverse engineered into a movie and
48:58
you can feel like it's a play reverse engineered into a
49:01
movie richard linklater's tape is a
49:05
great example of him just going gonzo for
49:08
one location it's a hotel room and you know it's i remember enjoying watching
49:15
it it's not a movie i ever went back to but ethan hawk uma thurman robert sean
49:19
leonard are all in it the play is interesting. The dynamics are interesting.
49:26
Linklater knows how to build a work, a movie work, just like you build a song
49:32
and it builds to a climax.
49:33
And all that stuff is really fascinating to watch. It's almost,
49:37
to me, a fascinating movie to watch. I don't think it fully works.
49:42
And I think you're watching it more as like, wow, they really did this all in a hotel room.
49:47
I think you're really aware of that the whole time. Not in a super bad way.
49:51
I think Linklater does a lot of really impressive things to not get you to think about that.
49:56
But that would be an example where you do at a certain point go, yeah, this is a play.
50:01
And not only is it a play, but we're literally in a hotel room the entire time.
50:05
And I would actually contrast that again with something like Linklater's Before
50:10
Midnight, where the second half of the movie takes place in a hotel room.
50:14
And yet before midnight, because the first half is them walking,
50:18
before they get to the hotel room, you have the contrast and stuff doesn't feel nearly as stagey.
50:24
There are single location movies like David Fincher's Panic Room.
50:30
We already mentioned Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat that always originated as movies.
50:35
And it's interesting to see them. And the cinema is just baked into the screenplay.
50:39
You're not reverse engineering the cinema.
50:42
Milos Forman's adaptation of Amadeus is really fascinating to look at, I think.
50:49
A great movie. Won Best Picture in 1984. four.
50:52
Incredible performances by F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulse.
50:56
Incredible cinematography by Miroslav Andrzejczyk. Incredible direction by Milos Forman. Great play.
51:04
Definitely Forman shoots it in a bunch of different locations.
51:09
We're on the streets, we're in opera houses, we're in palaces.
51:13
So it feels like a movie. And I think maybe the benefit there was because it
51:18
was also about Mozart, you're also introducing music.
51:21
And so that's great because you're not thinking about it as a play because you
51:28
have all these locations and then you have the music.
51:30
So you have these different layers and that may be one of the reasons.
51:34
And also just Foreman. I love Milo Shorman, incredible filmmaker in one of his great movies.
51:39
And Foreman had that weird cinematic ability where I never saw a Milos Forman
51:44
movie and said, wow, the editing or the camera work is next level. And yet,
51:52
It is next level because it's so suffused with the material.
51:57
And I think you specifically feel that in Loves of a Blonde,
52:00
which is my favorite foreman, taking off Black Peter Amadeus.
52:05
And many of those shot by Miroslav Andrzejczyk, by the way. So I feel like that
52:10
collaboration is super key.
52:14
There are so many play to movie adaptations. James Foley's adaptation of Glenn
52:19
Gary Glenn Ross, which many of us know because the Alec Baldwin scene gets played
52:24
to death and I think was actually written specifically for the movie.
52:28
I need to double check that. But I think weirdly, the one scene written for
52:32
the film is the scene that everybody remembers.
52:35
It's still a great movie and a great play.
52:38
And that one, I think, overcomes its drama, live theater roots,
52:43
just because you have a murderer's row of actors.
52:46
It's like Pacino, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, pre-controversy, Alec Baldwin,
52:52
Alan Arkin, Jack Lemon, just a nutso cast.
52:57
It's interesting to see when playwrights adapt or write screenplays. I do like that.
53:03
Like, I do love Tom Stopper's influence on Empire of the Sun, an adaptation of a J.G.
53:09
Ballard novel and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which he helped on uncredited.
53:15
But the dialogue is great.
53:18
The Polanski, Roman Polanski has adapted quite a few plays. Most notably,
53:24
we already talked about Macbeth, but he also adapted Death and the Maiden with
53:27
Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.
53:28
And that's a really, it's a hell of a film.
53:31
But I do feel the play seems in Polanski.
53:36
I do prefer the movies that either came from novels or original screenplays,
53:42
Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Bitter Moon, Knife in the Water.
53:46
I think those films are Polanski at his best because those stories sourced and
53:52
started as that this is going to be a movie. He wasn't just adapting a play.
53:56
I want to shout out this late, forgive me, but I am a big fan of Julia Haymore's
54:01
Shakespeare adaptation of Titus, which is of the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus.
54:07
If you've never seen it, see it starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange.
54:12
Incredible movie. What I love about it is that Titus Andronicus is one of the
54:16
Shakespeare plays he wrote when he was younger that was known as like the Jacobian blood play.
54:21
Very violent, very bloody.
54:24
Juliet Taymor really goes gonzo with the violence.
54:30
And I was all for it. And I want to shout that out as a Shakespeare adaptation.
54:34
I love, again, somebody who came out of theater. So I think she had a pretty
54:39
good understanding of, I know what theater can do. I can't wait to play with
54:43
the toolbox and the sandbox that is movies. And I think that Titus came out wonderfully.
54:48
Mike Nichols' adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the Edward Albee play.
54:54
That is an incredible movie shot by Haskell Wexler.
54:59
And I actually got to talk to Haskell Wexler for a whole afternoon. He was such a kind man.
55:06
I got to work with him. I shot. I'm so proud of this. He and I came up with
55:10
sort of how we were going to cover my, I was dating a woman,
55:14
incredibly talented director, Sarah Gerfield at the time.
55:17
And Sarah directed a adaptation of Proof, the play Proof.
55:21
And the lead actor happened to be the assistant for Haskell Wexler and he offered to shoot it for her.
55:26
And suddenly Haskell comes in and he sets up his friend as the master in the
55:31
back. So his friend is just covering the play as a master.
55:34
And then Haskell and I are the wind cameras.
55:37
And one of us had to work on a tripod and one of us had to handhold.
55:42
And I just said, well, how about if we, I sort of threw some ideas out and he
55:45
threw some ideas out and we shot it that way.
55:48
I thought one of us was going to cover the closes in the first act.
55:51
And then one of us was going to more cover the twos and the threes,
55:54
kind of get people in two shots.
55:56
And the proof is really a play of two people almost all the time and some movement. And then we switched.
56:03
And then the other one was covering the close-ups in the second act.
56:06
And the other one was covering the twos and the threes. And then Haskell read a movie I had written.
56:11
And I remember the first thing he said was, ah, I can't help you with this.
56:15
This is about a guy who just wants a piece of ass.
56:18
I remember this vividly. I was in Haskell's kitchen when he said that.
56:24
But then he proceeded to give me brilliant cinematography advice on how I could
56:27
do the movie. I never ended up making the movie, but it was worth it.
56:31
And but then he was like, but listen, listen, I got offered Star Wars and I
56:36
turned that down because I didn't understand what the hell the script was about. So what do I know?
56:40
He was a very humble man and a very kind man.
56:43
And I'm sure he was a hellion, but I didn't see it. I didn't see it either in
56:47
working with him or in the afternoon he gave me.
56:49
It's really one of the highlights of my my movie life was that afternoon with
56:53
Haskell. But he talked to me.
56:56
He had worked with Kazan in America, America, and then he had worked with Nichols
57:00
on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
57:02
And what he told me about who's afraid of
57:05
virginia wolf was they're in this house great play nasty play
57:08
and but but emotional brilliant play
57:12
and he had wanted to bring movement to
57:14
the house but they were still dealing with big old cameras in the mid-60s mitchell's
57:19
and you know cameras that used to have to go on huge cranes and stuff just to
57:22
move them and he put one of these cameras on a bicycle and he would just ride
57:28
the bicycle in the hallway as the dolly and would get these incredible moving
57:32
shots. And he told me about that.
57:34
And I just, and then he also told me that you should always motivate movement,
57:38
actor, character movement, camera.
57:40
I'm sorry. You should always motivate camera movement on actor movement.
57:43
And he showed me some great ways to do that. And I think one of,
57:48
I'm not that Haskell told Spielberg how to do this.
57:50
Spielberg probably understood it naturally and intuitively. But when you see
57:54
Spielberg shots, I mean, he is like so many of the things, just one of the masters
58:00
of that. And I remember Wexler telling me about that.
58:02
And if you've never seen Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, again,
58:06
Mike Nichols came out of theater, came out of improv.
58:08
And I think you see somebody who, I guess what I'm saying is that you should
58:11
probably direct some theater.
58:13
Because if you direct theater, then you're going to not be as insecure if you're
58:18
adapting a play and you're going to know what to keep and what to drop.
58:21
And so I would just tell movie directors rather than coming into a play adaptation
58:25
with your directorial type A,
58:29
you know, I've got to be an auteur in security, which always can get you in
58:33
trouble, your control freak insecurity. And I say that as someone who has all those things.
58:38
If you've done theater, you're just not as insecure about it.
58:41
You kind of know what you can do. You know how to talk the talk.
58:44
And I think you're able to code switch better.
58:47
And so that's probably my big recommendation is go direct some plays.
58:50
And then you'll get over it and you'll know it and you'll probably direct better play adaptations.
58:55
Thank you for going on this ride with me.
58:58
I highly recommend most of the movies I talked about today.
59:02
I don't think I talked about any that I disliked. In fact, that would have been
59:05
helpful to say, here's an example of a play adaptation that I don't think works.
59:10
Secret Movie Club podcast 219 will be the music video director generation.
59:16
And we're going to talk about the music video directors who made the transition
59:20
from directing two to five minute music videos to directing feature films.
59:26
And this includes everybody from David Fincher and Spike Jones and Sofia Coppola
59:31
to Michael Bay and Zack Snyder, F.
59:35
Gary Gray, who did Friday, Antoine Fuqua, who most recently did the Equalizer
59:40
movies, among others, and many, many others, by the way, Michelle Gondry,
59:45
Mark Romanek, who directed a really fascinating one with Robin Williams called
59:49
One Hour Photo and others.
59:52
And we're going to talk about that music video aesthetic, how it translated
59:56
over into films and looking at those filmmakers and what the music video generation
1:00:01
can tell us about that era of cinema.
1:00:04
Please join us then, won't you? In the meantime, June 21st, Sunday,
1:00:09
Father's Day, Indiana Jones, 35 millimeter.
1:00:12
We are doing Raiders at 11, Temple of Doom at 2, Last Crusade at 5 on rare 35
1:00:18
millimeter archive prints. bring your dad, or if you're a dad,
1:00:21
get your kids to give you this gift.
1:00:23
$30 all day passes. That's the best deal.
1:00:26
Single tickets are $12 and that goes up in a few weeks to 14 and the day of it goes up to 16.
1:00:32
So definitely get in. If you want to be with us, we'd love to have you as always.
1:00:37
It is weird, weird ass times, yo.
1:00:41
It's all probably always been weird ass times, but I do wish you,
1:00:45
I wish you the best. I hope you're doing okay.
1:00:47
Keep the faith, run the race, fight the fight and watch movies, make movies.
1:00:55
Thank you so much for.