Theater

views updated

Theater

THE SILENT PROSCENIUM, 1896–1916
THE NEW PROSCENIUM SPEAKS, 1926–1930
BREAKING THE NEW PROSCENIUM
PROMINENT STAGE AND SCREEN ARTISTS
FURTHER READING

In its mystery, blends different beauties, sang Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini's opera, Tosca. Indeed, the saga of stage and film interaction over the course of a century has resulted in what historian Robert Hamilton Ball has called "a strange and eventful history." The two media, one the inheritor of centuries of dramatic tradition and the other, an upstart technology bereft of dramatic antecedents, have been linked from the days of the very first moving picture experiments by Thomas Edison and W. K. L. Dickson late in the nineteenth century. Initially, the film medium was presumed to be merely a vehicle for the dissemination of theatrical events. As early as 1894, a writer in The Critic predicted that Thomas Edison's kinetoscope peepshow device could enable the viewer to "witness and hear shadow plays in which the only real performer will be the electromagnetic motor behind the scenes" (p. 330). That same year Edison himself boasted that in the near future a phonograph and kinetoscope could be linked together to bring plays and players from distant stages to the comfort of the parlor. But before the film medium would prove itself to be much more than a mere recording device for theatrical events, there would be subsequent decades of uncertain and tentative interaction and experimentation.

The first thirty years of theater-film interaction may be conveniently divided into three periods. In the first, roughly 1896–1907, pioneering filmmakers in America and Europe borrowed liberally from vaudeville acts, operas, dramas, and magic shows for their peep show and nickelodeon shorts. In the second, 1908–1915, filmmakers and theatrical entrepreneurs collaborated in translating famous plays and their players into feature-length theatrical films, commonly called "photoplays." (A "theatrical film" designates a motion picture that utilizes the subjects, processes, forms, personnel, and effects of the stage in a visible and prominent way.) Third, after a decade or so, during which the cinema developed as a commercial enterprise relatively independent of the theatrical establishment, the introduction of talking-picture technology in 1926–1930 saw a resurgence of extensive theatre-film interaction involving a new influx of stage stars and a new spate of photoplays.

THE SILENT PROSCENIUM, 1896–1916

Beginning shortly after the turn of the century and continuing sporadically for the next ten years or so, Lumie and Pathèré studios in France, Edison and Biograph and Vitagraph studios in America, the Nordisk Film Kompagni in Denmark, Svenska Bopgrafteaterm in Sweden, were among the many production entities around the world that released film recordings of vaudeville turns, dramas (including Shakespeare), operas, and magic acts. Stage magician Georges Méliès' (1861–1938) made fantasy films that bore the stamp of the French "feerie drama" tradition, which in turn influenced theatrical adaptations in America by Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941), notably, Jack and the Beanstalk (1902). Charles Magnusson (1878–1948) was empowered by August Strindberg (1849–1912) to bring his plays to the Swedish screen. Popular, operatic, and "legitimate" performers like Victor Maurel (1848–1923) and Coquelin (1841–1909) in France and John Bunny (1863–1915), Florence Turner (1885–1946), and Mr. (1863–1919) and Mrs. Sidney Drew (1890–1925) in America—products of a star system the moviemakers would soon appropriate as their own—brought their signature roles, opera performances, and stage routines to film (many of them via proto synchronized-sound technologies with curious names like "Synchroscope," "Vivaphone," "Chronophone" and "Kinetophone"). Shakespeare came to the screen, courtesy of D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) and other filmmakers, in a flood of one and two-reel abridged versions.

As demonstrated by the Edison studio's eight-minute photoplay Jack and the Beanstalk, which condensed the length of the original play into fourteen single-shot scenes, the screen itself was transformed into a proscenium stage, a shallow playing space bounded by the "wings" of the frame borders. A fixed camera position in medium distance simulated the spectator's third-row center auditorium seat. An uncut shot approximated a scene, and intertitles served as program cues. The action was blocked laterally in a plane parallel to the camera and consisted primarily of tableaux vivants. And theatrical performance techniques carried over to the screen an exaggerated, declamatory style more appropriate to a large theater house.

In their operations, some movie studios began to resemble theater houses. Of course, the use of artificial light in a theater house was insufficient for the cameras, so stages had to be built in accordance with the model of the standard theater house, but with the roofs left open and side walls constructed of glass to permit sufficient sunlight. Examples include Méliès' "théâtre de prises de vues," a glass-walled studio at Montreuil, France; Robert Paul's studio in England; and Edison's "Black Maria," which had a stage that revolved on a pivot 360 degrees to follow the course of the sun. According to one contemporary account published in 1907, some film studios were equipped with painted scenic flats, a property room, dressing rooms, and a completely equipped stage. "The studio manager orders rehearsals continued until his people have their parts 'face-perfect,' then he gives the word, the lens is focused, the cast works rapidly for twenty minutes while the long strip of celluloid whirls through the camera, and performance is preserved in living, dynamic embalmment (if the phrase may be permitted) for decades to come" (Saturday Evening Post, 1907, pp. 10–11).

In America alone, of the thousands of titles listed and described in the compendiums Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection, 1894–1912 and the American Film Institute Catalogue: Film Beginnings, 1893–1910 almost one-third prove either to be derived from specific theatrical events or to in some way simulate a theatrical mode. Typical entry descriptions include, "This was photographed as if from the audience at a theater"; or, "all activity parallels the camera plane"; or, "the set is a backdrop painted as an ocean scene"; or, "the action consists of participants being introduced to the audience." One such film, The Critic (Biograph, 1906), went to extraordinary lengths in its imitative method: "The camera, placed as though in the audience, shows several seats with spectators in the immediate foreground and a box to the right. The stage acts are burlesques of regular vaudeville acts." However, it would be a mistake to assume these effects were the result of ignorance of the more "cinematic" potentials of the film medium.

Active collaboration between theatrical and film entrepreneurs began in earnest around 1908. The naturalism of André Antoine's (1858–1943) celebrated?âtre Libre was transferred to the screen via the Pathé company. The most influential studio operation was the Film d'Art company, formed in France in 1908. Actors from the Comédie Francaise appeared before the cameras in a number of plays, beginning with L'Assassinat du duc de Guise (1908) and continuing with productions based on plays by Victorien Sardou, Eugene Brieux, and Henri Lavedan. Film d'Art's prestige, opulent production values, and theater-house distribution created a sensation and led to the establishment of similar collaborative production companies in America and abroad in the next few years. Famous Players came first in 1912, a collaboration between the eminent Broadway producer Daniel Frohman (1851–1940) and film exhibitor Adolph Zukor (1873–1976). The New York Dramatic Mirror reported in July 1912: "The men back of this movement have become fully convinced that the time for the amalgamation of the legitimate stage and the motion picture has come.…" (p. 34). Frohman wielded his prestige to bring Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) in Film d'Art's photoplay of Queen Elizabeth (1912) to his Lyceum Theatre in New York City, the initial critical enthusiasm of which led to subsequent Famous Players productions, such as Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932) duplicating her stage role in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1913) and James O'Neill (1847–1920) reprising his signature role in The Count of Monte Cristo (1913). Other collaborative theater-film production companies included the Protective Amusement Company, which allied the New York theatrical syndicate producers Marc Klaw (1858–1936) and Abraham L. Erlanger (1860–1930) with the forces of the Biograph studio for the purpose of filming, among other properties, plays by Henry C. De Mille (1853–1893) and David Belasco (1853–1931); the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, which brought together theater promoter Jesse L. Lasky (1880–1958) with filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959) to adapt stage plays by David Belasco (1853–1931); the World Film Corporation, formed by stage entrepreneurs the Shubert brothers and William A. Brady (1863–1950) and filmmaker Lewis J. Selznick (1870–1933) to adapt plays by Edward Sheldon The (1886–1946) and Clyde Fitch (1865–1909); and the Triangle Film Corporation, which imported dozens of prominent stage performers from New York to the Los Angeles film studios of D. W. Griffith.

HAROLD PINTER
b. London, England, 10 October 1930

Harold Pinter has said that his works begin with an image, rather than a theme, and that he is a visual writer. It is not surprising, then, that he has found success working in film. Although Pinter—winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature—is primarily known as a playwright, with many of his plays regarded as masterpieces of the English stage, he has also had a long and celebrated career writing for both film and television.

Pinter's screenplays are all adaptations of other works: his own plays, including The Birthday Party (1968) and The Homecoming (1969); other people's plays (Butley, 1974); and novels written by others, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (1976), John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers (1990), and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1990). His screenplays have won numerous awards and critical praise. They have also increasingly been the focus of his professional attention, and since the 1980s he has written more film and television screenplays than he has plays.

Pinter's interest in film began at an early age. At fourteen, he joined a local film club, and later he argued the merits of motion pictures as a member of his school's debating society. In the early 1960s he was commissioned by the BBC to write several radio and television scripts, and a number of his early plays appeared on television as well as on stage. His first screenplay, an adaptation of his play The Caretaker, was filmed in 1963. Pinter was immediately drawn to the technical opportunities afforded by motion pictures, especially the ability to use and manipulate time and space for dramatic effect. He also found the close-up to be an effective way of conveying conflict and drama without unnecessary dialogue, and has commented on the usefulness of editing as a way of creating meaning visually. The subtle complexities of his plays, in which a pause carries as much meaningas spoken dialogue, translate well to the screen. Just as the themes and structures of Pinter's plays have affected his screenplays, he has also used filmic techniques on stage, including the use of a voice-over in Mountain Language (1988), and lighting that simulates cutting between shots in Party Time (1991).

Pinter's films tend to be driven by character rather than plot, focusing on human relationships. They deal with many of the same themes that his plays do, including struggles for power and domination, the complex workings of time and memory, and the fear of a menacing unknown. These themes are present in the films he has adapted from other people's work as well as those he has adapted from his own plays.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Caretaker (1963), The Servant (1963), The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Go-Between (1970), The Homecoming (1973), The Last Tycoon (1976), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Betrayal (1983), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), The Handmaid's Tale (1990)

THE NEW PROSCENIUM SPEAKS, 1926–1930

Yet, despite an intense period of maturation in the teens and twenties that saw the development of silent theatrical films displaying the unique propensities of the film medium, the talking picture revolution that began in the mid-twenties with experiments by Warner Bros. and Fox in America, Gaumont-British in England, and Tobis-Klangfilm in Europe initiated yet another spate of closely imitative theater-film collaborations. In the early thirties in France, many theatrically-oriented theater playwrights and directors, such as René Clair (1898–1981), Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) and Sacha Guitry (1885–1957), filmed their own plays and/or staged their stories along theatrical models—notably Clair's operetta-like Le Million (1931), Pagnol's Marius-Fanny-César trilogy (1931–1936) and Guitry's Faisons un rêve (Let Us Do a Dream, 1937) and Le Roman d'un tricheur (The Story of a Cheat, 1936). Germany's storied Ufa studios (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) in Babelsberg was the site for numerous early 1930s musical extravaganzas, notably Der Kongreß Tanzt (Congress Dances) in 1931. In America in the late 1920s, Daniel Frohman and Adolph Zukor joined forces again, this time to collaborate on Paramount's Interference (1928), the first all-talking theatrical feature film. In a virtual repeat of their earlier pronouncements, they proclaimed a new era in theater-film cooperation. "No more will our best plays be confined to the few big cities," declared Frohman, speaking from the screen. "These plays, with their stirring drama enhanced by the richness of the human voice, will go to the whole world." By 1930 hundreds of film records of short vaudeville sketches, feature-length dramas, revues, and musical shows were once again flooding the movie houses. Actors with stage-trained voices forsook the stage and flocked to the East and West coast movie studios to face the dreaded "King Mike" (the label alluding to the primitive microphone technology of the day). Variety estimated that more than 205 stage personnel were working in the East and West Coast studios, including fifty-one playwrights, seventeen stage and dance directors, and ninety-five actors.

The most extensive collaborative endeavor at this time was Paramount's construction of sound stages in Astoria, New York, for the purpose of bringing nearby Broadway performers, directors, and producers as various as Fanny Brice (1891–1951), Rouben Mamoulian (1897–1987), and Florenz Ziegfeld (1867–1932) to the screen in their current stage successes. The years 1929 and 1930 saw theater and film directors work side by side in the filming of the Marx Brothers' The Cocoanuts (1929), The Dance of Life (1929, based on the play Burlesque), The Doctor's Secret (1929, based on James Barrie's Half an Hour), and many others. Warner Bros., in addition to bringing Broadway stars like Al Jolson to the screen and constructing a sound stage of its own in New York for theatrical adaptations—of its approximately one hundred talkies and part-talkies released by 1930, fully one-third were theatrically related—went into partnership with the Shubert brothers to finance stage productions in order to acquire advance film rights. This promised a double benefit to Warner—a ready-made supply of theatrical properties and a chain of legitimate houses in which to exhibit them. "An offer nowadays by a picture firm to bankroll a stage producer is very common," Variety reported on September 19, 1928. "The dialogue picture maker calculates it could produce a stage play, erect prestige for it by a Broadway run, and [photograph] the play, sending it on the road, but in the picture houses"(p. 5). (This move was later terminated on legal grounds by the Dramatists Guild.) "I believe that the plays I was doing in the theatre might be looked upon as 'high-brow,"' opined prominent Broadway actor George Arliss (1868–1946), who brought his Disraeli to the screen in 1929; "[and] there is no doubt that a considerable percentage of the people that came to see me in the theatre never went to the movietones [sic] at all.… The Warner Brothers realized that these lost sheep must be collected and brought into the fold.…" (p. 12).

To a significant degree, many of these theatrical shorts and features continued the tradition of close imitation of stage properties that had been seen—and subsequently abandoned—in silent photoplays. Whereas in the silent days this imitation had been largely a matter of intent, now it was a technical expedient. The cramped confines of the early sound stages and the limitations of the primitive microphones led at first to a "canned" product that was static and lifeless. Just as critiques of the silent films had included complaints that dialogue and expository titles retarded the action and that exaggerated acting styles jarred with the intimacy of the camera lens, now foes of the talkie photoplays rejected the audio-visual pleonasm of the synchronous union of image and sound, the "long photographic discussions between characters" and action that "had a repeated tendency to become too talkie and motionless."

Variety's complaint in a review dated 13 March 1929 about The Letter (1929), in which Jeanne Eagels (1894–1929) recreated her stage role, that the film was "entirely a transcription of a stage work and the cinema version does little to make the subject matter its own" (p. 14) was typical. Writing in the New York Times, 28 July 1929, Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) argued that in trying to transform itself into a theatrical event, films could never become more than a "bad photographic and mechanical copy" of a given play. And, as had happened before, several important theoretical works appeared addressing the new challenges to theatrical and cinematic identity. Joining Pirandello were Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) in Russia, Abel Gance (1889–1981) and René Clair in France, and Edmund Goulding (1891–1959) and George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) in America.

And, as had happened fifteen years earlier, the ticket-buying public in America again seemed to agree. By 1930 they were turning away from tedious, stage-bound adaptations such as The Letter in favor of films like Mamoulian's Applause (1929), an original screenplay that blended theatrical elements with a more cinematic nonsynchronous conjunction of image and sound. And while they embraced several of the new stage-trained actors, notably Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Edward G. Robinson, and the Marx Brothers, they dismissed many more, such as Ruth Chatterton and Hal Skelly.

BREAKING THE NEW PROSCENIUM

It is a mistake to regard this thirty-year period as primarily a series of misguided intentions and artistic and commercial failures for both the theater and cinema establishments. Quite the contrary. Not only did thousands of plays and players reach a public to which they would otherwise have been unavailable, but the consequences of these collaborations resulted in a reassessment of each medium's artistic and commercial priorities and an exploration of alternative modes of expression. The appearance of Queen Elizabeth in France and Cecil B. DeMille's The Squaw Man (adapted from the play by Edwin Milton Royle, 1914) in America spearheaded the acceptance of feature-length films and attracted the attention of important dramatic critics. Moreover, these attempts at close theatrical imitation, lamentable as they might have seemed, served to throw into even higher relief the unique effects and propensities of the film medium. When the otherwise stagebound The Count of Monte Cristo displayed a few scenes in natural locales, audiences applauded. Likewise, the Belasco plays adapted by DeMille and the Lasky Feature Play Company held out possibilities for exterior filming that could not be realized on stage but which could be fully exploited on film, thereby encouraging more filmmakers to quit the confines of the studio and shoot in natural locations.

Conversely, the theater's confrontation with the photographic realism of the cinema presented it with several alternatives. On the one hand, turn-of-century playwrights such as David Belasco and Eugene Walter (1874–1941) produced plays that attempted to rival the film spectacle (The Girl of the Golden West, 1905; film version 1915) and the intimate drama (The Easiest Way, 1909; film version 1917). On the other hand, as if in recognition of the folly of this sort of rivalry, the anti-realist movement, which had already begun in Europe in the 1880s with the symbolist theater of Stéphané (1842–1898) and Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) at the Théâtre d'Art and the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, gained headway in the new century in Paris with the experiments of Jacques Copeau's Theatre du Vieux Colombier, in Russia with Nikolai Evreinov Mallarme (1879–1953) and Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1942) at the Moscow Art Theatre, and in Germany with the expressionist theater of Ernst Toller (1893–1939) (Man and the Masses) and Georg Kaiser (1878–1945) (the "Gas" Trilogy), in Italy with the Futurist "synthetic drama" of Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) (Feet and They Are Coming, 1915) and in America with the expressionist-influenced works by Elmer Rice (1892–1967) (The Adding Machine, 1923), John Howard Lawson (1895–1977) (Processional, 1924), and Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) (The Emperor Jones, 1920 and The Hairy Ape, 1922). O'Neill was only one of many playwrights and producers who were outspoken in their rejection of cinema, referring to it as "holding the family Kodak up to ill-nature." He wrote, "We have taken too many snapshots of each other in every gracious position; we have endured too much the banality of surfaces" (Cargill, p. 525).

TONY RICHARDSON
b. Cecil Antonio Richardson, Shipley, Yorkshire, England, 5 June 1928,
d. 14 November 1991

Stage and screen director Tony Richardson was a major shaping influence in British theater and film during the 1950s and 1960s. Born the only child of a pharmacist in the West Riding region of Yorkshire, he was educated at Ashville College, Harrogate, and Wadham College, Oxford. After earning a B.A. in English Literature in 1951, he enrolled in the Director Training Program at the British Broadcasting Corporation. During the next four years he not only directed several notable television productions, including Shakespeare's Othello (1955), but completed his first film, a short independent documentary called Momma Don't Allow (1955), which helped inaugurate the iconoclastic Free Cinema movement.

Richardson brought this rebellious attitude to the stage when he and George Devine co-founded the English Stage Company and its performing arm, the Royal Court Theatre, in 1956 and promptly discovered British playwright John Osborne, whose bitterly sardonic attacks on social and political mores in Look Back in Anger (film 1956, 1958) and The Entertainer (film 1957, 1960) revolutionized virtually overnight the face of contemporary British theater. Richardson adapted both plays to the screen for his own production company, Woodfall Films.

For the rest of his career, Richardson continued to divide his energies between the stage and screen in both Europe and Hollywood. His theatrical projects included Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (film 1960, 1961) and a groundbreaking version of Hamlet at the Roundhouse Theater in Camden Town (both of whom he later adapted to the screen). But it is his screen work upon which Richardson's reputation primarily rests today. His movies may be divided into three groups—his literary adaptations (Tom Jones, 1963; A Delicate Balance, 1973; The Hotel New Hampshire, 1984); his original films (The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968; The Border, 1982; and Blue Sky, 1994); and his television projects (A Subject of Scandal and Concern, 1960; Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun, 1988).

"Perfection is not an aim," proclaimed Richardson about his work in Free Cinema and in the theater. "We reserve the right to fail." For awhile, those brave words fueled the brilliant experiments of his early career. However, his stubborn and unpredictable individuality, coupled with a penchant for spontaneity and a zest for bizarre humor, led to the erratic achievements of his later years. Critics savaged the caricatured humor of The Loved One (1965), the alleged pompousness of A Delicate Balance and the grotesquerie of Hotel New Hampshire.

Richardson's last film, Blue Sky, anindictmentof American nuclear testing, was well received. However, the accolades came too late. Completed in 1990, the film was shelved for almost five years before its release. Richardson, in the meantime, had died from complications of AIDS in 1991.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Mama Don't Allow (1955), Look Back in Anger (1958), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Tom Jones (1963)

PROMINENT STAGE AND SCREEN ARTISTS

A century of theater-film interaction has seen many stage-trained directors, writers, and performers whose motion pictures bear the traces of their theatrical experience and sensibilities. In the silent period, David Wark Griffith quit the life of an itinerant player to score a spectacular success in the burgeoning film industry with smash hits The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Way Down East (1920) (both based on stage plays) in America. Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928) and Victor Sjostrom (1879–1960) quit the stage to make popular films like Erotikon (1920) and K? orkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, 1921), respectively, for the Svenskfilmindustri in Sweden. Maurice Tourneur (1876–1961) left the French independent theater entrepreneur André Antoine (1858–1943) to come to America and direct the Mary Pickford vehicles The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and The Pride of the Clan (1917). After working with Max Reinhardt's (1873–1943) Deutsches Theater, Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) emigrated to America where he inaugurated the modern sophisticated sex farce with The Marriage Circle (1924) and Lady Windemere's Fan (1925). Sergei Eisenstein's experience with Vsevelod Meyerhold and the Moscow Art Theatre led to his revolutionary agit-prop films like Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925).

The coming of sound brought to the screen a fresh crop of stage-trained directors who went on to make many popular films either adapted from plays or at least consistently displaying a theatrical sensibility. Some, like George Cukor (1899–1983) and James Whale (1896–1957), turned their backs on the stage in 1929 and devoted the rest of their careers to cinema. Others moved with equal success between theater and film. Rouben Mamoulian shifted effortlessly from premiere Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma! to cinematic classics Applause (1929), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), and Love Me Tonight (1932). Orson Welles's (1915–1985) notoriety with the Mercury Theater productions in the mid-1930s led to an invitation from RKO to Hollywood, where, in addition to directing the groundbreaking Citizen Kane (1941) he made several Shakespearean adaptations, including Macbeth (1948) and The Tragedy of Othello (1952). After co-founding the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and instituting its famous "method" acting techniques, Elia Kazan (1909–2003) directed some of his greatest stage success for the screen, notably A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Sidney Lumet's (b. 1924) background in New York's Yiddish Art Theatre led to directing television dramas in the early

1950s and his breakthrough film, Twelve Angry Men (1957).

In England, the success of the Royal Court Theatre in the 1950s spurred Tony Richardson (1928–1991), Karel Reisz (1926–2002), and Lindsay Anderson (1923–1994) to bring to the screen adaptations of plays by a new generation of playwrights of the time, such as Look Back in Anger (1958) and The Entertainer (1960), by quintessential "angry young man" John Osborne (1929–1994). In Italy, before he directed the landmark Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Vittorio De Sica (1901–1974) was a popular stage actor—a profession he continued to practice between subsequent directing assignments. Similarly, actor Laurence Olivier (1907–1989) not only enjoyed a long career in the movies and also brought Shakepeare's Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955) to the screen. More recently, Kenneth Branagh (b. 1960) has continued Olivier's legacy with a dual career in theater and film, directing Henry V (1989) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993). Italians Luchino Visconti (1906–1976) and Franco Zeffirelli (b. 1923) have maintained dual careers in opera and film, occasionally bringing their own stage versions to the screen. And, of course, in Sweden Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918) continued to work steadily in theater, opera, and film. His film adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1975) remains one of cinema's most transcendent theatrical adaptations.

Many of today's foremost playwrights have also worked extensively, with varying degrees of success, in both theater and film. Clifford Odets (1906–1963), the best known of America's social protest playwrights in the 1930s, shifted uneasily between Harold Clurman's Group Theatre, for which he wrote Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! (both 1935), and Hollywood. Although well paid for his film scripts for None but the Lonely Heart (1944), Humoresque (1946), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and Sweet Smell of Success (1957), he hated his work in cinema. However, his Hollywood experiences did inspire one of his strongest plays, The Big Knife (1949), which was adapted to the screen in 1955 by Robert Aldrich. In England, Harold Pinter (b. 1930), John Osborne (1929–1994), David Hare (b. 1947), and Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) have written many screenplays, including adaptations of their own works—respectively, Butley (1974), Look Back in Anger (1958), Plenty (1985), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990). The American playwright who most parallels their careers is David Mamet (b. 1947), who has directed several original screenplays, including House of Games (1987) and his own adaptations of classic plays, such as Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy (1999). Two stage-trained directors, Sam Mendes (b. 1965) and Julie Taymor(b. 1952), have demonstrated a distinctive flair for the cinema, respectively, directing the Oscar^® -winning feature American Beauty (1999) and Titus (2000), a wildly post-modernist adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Undaunted by the restrictions of the proscenium stage and wholly cinematic in their vision of the theatrical translation to film, these new directors and writers were poised at the beginning of the twenty-first century to carry forward the tradition of intelligent dramatic adaptation. Doubtless, the advancements of 3-D and digital technology will bring new challenges to the process that will continue to redefine the very nature of that relationship.